The forthcoming presidential election is so consequential that it can be regarded as a plebiscite on the future of Nigeria. Here are the reasons. Despite some negligible gains here and there, Nigeria’s political and economic cultures have reached a point of exhaustion, having evolved in a particular negative direction where growth and development are no longer feasible. Any further attempt to pursue this course is the path of self-destruction.
A plebiscite is an advisory referendum on whether a nation should jettison the past and chart an entirely new course. For such to take place means that the nation is still somehow holding together despite the tempest and nation-consuming circumstances. Invariably, a referendum takes place when a nation has virtually reached the point of no return; an ethnic cum religious census in which its fate and continued existence hang in the balance.
Every human society, in the course of its historical evolution, reaches a point when old answers will no longer do for fresh historical posers, and when emergent contradictions such as rapid urbanization arising from population explosion, demographic reconfiguration issuing from aging and dying off suddenly pose a serious challenge to the old order. In such circumstances, the wise people of society must put on their thinking cap.
Unfortunately for Nigeria, the demons of national demolition pursuing the nation are unrelenting in their determination to bring it to heel. A referendum does not steal upon a nation. It is usually the manifestation of the failure of elite consensus which would have been building up and playing out for quite some time.
As the presidential campaigns take off, many members of the political class do not seem to appreciate what is in the offing. When you combine widespread social unease arising from hunger, insecurity and mass unemployment, with the possibility of elite disruption of the electoral process, you have a classic recipe for terminal implosion.
With the mindboggling revelations of the scale of oil theft by both state and non-state actors in the riverine areas of the nation, the economic and political woes of the country seem to have assumed a novel and damning dimension. A local wit summed up the development for yours sincerely with devastating pungency during the week. “You see, shark no dey hunt shark. Tompolo na government and government na Tompolo”.
Government Ekpemupolo, aka Tompolo, the new prince of the Niger Delta, is a hard-dying fellow indeed. Up till this moment, he seems to have lived a charmed life. As an outlaw and rugged denizen of the creeks and their labyrinthine waterways, he has survived years of hostile state surveillance and relentless artillery bombardment only to emerge from open hiding as a hero and model citizen.
In his current incarnation as a lawful agent of the state and supreme protector of oil facilities, the sparce, supremely self-assured fellow has made a lot of startling revelations about state collusion with criminal elements and officially enabled diversions without as much as a rebuttal from the authorities. Meanwhile while Government and government are at it, Angola has already outpaced Nigeria in the oil production sector.
Gabon and Equatorial Guinea seem to be piling up all pressures. If they maintain their national stability under their authoritarian regimes, it is only a question of time. With revenues accruing to the federal authorities dramatically declining as a result of this siege, it should be clear that Nigeria is bleeding to death economically. It will take a drastic change of direction to reverse the trend.
As the criminalization of the postcolonial state proceeds apace, the entire nation-state is beginning to resemble a vast crime scene or a bazaar of medieval engorgement. In a recent profile of Peter Obi, the presidential candidate of the Labour Party, a foreign magazine openly dismissed the country as a kleptocracy. With their war chest bulging with proceeds from the “Exclusive List”, it should not come as a surprise that the combined wealth of some non-state actors outstrips the sovereign wealth of the nation. It doesn’t get more scary.
Between state and non-state actors, there is a convergence of criminality in which the state has become a horrific joke. With the north already laid waste by banditry and kidnapping, nothing can be more destabilizing to a nation either politically, economically or even spiritually. The slow economic strangulation of the nation can only eventuate in anarchy and stateless anomie.
When the combined estimates of munitions and military grade weaponry in the arsenal of individuals and non-state organizations alike outstrip what the government can boast of, the stage is set for this lethal hardware to be deployed for general duties.
If it is the protection of the traditional state monopoly of the instrument of coercion that has led the federal authorities to consistently turn down the legitimate application of the Amotekun corps for military grade weaponry to guarantee the safety of life and property in its area of jurisdiction, it should be obvious that the horse has already bolted.
Read Also: FG to civil servants: Be above board in 2023 election
What is actually unfolding is a fate worse than peaceable restructuring or even resource control. If this can be happening under the watch of a president with a military background, one must shudder at the grave responsibility accruing to the incoming government of “pure” civilians. If care is not taken, and if urgent steps are not put in place to recuperate the essence and raison d’etre of the state, nothing will stop the nation from an apocalyptic meltdown resulting in warlord enclaves and anarchic fiefdoms.
As many commentators have essayed, the disintegration of Nigeria will lead to a humanitarian catastrophe of world-historic magnitude. The entire West Africa corridor will be overwhelmed by the refugee crisis. Once it has been fundamentally scrambled by adverse circumstances, it will be extremely difficult to put Nigeria back as one single, unified unit.
The unitarist vision of Nigeria isn’t going anywhere. Not even after a thousand elections and stage-managed transitions. In this hour of distress and dire emergency, what Nigeria needs is a visionary statesman of uncommon mettle and courage and not somebody with the misbegotten mindset of hegemonic domination. Nigeria does not need a tribal panjandrum but a heroic bridge-builder who can persuade the vital components to sheath their sword and see the bright possibilities.
As we have noted several times in this column, Nigeria is a wonderful tribute to the self-undermining genius of the colonial imaginary. If it did not exist in their imagination, the idea of a huge nation serving as a Mecca of self-actualization for the teeming population of the oppressed and marginalized Black people the world over would have had to be willed into actuality by existential necessity.
But Nigeria is taking too long to gel and come together. The human toll is becoming prohibitive. As an early colonial outpost and with its skilled emigrants on manumission from Brazil, its haul of modernized recaptives streaming in from Sierra Leone, its posse of enterprising indigenous people and the dash of Arab zeitgeist infiltrating from the Sahara Desert, Nigeria ought to prove a brilliant melting point; a wonderful conurbation of underprized and undervalued humanity.
So far so depressing and disappointing. The obvious strengths have proved to be the source of manifest weaknesses. Occasionally, the brilliant possibilities glimmer and shine through like a lone candle before being snuffed out by the combined forces of overwhelming darkness. Nigeria is proving the Black person’s Waterloo in the inability to nurture and grow a viable nation; a Pandora box of roiling and self-subverting contraries.
Like an impoverished bricklayer saddled with poor material, the political realist of the Nigerian condition must work with what is available rather than what ought to be available. It is a historical verity that people make history but not under the circumstances of their choice. Historical conditioning and structural contingencies often make it impossible even in better managed societies to throw up their best leadership materials. Only those with the means and the will to power often prevail.
This is why it is important to continue to struggle for a better society, whatever the glaring deficiencies and imperfections of the moment. Democracy is never given or granted on mere verbal request. The tree of democracy is watered by the blood of many martyrs, unsung, unknown and uncelebrated. They are like discarded pawns and sacrificed knights in a consuming game of chess.
Whatever its glaring imperfections and frank anomalies, the Fourth Republic has come a long way. From the abolition of the electorate, the jarring visibility of the selectorate, vote-snatching, candidate-garnishing and ballot box-switching, we have arrived at a point where votes are beginning to count and where increasing voters’ awareness and consciousness of civic responsibility have dramatically reduced such primitive anti-democratic practices.
The Nigerian electorate has arrived at the threshold of new possibilities. This has been made possible not because the Nigerian ruling classes at both the national and sub-national levels have suddenly become a Father Christmas dispensing electoral munificence to the people. The concession has been wrested at the cost of a vicious struggle in which many perished and several amputees of democracy litter the terrain.
Despite its massive militarization of governance procedures, its manifest imperfections and glaring contradictions and the antecedents of its helmsman as a military dictator, it will be said of this outgoing regime that it contributed immensely to this deepening of the democratic process.
Some will argue that this only happened after Genaral Buhari’s appetite for democratic conquest has sated. However that is, it can also be pointed out that after all some of his predecessors couldn’t care a hoot about whether the nation dissolved in an anti-democratic inferno.
This conditional pass mark will however depend on whether the administration passes the litmus test of conducting a free and fair election whose outcome is acceptable to the generality of Nigerians. The Nigerian multitude, with its hordes of disaffected déclassé and unemployed youth, appear to have sniffed blood. A wise ruler knows when the game is up for electoral gaming. General Buhari seems to have his instincts in the right place, except some hubristic fancy overtakes him on the home stretch.
All things considered, the coming presidential election will be so consequential that it will determine Nigeria’s future and whether it remains one entity or not. It is an opportunity to steer the nation in a different direction. Let those who are saddled with the responsibility take note.