Last week, we raised the ensign of a new power oligarchy in the country, the oligarchy of the creeks. Compared to other oligarchies in Nigeria, particularly the Yoruba oligarchy, the feudal oligarchy of the core north and the old military oligarchy, it is still inchoate and incoherent.
It is not yet a hegemonic power bloc, even though it is seeking to supplant the two major power blocs in the nation. Given its facile assumptions, the crass superficiality of its standard bearers and its very mode of ascendancy , it may yet shipwreck in its own backyard, without going very far from the shipyard. This will be very unfortunate, given the fact that Nigeria needs more countervailing power centres.
An oligarchy in itself is not a bad thing. As we have been told, all human organisations tend to crystallize into oligarchies. Power tends to gravitate to a small coherent group with the discipline, the self-control, the mastery of the terrain, and above all, the directing and specialised knowledge and access to political intelligence which allow them to take control and act on behalf of the larger group. This is the iron law of oligarchies.
But an oligarchy can become counterproductive or degenerate to a mere criminal enterprise when a combination of adverse historical circumstances and unforeseen realities force it to act in a way that is destructive of the very basis of its coming to existence or subversive of the rationale for its continued viability. The Nigerian political graveyard is filled with the bones of many oligarchies.
It needs to be restated that after the botched June 12, 1993 presidential election and its tragic aftermath, Jonathan’s pan-Nigerian mandate presented the best opportunity to create Nigeria anew and the best hope to forge a national and nationalist oligarchy which would have pushed Nigeria along the path of great development and genuine national cohesion. The old hegemonic power blocs had been neutralised and rendered hors de combat by adversity and –it must be said—by General Obasanjo’s brutal decimation and the creative destruction occasioned by his relentless war-gaming.
Alas, you cannot give what you don’t have. Poor Goodluck Jonathan seems to have bungled it. And it is a fairly comprehensive mess. Jonathan’s relative inexperience, the unpropitious nature of his party, his own provincial background, his lack of the political nous needed to grapple with the baffling complexities of a nation in traumatic transition have worsened the national crisis. Oligarchs are made of sterner stuff.
In the event, the nation has been pushed once again to uncharted territory. If it were possible to help the president back on his feet in order to regain the momentum, this would have been the path of least resistance and cost-effective damage limitation. But suborned by ethnic hysteria and completely beholden to the puerile shamans of apocalyptic violence, Jonathan is too far gone in the unfolding somnambulist nightmare.
In the circumstance, and given the fact that it had been badly bruised in several battles of the Fourth Republic, you would have expected the dominant Yoruba political tendency to adopt a siddon look attitude to the imminent collision of forces, particularly as the confrontation between the core north and its former Niger Delta collaborators shapes up.
In the alternative, realpolitik ought to have dictated that the dominant Yoruba group should team up in quiet complicity with the federal authorities against their old feudal adversaries no matter how reviled and revolting the nature of current federal politics. As a pragmatic strain of Yoruba worldview would have it, no matter the colour or complexion of the sky, what the bird eats is what the bird flies with.
But that miserable food ethics is not in consonance or conformity with the dominant ethos of the Yoruba enacted over a thousand years of state-building and state-disabling in the forests and plains of what was to become Southern Nigeria. Ever since the formation of Nigeria, the Yoruba people have been in the forefront of the battle for the nation.
It has been a Homeric battlefield indeed. .Many of their most illustrious scions have perished in the struggle for the state or have been wasted in a heroic but sometimes quixotic bid to lay down the foundations and principles of a modern nation-state.
Old traditions often weigh down on new traditions like an unbearable burden. Children of old empire builders cannot be expected to sit idly by when new state-formations that will determine their fate and the fortunes of their children are being put in place. The problem is that they will have to do this with the descendants of other empire builders boxed together with them in a colonial cage of utmost contraries and contradictions.
This is not to discount the specific issue raised by the Igbo questioning of the National Question. Not known to have built great empires in the immediate past, the Igbo people have marched into modern nationhood with grit, determination and dynamic resourcefulness thus bypassing the more gory contradictions of feudal formations.
The phenomenal strides taken in education and commerce in the last eighty years by the Igbo people speak to this explosion of individual talents without any iron fetters of feudal bondage. As such it is a great redemptive resource for modern nation-building which ought to place the emergent Igbo elite in the forefront of Nigeria’s march to authentic greatness.
Old advantages often turn into modern disadvantages. The situation recalls England of the Industrial Revolution. Precisely because it was at the periphery of ancient feudal formations, England was able to rapidly bypass the iron contradictions of the old order to rapidly emerge as the first authentic modern nation-state, unlike the more classical feudal formations such as ancient China, Ethiopia, Russia and to some extent Northern Nigeria. Snooper owes the initial insight to Samir Amin, the great Egyptian Marxist philosopher and political economist.
But as the English have also taught us, even rapid modernisation requires some strong state standardization and constant configuration in order to rein in individualistic excesses and the tendency to anarchic freewheeling and unethical competitiveness. This is the conundrum of human development .
Unfortunately, mired in convenient persecution complex, and suborned by the Ottoman-like antics and Byzantine intrigues of a feudally inspired post-colonial state for which they have no appetite and even talent, this crucial point continues to elude the outstanding Igbo philosophers in our midst. Rather than shopping for friends in a hostile environment, they are shopping for enemies. It doesn’t get more clueless and politically daft. The crisis of politics in Nigeria is also fundamentally a crisis of culture.
Past failures ought to lead to a modification of enthusiasm or the application of new strategies. Two critical instances from the Yoruba past will suffice to explain the current quest for alliances and cooperation by the dominant Yoruba political tendency and the crucial dangers thereof. It reads like a horoscope of disaster and possible salvation.
In 1978 at the commencement of party politics, Chief Awolowo invited a group of influential northern politicians, particularly of Middle Belt origins, to his Park Lane Apapa residence to solicit for their support to form a broad-based political party of which he would obviously be the presidential flag bearer.
The fledgling association broke down at the very next meeting when the issue of finance and the distribution of posts came up. To the northern power brokers, politics is about the allocation of resources and a game of who gets what and at what time. This position greatly irritated and discomfited Awo who did not hide his displeasure. According to Mvendaga Jibo, “Awo’s countenance changed. He seemed irritated”.
Needless to add that the whole thing ended in a fiasco. To show his contempt for prebendalist politics and its feudal past masters, Awolowo went ahead to name Phillip Umeadi, a political non-starter from the east, as his running mate. Unfortunately, contempt does not translate into votes. Awo’s political quest was doomed ab initio. So also by the same token was the Second Republic which dissolved into world-historic looting and state larceny.
Towards the end of 1983, Awolowo gathered together his party faithful in Abeokuta for a state of the union review. It was against the backdrop of hysterical ranting of Umaru Dikko about an NPN Third Reich which would last forever. The UPN had been electorally hammered and the future appeared bleak and terrifying indeed.
There was a forlorn and despondent mood in the background. It was at this meeting that Awolowo famously detoured into the Hegelian dialectic of inevitable change in which the best parts of a thesis combine with the best parts of its antithesis to form a new synthesis.
As usual, the Ikenne titan was showing a remarkable insight into how contradictory forces shape history and the evolution of human society. What you want is not always what you get, and what you get is not always what you want. By 1987, Awo concluded his earthly labours. But 10 years after his Hegelian prophecy, MKO Abiola, a famous apostate and reconditioned reactionary, romped to victory as the flag bearer of a left of centre military party tacitly supported by Awo’s surviving lieutenants.
Abiola was to perish in his quest to validate his electoral victory which had been annulled by his old military constituency. But upon the country’s return to civil rule in 1999, the Yoruba nation gave its full electoral endorsement to those of Awo’s acolytes who had waged a heroic battle against the annulment of Abiola’s mandate. Those Awo lieutenants who allowed their resentment of Abiola’s earlier role to becloud their perception of new realities were thrown off the cliff of contention forever.
These new realities and Awo’s Hegelian thesis subsist and prevail, whatever our purist preference for an idealistic utopian polis. The perfect community is an imaginary paradise. That being the case, Abiola’s electoral victory and its sorry annulment, Awolowo’s heroic but doomed quest to extend his vision and version of modernity and fiscal order to the rest of the country presuppose that the Yoruba must go into alliance with other groups as long as Nigeria is structurally disfigured.
Elementary political common sense presupposes that even if it is to preserve and consolidate the regional gains of the last few years, attack is the best form of defence. As the fate of the Action Group, UPN, SDP and AD ought to have taught us, you cannot wait for the enemy barricaded inside your own enclave and expect to survive the artillery onslaught. You must go out to meet him in the open coliseum of post-colonial strife.
Knowing the Western Nigerian electorate for what they are, the tacit and tactical endorsement of alliance and association with the “auld enemy” is not a free meal ticket. The political razzmatazz of the moment must not becloud the Yoruba faction of the APC leadership into thinking that endorsement of alliance is a mandate for the wholesale surrender of Yoruba cultural values.
Rather, they must see it as an opportunity to persuade their core northern colleagues that Nigeria can no longer be run along the old lines of patrimonial and prebendal feudal politics. It has already upended the old north, politically, spiritually and economically. Any federal government formed along those old lines will shipwreck in a matter of months. How the western faction of the APC does this will put to test their political sagacity and dexterity in the coming months. There is a limit to realpolitik in the face of the turbulent discontents of the real polity.
In ending, perhaps we must return to the old magi of Ikenne. In his very last interview, Awolowo noted that if he were to come back in 10 years and Nigeria was still the way it was, he would be found at the head of a stone-throwing mob. It is 27 years, and the mob is already gathering. The hurly-burly may be here with us. As Jonathan’s predatory presidency has conclusively proven, Nigeria cannot continue like this.
