At least half of termite studies used to be about how to kill them. But science is discovering their extraordinary usefulness
by Lisa Margonelli
In July 2008, I rented a small yellow car in Tucson, Arizona, and drove it south towards Tombstone. My passengers included an entomologist and two microbial geneticists, and I was following a white van with government plates carrying nine more geneticists. We also had 500 plastic bags, a vacuum flask of dry ice, and 350 cryogenic vials, each the size and shape of a pencil stub. We had two days to get 10,000 termites.
The goal was to sequence the genes of the microbes in their guts. Because termites are famously good at eating wood, those genes were attractive to government labs trying to turn wood and grass into biofuels (“grassoline”). The white van and the geneticists all belonged to the US Department of Energy’s Joint Genome Institute. Perhaps by seeing exactly how termites break down wood, we’d be able to do it too.
We stopped in the Coronado national forest, near the border with Mexico. I lifted a rock and saw a glint of glossy exoskeleton flowing into some little tunnels. I dropped to my knees and began sucking on an aspirator, a disgusting process that stimulated saliva production and made me dizzy. Two minutes later, there were no more termites on the ground and I had about 25 in the test tube attached to the aspirator.
But my pale termites were disappointing. When I separated one from the clutch, it was less substantial than a baby’s fingernail clipping. Doddering around blindly, it waved the flimsy antennae on its bulbous head. In its stubby, translucent body I could almost see its coiled guts – and presumably whatever it had eaten for lunch. Ants have snazzy bodies with three sections, highlighted by narrow waists, like a pinup model’s, between the segments. Termites, which are no relation to ants or bees, have round, eyeless heads, thick necks and teardrop-shaped bodies. And they long ago lost cockroaches’ repulsive dignity, gnarly size and gleaming chitinous armour. I put the termite back in the test tube.
What had I just sucked up? My little gang of 25 was incapable of doing much of anything. Without a colony, they had nowhere to bring food to, and thus no reason to forage. Without a crowd of soldiers, they couldn’t defend themselves. Without a queen, they couldn’t reproduce. Twenty-five termites are insignificant in the scheme of life and death and reproduction. Meaningless. What’s more, they were clinging to one another, making an icky beige rope of termite heads, bodies and legs reminiscent of the game Barrel of Monkeys. In the miniature scrum I couldn’t even see a single termite – they looked like a clot, not a group of individuals. Or perhaps I had found a single individual who happened to have 25 selves.
I had stumbled into one of the big questions termites pose, which is, roughly, what is “one” termite? Is it one individual termite? Is it one termite with its symbiotic gut microbes, an entity that can eat wood but cannot reproduce on its own? Or is it a colony, a whole living, breathing structure, occupied by a few million related individuals and a gazillion symbionts who collectively constitute “one”?
The issue of one is profound in every direction, with evolutionary, ecological and existential implications. By the end of that day I had a basic idea that the fewer I saw, the more termites there might be. Where I had thought of landscapes as the product of growth, on that afternoon they inverted to become the opposite: the remainders left behind by the forces of persistent and massive chewing. The sky was no longer the sky, but the blue stuff that is visible after the screening brush and cacti have been eaten away. Termites have made the world by unmaking parts of it. They are the architects of negative space. The engineers of not.
Nobody loves termites, even though other social insects such as ants and bees are admired for their organisation, thrift and industry. Parents dress their children in bee costumes. Ants star in movies and video games. But termites are never more than crude cartoons on the side of exterminators’ vans. Termite studies are likewise a backwater, funded mostly by government agencies and companies with names such as Terminix. Between 2000 and 2013, 6,373 papers about termites were published; 49% were about how to kill them.
Every story about termites mentions that they consume somewhere between $1.5bn (£1.1bn) and $20bn in US property every year. Termites’ offence is often described as the eating of “private” property, which makes them sound like anticapitalist anarchists. While termites are truly subversive, it’s fair to point out that they will eat anything pulpy. They find money itself to be very tasty. In 2011 they broke into an Indian bank and ate 10m rupees (then £137,000) in banknotes. In 2013 they ate 400,000 yuan (then £45,000) that a woman in Guangdong had wrapped in plastic and hidden in a wooden drawer.
Another statistic seems relevant: termites outweigh us 10 to one. For every 60kg human you, according to the termite expert David Bignell, there are 600kg of them. We may live in our own self-titled epoch – the Anthropocene – but termites run the dirt. They are our underappreciated underlords, key players in a vast planetary conspiracy of disassembly and decay. If termites, ants and bees were to go on strike, the tropics’ pyramid of interdependence would collapse into infertility, the world’s most important rivers would silt up and the oceans would become toxic. Game over.
By the end of our termite-collecting trip we had 8,000 termites in plastic tubs and bags, but they needed to be labelled and stored in dry ice before going to California to be sequenced. Once frozen in the vacuum flask, the termites were on their way to immortality: a collection of genetic code sitting in some database on a server somewhere, intellectual property, a sequence of nucleotides that might solve a wicked problem some day.
We were on the border between natural history and an unnatural future. We weren’t alone: all over the world, scientists are trying to find biology’s underlying rules and put them to use. They’re doing it with genes, behaviours, metabolisms and ecosystems. They’re seeing nature in new ways, and at the same time they’re trying to reinvent it and put it to work for us. In the future, we will harness nature’s tiniest life forms – microbes and insects – both their systems of organisation and control, and their genes and chemical capabilities. This fits with our paradoxical desire to have a lighter footprint on the Earth while having greater control over its processes.
At the core of this project is the provocative dream of changing biology into a predictive science, much the way physics started as the observation of phenomena such as gravity and then became the science of making plans for the atom bomb. Will there be termite bombs?
Termite colonies begin theatrically on rainy evenings. Small holes open in the sides of existing termite homes and largish, winged termites emerge, shake out their sticky wings, and fly. In northern California, termites of the genus Reticulitermes suddenly appear on the sides of buildings they inhabit. In South America, Nasutitermes shower down from nests in the trees. In New Orleans, Formosan termites, of the genus Coptotermes, burp from colonies in the ground and take to the air in swarms so dense they show up on weather radar. In Namibia, giant Macrotermes mounds seem to spring a leak, spilling froths of winged termites down their sides.
In the mound, most of the termites are eyeless and wingless, but the fertile termites who leave the mound on this night have eyes and what at first appears to be one single translucent teardrop-shaped wing. When they are ready to fly, this single wing, still soft and moist, fans out into four. Called “alates”, these termites are like fragile balsa-wood glider planes: just sturdy enough to cruise briefly before crash-landing their payloads of genes.
Male and female find each other and scuttle off to dig a burrow where they will mate. At first the two termites will be alone in their dark hole. Christine Nalepa, Theo Evans and Michael Lenz have written that termite parents bite off the ends of their antennae, which may make them better at raising their young. Antennae give termites lots of sensory information, and biting off the segments toward the ends could reduce that stimulation, making it easier to live in a tiny burrow with a few million children.
After she has laid her first eggs, the queen cleans them often to remove harmful fungi until they hatch as nymphs about three weeks later. The nymphs will moult grow and develop, but under the influence of the queen’s pheromone, most of them won’t fully mature, remaining permanent stay-at-home preteens – eyeless, wingless helpers.
Males and females alike will spend their time gathering food, tending eggs, building the nest deeper into the ground and eventually tending a fungus. As the family grows bigger, some morph into soldiers; their heads grow larger, dark-coloured and hard in a distinctive way, depending on their species. Thereafter they must be fed by their siblings the workers. Soldiers appear to return the favour by dosing the colony with antimicrobial secretions that help it resist disease.
Over time, in the small smooth dirt room where she lives, the queen’s body becomes “physogastric”, her abdomen swelling to the size of my thumb, constricted by taut black bands remaining from her old exoskeleton so she looks like a soft sausage that has been carelessly bound with string. Her head, thorax and legs remain tiny. Immobilised, except for the ability to wave her legs and bobble her head, she lays eggs at the rate of one every three or so seconds. The king stays by her. Her children lick off the liquid that appears on her skin, feed her and care for the eggs.
Or at least, that’s life for some Macrotermes queens (the genus found in Africa and south-east Asia, that builds its mound around a massive fungus). There are, however, at least 3,000 named termite species, and thus at least 3,000 ways to be termites. Some have multiple queens; some have cloned kings or queens; some are, improbably, founded by two male termites. One species doesn’t really have workers. Different species eat wood, others eat grass and some eat dirt. Macrotermes tend a fungus, but most others do not. All termites, though, live in their own version of a big commune.
Zebras by a termite mound in Okonjima, Namibia. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo
The South African writer Eugène Marais spent many years peering into their mounds and wrote The Soul of the White Ant, originally published in English in 1937. Marais called the termite mound a “composite animal”, uniting the millions of sterile workers, the soldiers, the fat queen and the king with the dirt structure of the mound itself into a single body. “You will need to learn a new alphabet,” he warned his readers before leading them in. The hard-packed dirt on the outside of the mound, he said, is a skin constructed by termites, which build passageways inside that allow the mound to breathe – like a lung. The organism’s stomach is the symbiotic fungus that sits in catacombs under the mound, digesting grasses delivered by termites. The mound’s “mouth” can be found in the hundreds of foraging tunnels the termites construct through the surrounding landscape. Because they carry nutrients and rebuild the mound, the sterile workers resemble blood cells. The mound’s “immune system” is the soldiers, who rush to defend the space whenever it is invaded.
To Marais, the queen was no Victoria, but instead a captive ovary, walled into a chamber no bigger than her swollen, sweating body. Marais imagined that eventually the mound would evolve into a being that could move across the veldt – very slowly in its dirt skin – a monster hybrid of soil and soul. Marais’s insight wasn’t original, and many scientists had taken to calling such social arrangements of termites, bees and ants “superorganisms”. The originator of the term was the entomologist William Wheeler, the founder of the study of ants in the US, author of a 1911 article called The Ant-Colony as an Organism.
For a time, superorganisms were all the rage. The concept dealt neatly with what Charles Darwin had called the “problem” with social insects. Darwin’s theory of evolution proposed that natural selection worked on individuals and the fittest individuals bred with others similarly fit to their ecological niche, while the less fit were less likely to reproduce. The problem with social insects was that while single termites seem to be individuals, they do not function as such. Only the queen and king of a colony breed, so who was the “individual”? By declaring the whole colony the individual, Wheeler said its members made up “a living whole bent on preserving its moving equilibrium and its integrity”.
In the late 1920s and early 30s, the paradigm of the superorganism grew colossal. Instead of studying individual trees, biologists studied forests as superorganisms. By 1931, the concept snuck into popular culture when Aldous Huxley reportedly based the dictatorship in Brave New World on humans as social insects, with five castes. Wheeler proposed that “trophallaxis” – a word he invented for the way insects regurgitate and share food among themselves – was the secret sauce, the superglue of societies both insect and human, and the foundation of economics. But even during the superorganism’s heyday, Marais was alone in his assertion that the mound had a soul.
In Namibia, I went to meet J Scott Turner, an American biologist who has spent decades studying how and why termites build their mounds. It took Turner years of experiments to show that mounds could work a bit like lungs, with interconnected chambers taking advantage of fluctuations in wind speed. Air moves back and forth through the porous dirt skin of the mound by two systems: in big puffs driven by buoyant gases rising from the hot fungus nest (like the sharp intake of breath from the diaphragm), and in small puffs, the way air wheezily diffuses between alveoli in your lungs. Turner suspected that the termites themselves circulated air as they moved, like mobile alveoli. This insight was an entirely new way of thinking about the problem. The mound was not a simple structure where air happened to move, but a continuously morphing complex contraption consisting of dirt and termites together manipulating airflow.
Termites who spend a year building an average mound of 3 metres have just built, in comparison to their size, the Empire State Building. Those who build taller mounds, at nearly 5 metres, have just built the Burj Khalifa in Dubai – 830 metres and 163 floors of vertigo – with no architect and no structural engineer. Such unthinking, seat-of-the-pants design is not possible for humans, who required squads of professionals, advanced equipment and 7,500 people working for six years to build the Burj Khalifa. Working with Turner, engineer Rupert Soar hoped to harness the powerful constructive groupthink that comes from the tiny mouths of termites and their even tinier brains to build structures in remote environments such as Mars. But there were issues: termites, he said, engineer to the point of collapse.
One morning a JCB arrived and Turner directed it to a mound. The JCB’s great blade came down on the top of the mound with a hollow whomp, the first note of a funny little concert. Half the mound fell away with a tumbling clinking clatter – as the shards hit different layers of cured mud they played a tune like a soft xylophone. We pushed in close, enveloped by the familiar smell of socks and bread.
What was left of the mound was a ruined hierarchy. Dirt shards and fungus combs and sculpted mud plinked downward, while termites ran every which way, at first as a sort of gauzy net. Soon they had organised themselves into small streams, and within 10 minutes those streams had consolidated into rivers of running insects. As order was restored, I could see the elaborate scheme of tunnels, rooms, chambers and fungus hidden under the dirt exterior. The spectacle was genuinely awesome – as in jaw-dropping and appalling.
The top of the mound was hollow, with wide vertical tunnels. The interiors of these tunnels were very smooth, and they segued in and out of each other in ropey vertiginous columns like a sloppy braid. Termites make the mounds by first piling up dirt and then removing it strategically in the tunnels. Eyeless, they use their antennae to feel for smoothness, and in the big tunnels they remove everything that is rough. They may even hear the tunnel’s shape.
Termites are often compared to architects for the way they build their mounds, but that is misleading because they don’t have plans or a global vision. What they really have is an aesthetic, an innate sense of how things should feel. When the top of the spire was first ripped off, there were just a few termites in the solitary tunnels at the top, probably listening to the clopping of their own six feet. But cutting into the top allowed in lots of fresh air at once, and activated an alarm system. Some termites ran away from the hole, agitating their brothers and sisters so they could help with repairs. Thousands of worker termites followed the smell of fresh air to find the hole, carrying balls of dirt in their mouths. Within minutes of the JCB strike, streams of termites canvassed the broken side of the mound, moving in a frantic start-stop pattern like a shaky old animated cartoon. I leaned in further and could see that each termite put its ball of dirt down on a ball left by the previous termite, wiggled his or her head, perhaps to get the ball to stick, and then backed away. Where there were two balls there were soon 20 and then 200, then 2,000. Some of these stacks joined up with other stacks at the perimeter of the breaks in the mound to form little bumpy, frilly walls.
Once the area was walled off, the signal from the fresh air would stop and the termites would fill the internal space with more dirt balls and small tunnels, making a sort of spongy layer. Later they would either block it off entirely or would hollow it out and remodel it. The JCB came back in for another swipe, taking away the dirt below the mound to reveal the system of horizontal galleries, tunnels and chambers where the termites live. It reminded me of those diagrams of cruise ships, visualised from the side, with small rooms packed together in a strict hierarchy of function and status from ballrooms and cafeterias to VIP staterooms and steerage bunks. The colony’s hierarchy is not money, of course, but the things that enable its survival: reproduction, child care, food supply and food processing. Some rooms are large, with vaulted ceilings, and walls and floors the texture of tortilla chips. When I looked closely, I could see that they were not so much rooms as places where many foraging tunnels crossed, like the grand concourses of old train stations. Deep within this area was a small capsule where the king and queen lived, making eggs, which were carried to nearby nurseries.
Below the mound lives the fungus, digesting grass. All termites use symbiotic collectives of bacteria and other microbes to digest cellulose for them, but Macrotermes outsource the major work to a fungus.
In some senses the fungus functions as a stomach, but it also has power reminiscent of the Wizard of Oz. Under the mound and around the nest sit hundreds of little rooms, each containing fungus comb. This comb is made of millions of mouthfuls of chewed dry grass, excreted as pseudofaeces and carefully assembled into a maze. The comb roughly resembles graham cracker pie crust, although it varies in colour from delicious beige to decrepit black. The termites inoculate it with a fungus that they have been cohabiting with for more than 30m years.
You can pull the fungus combs out of their little rooms as if you were pulling drawers from a doll’s wardrobe. The comb maze wiggles like the folds of a brain, with the hard, wrinkly piles of chewed grass making the gyri and leaving sulci-ish gaps in between. This is not an accident: as with a brain, the comb design increases the surface area of the structure. Within the gaps are what look like tiny white balloons, which is the fungus blooming. There is nothing accidental about this relationship either, or the construction that holds it: the details are so fine we can barely take them in. The bottom of the fungus comb stands on peg-like legs, little nubbins that hold it up just enough to let air circulate through. One of the grad students beat a small stick against the floors of the fungus galleries, playing something that was almost a tune.
The symbiotic relationship between Macrotermes and the fungus is tight: workers scour the landscape for dry grass, quickly run it through their guts, then place and inoculate each ball to suit the fungus’s picky temperament, tend the comb and snarfle the fungus and its sugars before distributing the goodies to the rest of the family. Then the workers run off to gather more grass for the fungus. Termite and Termitomyces fungus are so interrelated that it’s hard to tell where the mushroom ends and the termite picks up, but within their codependence is a sort of frenemy-type rivalry. (Fungi are capable of deliberately tricking termites. One invasive fungus in termite colonies in the US and Japan pretends to be a termite egg, going so far as to secrete the chemical lysozyme, which the termites use to recognise their eggs. For reasons that are not clear, colonies filled with impostor “eggs” are no less healthy than those without them.)
Prejudiced by our human sense of a hierarchy of the animate termites over inanimate mushrooms, we would be inclined to believe that the termites control the fungus. But the fungus is much larger than the termites – both in size and energy production: Turner estimates that its metabolism is about eight times bigger than that of the termites in the mound. “I like to tell people that this is not a termite-built structure; it’s a fungus-built structure,” he says, chuckling. It is possible that the fungus has kidnapped the termites. It’s even possible that the fungus has put out a template of chemical smells that stimulates the termites to build the mound itself. As I peered at the white nodules, I began to sneeze violently, sometimes with big gasping whoops, and something – it’s hard to even call it a thought, but a particle of one – flitted through my subconscious before flying out of my nose: the fungus is very powerful.
My admiration for the fungus only grew when I learned that Namibian farmers estimate that every Macrotermes mound – which contains just 5kg of termites – eats as much dead grass as a 400kg cow. Late in the day, one of the scientists used a pickaxe to pop the royal chamber out of the nest – the whole complex was the size and shape of a squashed soccer ball, but made of hard-packed finely grained dirt. He cracked it open, revealing the king and queen in a hollow space the size of a cough-drop tin. The chamber had holes on the sides, allowing air and smaller termites to pass through. The king was large and dark compared to the workers, but the queen was huge – as big as my finger. Her legs and upper body waggled but barely budged the fluid-filled sac of her lower body, which pulsed erratically, as though she was a toothpaste tube squeezed by an unseen hand. Her skin was shiny and translucent and the fats inside her swirled like pearly cream dribbled into coffee.
Everyone shuddered: the queen is viscerally repulsive. She offends our sensibilities and she is monstrous. I think the first stimulus to shudder is a reflexive reaction to her body’s pulses and swirls. But then a more intellectual sense of her horror kicks in. “She’s not a queen; she’s a slave,” said Eugene Marais, a Namibian entomologist working with Turner (no relation to the writer of the famous work on termites). Captive of her body, of her children, of the structure of the mound she conspired to build.
Even then, the queen’s more shocking aspects are hidden from us. Her truly stupendous fertility – creating millions of eggs over as long as 20 years – is something we can only infer. Some species of termite queens can clone themselves by producing eggs with no entry-ways for sperm, which then mature into sexual queens with only their mother’s chromosomes, duplicated inside the egg nucleus, to furnish a full set. Imperfect copies of the queen, these knockoffs are good enough to get the job done. Parthenogenesis allows the queen to live, in insect years, pretty close to for ever.
‘A different dimension of loss’: inside the great insect die-off
And yet we do refer to her as a queen. I wondered why. Marais said that when early European naturalists looked into beehives and termite mounds, they saw the monarchies they came from – with workers, soldiers, and kings and queens. It was misleading, he said, and kept us from really understanding what was going on with termites. For scientists, the great danger of seeing social insects anthropomorphically is that it obscures their true insect-ness. In the 1970s and 80s, when the ant scientist Deborah Gordon began studying massive ant colonies in the American south-west, scientists described the ant colony as “a factory with assembly-line workers, each performing a single task over and over”. Gordon felt the factory model clouded what she actually saw in her colonies – a tremendous variation in the tasks that ants were doing. Rather than having intrinsic task assignments, she saw that ants changed their behaviour based on clues they got from the environment and one another. Gordon suggested that we should stop thinking of ants as factory workers and instead think of them as “the firing patterns of neurons in the brain”, where simple environmental information gives cues that make the individuals work for the whole, without central regulation.
And so, these days, one scientific metaphor for the inscrutable termite is a neuron in a giant crawling brain.
Back in the 1930s, the other Marais didn’t write a termite science book, but a book about how humans could understand termites – as a bug, a body, a soul, a force on the landscape. Looking at termites this way changed how I see the world, science, the future and myself.
This is an edited extract from Underbug: An Obsessive Tale of Termites and Technology by Lisa Margonelli (Oneworld, £16.99). To order a copy for £14.61 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. P&P charges apply in the UK only to orders by phone.
The Nigerian political opposition is scoring desired attention from the Tinubu’s disappearing antics. In apparent response to the growing outcry of opposition voices and the enlightened citizenry about the President’s prolonged absence in a bad time, the Presidency has just issued a second statement explaining and justifying Tinubu’s mysterious vacation in Europe. The new statement is not different from the original one except that it aims at indicating that the President is at work even if away from his physical office in Abuja. It is becoming futile and even foolish creating an illusion of presidential overwork to cover up whatever else is keeping Tinubu away from Abuja. The man has been absent from his official place of work for longer than makes sense. Period.
Ordinarily, the political opposition has every business commandeering the matter of Mr. Tinubu’s whereabouts. Every misstep of the president is a quarry for the opposition. His inexplicable long absence is of course part of the opposition’s arsenal in the build up to the frenzy of the 2027 campaigns. A president missing in action in a period of general worsening insecurity and anarchic breakdown of order is everybody’s business. Predictably, the opposition has conveniently added the president’s prolonged absence to their growing inventory of anti Tinubu atrocities.
Both Atiku Abubakar of the PDP and Peter Obi of the LP , leading opposition figures, have screamed out loud that Tinubu has no business being away from the country at a time when the nation is in dire straights. There is trouble everywhere. People are being killed on an industrial scale almost daily in Plateau, Benue, Ebonyi and other vulnerable states. Boko Haram has reportedly returned to full business in Borno and its environs, gobbling up local governments and villages and killing as many soldiers as they can find. The political atmosphere in Rivers state remains uncertain and confusing as the Sole Administrator of the emergency rule there seems somewhat confused about his precise mandate or the exact meaning of emergency rule in a functioning democracy. Whether or not Tinubu willed it, his latest mysterious vacation has given his growing opposition an early consensus.
Very few Nigerians care about where Mr. Tinubu will spend tonight. Fewer still ever seem to notice when the president is present or absent in Aso Villa. The street side logic is that our life circumstances remain the same whether or not the president is at home or abroad, at work or asleep. It is sad that a president that has been in office for just under two years has worked his way to a level of consequential irrelevance and ineffectuality where his presence or absence makes no difference to the people whose mandate he parades. In contrast, his predecessor only managed to get to this point at the middle of his second unimpressive term. At that point, it no longer mattered to mot Nigerians whether Mr. Buhari was coming or going!
From the onset, Tinubu has been mostly abroad anyway. In preparation for his busy air miles presidency, the president hurriedly equipped himself with a super luxury “new” presidential jet bought under a very opaque procurement process or lack of it. Some argue that it is part of his job specification that he jets around the world doing the business of Nigeria. Lobbying for investment. Expanding the reach of Africa’s largest democracy and attending the many meetings that make statesmen something of travelling salesmen. No one has yet explained why and how a nation with dwindling fortunes and strategic importance should be present at every small gathering of world leaders even if Nigeria has tangential interest.
Nonetheless, the more significant side of the argument on Tinubu’s junkets is that an elected president has an implicit obligation to stay home most of the time to man the ever –turbulent boat of the Nigerian state. Purveyors of this argument go further to insist that the greater part of the president’s attention is required at home. The reasons are many: our nationalism has far too many unresolved grey areas. The business of nation building is far too incomplete for those elected to man the ship of state to stay too far from home for too long.
These clashing perspectives do not quite impress Mr. Bola Tinubu and his handlers. The man loves to work from anywhere else but home or his luxurious Abuja office. He loves to be air borne like his predecessor who would jet out to the nearest European capital to check an ear ache or bad tooth in a small clinic.
For Tinubu, his handlers insist that his far too frequent foreign missions and sojourns have little to do with any specific ailments or health concerns. He just feels uncomfortable with too many distracting visitors from local politicians and associates. For him, the business of overseeing Nigeria is too serious to allow for too long a stream of time wasters. So, he escapes from the rowdy crowd every now and again.
His current absence in Paris is one such example. He was probably seated in the aircraft when his handlers informed Nigerians that the president would be away in France for the next two weeks on a “working visit”, not vacation. During the absence, he would receive and review reports from government departments on the mid term report of his administration. He would be free to summon officials, interview them on the activities of their ministries and departments. For a whole fortnight, the president would work a crowded schedule remotely from Paris!
Where officials need to show up in person, they have to fly to Paris if they cannot fully explain their points on the phone or by email. The president requires a minimum number of aides and assistants to do the heavy paper work required by his mid term assessment. These officials and assistants will incur costs in hotel bills, estacode allowances and other costs. A two week working vacation in Europe will take a significant toll on the national treasury in an economy that is struggling with liquidity issues. It is even a very scandalous public relations gambit to inform Nigerians that their president is gone abroad for a whole two weeks to do the work for which the state lavishly provides for him to perform in Abuja. I hardly can think of any other country where the leadership will embark on such an expensive excursion in the name of a “working visit.”
Of course Tinubu’s handlers have readily drawn our attention to the fact that the president is still working for Nigeria from Europe. In the modern era of real time information technology and speed of light communication, executives can discharge their functions from anywhere without any significant loss of efficiency and effectiveness. That is hardly at issue.
A president is the political leader of a nation. He is elected to lead people through the vicissitudes of daily life. That is why most leaders only leave home in extreme necessity. And when they do leave to undertake important foreign trips, they adhere to a tight schedule that brings them home as quickly as possible. Political leadership is a homebound undertaking. The leader is not self -employed. He is an employee of the people as an electorate and public in a republican democracy. Every excuse to move from one point to the other must be credibly explained to the people. Such explanations must make sense from a cost benefit perspective and even at the level of common sense.
Casually telling 300 million Nigerians that their president is relocating from Abuja to Paris on “a working visit” is an insult of the intelligence of the people as well as a reckless waste of public funds. The various statements that have emanated from the Presidency on this matter cast a pall on the basic intelligence of the issuing presidential minions that issued them as well as casting the institution itself in very poor light.
Yes indeed, the presidency can be a crowded enterprise. That is why a good number of countries have established presidential retreats outside the official residence of the President. In the United States, the Camp David retreat was designed and established to provide the president with a comfortable and convenient getaway destination. It has all the conveniences of a presidential palace and also a vacation destination but also serves the president as an alternative work station. He can do his daily schedule from there and even host foreign leaders there while breathing the fresh air of a getaway location.
Nigeria has so many locations that could host a Camp David- type resort for the president. The Obudu Hills, Yankari Falls, Nike Lake, Ziba Beach, Ikogosi Warm Spring. Each of these and many other locations can host a world class presidential getaway resort built at a cost that is only a fraction of the billions being budgeted annually for renovating existing residences for the President, Vice President and other high officials of state. We can can give such locations our peculiar cultural flavor: have resident dance troupes, entertainers etc. We can build helipads, airports and other facilities to ease access to the location.
These speculations presume that the reasons that have been advanced so far by the presidency for Tinubu’s current absence are altruistic and basically honest and true. There is a high possibility that the president could be on an extended medical vacation if beer palor whispers in Abuja are to be believed. In that case, it is still irresponsible of the presidency not to openly inform Nigerians if indeed the president needs overseas medical attention. It is in fact easier to communicate a medical bulletin and save themselves and the public these convoluted and fake adolescent explanations. Nigerians would understand that the president is human and has a right to suffer ailments from time to time for which he might need better medical care than what is available at home.
A man above seventy would be expected to suffer one health issue or the other from time to time. If indeed his personal doctor is in Paris or London, he is well within his rights to undertake such medical trips or even take medical vacations to attend to his health needs while the Vice President acts in his absence. All these Mickey Mouse statements and childish attempts to disguise the truth are devaluing the credibility of the presidency as an institution. The truth is often light in weight. Incoherent lies are heavy baggage on the other hand.
For the better part of the last decade and half, Nigeria’s national security status has come to be measured by human casualties. Hardly any day passes without the news headlines featuring stories of gory mass murders and senseless killings. When such news breaks, the question is usually about the scale. How many died? If it is about one or two dead, people move on. Attention and feelings only begin to be incensed when the number of dead is in scores. As a society, our collective humanity has become so inured to the loss of human lives on an industrial scale that we are literally now an insensitive society.
In the last week or so, we have had the Uromi killings of over 18 alleged hunters by local vigilantes. The versions are varied. One says a lorry load of men armed with Dane guns was intercepted by local vigilantes in Uromi, an area of Edo state that has been constantly assaulted by armed ‘strangers’. The armed men who happen to come from the northern parts of our country were killed by the vigilantes. In that single incident, so many aspects of our corporate existence as a national community were abused: citizens’ right to move around freely in their country, the responsibility of locals to guard their safety, the ultimate responsibility of law enforcement to determine who bears arms and for what etc.
In the same week, the familiar inter ethnic and inter communal clashes in Plateau state led to the loss of many lives. All hell was let loose in the state in a now familiar virtual state of emergency in which inter communal communications and interactions in the affected areas have become impossible. Again, religion, livelihood interests and socio cultural troubles were raked up. The Plateau state governor has lamented his loss of security control of many parts of the state to bandits and random armed gangs who have literally outgunned the security forces. Almost simultaneously, similar skirmishes have been reported in nearby Benue state with an attendant loss of yet to be determined number of lives.
In the same week, Governor Zulum of Borno state has cried out about the resurgence of Boko Haram induced violence in many parts of the state. According to him, a new wave of the Sahelian jihadist violence has erupted and is rapidly retaking many parts of the state. Beside these major theatres of violent eruptions, sporadic killings and violence have been reported in places like Zamfara, Enugu and Ebonyi states. These are only recent incidents in a spiral of insecurity and violence that has become a permanent feature of our national scene. Literally, we sleep and wake in a virtual pool of the blood of our innocent compatriots who live in the susceptible areas.
For the past over a decade, every annual national budget has seen spending on defense and security rise astronomically. The pattern of defense spending looks more and more like that of a nation in an openly declared war. Orders of fixed wing combat aircraft, helicopter gunships, missiles, armored personnel carriers (APC) and drones have since become part of the annual ritual of our defense and security budgeting. Nothing in our budgeting or defense orders suggests a nation at peace with itself.
Correspondingly, insecurity has come to occupy a permanent place in the rhetoric of our politicians and political actors. Every presidential candidate and virtually every other governorship aspirant has come to include the eradication of insecurity as a priority item in their manifestoes and agenda. There is in fact, a pervasive psychological state in the nation that seems to have come to accept insecurity as a permanent part of our reality. We are a frightened nation. People are afraid of each other. People are afraid to travel along the highways, rail roads or urban alleys. A mood of fear has been added to the prevailing atmosphere of poverty, hunger and economic desperation in the land.
Because our land is among the top five most dangerous places in the world, the military has since become part and parcel of our internal security profile. In virtually all the states of the federation and the Federal Capital Territory, joint patrols of the police and all arms of the military have been joined by Civil Defense, Department of State Security personnel and even local hunters armed with charms and amulets in a daily round –the- clock chase after bandits, jihadists, kidnappers, abductors and sundry “unknown gunmen” in urban and rural parts of the country. Squads of combat joint patrol troops in pickup vans have become a common sight on our roads and streets.
Beyond animated physical chases of bad people by security agents, there seem to be little effort to intelligently interrogate the real causes and patterns of our insecurity. Yes indeed, there is a fancy office of a National Security Adviser (NSA) with a full compliment of the paraphernalia of high power. But it is routinely defied by armed non- state actors who terrorize the populace consistently.
In a nation that has weaponized faith as an instrument of national existence, religious zealots have found it attractive to arm their devotees with assault rifles, Improvised Explosive Devices and suicide vests to advance toxic versions of their faiths. In a nation where the government used to maintain a monopoly of ultimate violence and coercion, the availability of the instruments of violence to all and sundry at a market price has demystified the state. Uniforms have become common outfits made by tailors which should not frighten people. People are no longer afraid of the guns or uniforms of the state.
Non state actors have been emboldened to challenge the state and sometimes even outgun the state. The democratization of the technologies of violence, disruption and destruction through the internet and other dark channels have made the task of the state as possessor of the instruments of ultimate violence more herculean.
Add to this the recent rise of micro nationalism in different parts of the world and the popularization of the ideas of self-determination of minorities as part of the rhetoric of international political language. Weapons of war and their random deployment by all manner of militias and separatist non-state forces have become part of the language of international political interaction. A new dictum of sovereign assertion has emerged: “We shoot, therefore we are.”
Most dangerously, in parts of the developing world, politicians have come to be agents of insecurity because insecurity itself has also become a tool in the quest for political ascendancy and apex power. Investment in non- state violent expressions has become attractive to politicians and professional trouble makers. It is common knowledge in Nigerian politics that in successive years, politicians have been known to import military uniforms, assault rifles, light arms and tear gas grenades to threaten and frighten and intimidate their opponents.
Thus overwhelmed by rival coercive forces, the state has buckled and weakened under the pressure of violent intimidation. In the process, merchants of trouble and blood have forced the state to cede them space in an illicit power sharing arrangement. Bandit leaders have signed MOUs with elected governors literally ceding parts of the territories of states to bandits and terrorists. Farmlands have been known to be ceded to bandit squads as concessional territories for revenue collection. Farmers have to pay bandits to plant, weed and harvest their crops.
In the process of this parade of illegitimacy, our society has created and tacitly come to recognize new categories of errant citizens and outlaws. We have seen the emergence of new types and archetypes of the anti social hero- Unknown Gun men, Gun Men, Bandits, Cultists, Yahoo Boys, and Kidnappers etc. These categories literally wear their badges with swagger and a certain degree of ‘pride’. It is worse when each of these illicit undertakings yields troves of cash in returns. A society that has come to enthrone the worship of money is prepared to do obeisance before these new deities of money and power.
On the social and cultural canvas, an insensitivity to blood and human suffering has come to characterize our new collective psychology. Capturing people like animals, maiming them with pleasure and dismembering them no longer frightens people. New forms of trade have emerged. Trade in human parts for money rituals, human sacrifice to facilitate success in cybercrime ventures, the use of rape to test male prowess and access to supernatural powers is now a vogue in some parts. A new generation of Nigerian youth sent to universities to partake in the wonders of modernity in science and technology are ending up as ritualists, rapists, voodoo priests, campus cultists and all the direct opposites of the aims of modern higher education. A society suffused in religious superstition and all manner of prehistoric beliefs rolls out the red carpet for the new heroes who are then rewarded with lavish accolades, traditional titles and honours.
In a society where literally everything is a form of organized crime, even the fight against violence and insecurity has itself become a form of organized crime. Security has become an industry in itself. Security personnel collude and collaborate with kidnappers, abductors and bandits to facilitate their operations in return for a commission. Field commanders have been known to trade in intelligence that endangers their men in return for cash.
Sometimes, commanders sit on the allowances of their subordinates. Racketeering in defense and security budgets are not strange to generals who aspire to retire as billionaire real estate moguls and big business people. All this fits snuggly into a socio economic ecosystem in which corruption has since become the other name of public service and state assignments.
Even our cash hungry banking system has informally recognized kidnapping ransom as a source of cash deposits. Ransoms are paid into known bank accounts and hardly any kidnapper- related arrests have been effected through information provided by the banks.
For the police, combating violence and insecurity has become more than the business of maintaining law and order. It is not even crime fighting in its classic meaning. For the military, the nation is neither at war nor at peace. It is in a state of “no man’s land”, a never land where everything goes and all is fair in a war neither declared nor absent. This is a new abnormal.
Yet we cannot accept that this nation is chained to a permanent cycle of violence and insecurity. But in order to restore the sanity of our polity and the values of our society, we need to tackle our insecurity differently. Chasing after squads of bandits with squads of armed soldiers in pickup vans will yield nothing. Deploying drones manned by illiterate soldiers will only lead to more collateral casualties. Bombing villagers in their natural habitats does not recognize the humanity of the defenseless. Killing innocent villagers with sophisticated American fighter jets will harden the hearts of the people against an uncaring state. A headcount of casualties of such reckless bombings in the name of ‘anti insurgency’ is a violation of human rights. Indiscriminately branding innocent casualties as “dead terrorists and bandits “ is an insult on innocent Nigerian villagers simply for the crime that they cannot defend their identity and rights in the English language.
Let us be fair to some chapters of the Nigerian state in the past. Serious concern about insecurity has been part of state thinking for decades. The most systematic was under the Babangida military regime. Towards the end of its tenure, the idea of a National Guard was being implemented. The recognition was that the Nigerian state was not a fully settled idea. There were too many grey zones and areas of unresolved nationalism. Neither the police nor the military was equipped to deal with these unsettled areas. The police was considered too tepid and civil while the military was designed for a more aggressive engagement with outright external enemies. There was a need for an intermediate force to manage the unresolved areas of our nationalism such as the farmer-settler issues in the Middle Belt, the unresolved animosities of the Biafran secession, the seething anger of the porous oil and gas rich Niger Delta and the highly exposed Sahelian northern fringes bordering North Africa. These were the residual tasks of the National Guard.
In subsequent years, the idea of the National Guard was dropped even before it was ever tried in the field. Later civilian dispensations thought of Community Policing but lacked the political will to fully articulate or implement it. Recently, the idea of a State Police structure was considered. No one knows what has become of that idea which is fraught with political and conceptual booby traps.
While the dithering continues, violent insecurity has spread to previously unlikely places like the Federal Capital Territory of Abuja, now the setting for abductions, kidnappings and senseless killings of people even in their very homes. There is no escaping a serious intelligent conversation about violence and insecurity in our land. Fancy military hardware and fiery political rhetoric cannot replace the power of serious thought to restore our humanity as a nation. The abiding question now is: when shall we be serious enough to remove insecurity from our political agenda by ending it permanently in our reality?
In recent weeks, we seem to have been wrestling with the very idea of democracy. After all, our political system has passed through the Westminster parliamentary system and over three decades of the Washington type presidential system. There is a prolonged assumption that we are indeed a thriving democracy and ought by now to have come to take certain issues for granted. But on a daily basis, our politicians and political elite seem more confused about the essence and meaning of democracy itself. This is clearly an illustration of the vagrant and unserious nature of our political elite.
Surprisingly, however, our political elite has this curious habit of returning to interrogate our democratic credentials ever so frequently. Last week, a major gathering of consequential political voices gathered in Abuja to nark the 60th birthday of former House Speaker, Emeka Ihedioha. It was yet another opportunity to interrogate the efficacy of our democracy and indeed the very appropriateness of our democratic route.
Former President Mr. Olusegun Obasanjo, chairman of the occasion was his predictable cynical self, skeptical as ever about the appropriateness of Western democracy for Africa. His contention was essentially a cultural conservative reservation about the alien roots of democracy as practiced in most African countries. Bishop Kukah in the role of keynote speaker asked the question as to whether democracy has failed in Africa. Former Sokoto State Governor, Aminu Tambuwal was definitive in disagreeing. For him, democracy has not quite failed in the country or indeed the continent. Peter Obi was non equivocal in asserting that democracy has failed totally in Africa. Segun Adeniyi was typically journalistic in saying that democracy has neither succeeded nor failed in Africa. He instead zeroed in on the individual foibles of the political leadership as unserious mascots of democracy in Africa. Other voices found weaknesses in the practitioners of our democracy, insisting that nothing is wrong with the various concepts of democracy as practiced in Nigeria or indeed Africa.
Pitfalls like corruption, disruptive governance, abuses of due process by politicians have combined to give democracy a bad name. In all of these attempts to understand the failings of democracy in our country, politicians and the elite have tended to uproot the concept of democracy from is European roots. The fact of mouthing democratic concepts and systems is unfortunately not likely to make us a democracy. Our society has not paid its dues. We have not passed through the economic crucible of evolving a productive economy first before exploring the most apt system of government. In Europe, the
Industrial Revolution and the tyranny of kings and oligarchs preceded the rise of democracy. Similarly, economic independence and the emergence of a political consensus among the urban elite created the necessity for popular democracy as an alternative to monarchical absolutism.
It was this combination of forces that compelled Europe to behead and dethrone kings and queens and overthrow or reform the monarchy in favour of elective popular governance. Representatives of the people took over power through a system of representative democracy to ensure that the taxes paid by the productive populace were spent by representative governments to fund social programs and services. The modern nation state was born on the foundations of elective democracy based on the popular mandate of economically empowered citizens. With democracy, subjects became citizens. Citizens acquired rights and rulers were compelled to accountability to ‘the people’.
Elsewhere especially in Asia where democracy later took roots, it was the rise of authoritarian military regimes which suppressed workers rights, whittled down civil rights, forced people to fight for the rights they wanted to enjoy and assiduously grew the economies to create the wealth and prosperity that empowered people to demand certain rights and privileges of freedom and representative government. Like in Europe, it was the empowerment of the people that forced them to demand certain rights especially the right of citizenship and political representation.
In each of these instances, democracy was not a ‘given’ handout or arrangement. It was not an organized syndicate or arrangement agreed upon by a departing colonial order and its successor local political elite of trade unionists, traditional rulers and western educated elite as in most African countries. Democracy in either the European West or Asian dictatorships did not emerge in and of itself but as a consequence of compulsive economic and social forces.
In the Nigerian instance, our ‘democracy’ has transformed from an arrangement of colonial selection to one cultivated by self- appointed military dictatorships. Representatives of the people have been selected whether by a colonial order or by an imposed military dictatorship. The popular masses were literally ‘invited’ or coopted into the democratic wagon and taught the rituals of periodic electioneering. Consequently, our democracy has hardly had organic roots in and among the people. At best, the people have been ‘invited’ during election cycles to the seasonal political agenda, told major issues in contention and the major personae contending for power. In the post election periods, the politicians disappeared to the centres of power from where they lord it over the masses until the next election season. In most of Africa and in Nigeria especially, there has not been a process of consciousness creation about the rudiments of democratic culture. At best, democracy has been merely a dialect of political speak.
Democracy is not however a voluntary self -generating force. It is an outcome, a momentum unleashed and driven by social and economic forces of a historical nature such as happened in Europe and Asia. The driving forces include an urgent compulsion by productive working people who demand accountability for their hard earned tax money. It is the vortex of pressure by the masses which wanted their views and perspectives heard and reflected in the way the society was governed and manifested itself. Taxation is guaranteed by representation. That is the basis of accountability in governance which confers power on the people.
Therefore, when modern constitutions and other social contract documents begin with the expression “We the People”, it is a conscious expression of the real power of the people as tax payers, citizens and voters. It is the people’s power of tax money, the power of labor power and the exertions of workers as an organized force that propels the economy. It is in addition the momentum of the cultural solidarity and the willful surrender of the power of independent self- defense in preference for collective security embodied in an elected sovereign. We the people hereby surrender unto you the right and power to preside over us and protect us from one another and from hostile others!
That is the foundation of the Social Contract, the intangible contract that binds the broad majority to the sovereign elected authority who wields state power on the collective behalf of the “people”. Thus is born the modern nation state as the foundation of world order.
Democracy does not give birth to itself nor does it protect and sustain itself. It has certain guardrails in the nature of institutions which it needs to operate and survive. The elected sovereign is a guided executive authority. That authority is guided and guarded along the path of law and order by a judiciary of trained honest judges and a battery of lawyers. An executive not guarded or guided by a judiciary is bound to degenerate into an unregulated anarchy, the lawless Hobbesian state of nature in which the laws of nature reign and bloody violence rules the affairs of men.
In turn, elected conclaves representing the people as a constituent whole are empanelled as parliaments and assemblies to ensure that the affairs of the state reflect the interests of the majority and diversity of the public.
The collective feedback voice of the people is wielded through the power of the media- the agencies of the mass media which function as the unofficial monitor and regulator of the conduct of state and its officials. It does not matter whether the media is the legacy print and electronic media that we have since come to know or the contemporary social media platforms in which everyman is a media owner and practitioner. The functions of the media in a democracy remain basically the same- moderation and modulation of public opinion in the service of the enlightened governance of the state.
The rest of the society whose interests and opinions matter in the progression of the society is what has come to be known as civil society, that amorphous collective of chattering voices in the market of society that is usually the first to gather at the venue of protests against bad governance. It can be organized into pressure groups and interest groups or show uo facelessly as a mob.
The guardian elite of a democracy consists of both the practicing political elite and the broad spectrum of enlightened voices-professionals and interested others with an abiding interest in the survival of the society either as a functioning state or thriving democracy. An elite cannot possibly be illiterate or ignorant. An illiterate or ignorant national elite is a danger to itself and to the perpetuation of the society it pretends to serve and represent. A national elite must share a common commitment to the wellbeing and continuity of the society. When a bunch of vagrants, casual thugs and unemployed political jobbers control the commanding heights of the political space, the result is a perennial confusion as to the meaning and plight of democracy. Mob rule could be mistaken for democracy.
When illiteracy, ignorance and lack of enlightenment dominates a political space, even the simplest challenges of routine democratic practice are presented as systemic earthquakes. The budget process is often rigged in favor of paddings by the legislators just as the executive muzzles its way through questionable bills. Legislators are not certain how to vote for simple legislations. Debates on the floor of parliament are either not held at all or are muzzled through the nefarious power of open bribery. Or legislators as licensed thugs scream their way through troublesome sessions.
The executive frequently read or deliberately misinterpret the constitution to serve their narrow political interests. Both unfortunate features have been displayed recklessly with the President’s recent declaration of a state of emergency in Rivers State.
Those who are still troubled by the present sorry state of democracy in Nigeria should look even harder at the character of our national elite especially those who call themselves politicians. The time is approaching when we shall ask our political class to educate us on whether politics in Nigeria is a career, a vocation, a profession, a trade or part time unregulated business.
