Despite the euphoria that has greeted the successful completion of party primaries and the sunny projection of a successful transition come 2023, there are still some potent terrors stalking the nation. Any one of these or a combination thereof, could spell political and electoral doom which can send the nation on an apocalyptic tailspin.
Elite suicide occurs when the extant political institutions and the traditional bastions of state authority and legitimacy could no longer manage or contain a crisis arising from political conflicts leading to widespread anarchy and chaos. The state and its agencies are completely enfeebled and enervated with the enforcers in hiding or in technical surrender.
In such circumstances, the rule of the mob or the reign of rural yobos and urban yokels sets in. Those who were old enough to have witnessed the fabled wetie insurrection of 1964 to early 1966 will attest to the destructive potency of this resurgence from the Nigerian underground.
The Nigerian postcolonial political elite have a legendary reputation for flirtation with suicide. When they wish, they push the nation to the edge of the abyss only to wheel it back from the brink in the nick of time. Like a pyromaniac mob, they enjoy setting off huge fires just to reassure themselves of their capacity for flame-dousing. One has lost count of how many times the political class since independence has taken the nation to the doorstep of suicide.
But it should be noted that these unwarranted embroilments take a cumulative toll on the health and psyche of a country still lacking an organic national identity. The Roman Empire did not die of a single major wound but from a thousand cuts. Those who believe that it doesn’t really matter and that no matter the adversity, the nation will fumble and wobble through are engaged in the most irrational exercise of self-delusion. Some wounds never heal completely.
This is where the uproar and widespread brouhaha that have greeted the announcement of the running mate to the APC presidential candidate is regrettable but understandable. No one in his right mind, and perhaps only the most insensitive brute, can deny the trauma and brutalization the Christian community in Nigeria has suffered in the past few years in the hands of psychotic religious extremists pursuing their theocratic delusions in a secular nation.
You cannot procure the profits of happiness with the proceeds of misery. It is a reflection of the mismanagement of ethnic and religious diversities of the nation in the past one decade that we have come to this sorry pass.
The demons of religious hysteria are on the rampage in the nation, baying for either political or electoral blood, whichever comes first. One must shudder at the hour when political campaigns and mass indoctrination based on religious identity are taken to places of worship in this nation.
Yet it is a measure of how far religious identity and the weaponization of faith for electoral purposes have proceeded ahead of ethnic supremacist politics that it is the choice of the APC running mate that has provoked widespread anger and indignation rather than the original culprit. This is what was alluded to in this column a fortnight ago.
If the truth must be told, it is the PDP which broke with the sacred tradition of its founding fathers by staying north after eight years of northern rule and by choosing as its candidate a member of the dominant hegemony for sheer electoral gamesmanship that must be fingered as the original culprit of this untoward development.
The APC, fearing an electoral debacle, merely responded in tactical kind. This obsession with power and with winning at all costs on all sides shows how difficult if not impossible is the very idea of consociational politics and elite consensus is in postcolonial Africa. It takes a disciplined and nationalist political class to pull off.
To repeat the Heraclitan dictum that is fast becoming the mantra of this column, you cannot step into the same river twice. In the light of this, it is important to go back to where the rains started beating us in order to draw appropriate lessons.
In the First Republic, no eyebrow was raised about the leadership hierarchy in the north which consisted entirely of Muslims. The Sardauna sent his deputy, Abubakar Tafawa-Balewa, to rule at the centre and Balewa chose Mohammadu Ribadu (1909-1965) as his deputy. When Ribadu passed it was the turn of Zana Bukar Dipcharima (1917-1969). Although the Sardauna hinted darkly about dipping the Quran in the Atlantic Ocean nobody complained of Islamization or Fulanization.
In the east which was a bastion of Christianity, it was an all -Christian affair. In the west which has a sizeable mix of Moslems, Alhaji Dauda Soroye Adegbenro was unanimously endorsed to replace the ousted S.L Akintola and heavens did not fall. For a long time in many states that replaced the old west, the Christian/Christian ticket prevailed without any hint of social or religious tension arising from the choice. What seemed important to the Yoruba people was good governance and service delivery.
In the presidential election of 1979, Chief Obafemi Awolowo of the UPN chose Phillip Umeadi, another Christian and southerner, as his running mate. Having failed in his efforts to persuade a group of leading northern politicians that good governance and superior service delivery are more important than pre-elective distribution of posts and offices, Awolowo took to this route as a gesture of defiance and heroic disavowal. It backfired catastrophically.
The military of that period was arguably at its most nationalist and patriotic phase. Nodding to ethnic or religious sentiments in appointments and promotions was considered taboo. There might have been some underhand or under the table gaming by people with malign and dark motives. But by and large, the old military, even in its conservative ethos, was a stickler for competence and professionalism.
It can be argued in retrospect that the botched major’s uprising of January 1966 finally domesticated the virus of ethnicity and religious bias in the Nigerian armed forces. Yet up till that moment, it was still largely containable through a combination of bluff and sheer bluster.
When General Thomas Aguiyi-Ironsi took over the reins of power after the mutiny, he appointed Brigadier Olufemi Ogundipe as the Chief of Staff, Supreme Headquarters and the then Lieutenant Colonel Yakubu Gowon, a Christian from a minority northern ethnic group, as the army boss. After the mutiny petered out, its putative leader, Major Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu, quietly negotiated a safe passage with the new supremo and was taken to Lagos by Colonel Conrad Dibia Nwawo, his old and much beloved instructor.
After the assassination of Ironsi, Gowon appointed Lieutenant Joe Akahan, an ethnic Tiv from the north, as the Chief of Staff of the army with the old Navy veteran, the then Commodore Joseph Akinwale Wey, serving as the Chief of Staff, Supreme Headquarters. He also made Chief Obafemi Awolowo, the Vice-Chairman of the Federal Executive Council. It was an all-Christian team, but nobody raised an eyebrow, or perhaps it was too perilous to do so.
Unfortunately by then, the cankerworm of ethnicity and religious inflammation had already found its way to the sinews of the society as well as the fabric of the armed forces. It was to lead directly to pogroms in the north and a terrible civil war in which millions perished. After the civil war, all became quiet on the eastern front given the military and political amputation of the third leg of the old ethnic-based triumvirate.
But the military scions of the northern minority groups who believed they were the ones who bore the brunt of the war and who put the hegemonic cabal back in power began to ask probing questions of the oligarchy. It was to lead to thre military upheavals and savage reprisals, 1976 with the Dimka failed coup; 1985 with the Vatsa group and 1990 with the Orkar uprising.
The ethnic and religious tension did not abate even after an officer of minority extraction seized the reins of power from a scion of the feudal oligarchy. Having deposed his former boss, the then Major General Ibrahim Babangida eventually lost patience with being serially accused by Junaid Mohammed of excluding Fulani military officers from the pork pie. Babangida simply impounded the late Kano born fiery medic and hell-raiser.
The choleric and implacable Junaid, who was later to surface at OMPADEC after cooling his heels in military detention for trying to insinuate ethnicity and religious bias to pure military postings, got more than he bargained for. But it was widely believed that his constant carping and the ominous stillness of the northern feudal oligarchy panicked the Babangida administration into joining the OIC as a way of establishing some kind of religious and ethnic parity. It merely deepened the crisis.
In a sense, then, it can be argued that Babangida’s regime was a watershed in the annals of governance in post-independence Nigeria and the Minna-born political gamesman a ruler of great consequence for the destiny of the nation. It was under him that the Nigerian military reached its apogee of professional competence in peacekeeping abroad.
But it was also under him that the insinuation of ethnic and religious identities into the officer-corps and the nation’s politics assumed an ominous dimension, despite being a robust secularist and religious liberal himself.
Three nation-defining events can be isolated: The failed Orkar coup of 1990, an armed critique which put the National Question in sharper relief; the Zango-Kataf uprising of 1991 which Babangida himself described as an attempted civilian coup; and the 1993 annulment of the freest and fairest elections in the history of the nation.
After this, the nation has never really been at ease as the deployment and weaponization of ethnic and religious identities took the front burner at the expense of genuine nation-building even in the post-military Fourth Republic. During the Obasanjo regime, some elements in the north resorted to the gambit of Sharia just to remind the Owu-born general of who held the ultimate veto power. It was a joke taken too far and it led ironically to Boko Haram and the savage decimation of the north.
Nigeria is a country that has been much traumatised by religious and ethnic polarities with the fire being stoked on either side by parasites of national hysteria. General Buhari has not helped matters by his cavalier and less than sterling handling of diversities in the nation. One can then understand the umbrage, the outrage and the outcry over same faith presidential ticket. For those who have been hurt in the inferno, it is a matter of life or death.
But we will be hurting ourselves the more if we fail to appreciate and understand the complex and complicated realities driving what may appear a cruel and unfeeling choice. As long as a section of the country holds the franchise for undemocratic vote-herding, and baring an urgent structural reconfiguration of the country, strategic-minded politicians will give pragmatic priority to what will get them into office rather than transient applause which guarantees nothing but electoral annihilation. It is a question of the balance of electoral forces.
The cumulative damage of the ethnic and religious manipulations of the country’s fault lines cannot be undone overnight or by a single gesture of heroic futility. What is important in the coming months is for Nigeria’s active and increasingly sophisticated electorate to hold the feet of the leading candidates to fire and get them to avail the nation of their programme for the religious and ethnic detoxification of the nation.
As we noted at the beginning of this piece, Nigeria’s political elite are prone to brinkmanship and constant flirtation with suicide. There are four major terrors staring the nation in the face which may imperil the journey to a successful transition in 2023 or bring the democratic process itself to a shuddering terminus. First is the possibility of state implosion arising from a combination of incompetence and sheer mental fatigue.
Second is the possibility of non-state and anti-state actors overwhelming the state in a lightning blitzkrieg. As we have seen with the security nightmare which led to the Guje Correctional Facility invasion and the ambush of the presidential advance convoy, this is no longer a matter of conjectural possibility but a dire plausibility.
Third is the possibility of hunger, looming famine and deepening social discontent in the land snowballing into an apocalyptic nightmare of anarchy and nation-wide chaos in which the already overstretched security forces find it impossible to restore order and normalcy.
Finally, there is the terror of unintended consequences and obdurate political gamesmanship. When the presidential candidate of the APC, in an offhand remark, noted that the spirit of 1993 may be upon the nation, many of his virulent critics descended on him, some chiding him for equating himself with Abiola. But he may be clairvoyantly describing a social and historical process rather than the trajectory of personality.
This is a figure of speech in which the trope, in full enactment, surpasses the best intention of the speaker; a clairvoyant moment of revelation. In 1993, the Nigerian people were ready for a new country but their military overlords were not. If the current political ferment in the nation is a precursor of 2023, let us hope that those who have held Nigeria to political ransom are ready. The cost will be prohibitive. There is time for everything under the sun.