As the world goes through rapid transformations, so do the professions and the old divisions of labour. There are interesting developments that make nonsense of specialization and even the old notion of the nation-state. Yet it is too early to conclude that globalization will provide the coup de grace for the post-colonial state in Africa or precipitate what will put the superannuated colonial contraption out of its terminal misery.
The omens are not very reassuring. Already gravely imperilled by its juvenile delinquency, its serial breach of the Lockean contract, its aggravating insolence, its multiple infidelities, the post-colonial state in Africa lurches from crisis to crisis, conflict to conflict and confrontation to confrontation.
Such are the internal contradictions, the antinomies between state and nation that the moment it weathers a crisis, a more terrifying disaster looms in the horizon. Disorder is the organizing order, the dysfunctional fulcrum on which national dysfunction revolves.
Yet despite its debilitating impairment, its historic infirmities, the post-colonial state, particularly its Nigerian incarnation, has shown a surprising resilience, a capacity for self-reproduction, an elegant ability to mutate at short notice that has defied all historical odds and doomsday predictions.
The obituaries have been premature. The reports of its death are grossly exaggerated. Drawing incredible resources from its very contradictions, its increasing criminalization and sheer perversities, the Nigerian state fumbles and wobbles on. As the Nigerian state mutates, wearing several masks of tyranny while its fundamental nature remains the same, adversarial journalism, its dialectical mirror image, is also constantly transformed as a response to its own internal contradictions as well as historical developments.
In the First and Second Republics, oppositional journalists were content with writing their stuff and waiting for the government to come for them. Many ended in jail. Ironically enough, because the effects of colonial rule were yet to wear out, there were still some rules to the game. The government was trusted to obey its own laws.
As the Nigerian military state naturalized and sheer lawlessness became the norm, military tactics also infiltrated the press. Obeying the dictates of self-preservation, which is the first law of nature, journalists were no longer willing to trust their fate to a state which murders its own citizens. Hence the rise of the “guerrilla journalist’, an insurgent with mobile typewriter who operated outside the laws as an intellectual sniper.
Now, the journalist as journalissimo has arrived: an insurrectionist with a laptop who has carried the battle to the state from global space. It is the age of the new kids on the blog. Just as it is said that war is too serious a business to be left to soldiers and politics is too sacred a profession to be left to politicians, journalism is too serious a business to be left to professional journalists.
Nature abhors a vacuum and as history has demonstrated, every profession which devalues itself, which desecrates its sacred obligations, invites external interventions. The generalissimo defied and demystified the general; the political practitioner disrobed the politician; the “journalissimo” has demystified journalism turning citizens’ arrest into the pre-eminent form of order-enforcement.
The age of the Internet is proving as revolutionary as the discovery of the printing press. Of all the dangers threatening the post-colonial state in Nigeria, none is more debilitating and potentially more devastating than the rise of the Nigerian blogger. Using tactics and electronics normally associated with advance espionage, taking advantage of globalization and the sheer borderlessness of the new world, the blogger threatens the very foundation of the post-colonial state in its totality and territoriality.
As explosive exposure follows explosive exposure, as revelations of spellbinding corruption and official chicanery cascade, the legitimacy and authority of the state suffer signal erosion. Thus an interview began in Benin Republic under the watchful eyes of rent-seeking immigration officials might be concluded in Lagos, Nigeria only to be edited and put on the World Wide Web in New York.
Totally paralyzed and rendered inept by the ceaseless global flow of information, the state becomes a minor, inconsequential actor within a micro-pluralism of power. Unable to police either its borders or its so-called citizens, the state forfeits its power of surveillance. In this brave new world of Internet hostilities, the surveiller becomes the surveilled.
As disaffected nationals in the Diaspora position themselves on the Internet lobbing artillery shells of disgust and disdain on the home country, the situation becomes very dire indeed. Such are the resources available; such is the intellectual firepower that village despots tremble in their liars under the sustained bombardment. The hunter has become the hunted.
What then has brought the post-colonial state in Africa to this critical impasse? And what is the implication for the colonial contraptions that go by the name of nation-states on the continent? In all the major indices of governance, the state is unable to justify its fundamental raison d’Átre. The serial defaulting on the Lockean contract between the ruled and rulers, the peevish and pathological re-offending, have led to massive alienation and one-way exits from the benighted continent.
The result has been a steady regression into the Hobbesian state of nature where everything is short, nasty and brutish. With the breakdown of law and order, with the collapse of legitimacy and authority, anarchy reigns supreme and hostage taking both at the official and unofficial level becomes the norm. In frustration and impotence, and unable to obey its own laws, the state resorts to hostage-taking while the armed insurrection replies in kind. The result is new kind of anomie unique to civilian governance in post-colonial Africa.
Yet dire as the situation is, it can get much worse. In Nigeria, for example, the crisis of governance is at the level of state and civil society. With poverty stalking the land, with the massive cooptation of many oppositionists into government, and with the exit of the best and brightest, there is struggle-fatigue. Nigeria lacks a tradition of long-distance resistance. We are all short-distance runners.
Many contemporary leading lights in civil society anchor their reputation on one-off acts of defiance against a particular tyrant which they then inflate into cosmic self-importance, or which they use as bargaining chips for entrance into the ruling caste. Any wonder then that every phase of resistance usually leaves the opposition gasping for breath and ready to accommodate any political settlement imposed by the ruling class?
Unlike the ANC which was founded in 1912 and which did not come to power until the mid-nineties, there is no such tradition of sustained and organic resistance. Every contention with the latest tyrant has to begin anew, and with fresh political formations. The result is an elite and elitist power play completely dislocated and disconnected from the real people. Realising that neither their vote nor even presence count, the people take refuge in cynical apathy as factions of the elite duel themselves unto death.
This is the political disequilibrium under which our new kids on the blog will operate. There is a clear and present danger to this. Rather than leading to a revolution or even the reformation of an ailing state, the revelations of official shenanigans in the absence of a critical mass may provoke an extreme, right-wing fundamentalist cleansing of the state which may push the nation in the direction of civil war and dismemberment or lead to the consolidation of revolutionary anarchy.
On the other hand, the abstract idealism which often underpins these interventions, the attempts by nationals in the Diaspora to view developments at home with the critical lens of developments in the west may lead to further alienation of the state without creating an enabling or conducive environment for genuine change at home. Either way, it is a play of giants with the blogger granted his fifteen minutes of fame, but marooned on the internet or stranded at the Empire State Building.
In the past twenty years, the Nigerian military state has demonstrated a surprising capacity to deal with emergencies and an impressive ability to assume different masks to deal with political exigencies. It has also shown a ruthless will to power. It found a frowning general to handle the emergency created by the profligacy and irresponsibility of civilian governance in the Second Republic.
When the political class began to chafe under the draconian inquisition, it came up with a smiling general. But when the smiling one lost command and the ruling caucus became gravely imperilled as a result of radical pressures from below, it came up with a begoggled frowning tyrant. After five years of low intensity warfare, the taciturn merchant of mayhem in turn expired in fabled circumstances just as he was about to push the nation over the precipice, thus giving way to another benign charmer who was to prepare the ground for the civilianized general who could frown by the day and smile at night.
It is not the blogger who will put an end to this elaborate charade, this sustained chicanery and macabre musical chairs. But blogging will help. The defenestration of some important sectors of the Nigerian press as a result of corporate corruption and individual greed has assured the blogger of a great historical platform. Yet if he is to fulfill this historic mission, the blogger must conduct a constant reality check and come up with a profound intellectual interrogation of his own vulnerability in a web of elite deceit and mischief. It is only after this that the blogger can reconnect with the endangered forces of genuine change in the home country.
- (This text was given as opening speech at the launch of the website Saharareporters.com at the Empire State Building, New York, Saturday, February 18th, 2006.)
