By Ropo Sekoni
A significant aspect of the arguments of Obasanjo and Sanusi is the potential of their arguments to revitalise political discourse in the country.
We need not go the way of Yugoslavia or Sudan and certainly not the way of Rwanda and Somalia. But none of these countries knew the avoidable and divisive end from the beginning. Let us learn from the experience of others and of our founding fathers who resolved their political differences through dialogue and debate without resorting to violence and separation but accommodation, telling themselves hard truth, tolerance and give-and-take spirit. That was the foundation of Nigeria at independence and let it continue to be….If all we are interested in is power and not holding the country together harmoniously and wholesomely, we may hold the mirage of power and lose the nation or the country bequeathed to us by our founding fathers—Olusegun Obasanjo, former President of Nigeria
Nobody who is a leader in Northern Nigeria today can afford to be happy. You cannot be happy about 87 per cent of poverty in Nigeria being in the north….You can’t be happy with millions of Northern children out of school. You can’t be happy with nine states in the North contributing almost 50 per cent of the entire malnutrition burden in the country….It is education, it’s girl- child education, it’s women’s right, it’s child begging, it is parental irresponsibility, demographic growth, it’s managing a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic and multi-religious society and bringing them into one community where they are all citizens—Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, Emir of Kano
The authors of the two passages overleaf have been experiencing bashing especially in the social media and visibly enough in some traditional newspapers. The bashing has not been because of their message or argument but because of the messenger. But the focus of this essay is on the significance of the message for national and subnational governance in the country.
There is no attempt to claim that there is no significance to discussing the influence of the messenger on the authority of the message, but the real meat of today’s discussion is about what the messenger has said. Of course, it is important to citizens not born during the two terms of Obasanjo as head of state to hear from experts how much Obasanjo contributed to governance failure that he is now proffering solutions for. But Obasanjo also deserves to be accorded full right as a human being to always have the right to develop his reasoning powers and acquire new perspectives anytime in the course of his life.
Similarly, there is logic in the argument in the social media that Sanusi Lamido Sanusi himself may have contributed directly or indirectly to population explosion if, like most leaders from the North, he has multiple wives. But the core of Sanusi’s argument is not just about the number of wives that can lead to a high number of children per one citizen; it is about the failure of those in power to create policies and rules that can prepare the teeming population that may result from rise in population of the community that practices a pre-modern family size—principal cause of high population—from automatically wallowing in ignorance and poverty for being born into a feudal society.
The two authors are making the same complaint in different words and with different illustrations: that prisoners of a pre-modern worldview are more susceptible to politics of inequality than those raised in a more egalitarian ethos. Obasanjo provides examples of poor governance from a country-wide perspective while Sanusi focuses on a subnational space very familiar to him to illustrate his thesis. It is the danger inherent in using feudalism as an instrument of governing Nigeria—a multicultural political territory—that worries Obasanjo while Sanusi is concerned about the use of feudal tactics for governing the northern section of the country and the consequences such approach has brought to degrading the humanity of citizens in the northern part of the country relative to its southern counterpart.
Obasanjo had been a head of state of Nigeria for about 14 years as military dictator and elected ‘executive president.’ He was pivotal to creation of the national spread of feudalistic governance during his military presidency. He supervised the handing over of major regional or subnational institutions to the centralism that grew before him and blossomed under him—handing over of regional universities and other subnational institutions to the central government. In the case of Sanusi, he was governor of the Central Bank for five years during which he had access to data on distribution of national resources and transfers from the federal government to state governments in the north. Since he became Emir, he has served as traditional ruler of a state that receives the largest allocations from the federation account. In other words, both of them have adequate experience of governance in Nigeria to make the type of complaints they have made recently.
The core of both speeches is the danger that political leaders with a lord-vassal vision of governance to the quality of governance and quality of life of citizens in a political space that favours inequality between citizens and between communities. However, none of the two authors has said anything new. Obafemi Awolowo warned for decades about the dangers of governing Nigeria without respect for its cultural diversity. He wrote books on the imperative of cultural democracy in a multicultural political space, warning with global examples of the disadvantages of governing Nigeria as if it is a political space of one language, one culture, and one worldview.
In addition, Awolowo argued that democratic federalism was superior to any form of feudalism in Nigeria’s multicultural space, warning that direct or indirect attempts of one nationality to dominate others in a federation is usually a recipe for disharmony, conflict, and underdevelopment. Obasanjo who thought otherwise for decades, especially while he was in power at the national level, shows in his own lecture to have seen the wisdom in the warnings given by Awolowo and he is now repeating similar warnings to Nigeria, including some of his co-designers of unitary Nigeria.
Similarly, Sanusi’s emphasises the imperative of literacy and education in a multicultural, multiethnic society, but this idea too is not new to the north. Awolowo and Aminu Kano and Awolowo preached a similar message to the north for decades.
A significant aspect of the arguments of Obasanjo and Sanusi is the potential of their arguments to revitalise political discourse in the country.
Given that the two dominant theories of multiethnic governance in Nigeria are 1) the imperative of centralism and homogenisation of diverse cultures in the guise of “even development and national unity,” and 2) the belief by some pundits that Nigerians should learn how to erase their pre-Nigeria cultural identities as a means of creating a sustainable and progressive united Nigeria. The positions of Obasanjo and Sanusi on Nigeria’s governance, though not original, appear to be more realistic than those of pundits who urge Nigerians to erase their ethnic identities because such self-definition militate against national progress and unity, as much as it to advocates for uniformity across the country.
Both Obasanjo and Sanusi, despite their antecedents and pedigrees, have popularised at a critical moment in the history of the country the idea that multinational democracies can do away with the theory that circumscribed Westphalian nation-space. They see the benefits in creating a multiethnic state that is propelled by politics of equality of citizens and of cultural communities as superior to attempts to transform Nigeria into a nation of one visible nationality over others and of citizens in a multiethnic state to reinvent themselves through erasure of cultural identities.
Readers of Obasanjo and Sanusi outside of what the authors have done or not done in the past. Readers may benefit from benchmarking the ideas of the two leaders with the discourse of and on federalism in Germany, Belgium, Canada, Switzerland, United Arab Emirates, and other federal systems.
Roposek@msn.com
Leave a Reply