Nigeria has serious security challenges like virtually every other country, even the most prosperous and powerful, in our troubled world. Africa’s fabled ‘crippled giant’ contends with severe developmental debilities that are inexcusable given her human and resource endowment. Existential conditions for the vast majority of Nigerians are among the most dire and dismal on earth even though a minuscule number of her citizenry number among the world’s most opulent global citizens. But is Nigeria a failed state? Has the territorial space she occupies been declared an ungoverned and lawless jungle? Has the Nigerian state, in Marxian terms, ‘withered away’? The last time I checked, there is a legitimate government currently in power in Nigeria. There is a legally constituted authority that holds the sovereign mandate of the majority of the electorate in polls held in accordance with the country’s extant constitution.
Of course, it is only natural that her diverse constituents will hold divergent views of Nigeria depending on their peculiarities, proclivities and inclinations. For some, she is a country whose extant structure is cast in granite, non-negotiable and eternally immune to any form of change. This is an unrealistic perspective. There are those like Mazi Nnamdi Kanu, leader of the Indigenous Peoples of Biafra (IPOB), and emergent imperial monarch of Igboland, who dismisses Nigeria as a vast zoo. For him, Nigeria is a barbarous terrain from which he desperately seeks to extricate his people via secession. Unfortunately for him, the extant Nigerian State, which for now has the legitimate monopoly of force and cohesion within its territorial jurisdiction, says no. In his post medical-vacation national broadcast to the nation, President Muhammadu Buhari effectively told those with secessionist aspirations that he has no mandate to oblige their wish.
Although his speech may not have been as profound, tightly reasoned and logical, Buhari’s message to his ‘dear citizens’ was akin to Abraham Lincoln’s to the aspiring secessionist Southern slave-owning States in his March 4, 1861, inaugural address as President: “In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered under heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to “preserve, protect and defend it”. Lincoln urged the secessionists to consider the very real possibility that “the certain ills you fly to are greater than all the real ones you fly from”.
An active participant in the Nigerian civil war, Buhari is of the cast of mind that that conflict resolved Nigeria’s national conflict for all time. He is wrong in the sense that cohesive and viable nationhood can only be sustained by never ending dialogue among the diverse peoples of a complex polity like Nigeria that allows for continuous necessary structural and behavioural adjustments. He is right, however, in the sense that the current constitution makes provisions for changes in our governance institutions, structures and processes in accordance with the will of the majority and following clearly stipulated procedures. There are those who attribute our current socio- political and economic tribulations to the deficiencies of the extant 1999 presidential constitution. But that was the same way our errant political class abused and perverted the 1963 parliamentary constitution leading to the collapse of democracy and the descent to civil war. The fault lies not in our constitution but in our selves.
Adopting a no nonsense approach to the Biafra secessionist advocacy, the Buhari administration charged Kanu to court and clamped him in jail for alleged conspiracy to commit acts of treasonable felony and other related offences. Among other activities, Kanu whose IPOB upstaged the earlier Movement for the Actualization of the Sovereign Republic of Biafra (MASSOB) led by the now sidelined Ralph Uwazurike, was behind the clandestine Radio Biafra illegally broadcasting incendiary and divisive messages across Nigeria. There are those who contend that the Buhari administration should simply have ignored Kanu; that it was his perceived ill- advised prolonged incarceration that has turned him into a folk hero in Igboland.
But then, this is a controversial view. Ignoring Kanu’s combustible vituperations could also have unsavoury consequences for national unity, peace and stability. Without the extremist activities and provocative xenophobic vituperations of IPOB, for instance, it is unlikely that the misguided groups of Arewa youths would have given the criminal and illegal ultimatum for Igbos to quit the North further worsening national tension and trepidation. We can learn from history here. The genocide against the Igbo in the north following the January 15, 1966, coup was indefensible. It was illogical and irrational to hold an entire ethnic group responsible for the actions of a few coup plotters even if the key leaders of the putsch were Igbo and majority of their victims’ non-Igbo. But there was a background to this.
According to the pre-eminent political scientist, Professor Billy Dudley who was then teaching at the Ahmadu Bello University (ABU), for instance, in his classic, ‘Instability and Political Order in Nigeria’, “Outside the university, the practice of Ibo men holding up Northerners to ridicule had become a common enough experience. Pictures of Nzeogu with one foot over the corpse of the slain Premier of the North, Sir Ahmadu Bello, symbolic of the downfall of the North and the ascendancy of the East and the Ibo, were to be found on sale in the markets in the North”. That is why it would be extremely unwise to allow characters like Kanu a free hand to pursue their dangerously destabilizing antics even though that is no excuse for the impunity of the so called Arewa youth groups against whom no action has inexplicably been taken.
Ever since he was granted bail on stringent conditions on April 25, Kanu has violated his bail conditions as if the Nigerian state is non-existent. He has attended rallies consisting of crowds of more than ten people contrary to his bail terms. He has granted countless press interviews again in utter contempt of his bail conditions. This has prompted the Honourable Attorney General of the Federation (HAGF), Alhaji Abubakar Malami, to approach the Federal High Court, Abuja, seeking an order revoking Kanu’s bail as well as directing his being arrested and committed to custody pending trial.
Condemning the HAGF’s action, the President-General of Ohanaze Ndigbo, Chief Nnia Nwodo, said “I am amazed that the distinguished attorney is prepared to contest the superiority of the provisions of the constitution on fundamental human rights of movement and freedom of association over an erroneous judicial proclamation violating those rights”. I am not aware that Chief Nwodo has become a duly constituted court of law to pronounce magisterially on the erroneousness or otherwise of a judicial proclamation. Until a court of law voids the IPOB leader’s bail terms, he is bound by the law and cannot be allowed to get away with impunity. Kanu himself has publicly threatened that anyone who dares re-arrest him will die. What informs such delusionary arrogance?
But then, does the Buhari administration have the moral authority to call Kanu’s bluff? Does it have the ethical integrity to assert its ‘stateness’ against such lawlessness? I doubt it. If today, President Buhari calls a meeting of his security chiefs, the majority of those in attendance – the Minister of Defence, Chief of Army Staff, IG of Police, Director General of the Department of State Services (DSS), Chief of Air Staff and National Security Adviser will be all northerners. The only exceptions will be the Chief of Defence Staff and Chief of Naval Staff who are the only non-northerners in the security leadership hierarchy? How can anyone expect fairness and objectivity from such an ethno-regionally skewed security structure in a plural federal polity like ours?
Furthermore, the same HAGF, who wants Kanu re-arrested and tried for conspiracy to commit acts of treasonable felony has embarrassingly said that the Arewa youths who gave Igbos an ultimatum to quit the North before retracting their threat cannot be arrested and made to face the law because of ‘security implications’. Beyond this, Fulani herdsmen continue to commit genocidal acts against farmers and host communities across the country without the slightest reaction from the security agencies. Where is fairness? Where is justice? Where is equity? How can anyone credibly call the impetuous Nnamdi Kanu’s bluff?