The nation-state project is arguably the most ambitious human self-propulsion since the discovery of religion. Most successful nations are invested with a mystical aura and the myth of exceptionality. This is why for such countries the god of the nation replaces the nation of gods with nationalism often supplanting religion as a deity to be worshipped, supplicated to and placated. This is why in most successful countries religion as a formal proposition is an embattled idea.
But in bitterly divided nations riven by ethnic, religious and political animosities, mutual hatred and loathing is the order of the day. There is no national narrative to expand and build upon, no golden myth to sustain it in times of trouble, no shared values or common creed to summon in national distress and no evocative memories of national heroes to whip the errant political elite into line.
Even the notion of history and civilization are being fiercely contested. Progress is a savage battle ground. While many look back to a pristine el-dorado for salvation, others prefer to inch their way forward, away from the present dis-order, to a future salvaged from the prevailing mismanaged modernity.
In such circumstances, “national” politics is driven to its primeval roots. All politics become local as an existential and psychic necessity. In order to recuperate the future and its rosy possibilities, we must go back to the past to see what can still be retrieved from the murderous mess we have made of Nigeria.
Last week, we promised to bring our readers, the kernel of our intervention at the last and concluding segment of the Apero gathering that took place Saturday last week. Here are excerpts.
A Catalan conundrum
Protocols. It is a great pleasure to participant in the final round of Apero. As we have noted, blessed are those who are yet to give up on Nigeria. It is easy to give up on the nation. There is something frustrating, even infinitely infuriating about a country so scandalously blessed in natural and human resources only to end up as the poverty capital of the modern world. This bizarre anomaly is without any precedent since the beginning of recorded history.
Apero is coming at a very interesting conjuncture in the history of the nation. It is a time when the pessimism unleashed by all the stark indices of virtual state failure combines with the optimism of many who believe that the coming elections might just halt the drift towards national collapse. There many who insist that this is nothing but a promiscuous dream based on fantasies rather a honest engagement with the facts on ground.
It reminds one of Marshal Ferdinand Foch, a great French hero of the First World War, who famously insisted that although his left and right flanks are collapsing and the centre giving way, he was nevertheless advancing. Before coming to the main issues, it is pertinent to make some preliminary observations.
One has read all the recommendations of the participants of the Apero gathering. Needless to add that one has been very impressed by the depth, versatility and originality of the proposals. It is a moveable feast of intellectual production. One must congratulate the organisers for the feat of logistics and painstaking efforts that has brought together an incredible array of Yoruba thinkers, philosophers, scholars, military policy wonks, traditional savants and political crusaders to such an event.
The common theme that runs through all the presentations is how to secure the Yoruba nation, enhance its prosperity, boost its production capacity, reinvent its old cottage industry and bring back the embattled omoluabi ethos in the context of a besieged and embattled Nigerian nationhood.
It is axiomatic that paradise cannot be surrounded by hell. Something has to give eventually. As it is, the Yoruba nation is in a state of normative and ethical free fall. Let us not deceive ourselves. Yoruba sons and daughters have also contributed to the moral, spiritual, economic and political collapse of the nation. Many of us are in the habit of hunting with the hounds and running with the hare.
One cannot but notice that all the efforts and energies expended on this gathering are geared towards evading or bypassing the Nigerian postcolonial state. This is the product of perfectly rational thinking. As it is noted, if an inferno is consuming people together with their offspring, they must deal with the enveloping flames around themselves first.
As it is at the moment, the Nigerian state resembles a monster killer-whale thrashing about the vast waters ready to devour or destroy anything across its path in sheer predatory malice. The Nigerian state will not ignore or evade us in as much as we pretend to ignore it or we delude ourselves that we are evading it.
The Nigerian postcolonial state is driven by the logic of its own nation-alienating necessity. Our history has shown that what it cannot build, it must seek to destroy; what it cannot appropriate, it must seek to misappropriate. The evidence of this litters our post-independence history. Yoruba folk wisdom suggests that you must prepare an extra dish for he who will not allow you to feed to your satisfaction.
So the question is this: What happens if the state refuses to ignore or evade us? What if it decides to come after what it considers a constitutionally overreaching section of the federation as it happened in 1962, 1963 and 1965?
In 1962, a federally engineered plot led to the implosion of the Action Group and the declaration of a state of emergency. The following year in 1963 Awo was jailed in another engineered conspiracy which was a flagrant breach of the constitution and a unitary assault on a federating unit. In 1965, a forcible takeover of the old west through electoral shenanigans led to the collapse of order and the termination of the First Republic through a military uprising.
The contradictions we are tracking create what we propose as a Catalan conundrum for the Yoruba people within the Nigerian federation. What is a Catalan conundrum? It occurs when the most stable, the most prosperous and the best economically organized section of a federating nation decides that it has had enough and decides to leave with the federal authorities taking military umbrage at what they see as a violent constitutional infraction. We will elaborate on this later.
I have been asked to compare political life in the run up to independence and the few years after to what was to happen subsequently. This is like comparing an apple to an orange. They are both fruits. But they taste different. This is because they have different historical trajectories and are powered by divergent dynamics of power appropriation.
To restate what is often stated nowadays with increasing vehemence. It is obvious with the benefit of hindsight that the colonial powers were not interested in the cohesion or organic unity of the territories they have subjugated beyond protecting their own economic interests. The elite of the different ethnic groups were separated from each other with interaction forbidden and in fact virtually criminalised.
This was the situation that obtained in the early decades after the amalgamation of different entities. You cannot give what you don’t have. The British masters were showing fidelity to the logic of their own colonial history which was to let the new nation congeal and cohere around a master-nationality that has shown superior discipline and organizational ability and let them get on with it in a brutal war of all against all. For them, order and stability are superior to political equity and social justice.
It took the equivalent of a civil war among colonial officers to make the authorities realise what a hot potato they had on their hand. In a seminal policy rethink, they came to the conclusion that based on recalcitrant realities the cultural, spiritual and political differences among the regions were of such mutually antagonistic dimensions, that it would be better to allow the people to develop along their own individual trajectories.
As such they changed the modus operandi if not the fundamental logic of the colonising impetus. The immediate fruits of this policy rethink were obvious. It led to a thaw in the policy which foreclosed interaction between the new Southern elite group and the emergent northern powerbrokers. It also altered the power equations in favour of the indigenous political class spawned by the advent of colonization.
Self-rule for the three regions unlocked the visionary capacity of the colonized to preside over their own affairs and to chart an independent course. With the three regions in dynamic competition, production capacity was boosted beyond what was thought possible and the three regions experienced accelerated growth and development which led to a dramatic rise in living standards.
This was arguably the finest moment of the trio of founding statesmen who pushed their people to the limits of their ability and capability in order not to appear to have been left behind. It was the new spirit of give and take which led to the miracle of the Lancaster House conference held in 1957 which led to the adoption of an authentic and workable constitution based on federating units.
But this was not destined to last for long. The old demons of hegemonic domination suddenly reared their head effectively scuppering Nigeria’s chances of post-independence prosperity and stability. While Awolowo and Azikiwe were actively gaming to take over the government at the centre, Ahmadu Bello suddenly rumbled that Nigeria was his great grandfather’s estate and that he would soon resume the aborted mission to dip the Quran in the ocean.
And he made good his word. First, they came for the west. After that, it was the turn of the east to bite the bullet. It is useful at this point to be reminded that General Aguiyi-Ironsi’s Unification Decree of 1966 which was the original leitmotif for the northern-inspired violent military uprising which toppled his regime was never really repealed. Rather, its spirit was boosted and bolstered by succeeding military dictatorships until Nigeria became a unitary autocracy per excellence.
The journey of the nation to a berserk and misbegotten autocracy can be seen in two significant developments. Whereas in the Second Republic the transition to civilian rule from military dictatorship was marked by a cautious interference with the recommendations of the Constitution drafting body by the military authorities, the gloves seemed to have come off in the aborted Third Republic and the current post-military Fourth Republic.
The military, having domesticated its rule, appeared bent on imposing its will on the nation by resorting to an awful manipulation of the process when it appeared its tinkering with the constitutional document might not be enough.
In the document bequeathed to their compatriots as the Fourth Republic constitution, the military simply appropriated the people as if they are an inert mass to be moulded into desired shape. This vaporization of the citizenry has dire consequences and it forms the basis for comparing the First Republic with what obtains in the current epoch.
First, the relentless militarization of politics and the polity has turned Nigeria into a vast civilian garrison without an authentic democratic ethos. Second, the militarization of the political class has led to the homogenization of Nigeria’s political culture in a way that was thought impossible in the First Republic.
Third, it has led to the collapse of party discipline with influential party members behaving like local war-lords ready to cock a snook at their party or flout its rules and conventions. Third, the mode of leadership recruitment has become so absurd as to be eerily sinister. Finally, this has led to the abandonment of ideology-based politics with the evaporation of rational choice and reason based evaluation of party policies.
The net effect of all this is that a predominantly urbanized, forward-looking, intrinsically progressive ethnic group that has seen better days and whose people enjoy holding the feet of their leaders to fire even in the pre-colonial times find themselves roiling with rank disaffection and acute discomfort in the besetting political normlessness that Nigeria has become. Consequently, it is no surprise that a sizeable proportion of Yoruba sons and daughters want out from the stifling unitarist hell of Nigeria.
But this is not going to happen, if it happens at all, in the way and manner expected or following the pattern of predictable and conventional agitation. The region known as Catalonia with the alluring city of Barcelona as its jewel is without any doubt the most prosperous, the most advanced and the most enchanting region of Spain. This is partially due to the accidents of geography and its proximity to the advanced nations of northern Europe.
By all the acknowledged indices of nationhood, Catalonia is impressively credentialed: shared language, shared history and destiny and a homogenous culture to boot. But each time the Catalans have tried to raise the banner of rebellion and secession they have always been suppressed with brutal ferocity by their Spanish overlords down South. They will just not let them go. Their leader was publicly executed during the Second World War.
To be fair, the central authorities in Madrid have always shown the willingness to grant the restive region a great measure of autonomy and some trappings of independence. But outright separation is not part of the combo.
You cannot bluff your way with bullets and superior armoury. It would appear that while the Catalans were developing their region in relative peace and safety, it is the Castilians whose military muscle has held Spain together against sundry invaders. You cannot eat your cake and have it. In every human situation, there is always a trade-off.
Despite the charter of self-determination enshrined in its founding principles, the United Nations does not grant independence just like that and a la carte. The Yoruba nation has not shown the appetite or the wherewithal for a violent military confrontation. Neither have its denizens shown an aptitude for the precipitation of a violent disintegration of the nation beyond mere appeals and letter writing. Secession is made of sterner stuff.
In such circumstances, the situation requires tact, diplomacy and painstaking capacity for negotiation and the clarity of graduated objectives rather than Boys Brigade stratagems. We must not endanger our own people. There is time for pragmatic heroism and there is time for heroic pragmatism.
Rather than cutting our nose to spite our face out of sheer spite and folly, elementary wisdom and strategic acumen suggest we should let the Buhari transition run its course while not complicating things or muddying the pool for our political sons who are well-schooled and well-practised in the high- octane art of political intrigues and the cloak and dagger manoeuvres of the Nigerian postcolonial coliseum. They may be there for a divine purpose.
To this end, our humble advice to the leadership of the Apero gathering whatever their bitter regrets and disappointments with the events of the last seven years is to fully engage with the current dominant Yoruba leadership without foreclosing their own options for the inevitable renegotiation of the Nigerian union. I thank you all.