Impunity in a society that has moved on is an excellent opportunity for a nation to flirt with suicide. This is why at the moment Nigeria appears to be running on an autopilot. Nobody seems to be truly in charge. The president has just returned from medical pilgrimage abroad where Nigeria’s highest diplomat in the host country reportedly had a tough time keeping away prying native eyes keen to register their displeasure with the state of things at home.
Although the security situation appears to have slightly improved in the last few weeks, there are still areas of deep concern when it comes to actual governance, particularly the management of the nation’s ethnic divergences, and an economy that is on a tailspin. The problem is that the nation’s affairs have been so badly bungled, so grossly mismanaged, that it will take years of unrelenting messianic toil by a committed political elite and a group of mandarins that know their onions to get things back on track.
The prospects of that state resurgence and national renaissance appears to be very bleak, judging from the current lopsided configuration of the nation and the violent state suppression of all agitations for a renewal of the national charter or a redefinition of its territorial dominion. With the clampdown on all agitations for a renegotiation of the basis of the country, all appears to be quiet on the eastern and to some extent the western fronts.
But we wager that this can only be a temporary and transient retreat, as even more potent forces regroup, reorganize and re-strategize. This is because from time immemorial, arguments and contentions about the National Question are better resolved through rational dialogue and sober negotiation rather than the summary liquidation by military force and fiat of agitators for a more humane and democratic polity. They will find their way back to the front burner one way or the other.
Nigeria’s burden of malignant national memory is compounded by the culture of impunity. Political impunity trumps other impunities. It is from the barrel of political impunity that other impunities flow. Without political power, either in its soft or hard form, economic, cultural, gender and spiritual impunity does not thrive. Political impunity, or power without ethical responsibility, gives immunity for other forms of impunity and provides them with cover from punishment.
This is why it often grieves the soul so badly and bitterly that those who should be in jail or voluntarily depart for political purgatory having contributed to the political and economic adversity of the country still strut about freely insulting the abjured spirit of the nation and the memory of many who gave up their life for the inauguration of a more humane and egalitarian society.
We are dealing with professional managers of political violence and the militarization of the society for the purpose of perpetual domination. Since power, in its untrammelled and unadulterated form, is all that matters to them and thinking that they have neutralized and de-platformed all oppositions while putting sundry competitors in the political infirmary, they are now going about figuring out how to impose their next presidential choice on the nation come 2023.
If they succeed, it will not be because of any divine instrumentality or the superior justification of their hegemonic quest. It will be a mere reflection of the balance of forces at play. For this not to happen, it will take a critical pan-Nigerian mass and the entire nation acting in patriotic concert. Judging by the forces at play and the current balance of power, one cannot see this happening between now and 2023 unless there is a true revolutionary uprising which completely suborns the old ruling clique.
This is why one is often nonplussed and quietly amused by protests from some progressive circles about the unjustness and unfairness of the 1999 Constitution. It is the subtle ironies of history once again. We need to ask ourselves why the protests suddenly resurged almost two decades after the constitution had been operationalized when the progressive forces had all the time, focus and energy to protest or even reject the imposition of the constitution.
The point is that the military constitution was an acute reflection of the balance of power and the forces at play at that point in time. Beginning with the coup of 1983 which terminated civil rule and the subsequent annulment of a presidential election ten years later, the military had driven back the forces of progressive politics and the democratic emancipation of the nation. In between, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, the avatar of that political tendency, had joined his ancestors in May, 1987.
The shrewd and politically alert leaders of the progressive platform knew that they had reached the point of political exhaustion and struggle-fatigue. They were after all not revolutionaries but left of center political juggernauts who knew their limits and limitations.
It is to their credit that they had gone that far without betraying the struggle or compromising their integrity. To insist on going any further would have cost them some pricey members and the fractious political alliance that has sustained them and borne them perilously aloft in the turbulent years of Abacha.
The military oligarchy, wearing the deceptive camouflage of repentant nationalism and their most humane and conciliatory face in Abdulsalaam Abubakar, knew exactly where they wanted to go and who they wanted to hand the country over to despite the fact that their messianic pretensions had suffered a massive jolt.
They were content with humouring and massaging the ego of the old troublesome Yoruba elders, conniving with them to register a regional party and tactically allowing them to impose their supremacy and suzerainty on their catchment area. They knew that Obasanjo, their old nemesis and bête noire, once he had gathered the levers of power in his palms, would go after them and re-establish the supremacy of unitary federalism with punitive urgency.
In the event, Obasanjo did better than the conventional expectations of the old power masters. Having routed ambitious military officers who might constitute a nuisance to civilian rule on the grounds of their complicity with military despotism and politically controversial past, Obasanjo turned his attention to the two opposition parties, particularly the AD, relentlessly destabilising them until they fractured and folded up.
In equal opportunity gaming, the wily and hardboiled Owu warrior snared up his own party in an anaconda hug sending the original founders who managed to escape by the skin of their teeth on a fatal stampede. The survivors from the Second Republic who thought that the rosy days of the NPN were back, where party supremacy was a sacrosanct principle, soon learnt to their peril that what was unfurling before them was a classic war game of a military in civilianizing transition.
Those who were wise quickly jumped out before they were overtaken by a more sinister fate. Others went under wondering what had hit them. This was not an ordinary party. The post-military party formation is not exactly a truly civilian gathering. It must reflect the conditions of its possibility and its provenance in garrison politics. It is for those who can take orders, as Obasanjo famously inquired of Atiku.
Consequently, the Oputa Panel for National Reconciliation, rather than being a theatre of atonement; a vehicle for national catharsis and redemption of sins, quickly dissolved into a grotesque parody; a parade and panorama of impunity on an epic scale. The commission itself was a victim of impunity. It was not meant to be otherwise. Nothing of enduring value could have come out of such a hopelessly impaired agency.
This is why two decades after the termination of military tyranny nobody has ever paid for or atoned for the grave infractions against the spirit of the nation. Those who annulled a free and fair election, the freest and fairest in the history of the country in which fourteen million Nigerians voted, are still strutting about as if it was all in a day’s job.
Occasionally, they venture from their accursed liars to further insult the sensibility of the nation. Since no one has ever been interdicted or remotely queried for such heinous electoral heist, they cannot be accused of gross indiscretion.
And they are in excellent company. Despite the widely documented assassination of high-profile Nigerians that occurred under General Sani Abacha’s watch and the freely given confessions of some of his murderous henchmen, nobody has ever been brought to book for the serious crimes. Indeed in a deeply polarized nation in which one nationality’s villain is another nationality’s hero, all the monuments named after the goggled Kanuri general from Kano remain intact.
Now his principal honcho, and main enforcer, has ambitions of ruling the entire country. Given the power equation in the country, it may not be a forlorn dream. On too many occasions, we have seen what we thought was an impossible dream become harsh reality in the country to our mournful chagrin.
It may be useful at this point to expound on the doctrine of fatal impunity before we round up by speculating on where the culture and the collapse of national values are leading the nation. Impunity appears legal and lawful when the perpetrators of crimes against the nation get away with it because they are either too strong or powerful or because the balance of forces is overwhelmingly freighted in their favour.
Moral suasions and futile protests can never lead to restitution or the restoration of the moral universe in such circumstances. But no such situation can subsist forever. Impunity is immunity on the prowl, depending on how much a society is willing to take which in turn depends on the objective realities of its economic and political condition.
When Louis X1V of France famously proclaimed himself as the absolute incarnation the state, it was an acute judgement and prime example of impunity accurately reflecting the balance of forces in feudal France. Under him, France reached the apogee of its imperialist grandeur. When the balance of forces shifted to the people in a revolutionary uprising a century later, some members of the royal family had to pay the supreme price.
In these matters, the famous owl of Minerva always begins its flight at dusk ,that is after the event and after the deed has been done. In human history, very few oligarchies or antiquated feudal royalty have been known to freely give up their privileges and perquisites even when it is glaring to all that their time was up. It is one of the iron laws of oligarchies that they must be incapable of reading the handwriting on the wall.
From old England, feudal France, colonial America, colonized Brazil, Tsarist Russia, post-colonial Iran and the Hapsburg Empire, they are always swept away after much violence and protracted bloodshed. While Benito Mussolini was hung like a common criminal from the lamp post by the local Italian militia, Adolf Hitler spent his last days in his besieged bunker, ranting, raving and hallucinating as Soviet tanks crunched their way into Berlin from the east and American shells fell from the west.
But as the weird finale crept nearer, Hitler suffered a momentous intervention of lucidity and utter clarity. He had noticed that many of the bulkier, taller and more athletically endowed American troops that had vanquished his Germany were descendants of German people who had fled the inequities and impunities of feudal Germany in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to make a new life in America.
Their leader, the tall, bulky and calmly menacing General Dwight Eisenhower, was one of these new liberators of the ancestral fatherland. The Hohenzollern Kings had long been deposed by the Germans themselves but the new Hohenzollerns represented by Hitler and his court must bear the brunt of American umbrage and global outrage.
Anybody who has been following the unfolding drama of age-old political impunity and economic inequities in Nigeria will attest to the increasing power of the Nigerian Diaspora lobby and the disproportionate influence the exiled natives wield in directly impacting developments at home. They are unlikely to return to their old fatherland as conquering troops.
But it is obvious that they will deploy their economic as well as political resources and intellectual firepower to influence the course of events at home. The hostile reception accorded to General Mohammadu Buhari on his last two medical trips to England is an indication of approaching turbulence. Since emigration from Nigeria has not been uniform and evenly spread for obvious reasons, this development is likely to fuel the rabid paranoia of an increasingly isolated hegemonic class and the siege mentality of the clan.
In an editorial that went viral this past week, the Punch newspaper chronicled how Nigeria’s strength and importance in the world of sports is being systematically whittled down by defecting Nigeria-born athletes and sports people who have shown preference for wearing the insignia of other countries. In a particularly embarrassing instance, Nigerian-born Monica Okoye helped the Japanese female basketball team to dislodge the Nigerian team from the last Olympics game.
More international embarrassments are likely to follow. Like the fabled African slave woman in Brazilian captivity who produced seven more children for her Portuguese abductors, Nigeria has become a famous nursery bed producing young offshoots and tender plants for eventual transplantation to more humane and benign environment. Nobody would remember this great sacrifice just as no one remembers the great soldiers, writers, philosophers, jurists and athletes of African extraction who helped to man and service the Roman Empire.
Several thousand years after, Africans are still at war with themselves like a race fated to extinction or assimilation. The direct military impact of the Diaspora can already be felt in the funding and financing of separatist groups in the country, particularly IPOB. Tactically isolated and increasingly driven underground by the scorched earth policies of the government, IPOB is resorting to increasingly brutal and terrorist reprisals of its own which now include assassinations and summary decapitations of known opponents.
The situation is likely to worsen as a beleaguered hegemonic caste reaches the end of its historic tether. It ought to be clear from the above that no matter how long it is elongated and stretched beyond the limits of human endurance, impunity has its timeline and historic serve-by date.
It is a profound historical irony that the wisest and smartest ruling classes in Africa in recent times are the Boers and British overlords of South Africa and Zimbabwe. They knew when to cut their losses and save their people and nations from further punishments. Their African counterparts, particularly in Nigeria, simply have no sense of an ending.
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