Category: Saturday

The day was Thursday, August 14, 2025. The time was 3pm. The venue was the Rev. Chris Oyakhilome Auditorium of the Ambrose Alli University, Ekpoma, Nigeria. The event was the 133rd in the inaugural lecture series of the over four and a half decades old institution established by the administration of the former governor of the then Bendel State, Professor Ambrose Alli, in the Second Republic. The lecturer was none other than the revered scholar of Comparative Politics and Strategic Studies, Professor Babatunde Olusegun Agara. The intriguing topic of his intellectual disquisition was ‘The Nigerian State: A Country Without Countrymen’ and for nearly two hours he held the audience spellbound with his penetrating interrogation of the dilemmas, uncertainties and challenges of the contemporary Nigerian condition.

Professor Agara kicked off his cerebral offering with a declaration of the credos constituting what he described as ‘My three guiding principles in life’ stating directly, unpretentiously and unrepentantly that: “In religion, I am a Christian and hence I believe passionately in God, the Almighty; In politics, I am a radical humanist, I believe in bringing about radical change that positively affect the masses through the instrumentalities of violence (if need be); In economics, I am a committed Marxist and hence I believe in revolutions”. His affirmation of belief in and support for revolutionary change in society if necessary may sound sacrilegious to conservative defenders of the establishment and advocates of continuity of the status quo. But inherent in variants of Marxist theses is the belief that it is only rational to respond to what is perceived as the disguised and structural violence imposed on society by a ruling class or elite with a counter violence designed to engender a more just, equitable and fair social order.

It is thus not surprising that Professor Agara ‘s lecture is suffused through and through with concerns about the challenges over the years of inept governance, paucity of leadership vision, structural inequities and debilities among others contributing to what he perceives as the deepening fragility of the Nigerian State even if it is yet to degenerate to the condition of total state collapse. On his choice of the topic of the inaugural, he explains that “The Nigerian State is seriously under a siege being plagued by what I have referred to as ‘the evil triad’ of insecurity, threats of secession and herders’ invasion. All these are simply due to the fact that we, Nigerians, do not see ourselves as countrymen, rather primordial sentiments and loyalty have created a divisive fault-line among us. Our argument is that it is  our inability to see ourselves as countrymen that have not only brought the evil triad, but is escalating them on a daily basis”.

Critical to Professor Agara ‘s characterization of the Nigerian State as a country without countrymen is the stalled progression of the polity from mere statehood to a more cohesive sense of nationhood. Can Nigeria be said to be any more organically viable today than she was when the great statesman and first Premier of the Western Region, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, described the country nearly eight decades ago as ‘a mere geographical expression’? Are there not still many Nigerians who would not disagree with the reference by Sir Ahmadu Bello, Sardauna of Sokoto and Premier of Northern Nigeria in the First Republic, to the colonial amalgamation as ‘the mistake of 1914’? With virtually every component of the country seeing themselves as marginalized and some groups advocating the outright breakup of Nigeria through secession, can it be plausibly contended that ours is indeed a country without countrymen?

When he speaks of the absence of countrymen in a country, Agara obviously refers to a deficient emotional bond between citizen and state and the lack of patriotic commitment of the vast majority of Nigerians to the structural entity known as Nigeria. While noting that what he describes as ‘the evil triad’ – insecurity, threats of secession and herders’ invasion – have reached an international dimension, he states that the situation is complicated and worsened by “the domestic problems of governance with virtually no opposition party, recycling of wasted political elites, lack of ideological convictions and a lack of political accommodation for the minorities within the state as it is presently structured”.

This, he argues, “has led to some questioning the legitimacy of the state and consenting to the fact that a state thus construed and not in total control of the means of violence added to the fact of its gross inadequacy in ensuring the security of its populace, is already a weak state on the path of being a failing, failed or collapsed state. These are the informing motifs for the choice of this topic”. Professor Agara interrogates the subject through an exhaustive examination of the concept of nationalism which, he states, “implies a national sentiment be it political, economic, religious or symbolic that unifies a people together and for which they are ready to sacrifice anything to sustain”.

Some of the dimensions of nationalism x-rayed by the lecturer include cultural nationalism which “stresses the need to defend or strengthen a national language, religion, or a way of life rather than achieve overt political ends”; liberal political nationalism predicated on the belief that, just like the individual, all Nations have a moral status and right to self-determination; conservative political nationalism which stresses social cohesion, public order and deployment of the sentiment of national patriotism in defence of traditional values and institutions; ethnic nationalism which “emphasizes the commonality of ancestral heritage thereby implying a stronger and perhaps more intense sense of distinctiveness and exclusivity” and expansionist nationalism rooted in a chauvinistic world outlook and value system difficult to distinguish from racism.

The political scientist sheds light on the notion of a country without countrymen when he submits that “Within a federal pluralist society filled with much sentiment of ethnic differences and more heterogenous factors than homogeneous, ethnic consciousness and differentiation becomes ‘natural’ and is ‘real’. In cases where some set of people feel that they are marginalized and that the political arrangement and structure does not provide enough or sufficient political accommodation for them to feel that they ‘belong’, primordial instinct of identifying with their ‘kind’ kicks in and national loyalty is transferred to ethnic loyalty expressed through ethnic identification and nationalism. Thus, ethnic nationalism and identification becomes an intellectual response to political, social and cultural problems of integration and legitimacy”.

One of the theoretical frameworks or anchors through which Professor Agara analyses his subject is that of political accommodation which is particularly central to federalist theory and practice. Thus, he posits that in a complex, ethnically, culturally and religiously plural society, the adequacy of the arrangements for political accommodation and coexistence of diverse groups in the polity are critical to the achievement or otherwise of harmony, peace and stability. He submits that federalism as a political format provides a framework for managing differences and that “political accommodation is only possible within a context where competing demands and claims by constituent groups are reconcilable and the various groups making up the federation are agreed to stay together”.

Critical to the viability of sustainable and productive political accommodation, the professor points out, are the mode of allocation or distribution of material and fiscal resources among component groups of the polity which must be reflective of justice particularly with reference to contributions to the polity’s collective resources; the opportunities offered the diverse component groups for peaceful, systemic and Judicial articulation and resolution of their demands as well as the imperative of achieving a balance between national cohesion and the desire for autonomy and self-determination by the federating units.

Read Also: Fed Govt to remap Nigeria after 50 years, says Surveyor-General

The second theoretical framework around which Professor Agara’s thesis revolves is that of contentious politics and violence which encapsulates such concepts as contentious collective challenge, contentious political behavior and social movements. He explains that contentious collective action through aggravated social movements comprising complex underlying social networks offers a critical avenue through which “the oppressed can draw an unresponsive state’s elites’ attention to their plight, or better articulate their grievances and confront the better equipped opponents or the state. Contentious collective action brings ordinary people together under the same umbrella, for the same purpose and to confront opponents, elites’ or authorities”.

In this regard, Professor Agara cites ethnic militias as examples of a form of social movements mobilized to pursue or undertake a collective challenge against state authorities for failing to address collective grievances of, for example, the peoples of the Niger Delta or the Igbo nationality of the Southeast region. He avers that the easiest and readiest recourse of components of aggrieved social movements desirous of social change is ‘the power of disruption’. According to him, “Social movements employ the power of disruption basically because this draws attention to them; enables the social movement to spread uncertainty while giving them the necessary leverage they need against powerful opponents such as the state”.

However, the deployment of the coercive apparatus of the state including the police, military and intelligence services to contain escalation in disruptive activities of social movements and eliminate their offensive capabilities tend to split the latter into two – moderate elements who tactically withdraw from the struggle and the more extremist and militant who resort to continuously intensifying acts of outright violence. Professor Agara makes profuse references in the literature to demonstrate that (1) political violence tends to progress from the onset of mild discontent to the politicization of discontent and ultimately the actualization of violence against political actors and structures; (2) political violence challenges the monopoly of force which is the defining essence of state authority while destabilizing normal political processes and (3) political violence tends to be directed not just at incumbent governments and their functionaries and facilities but also opposing political actors, forces and groups thus constituting a threat to the extant political order.

In this inaugural lecture, we have a most exhaustive and rigorous analytic interrogation of the various incendiary and destabilizing groups running rampant in Nigeria today including terrorist organizations, separatist agitators, extremist religious proselytizers, invading expansionist herdsmen and criminal cartels with detailed examination of their comparative organizational structures, internal value orientation, diverse modes of operation, assorted psychological motivations, extraterritorial organizational linkages as well as inter-organizational relationships.