State security and uncaptured combatants
It would have been better to end this eventful year on a note of high hopes and expectations. Buoyed by rousing defiance of adversity and the incurable faith that everything will be alright in the end, that would have been in keeping with the great Nigerian spirit of indomitable courage.
But brutal and uncomfortable facts keep impinging on syrupy and saccharine reality, turning the great Nigerian paradox of hope amidst sheer hopelessness on its head. Hoping against hope is not the cure for hopelessness. It is the marijuana of the hopeless.
Nigeria is bleeding from a thousand cuts, like a great elephant besieged on all fronts. There is anger and frustration in the land. Our people are hurting. Everybody is angry with everybody. There is massive insecurity and hunger everywhere. Reason or rational argument becomes the first casualty in such circumstances. Just as it is impossible to philosophize on an empty stomach, it is also impossible to conduct reasonable discourse with a hungry and angry person. The kingdom of the belly is not at material par with the paradise of the brain.
On Tuesday evening, Air Marshal Alex Badeh, a former Chief of Defence Staff facing prosecution for self-enrichment, was taken down as he returned from his farm in what bore the hallmark of a classic political execution. It was a great reckoning in a little corner of the Abuja-Keffi highway. Hopefully, this is not the first warning shot of an approaching political tsunami as the presidential elections of next February begin to take an ominous shape.
The very next day, President Mohammadu Buhari addressed a very rowdy session of a National legislature that is divided and polarized all the way down the line. It was a historic show of shame. Not since Caligula, the Roman emperor, sent his horse down the Roman senate to rough things up and “lively up” proceedings has the world witnessed such legislative rascality. Decorum and dignity went out through the door.
Even before the federal authorities had vowed to fish out Badeh’s killers for appropriate punishment, the comments and obituaries have taken a decidedly partisan and ugly hue. If one were to take an audit of the highly decorated soldiers killed in supposedly civil circumstances in the past two years it would be quite a statistic of shame.
Consequently, it should be apparent to all that the military itself is bleeding and hurting all over. Bugged down in an unconventional and asymmetrical warfare which defies its orientation and originating ethos, besieged on many fronts by hostile multi-dimensional forces and enemy nationals, the army’s patience is beginning to wear thin as a result of combat-disorientation. This explains its testy and highly controversial upbraiding of Amnesty International.
In such a climate of national hysteria, rational discourse and measured interventions become the first casualty. Yet in order for the country to heave forward, in order to probe and feel our way out of the terrible mess, we must re-establish the template for rational national discourse.
There is already a national consensus that corruption is the greatest bane of this country. Corruption has eaten so deep into the national fabric that it often appears natural and divinely ordained. The goat eats where it is tethered is a famous African proverb. But the goat is also a captive where it is tethered.
Corruption has become so deeply entrenched, so embedded, so interwoven that it has acquired its own self-legitimating order as an integral part of human culture or part of the totality of human existence in this clime. It will take a revolutionary concussion or a series of radical character-remoulding events to weed out.
Unless we are reconciled to the evolutionary procedure of a disease burning itself out after inflicting the greatest possible damage on the afflicted organ, it will require a more holistic and hands-on approach to tackle the bane of corruption in Nigeria. In serious societies, fighting corruption has never been a tea party,
Corruption has its systemic, structural, diachronic and synchronic dimensions. Corruption is not limited to taking possession of what does not and should not belong to one, it also includes giving out to others as a result of primordial considerations posts and preferment which do not and should not belong to them particularly in multi-ethnic and multi-religious societies emerging from the throes of colonization.
Many of President Buhari’s teeming supporters believe that he means well for the country, however flawed in conception and partisan in execution his anti-corruption mantra may appear. Yet it is also obvious that his provincial pattern of patronage, narrow sense of privilege and stubborn self-righteousness get in the way and are a terrible blight on his anti-corruption crusade.
Nigeria is in a serious national emergency. Whoever wins next year’s presidential elections must expand the scope and size of his vision to put in place a bipartisan cabinet of truly accomplished Nigerian patriots and tested technocrats who will drive accelerated economic development and deepen the culture of democracy away from the accretions of authoritarian rule and accumulated military hangover.
This is because Nigeria has been thrown into a deep conundrum. The exponential growth in population and the changing demographics in favour of youth have proved overwhelming for the talents of economists thrown up by successive post-military governments despite success in a few spheres.
In any nation where population growth exceeds expansion of economic opportunities , the Swiftean possibility of mutual elimination and social cannibalism is never far away. This is an iron law of nature which has exercised the mind of economists since the seventeenth century. Civilized governments anticipate this and plan well ahead for it.
The ritualization of poverty is here with us. At no other point in modern human society have a people been this close to rampart cannibalism with the gory trade in human parts thriving. It is a world-historic tragedy that the nation with arguably the greatest eco-diversity that the world has seen cannot feed its own people.
But it is said that a man can make for himself a throne of bayonets, whether he will be able to sit in it is another matter. The hunger stalking the land, the lack of social security and safety valves for the poorest of the land, the massive de-education of the populace and the general lack of opportunity for a teeming and dynamic young population have now returned to haunt our security forces in all their grim and gruesome possibilities.
In the north where there has been a complete collapse of redemptive social vision and ameliorative politics, it has spawned the greatest and most vicious insurgency of our time, feeding on and feeding off the teeming multitude of uneducated and unemployed youth mired in superstition and religious hallucination now complicated by the global rise of militant Islamism.
In the east, it has helped to breed a rough and ready lumpen-proletariat weaned on a diet of ethnic Exceptionalism , the crude delusions of Black Zionism driven by a militant and secessionist urge to upend the Nigerian state. In the west, it has produced a congeries of urban social misfits bent on wreaking vengeance on the entire society leading to crimes so horrendous that they are better imagined.
Finally and reinforcing the social mayhem is the phenomenon of uncaptured or undocumented Nigerian combatants. As Nigerian youths absconding from the concrete hell of the post-colonial state are thwarted and frustrated in their mission in stateless Libya, they returned or are repatriated home with violence and vengeance lurking in their heart.
Many of these have already received rudimentary or full military training. Brutalized and dehumanized by their horrid experience, they return with full blown Diasporic dementia. We can see their handiwork in the spate of recent killings across the nation and the fact that they are unfazed by the might of the Nigerian military. When they are in number, they confront them toe to toe and chin to chin without wilting under fire.
When it is not convulsed and confused by these developments, the Nigerian state is perplexed and nonplussed and can only confront them with the conventional approach of a military trained in symmetrical warfare. But it will not work. According to a famous military saying, the past is prologue and when the enemy changes in nature, the nature of the army confronting it must also change. Nothing short of a complete overhaul of the state and security architecture will do at this point.
Given the circumstances we have enumerated above, it should be obvious that the Nigerian presidency is not a job for a political adventurer, an economic haymaker or a security neophyte either. General Babangida will be laughing at us. The Fourth Republic is structured on the concept of protracted transition and permanent national emergency.
Those who designed the Fourth Republic have also attached to its presidency an immutable job specification. Nigeria is a classic example of how structural contingency circumscribes human agency. This is the basis of the contemporary Nigerian conundrum and it will remain so until either the paradigm or the nation gives way.
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