IF there are Nigerians who can define their country’s national identity, that is, who Nigerians are as a people, they are a very rare breed. As indicated in this place last week, without that definition, without settling the question of national identity, it is extremely difficult to run a united, stable and prosperous country. Force can of course be applied to procure unity and a semblance of national identity, but it will not last. For the past five decades and more, Nigerian leaders, starting from British colonialists, have struggled to run a country uninterested in or incapable of defining or discovering who they are. By a combination of force, emotions and presumptuousness, they hoped Nigerian unity could be forged from the anvils of collective experience. So far, they have failed. Without changing the paradigm, without attempting a deep understanding of the fundamental problems that predispose the country to endless crises, the leaders kept hoping that palliatives and tinkering with political structures would do the job. They could not be more mistaken.
The problems created by the absence of a national identity have never been far from the surface. But in the past few months, the agitations for self-determination first spearheaded by the Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB), and now particularly the frenzied and apocalyptic rants of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) in the Southeast, have brought the crisis to the fore once again. This time, a sense of urgency, not to say a feeling that the country might be confronting an endgame, confuses and aggravates the controversy. The country in fact seems surprised that the debate has appeared to follow the usual ethnic and to some extent religious fault lines. Unfortunately, both in the North and South, there is a shocking tendency to situate the discourse in the verbal excesses and apocalyptic predictions of the IPOB leader, Nnamdi Kanu.
With or without Mr Kanu and the once fiery leader of MASSOB, Ralph Uwazuruike, both the agitations for Biafra and the crisis of national identity will continue. The country has a responsibility to disentangle the discourse from the textured arguments, emotions and hate speech of the past few weeks, and the reluctance by past and present leaders to understand and grapple with the elements that constitute national identity. Neither force nor placations, nor yet abuse and blackmail will dispose the country to unity and stability until national identity has been forged, if it is not already too late. It is clear that more than the people themselves, Nigerian leaders have been uninformed in their approach to the crisis — a lack of appreciation that was acquired and nurtured almost right from the beginning at independence.
At independence, Britain did its best to provide a constitution they believed would accommodate the country’s competitive and often conflicting diversity. That constitution, as everyone knows, did not last. In fact, since 1966, Nigerian leaders have shown absolutely no understanding of what national identity means, and have done nothing to build the country into a distinctive and cohesive whole. At a point, rulers like Ibrahim Babangida even began to subvert the few elements that still sustained the country’s unity facade, such as the military, the judiciary, the police, and external relations. It was clear they learnt nothing from history.
But a cursory reading of history would have instructed Nigeria’s past rulers on how to build a nation and forge a national identity for their country. Surely they would have understood how the Prussian (German) leader, Otto von Bismarck, in the mid-19th century ruthlessly unified the German people, outplayed Austria, balkanised Denmark, and by a shrewd understanding of the concept of national identity and force of arms raised the power and prestige of a unified Germany. Nigerians rulers would have appreciated the history of the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and how brilliantly Kemal Ataturk, beginning from May 1919, created a Turkish rump from the collapsing empire, imbuing it from 1921 with a radical, secular identity that completely broke the mould from the Ottoman imperial and theocratic paradigm. Nigerian rulers would have understood why and how the 15 Soviet republics broke up in 1991, and how the main rump, Russia, is forging a national identity; and why and how in 1992, after 47 years of pretence, Yugoslavia ultimately failed to forge a national identity for its multi-ethnic society.
There are enough lessons from history to instruct Nigerian rulers. Instead, they have skirted around religious symbols and identifications, executed incredibly unwise political and constitutional schemes, built self-centred regimes and assembled cabinets that alienated ‘others’, and promoted exceptionalism and encouraged primordial and sectional policies and politics. They hoped that despite these political and electoral shenanigans, they could use propaganda — National Orientation Agency, MAMSER, Transformation Agenda, Change Begins with Me — and other such futile and fatuous methods to instil oneness and a sense of shared destiny in the people. If France had not first built a national identity, how could they have aspired to rule Europe? Indeed would they have anything to promote and export? Was it not because they possessed something they think was worth selling that they undergirded their colonial ambition with the policy of assimilation?
Have Nigerian rulers pondered why China is a major world economic and political player today? China’s domestic and international ambitions would have been impossible without the visionary and foundational work of Mao Zedong, and the astute and expansionist policies of their reformist leaders such as Deng Xiaoping, Zhao Ziyang, Hu Yaobang, and others. In fact the Chinese approach has seemed to follow classically the methods employed by Bismarck in the mid-19th century. Forging a national identity, as Giuseppe Garibaldi and Giuseppe Mazini also showed in the case of Italy in the 1830s and 1840s, must come from within as patriotic and nationalist forces explore the elements of shared culture, language and most importantly great history. Despite its 69 years history, the Soviet Republics still collapsed in 1991 after about seven decades of consciously trying to institute elements that conduced to national identity. But knowing what to do does not even guarantee success, let alone not knowing what to do, as Nigerian rulers indicate. The leadership of Yugoslavia’s Josip Broz Tito also proved this point. The country he singlehandedly put together after World War II sadly collapsed 47 years later, and 12 years after he died in 1980. These are histories Nigerian leaders should pay attention to.
It is clear now that Nigerian rulers have a terrible misconception of national identity. It is also established that till today, and much worse under President Muhammadu Buhari, these rulers do not have the capacity — in ideas and character — to rule a multi-ethnic and multi-religious society. It is also established that with perhaps the exception of Gen Yakubu Gowon and to a little extent Gen Murtala Mohammed, they were unable to rid themselves of their primordial sentiments. These reasons, singly or in combination, explain why they show an emotive and fruitless response to the agitation for separation in parts of Nigeria, particularly in the Southeast. They see these agitations as a challenge, as a demonstration of lack of patriotism, and as a clarion call to war or revolution. The same pedestrian thinking on the street unhappily manifests in the State House and even tertiary institutions where far more robust thinking should take place. Even in the Southeast, which is the new locus of the self-determination campaigns, many Igbo leaders are unable to respond adequately to the unfolding crisis. They choose, like the man on the street, to focus on the hysteria of Mr Kanu, when the problem is far deeper and more debilitating.
Mr Kanu is certainly not the problem, despite his immaturity and excesses. And unknown to the Igbo themselves, many of whom have become quite apologetic for choosing a recourse to their innate self in the face of huge and unsympathetic challenges from the rest of Nigeria, particularly the North and Nigerian leadership, other factors are at play in their agitations. Mr Kanu is nothing but the clumsy and unqualified representation of that deep and understandable, even respectable, Igbo yearning for a national identity and its significant and positive effect as a catalyst for self-actualisation and fulfilment. The 1967-70 civil war became for the Igbo the closest thing to their renaissance, a time when they flowered in technology, language, culture, and religious expression, and shared, even if, brief history. They came to revolutionary and political grief; but they still apparently remember the period with great nostalgia and self-belief, convinced that the limitations others read into their existence are nothing but opportunities for greatness. After all, they held out against the ‘mighty’ Nigeria for three years.
Until Nigerians and their rulers — most of whom see the problem from a cracked prism — recognise that nothing can be done outside the creation and establishment of a national identity as a tool for national mobilisation, the country would continue to list dangerously. Much worse is the fact that the absence of that identity would also mean a constant recourse by nationalities to the countervailing identities already in existence in their various enclaves probably for hundreds of years. In the historically stateless societies of the Southeast, the deeply embedded idea of Biafra was their first real attempt at creating a ‘universal’ Igbo identity. In that brief period, they surprised themselves at what they were capable of. Even if Nigerian rulers were to study and appreciate the factors that drive and imbue the Igbo with a great essence, they would still have found it difficult to subordinate that Igbo existential conundrum to the quest for a national identity. Unfortunately, they have not undertaken that study. They are surprised that Mr Kanu is able to harness the frustrations among the Igbo. They are miffed that Igbo leaders themselves appear to be reticent over the agitations in the Southeast.
But it is also indisputable that the North, liberally defined, is stuck to a shared sense of caliphate thinking and world view. That caliphate mentality has smuggled itself deeply into national discourse, whether as it relates to presidential politics or even the operation of federalism. At the bottom of the caliphate instituted by Shehu Usman dan Fodio are Fulani hegemony, national dominance, subliminal understanding of power, and the inseparability of religion from public office and society. Over the years, a curious form of a sense of entitlement has even crept into the caliphate world view, with frustrations sometimes displayed whenever power shifted. After many years of caliphate ascendancy, begun with deliberate British transfer of power to the North at independence, it will be a tough job vitiating that hold and subordinating it to a national identity. The caliphate, its proponents say, represents the entire spectrum of life. There is nothing outside of it.
Then, of course, there is the Yoruba world view, which takes its existential departure from Oduduwa, and was nurtured before colonial rule into an advanced political system, complete with empire and kingdoms that instituted checks and balances and many of the liberal concepts popularised by Western philosophical thinkers. Such a people with an advanced political system were forced by colonialism to comingle with other peoples of different and persistently conflictive cultures, civilisations and world views. The Yoruba are questioning, often unyielding, contemptuous of feudalism, urbanised and impatient to experiment with new, secular philosophies. Indeed, in their recent history, they had become so secular as to elect Moslem-Moslem political tickets. Now, corrupted by the national tendency for fundamentalism, they have also begun to embrace extremism and other political and social perversions alien to their founding philosophies and ideologies.
It requires a deep understanding of the modern history of Nigeria to attempt, without assurance of success, the forging of a national identity. No such understanding exists, and no effort is being made. In the absence of a national identity, and especially in the face of competition and challenges where the best may not necessarily win and the losers are treated unfairly and contemptuously, other identities, especially those with strong ethnic appeal, are bound to enjoy fresh attention. Thus Biafra will continue to appeal to the Igbo whether Mr Kanu approximates its virtues and values or not. The concept of a liberal and federal Odua Republic will also retain an enormous attraction to the Yoruba whether anyone thinks the Oyo Yoruba will fight the Ekiti, and Ibadan will fight the Ijesha. The Yoruba believe, and have said so, that they have the innate endowment to run a liberal democracy far better than anyone in Africa. Also, the history of the Sokoto Caliphate will continue to mesmerise the Hausa/Fulani no matter how deeply other nationalities resent its intrinsically feudal undertones. Indeed, as Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso, a former Kano State governor and presidential aspirant, and Ahmed Makarfi, another former governor and party leader, showed in their defence of acerbic northern youths, primordial, caliphate feelings and a general misunderstanding of other cultures persist among top northern politicians.
The presidency, governors and many political leaders think that regardless of the obstacles, a national identity can still be fostered to unify and stabilise Nigeria. Unable to prove that as leaders they have purged themselves of their parochialisms and religious and political intolerance, they must ask also whether, in view of their inexpert responses to the excesses of IPOB’s Mr Kanu, they really understand the issues at stake, whether they know they cannot just wish away the histories of Nigerian nationalities but must take cognisance of them, and whether they have the intellect, stamina and discipline needed to forge a fairly lasting and workable national identity. They must ask why decades of moralising about national unity have not yielded the desired result, and why Nigeria seems eternally poised on the edge of disintegration. There is nothing to show that Nigeria has the right leaders at the moment to do that great and noble job. Their present tactics and strategies are useless and futile; they will not work despite the meddling and insinuations of Britain and the United States. Nor is there proof that a return to federalism — the present system is undoubtedly unitary — will accomplish more than short-lived peace and stability built around regional agglomerations. Nigerian rulers have allowed the problem to fester for too long until it has now calcified beyond what a radical and truly patriotic leader can tame or ameliorate.
Overall, the lack of a national identity is clearly at the root of Nigeria’s problem. It began with Hausa/Fulani distrust before independence and campaign to secede in 1966; regressed to Yoruba self-determination hunger over the MKO Abiola debacle and other general frustrations with what they described as national predilection for mediocrity, and appears now to be culminating in Igbo self-determination struggle over alienation and marginalisation. Always one problem or the other. The lack of national identity makes it impossible for the leader to appreciate the inviolability of the law and the constitution, encourages law enforcement agents to brazenly abuse their powers and commit rights excesses, forces nationalities to retreat into their parochial existence and loyalties during competition for resources and power, and guarantees that both leaders and the led are in equal measure reluctant to make inspiring sacrifices, sometimes to the death, for the nation.
