It is perhaps necessary in this concluding piece in the series that began two weeks ago in this column to start with the observation that even though the voices and forces of, on the one hand, restructuring and, on the other hand, anti-restructuring have dominated political discourses in our country in the last two or three decades, the real fault lines lie elsewhere and not in this particular opposition. In other words, I am suggesting that beyond and perhaps also above the opposition between federalists and anti-federalists, there are deeper, indeed more fundamental oppositions and contradictions in the role that metanarratives and micronarratives play in the constitution and the continuation of our country as a national political community. Please take note, dear reader, that I am talking specifically here of narratives – meta or micro – that are both told and untold on either side of the divide between federalists and anti-federalists.
In order to make a brief elaboration of this observation, permit me to quickly draw attention to one untold narrative before spending more time on the narratives that are regularly told and peddled, justifiably but also endlessly. What is this untold story or narrative? It is the terrible story of the conflict between justice and injustice in every part, every inch of the country, absolutely without any exception. Everywhere in the country, among and within all the ethnic, religious and regional-zonal communities of the land, this narrative exists anywhere and everywhere that one chooses to look, hear and listen. It is a quality of life narrative and also a narrative of bare existence itself; it is a human rights story and a socio-economic justice narrative. Of course, it is not the case that it is a forgotten or ignored story; rather, what I am arguing is the fact that it is a story that is set apart and bracketed in controversies between the federalists and the anti-federalists, almost without any exceptions.
Readers of this piece familiar with Marxist revolutionary thought and history might perhaps see in what I am arguing here a recycling of the old, so-called contradiction between the class question and the national question. I admit that this is not incorrect. However, beyond an impulse to revisit this old Marxian dialectic of class and nation, I am in this concluding piece to the series drawing attention to what strikes me as almost a Nigerian exceptionalism in the contemporary global rise and spread of ethno-nationalism. Let me put this observation or claim across as simply and directly as possible: in most of the other parts of the contemporary world, those who lead the ethno-national movements or struggles, whether separatist or only devolutionary, are not those who have robbed and looted their own peoples; rather, it is for the most part those who have consistently opposed the oppression and suffering of their peoples that lead the movements. Yes, wealthy ethno-nationalists who made their wealth through heartless looting and cheating often bankroll many of the ethno-national movements of the contemporary world, but it is rare for them to be the leading voices and figures in such struggle and movements – of course Nigeria excepted!
In order not to be accused of distorting the actual facts of the opposition between the fervent proponents of restructuring and federalism and the diehard apologists of the hegemonic, business-as-usual anti-federalism in power in the country at the present moment in history, I should perhaps specify here that I am making a distinction between the intellectuals and the politicians on both sides of the divide between federalists and anti-federalists. What do I mean by this distinction? Well, take this newspaper, The Nation, as an instructive case. Together with The Punch, this newspaper arguably has the most articulate and persuasive phalanx of proponents of federalism and restructuring among the news and information media in the country. Now, none of them can be accused of being unaware of the fact that the two leading ruling class political parties, the APC and the PDP, are totally dominated by wealthy men and women whose sources of enrichment are not in industry, not in manufacturing, not in inventions and innovations and not even in venture capitalism, but in naked and relentless looting of the wealth and resources of the nation. But all the same, for the most part, these intellectual warriors of federalism look to reformists and strongmen in either of these two parties – but mostly in the APC – for leadership of the federalist, restructuring projects. Or, failing that, they have not looked elsewhere – for instance, among the masses themselves – for leaders of clean, robust and mature movements of devolution. This observation brings me to a crucial point in the ongoing discussion.
Permit me to state the point with as much clarity as I can muster since its significance for present and future developments in the durability of political community in our country cannot be overstated. And so, very simply, I say that the case for federalism, for restructuring and devolution has been powerfully and persuasively made in Nigeria in at least the last decade and half – perhaps even longer than that. That being the case, we need to pay attention to how this significant development came to be. The conventional wisdom would give the tireless official and non-official debates that have taken place in the country – at national conferences, in seminars and public lectures and in newspaper advertorials, reports and columns – as the source of this triumph of the case for federalism and restructuring in our country. But this completely ignores the fact that the cause or project of federalism or restructuring is yet to achieve the status of a project or movement involving the action, the intervention of the masses of Nigerians in their millions, in their tens of millions. I make this assertion in light of the documented fact that in many other parts of the contemporary world, ethno-national and religious communities demanding true federalism or devolution are, typically, mass movements, i.e. movements in which the masses are actually matching and demonstrating with their feet, with their hearts and with their minds. But not in Nigeria.
I take a pause in my feelings, my ruminations on this matter. Ethno-national narratives are rife in our country. There are well-known stories of long held dreams of perpetual domination of all other groups in Nigeria by the Fulani or the Hausa-Fulani. There are narratives of the plight of the ethnonational groups of the South-south, in particular those in the Niger Delta. The narratives of the exclusion of Igbos, after the alleged failure of the project to exterminate them during the civil war, are known to every literate, adult Nigerian, Igbo and Non-Igbo. In the Southwest, quite possibly the ideological and intellectual powerhouse of the case for federalism and restructuring in the country today, there are innumerable stories being openly told of divide-and-conquer projects from the “North”, with “traitors” and “opportunists” on one side and “defenders” and “saviors” on the opposing side. Also well-known are the stories of the past and present travails of the peoples of the North-central region of the country, especially of the Benue and Plateau States, on both religious and minority-status grounds. Indeed, in the wake of the repeated cycles of savage killings associated with unchecked, rampaging herdsmen, these narratives from the Middle Belt region of the country have become the core of the case for the prevalence and “authority” of ethno-nationalism in our country at the present time. I think about all these narratives and I ask: why are there no mass protests and demonstrations for federalism and restructuring in Nigeria? I ask further: the stories are there, the mass feelings and sentiments subtending them are there, but where are the mass protests and demonstrations, the likes of which we routinely find in many other ethnonational movements in the world?
I would be lying if I said that I know or have the answer to these questions. I am not entirely clueless about probable answers, but I think it is meet and proper for me to admit that what I have in lieu of definite answers are hunches, educated guesswork. Here is one hunch, the one about which I spend most of my waking hours worrying about the most: all over the country, in every ethnonational and regional community, the masses of ordinary people are too preoccupied by the challenges of surviving with the minimum of material and psychological resources they can muster for them to march and protest about the narratives of exclusion, marginalization or domination they are told and themselves talk so much about. I think also of the Yoruba adage which, roughly translated, states that when hunger takes residence inside the stomach, there is no room for any other thing to enter therein. And please note that Nigeria is not noted for hunger demonstrations and marches either. Finally, I think: yes, the masses everywhere are not marching and protesting about the ethnonational narratives of domination they are so much obsessed by and that’s probably a good thing for Nigeria in the short run, but in the long run, it will all explode one day, in what ways and with what effects, no one can tell.
On the grounds of the global balance of forces and the world-historical process, everything that I have talked about in this series has happened or is happening in the age of a fully globalized neoliberal capitalism. Here are the few important things to keep in mind about this phrase which, to many right-wing or even independent readers, sounds like jargon, a Marxist jargon, if you please. Perhaps the most important thing of all to know and keep in mind about neoliberal capitalism everywhere is determination to keep regulations in check, to the barest minimum possible. There was an earlier phase of capitalism known as laissez faire capitalism which also tried to keep regulation within and between countries minimal, but it did not achieve success anywhere close to neoliberalism. That is because under laissez faire capitalism, it was still possible to distinguish between foreign and domestic capital, with a view to protecting domestic capital from the more powerful and rapacious foreign capital. But that is no longer deemed particularly necessary as all the financial services industries of the world are now very closely integrated and the billionaires of the world really have no country, so to speak.
To deregulation must be added privatization, on a monumental scale, of public wealth, resources and assets as the second important thing to keep in mind about neoliberalism. There is talk of PPP, public-private-partnership, but na lie! In many places throughout the world, where the “public” should be in the so-called PPP talisman, there is only “property” which gives us “private-property-partnership”: it is the same groups or classes of people who sell off public properties and assets that buy them. Only in a few places in the world has PPP worked to the betterment of public good and in those places, the difference has always come from how mobilized the public, the people are to protect and defend their interests. This leads us to the final or closing arguments in this series.
Neoliberalism has generated untold wealth in the world, probably on a scale that was thought impossible in all previous stages of economic growth in human history. But so also has it produced a widening of the gap between the rich and the poor, the haves and the have-nots, this in the very face of wealth production on a monumental scale. This, in turn, has turned many communities in the world against globalization. Hence the rise of nationalism and ethnonationalism in virtually all the regions of the world. The question is: when will the project of federalism and restructuring in Nigeria be informed by these worldwide currents?