If you want to cause some uproar in the United States, just whisper it out loudly that Barack Obama made the presidency because of his merits or for being a gifted and brainy boy. The fact is that in the first 1000 smart Americans, an Obama won’t make the list, and he knows. One of those who would have protested, Professor John Nash, just died in a deplorable motor accident.
Certainly a Nash would wondered out loud: If Obama is smart or brainy then what am I? A god? And it is not just big dudes like Nash, people folks like Bruce Springsteen, Beyonce and husband, would feel particularly slighted if an Obama is ranked above them as genius. Even common businessmen won’t concede Obama an inch. The point of it is that in America especially, and Western Europe generally, politics is left for folks who have nothing better to do, who have no real merits or brains. And that is how it should be. America as a superpower is created by a thousand points and more of lights and powers generators and generating. It is out of the abundance of these generated powers that each power generator donates a portion of this powers and lights, to the centers to be managed by politicians.
That is politicians don’t create power or light, they only are employed to manage created powers and light. Thus really smart Americans, Americans who have real merits or genius, are primarily power creating units. They are the philosophers, thinkers, scientists, poets and businessmen. So smartness belongs to those who create these powers and not those politicians who beg for votes to manage parts of the sum of created powers. America as a political being and not just its politics, starts with a simple and fundamental assumption. It is the sacred idea that the politician, the leader, is of a common stock as the people. That is the old European idea or ideal of the leader as a genus apart, is for Americans a fallen statue.
This enlightened substructure of America is why America works so well. America was a new art form, altering not just the form, but above all, the internal logic and material of the new creation – the new world, America. Now, all of Europe has learnt and are copying America. Today in the enlightened world the best a leader may is a lovable fool. This is the American lead. Miss it and you have lost it. So one is genuinely scandalized to read of APC leaders speak, that the Senate President and such characters will be elected on the basis of merit. This is school boy ignorance. First of all, voting cannot measure or track merit. What voting measures and democracy elects is the popularity, numbers not quality. Thus, if A is elected in preference to B, all it means is that A is more popular than B and not that A is more meritorious than B. Electoral democracy has no tools to measure other than numbers.
Democracy is in representativeness. So if a political order is not representative, it is not democratic, whatever else it is. Second of all, all democracies, repeat all known, sustainable and prosperous democracies are products of zoning. There is no sustainable democracy outside zoning. And there are no such histories of one. The point that is lost on Nigerian ignorance, is that America is the first purpose zoned polity. In fact this reality of a zoned America is lost to Americans themselves. Perhaps we shall excuse the Nigerian ignorance? But shall we? The answer is no. A backwater power, a Nigeria, to develop must understand the history of the developed metropolitan powers more than the metropolitans themselves. Otherwise they like the watchman watch in vain.
Thanks for the works and insights of Mother A’endu. She has taught us as no other historian. Her commission to her followers: this history is new, this history must be news, has led to the unearthing of some of the most hidden or even harmlessly stolen realities. It is how it was revealed that all sustainable statecrafts must be architected on zoning. All else is public relations. That the practitioners of these zoning do not know does not handicap their development. They are already about it. Their ignorance is like the ignorance of the Jews before their encounter with the new world of Romans and the intellectual Greeks.
The Jews, an eastern peoples, had founded some of the most profound insights, but had no logic to back it up, had no theology even for its mighty god. It was this encounter that led Saint Paul to confess: For Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks ask for wisdom. 1 Corinthians 1:22. For the first time the poetic genius of the Jews came in conflict with the cold rationality of Greek thoroughness. And both worlds prospered. And Saint Paul again bore witness confessing again: I am a debtor to both the Greeks and to the barbarians… Romans 1: 14.
Our prosperity will vanish if APC does not learn like Saint Paul to learn from the modern Greeks – Americans and in this case separate merit from politics. Politicians don’t have merit. They can only have numbers.
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