Author: The Nation

As we noted in this column about a fortnight ago, whoever happened to be elected as our next leader has his work cut out for him. Nigeria is in dire straits. The economy is on a tailspin with stagflation and de-industrialization driving the pauperization of the people to a point where Umaru Dikko’s cynical projection that Nigerians would have to start eating from the dustbin before he could believe there was hunger in the land has now become a moot academic point.

From all available evidence, it is now important to avert elite suicide in Nigeria. Our people are hurting from a misguided and misbegotten currency redesign fiasco. The horror of it all! Yet nobody of substance is offering a word on the fiscal gridlock of having the people denied access to their legitimate earning. This bizarre tomfoolery has lasted for too long.

In all likelihood, elite suicide will lead to the swift disintegration of the nation and leave all of us at the mercy of local hyenas and international vultures already on the prowl. Elite suicide occurs when the regnant elite formation of a nation can no longer handle the contradictions arising from their own acts of omission or commission.

The field is then left open to the rule of the mob which is anarchy formally enthroned. Politics in contemporary post-military Nigeria has failed to nurture and foster a wise and politic society. Instead the impolitic and impertinent rule the roost.

Professors, philosophers and wise men of the society are routinely slapped down in sharp and acerbic exchanges. One recalls that during the chaotic Chinese Cultural Revolution, Chairman Mao finally had his way with a famous professor who had humiliated him as a private student by getting him to dig roots in a remote village without any opportunity of early restitution. It was called a Programme of Re-Education.

We will be lucky if this programme of re-education has not already arrived in Nigeria. Autochtonous species from the last redoubts of humanoid existence in Nigeria pop up everywhere. A city once celebrated for its leisurely cultivation and good manners has now become a point of convergence for arboreal creatures and other evolutionary fiascoes.

Whatever else you might say of the ancient Romans, it cannot be said that they didn’t lay down the rules of engagement in their famous capital. When you are in Rome, you do as Romans do. The English frown very much at disgraceful behavior not in accord with the people of excellent manners. The Chinese disdain bovine rudeness.

For some cultures, it is a matter of ancestral honour to comply with the code of conduct and habits of the hosting habitats. Nobody in their right senses will go to the core north and tell them that it is their desire to live among the women in purdah. It is a sacrilege that will be met with the appropriate response.

The tension is so palpable these days, the national discord so tangible that sometimes you feel as if you are in pre-war Lebanon or in the strife-torn Palestinian enclave of Israel. The discord and tension are driven by elite rancor and disharmony. Never in Nigeria’s post-independence history have the political elite been this badly polarized and bitterly divided.

It is just as well, then, that the BVAS imbroglio has forced Mahmood Yakubu and INEC to postpone the remaining elections by one week. That may well turn out to be a fortuitous collusion between technological imperfection and human incompetence. At least the tension will go down a little bit. As we noted last week, in a multi-ethnic and multi-religious country, if one section of the country decides to circle the electoral wagon for whatever reasons, it may provoke similar neuroses in other nationalities.

We have now arrived at a point where elections have become an ethnic census; a gathering of the tribal faithful. This speaks to a sharp retreat and regression of national consciousness which does not augur well for the Nigerian project. How did we get to this point when there are electoral markers in our recent journey to full nationhood which indicate a collective striving to overcome ethnic divisions and contra-national identities forged on religion and ethnicity?

The resurgence of ethnic revanchism and tribal triumphalism  in the nation’s political space is evident everywhere: in the media, on the internet, market place discussions and the so called social media where the gladiators come garlanded and festooned in primordial plumes. The cumulative damage to national consciousness is better imagined. This column has argued several times that elections without substantial elite consensus merely serve to exacerbate national fault lines.

Pretending to be saints in the matter, the federal authorities have also weighed in insisting that unlike what happened in 1993, they are not available to be used to truncate the electoral will and wish of the Nigerian people. In 1993, General Babangida and his military cohorts summarily annulled the freest and fairest election in the history of the nation sending the entire country into a nose dive from which it has not recovered.

On the face of it, the federal call out seems a patriotic and well-judged intervention. But it shows everything that is wrong with the post-colonial state. Unlike the classical incarnation where the state is supposed to be above the elite fray as it acts as a neutral arbitrator and impersonal adjudicator, the postcolonial state in Africa often wades into intra-elite disputes in a partisan manner, losing its authority and legitimacy to the fracas.

This was precisely how June 12 happened. Because it was a partisan rather than a honest and patriotic power broker, the military state allowed itself to be lured to take sides in the elite jousting for position and power. By the time the smoke cleared up from the coliseum, the army had lost all its claims as a national institution. It had become an ethnic quango brimming with state assassins.

As a parting gift to the nation, the Buhari administration must resist the lure of partisan proclamation from the lofty altar of the state as the nation faces its most tasking post-election management crisis. There is an ominous quietude about. Understandably, not everyone is happy. The outcome of the presidential election is a devastating blow to the solar plexus of many of the nation’s traditional power-brokers.

When General Ibrahim Babangida, Buhari’s military nemesis and bête noire, famously proclaimed from the military throne that although he did not know who would succeed him, he knew who would not, he was of course referring to his legendary capacity to ban, unban and then re-ban members of the political class.

In at least one significant respect, the Minna-born grandmaster of military chess was right. He was able to determine who did not succeed him. In the other respect, he was also partially right if his decision to leave General Abacha behind is seen as a masterstroke of genius and absolute self-interest. It is to be noted however that both feats have been achieved at the expense of the ruination of personal honour, the integrity of the profession and the reputation of his nation.

Power not directly deployed or crudely used for personal obligation is power most potent. The incoming administration must immediately put in place a mechanism for elite integration while a commission for horizontal and vertical mobilization of Nigerians across ethnic, religious and class divides must be immediately empowered to deal with exigencies arising from state omissions and commissions of the last eight years.

To do this, we must study closely the global phenomena that impact on the nation-state project in a dialectical combination of both the negative and the positive. Perhaps the most impacting of these global developments is the phenomenon of globalization. Twenty years ago, this writer had posited that if one cannot argue with an earthquake, one can at least study it closely in order to master its hidden dynamics and secret dialectics.

Globalization is rich and immense in its contradictory and countervailing resources. On the one hand, it can be seen as a major enemy of the nation-state paradigm since it forcibly co-opts nations into the ambits and parameters of its globalizing procedures and propensity.

On the other hand, since the nation-state project— as the site of the most potent resistance to globalization— needs to pull its inner resources and national resilience together to stand a chance against globalization, then the phenomenon itself can be seen as a paradoxical reinforcement of and collusion with the nation-state.

On the strength of evidence, we are still far away from the end of the nation-state paradigm. This is why despite its faults and iniquities, the nation is still worth putting up a strong pitch for. It is even more so in the case of a Nigeria which is widely regarded as the last Black hope.

• The Strange case of Omoyele Sowore

Globalization  the process by which a more developed part of the world incorporates and subsumes the less developed parts in its developmental orbit, has been with us for a long time, depending on the level of technology and the state of human consciousness. Slavery, for example, has always been part of the human condition as a consequence of wars, sieges, famines and other cataclysmic occurrences.

But the internationalization of slavery and the rise of globalized capitalism have engendered such dislocations and shifts in human consciousness the likes of which nobody has witnessed before in the recorded history of humanity. In the end, perhaps nothing can beat the description of globalization as the universalization of the particular and the particularization of the universal.

What do they mean by this? A particular brand of capitalism, that is western capitalism, projects itself as the global exemplar of this mode of production against the claims of all its competitors. From then on this brand began to lay claim to universal verity by suppressing the claims of other rivals and pretenders to the throne. By the time it has finished, it was natural to assume that there is, and has been, only one mode of capitalism that the world has known.

Western modernity, the intellectual ancillary and ideological power-house of western capitalism, deployed very much the same ruthlessness in its confrontation with other versions of modernity. It should be noted that before it gained global ascendancy over its rivals, western modernity, and in particular its Anglo-American variant, was only one of several competing and countervailing variants. But by the time it worked through its rivals, it was as if they never existed.

Despite the pains, the trauma and the shock therapy of its disruptive possibilities, globalization has been game-changing. It has brought accelerated development to parts of the world which would have taken much longer had they been left to intuit or feel their way forward. It has contributed immensely to the rise of a global knowledge society by making developments in the more developed centres readily available. Finally, it has accentuated global mutual awareness and collaboration.

But the obverse of the coin is equally compelling. Globalization encourages a cult of abstract idealism and unrealistic expectations among many former denizens of the Third World who have found their way to the west which tend to complicate efforts at home.

By constant carping and resort to an unfavourable comparison of the situation at home they often lose sight of the bigger picture, particularly where it comes to the democratic project. Yet it can also be argued that without nudging the home government to a higher ideal, nothing reasonable or realistic can ever be achieved.

Nowhere in the world has the democratic emancipation of a people ever been a tea party. You cannot latch on to the emancipatory projects of other people to compute and configure the historic trajectory of your own society.

You can surely borrow tropes and tropicalization but not the story line itself. The Magna Carta was not an African event, neither is the French Revolution or the Chinese Revolution for that matter. Out of its inner reserves of resilience and visionary stirring every society must fashion its own ethos of liberation. Without lifting yourself up by the bootstraps, you cannot appropriate the gains accruing from other people’s costly struggles as your legitimate inheritance.

None of these foreign events can be used as plea bargain or as part of an application for remission of sentence. Africans and in particular Nigerians must learn to build on their own history of resistance to evil governance. There is no short cut to manumission.

Those who use the latest disruptive technologies to disrupt the electoral process of their country are merely fronting for anarchy and chaos. The people who actually do the voting know how they voted and if the outcome does not tally with their expectations, they will also resort to self-help. So, in the spiral of chaos and destruction, self-help normally cancels out self-help.

Nigeria is at a delicate and fragile conjuncture in its post-military democratic evolution. Seventeen years ago in a paper delivered at the official launching of Sahara Reporters at Empire State Building at New York titled The Blogger As Nemesis, one had hailed the arrival of the citizen journalist at the site of unspeakable political crime. But one had also cautioned against the abstract idealism and the unrealistic expectations which often fuel and propel the blogger and whistle-blower in the diaspora.

As we argued further, this relentless bombardment and unremitting revelations of shenanigans in high places can actually play into the hands of counter-revolutionary forces that may be looking to impose their own rightwing solution on the organic crisis of the state in the face of the helplessness and utter paralysis of the will of the extant progressive forces.

Having made his own heroic and sterling contribution both as an observer and participant in the struggle for the expansion of democratic space in Nigeria in the last three decades, Omoyele Sowore should now understand the full import of that cryptic statement about abstract idealism and the hopeless habits of great expectations.

As another parting gift to the nation, the federal authorities should discontinue with any matter pending for this gutsy and patriotic young man and release his travel documents. Should the federal authorities fail to honour this plea, the incoming president-elect must consider the matter as an urgent obligation to elite-reconciliation in a divided and polarized polity.