Suddenly, Ihube has acquired a fearsome reputation and reinvention in the nation’s political imaginary as a secessionist stronghold; a hotbed of IPOB’s guerilla activities and a dreaded enclave of murderous abductors. The charred remnants of vegetation and incinerated farmsteads spoke to unrelenting aerial bombardment and a new passage of thunder. But the Ihube that remains in the imagination of this writer is totally different.
Forty eight years ago when yours sincerely served as a Youth Corper in the area, Ihube was an idyllic and somewhat somnolent agrarian community lying just off the main road that connected Okigwe to Enugu through Awgu. The place was bursting with farm produce from the outlying villages. Just after the elite Ihube-Okigwe Boys Secondary School was a lonesome unpaved road that slithered through sand and dust to the Mbala-Ngodo-Isuochi community and beyond.
If you kept going at it in the right direction, you might find yourself in Arondizuogu and its famed People’s Palace. The other direction might eventually land you in Orumba North District and Alex Ekwueme’s Okoh community.
Although the regnant scars of the civil war were still visible then, the remarkable people were making a remarkable comeback. It was only a question of a short time. Now, there is a clear danger that it may all end in tears again.
Nigerians are an awfully inventing and inventive lot. In the course of inventing and reinventing others, they also get invented and reinvented. People and places and nations collect a lot of sobriquets, nomenclatures and nicknames in the course of their existence in most cases as a response to existential pressures and historical exigencies.
All entities, both human and non-human, are constantly imagined and their images redrawn in the universal imaginary. It is said that those who enjoy raiding rabbit warrens also have their own hind thoroughly frisked by divine retribution.
But while negative profiling and hostile “inventions” of others, particularly rival nations, is the norm in adversarial international relations, they can only stick if the reality on ground matches the adversarial portrait. No amount of “bad mouth” and negative profiling can remove the anodyne sweetness of honey, just as no amount of treatment and reprocessing can remove the sharp and nettling taste of raw pepper.
By this same token, positive and imaginative self-profiling by a nation can only succeed if the reality on ground matches the self-projection. For example, how did the word “Teutonic” come to be associated with German precision of tools and the ruthless efficiency of its industrial workforce?
Originally, the word denoted a person of Germanic ancestry. But by the time the tough Germans erupted on modern civilization, the word had acquired added meaning as a result of steely performance based on rational evaluation and militant self-belief.
The positive self-profiling by Americans of their country’s Exceptionalism, its manifest destiny as a covenanted nation and its occult valorization as a little city shining on the hills whose light cannot be obscured or occluded is validated by the concrete reality on the ground as America took centre stage as the global exemplar of a functioning democracy and accelerated national development.
One sure thing about all this is the fact that stirring tropes are impossible without elite unanimity about the destiny of the nation. This critical consensus among ruling groups is the glue that binds all exceptional nations together irrespective of ideologies: the western liberal democracies, Singapore, United Arab Emirates, China, Russia, Japan etc. Without it, nations merely toil in vain and are nothing but sheer geopolitical agglomerations of anarchic ethnicities such as we have in postcolonial Africa.
It has been observed by some shrewd commentators that Nigeria is a wonderful tribute to the subversive genius of the colonial masters. If such a big resource-laden country in the heart of Africa did not exist in the colonial imagination, it would have had to be willed into existence by postcolonial patriots thrown up by the decolonizing project.
Many have noted that this rosy projection exists mainly at the level of imagination and child-like fantasy. Out of nothing, nothing will come. The postcolonial elites of Africa have willed nothing substantial into existence and are unlikely to do so in the nearest future if the current political sterility, economic and spiritual anomie continue.
All the extant nations on the continent, except Ethiopia, are creations of colonial fiat. No new African country has been created by pan-African concert and consensus. Eritrea and South Sudan were international projects rather than local initiatives. In Nigeria, the continental behemoth, the major nationalities were boxed together and coerced into nation-hood by sheer colonial firepower.
The attempt to sustain this colonial contretemps at the level of internal colonization by the last indigenous empire met with military doom on the plains of Jukunland, the Jos Plateau and the Osun River in what is known as Jalumi War. Thereafter, the local superpower resorted to political intrigues and subterfuge to recoup what it lost on the battle ground.
This war of hegemony among the major nationalities in Nigeria, now overt and now covert; now brutally frontal and now by superb proxy is at the root of the dystopia which has made it impossible for the nation to make any meaningful progress since independence either on the political or the economic front.
Elite consensus on the political and economic destiny of the nation is a prerequisite for any major economic or political breakthrough, particularly in multi-ethnic nations. This is why coerced national consensus, such as we have seen in Rwanda, Equatorial Guinea, Namibia and Uganda, can feel like a harbinger of peace and prosperity.
Unable to arrive at a consensus on any major national political project or programme for the economic resuscitation of the nation, the Nigerian elite resort to spectacular stealing schemes and raids on the exchequer so daring and outlandish that they must call to question the mental wellbeing of the perpetrators.
But the chicks may be coming home to roost. The auguries are dark and foreboding. With the economy stretchered and on a life support machine, it is obvious that some endgame is approaching. The nation is roiling in dysfunction and disequilibrium. It will be foolish for anybody to dismiss this as mere apocalyptic scaremongering.
Last week, the nation marked its sixty third independence anniversary in a dark and sombre mood. Almost everybody wore forlorn and mournful looks. With inflation hitting the roof and with the purchasing power of the national currency sharply reduced, it will require an economic wizard with formidable political balls to get Nigeria out of the wood.
To compound and deepen the trauma of the nation is the political anomie foisted on it by an errant political class. Isn’t it a source of pain and misery and a fountain of national embarrassment that several months after a presidential election held and a winner declared, the main political combatants have refused to sheathe their swords?
More than six months after, the rancor persists; the hate-filled propaganda and no-holds barred dissemination of fake news continues. The foul and fetid odor of political muck-raking assaults the nostrils at every turn turning the country into an object of international ridicule and global obloquy. Any rational objection to the theatre of political absurdity is met with indignant howls of derision and disdain.
If you meet with the core supporters of the losing candidates and you insist that based on the current political configuration of Nigeria, the extant balance of electoral power, the patchwork alliances and the disposition of judicial forces on ground the outcome was unlikely to be different, you are likely to be assailed as an enemy of democracy, peace and progress.
Amidst so many violently colliding notions of the truth and of justice and democracy, the invention and reinvention of Nigeria also proceeds apace. If this were to be a secondary school, even the senior prefect would have been subjected to brutal assault in the consuming chaos and anarchy of wild and untamed private desires.
Politics is the canalization and channelization of wild private desires for public order and national good. In order to escape the Hobbesian state of nature such as we have in contemporary Nigeria and much of postcolonial Africa, individuals and groups must be willing to surrender their private desires for public good or it will be done for them by an implacable homogenizing Leviathan, failing which it will be the turn of disruptive forces of disintegration to try their luck.
The impatience with natural disorder was what made Hegel, the great conservative German philosopher and ardent fan of Prussian military hegemony, to declare that what is real is rational and what is rational is real.
A great nation is often the triumph of public order however harsh and autocratic over contending private fantasies however egalitarian and republican. The French and Russian revolutionists learnt this lesson the hard way.
We can now begin to plot our way out of the conundrum and the paradox of a nation that underachieves where the state and modern governance is concerned but overachieves where individual talents and the exploits of private citizens are concerned. Immigration officials at global entry points who profile prospective entrants speak in unison of Nigerians and their proud, imperious and lordly bearing in contrast to most other Africans. That is not taught by the state.
The spectacular explosion of talents in the arts, music, fashion and sports as well as the exploits of Nigerians abroad in their various fields of human endeavor speak to a fundamental disjuncture. Why is it that it is when the state and governance are left out of their business that Nigerians tend to come into their own?
Do we then ask the stunted and underachieving state to leave us severely alone? Not so fast and not on your life. In the absence of a potent and viable state, Nigeria will become a nursery bed and humongous hatchery for transporting and exporting talents to more viable nations abroad. The remittances will dry up and stop completely in the second generation. This is the iron law of emigration.
The problem with the postcolonial state in Nigeria is the weak national consensus on which it is anchored and the genetic indiscipline of the political elite. Rather than retreating in order to live to fight another day, the opposition appears bent on bringing the roof down. In the controversial presidential election of 2000, Al Gore was the winner by more than half a million votes and was only denied the presidency by some electoral skullduggery.
But he bravely and nobly refused to bring the system down. The nation was far more important. The Democrats went back to the drawing board and kept at it. Eight years after, they emerged from the shadows and through the instrumentality of the Barack Obama phenomenon they were able to put the Republicans out of their misery. The ping pong has continued.
What Nigeria needs is urgent constitutional reform which is impossible without fundamental elite amity. Our brothers, sisters and compatriots from the east should not allow their people to be made to carry the can for a dysfunctional and malfunctioning Nigerian postcolonial state once again. Their leading lights must come up with a comprehensive blueprint for achieving peace in the restive region. This writer counts many of them as his personal friends. The bloodletting and economic self-emasculation has gone on for far too long.
