From State And State Power To Man And Social - National ...

Machiavelli wrote The Prince for a State that is torn by civil strife, and is surrounded by hostile,powerful neighbours, ready to invade it and subject it to imperialist control. The Prince waswritten for the ruler that is burdened with the responsibility of bringing order to a chaoticpolitical situation, where fractious warlords have taken control of different parts of the state andin a society where the majority of the people have succumbed to debauchery and profligacy, andin which the level of morality has fallen to its lowest possible point. Besides, the treatisecontained in The Prince is an exercise in sycophancy. It was deliberately crafted by theunemployed and banished Niccolo to curry favour from the Medici family. It was written byMachiavelli in political exile, with the partial purpose of putting the King of Florence in such aframe of mind that he would recall him from banishment, and possibly offer him a good politicalappointment. The Prince was written basically as an advice to the Medici family of the city stateof Florence, in Italy, on how to rule effectively, in periods of political decay and survive inpower. It was not meant to be a general treatise on good governance, but simply a set ofsuggestions on how a particular ruler, in a specific city, under certain peculiar circumstances,can effectively outmaneuver all hostile forces within and outside the state and remain in power.In a sense, it is hardly surprising that The Prince, and not The Discourses, is the book that is verypopular with tyrants and sycophants, especially in Nigeria. To illustrate the danger, in Nigeria ofa classical distortion of Machiavelli’s political thought, let us listen to Prince Tony Momoh, aproduct of our University, and a former Minister of Information. In a recent interview granted toSunday Sun, Momoh adumbratedYou see, Obasanjo is a good student of Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Princewhich says the first thing you should do when someone puts you in power is todestroy the person who put you there. Not destroy him physically, butpolitically. Obasanjo incapacitated all the people who put him in power andeven took over the party. He destroyed the PDM (People’s DemocraticMovement) of former Vice President Atiku Abubakar founded by late(Shehu)Musa Yar’Adua, elder brother of Umar. That was the political ladder [by which]he climbed to power. He destroyed it. He threw members of PDM out of PDP toget control of the party] Sunday Sun, July 1, 2007:10]If the above passage reflects, indeed, Obasanjo’s understanding of the political thought ofNiccolo Machiavelli, in The Prince, he should be pitied and forgiven. After all, Obasanjo may bean experienced, practical, politician, but in the area of the science of politics, he is a starkilliterate. He actually needs to go and enroll in a good department of Political Science in a gooduniversity, to study Political Science. That was precisely what a former Nigerian Head of State,General Yakubu Gowon, did in 1975, after ruling Nigeria for nine years, and discovering that heknew very little about the subject matter which he had ostensibly practiced for so long. By theway, Gowon’s wise act provides an eloquent anti-thesis to Julius Ihonvbere’s claim that it is theprofessor of political science that needs to sit at the feet of the practicing politician, to be reeducated,as he ostensibly did under Obasanjo. While we understand the reason for the allegedmisapplication of the thoughts of Machiavelli by Obasnajo, we can not, so readily, forgive ourown alumnus, Prince Tony Momoh, for that implied distortion of the science of politics. Weexpect his appreciation of Machiavelli’s thoughts in The Prince to be much deeper, and for thesake of less politically educated Nigerians, he should have provided that more profoundunderstanding of Machiavelli’s thoughts. For Momoh actually graduated from our Department ofMass Communication, and must have taken courses in the Department of Political Science and5