Further reflections on devolution
Nigeria has been in turmoil of late. The turbulence has been such as never been seen since the civil war. But strangely enough, the Nigerian ruling class continues to live in denial believing that the problem will go away on its own or that the occasional resort to threats and bluster will just do. It has not occurred to them just how vulnerable the state has become in the wake of Boko Haram and other social fiascos.
Meanwhile the senate, with power as its sole objective, continues with its game of domination by subversion. You ask, what was the long term and short term tactical and strategic advantage secured for the ruling coalition by voting against devolution of power, more so when both the party and the government said they have set up different committees to look into the matter.
You have been mulling and ruminating about the rise of religious bigotry and ethnic fundamentalism in the nation. Ethnic fundamentalism—or my tribe is better and greater than yours psychosis—is the bane of multi-ethnic nations in post-colonial Africa. It is the mirror image of nationalism which was the bane of the emerging international order at the dawn of nation-states.
The difference is analytically instructive: whereas ethnic nationalism takes place within the framework of different ethnic formations boxed into the same nation-space by imperialist conceit, nationalist fundamentalism takes place in the context of a battle for supremacy among emergent nations. Internal civil wars and external wars of aggression are often the result.
Patriotism—the unquestioning and unyielding love of the fatherland—just like nationalism, its by-product, exalts a nation and drives its denizens towards higher and loftier goals of self-actualization. In developing multi-ethnic nations, ethnicity, the self-protective bonding and binding together of tribal collectives, is often the result or product of stiff competition for scarce resources.
But once ancestral memories of past hurt and recollection of assumed or real betrayals and bitter feuds weigh in, the love of ethnic compatriots and affective nationalism solidify into hatred and burning animosity against others. It is only a question of time before all this tips into murderous impulses and genocidal rage. This often happens within nations, across nations and among nations.
Now talking of conflicts within post-colonial nations, it is not hate speech that is the problem, as this is a mere symptom or shorthand. It is the economic, spiritual and political war of all against all which induces hate speeches and the hysterical hype of marginalization and discrimination as state policy. If a disease cannot be combated then you must bear with the symptoms.
Between 1870 when the Germans defeated the French and 1914 when the selfsame Germans arrived at the gates of Paris, there were at least forty wars of nationalist aggression the world over culminating in the mother of all human hostilities which saw the worst carnage in the history of warfare. The First World War has been adjudged by military historians as the most savage contention in modern civilization.
Before then, Japan made a mince-meat of China and of Russia on the eve of the great war, while the USA hammered Mexico, Spain and Cuba in quick succession and all in the name of manifest destiny and American Exceptionalism. As for the doughty and hardy Germans, they fought everything and almost everybody until the world found an answer to the German Question.
So incensed was Georges Clemenceau, aka the tiger, the French Premier of the era, by what he considered the implacable and raw aggression of the Germans that he insisted on maximum penalties being piled upon them in the run up to the Treaty of Versailles. When he was asked by a concerned American diplomat whether he had actually been to Germany to obtain the objective condition, the tiger snapped: “Sir, never, but twice in my lifetime, Germans have been to Paris”.
Had the tiger tarried a bit longer, he would have lived to see the Germans arrive again in Paris in 1940 after the dazzling blitzkrieg of the Panzer Division which simply bypassed the Maginot Line. This time around, they stayed for four years. In a brief moment of megalomaniac madness, Hitler had even thought of razing beautiful Paris to the ground. Instead, he sent his favourite architect, Albert Speer, to take a close look at the French wonder.
Humanity never profit from or learn the lesson of history. Like Nigeria, America is also in deep distress arising from racial bigotry and cultural chauvinism. America is beginning to reap the rewards of ethnic fundamentalism and white supremacist nonsense. This past week, the White House, the symbol of the greatest human, military and economic consortium the world has witnessed since the fall of the Roman Empire, looked very much like a Third World Country with a nuclear weapon.
The hallowed domain of Abraham Lincoln is in such a shambles that the world has never seen before, what with sackings and counter sackings. Donald Trump looks very much like a self-regarding figure of fun and a monstrous charlatan to the bargain. What has America done to deserve this inglorious charade? Can the civilized world trust its fate to this comic disaster of a Republican administration? It is obvious that if care is not taken, the Don, in a fit of pique and delusional self-importance, may yet take America and the rest of the world to the edge of the precipice.
In an insightful comment dripping with native wisdom, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, Nigeria’s former military and civilian ruler, is said to have observed that God has inflicted Donald Trump on America just to humble America and make the citizens less gung-ho about its manifest destiny and the myth of American Exceptionalism. It is indeed a humbling and humiliating moment for God’s own country.
But Trump is not the problem. Trump is the product a right-wing revolt against the multi-cultural liberalism and humanitarian tolerance that threw up Obama. Trumpism is a monumental uprising against the American establishment and a tribute to the rise of ethnic nationalism and racial bigotry, the dark re-enactment of right-wing populist fascism sweeping through America and large swathes of Europe. It drips with malice and xenophobia.
This is what you get when you allow deep-seated economic, political and social insecurities to take root in a multi-racial society to the extent that the sullen majorities begin to view the equally afflicted minorities with loathing and genocidal rage. The wagons are being circled all over modern America again just as it happened during the earlier centuries of savage contention against the native Indians.
But despite America’s current travails, there are many who believe that the country has the institutional durability and deep-seated resilience and strength to deal with the Trump threat. Had America been centrally and unitarily administered like Nigeria with all the levers of military, economic and political power concentrated in the hands of one hegemonic group or tribal concierge the looming implosion would have been of a world-historic proportion indeed. In the end, the survival of countries and human civilization depends on the type of institutions put in place to contain and constraint the excesses of humanity.
This is why it must be stressed once again that proponents of restructuring and an institutional retooling of Nigeria away from the ravages of unitary federalism have a valid point. The dispersal of power centres and formations in Nigeria, the devolution of responsibility from the centre to the periphery will also serve to disperse the misdirected rage against a section of the country.
Rather than resorting to unhelpful shibboleths about unity in diversity and the non-negotiability of its union, the federal authorities will do well to study the factors that undermine authentic nationhood. Marshal Tito and Josef Stalin will be chuckling in their grave. National unity can never be procured on a procrustean bed. In order to unify them in diversity all huge and unwieldy countries must undergo a radical dispersal of power; a diffusion of authority which acts like a powerful but invisible glue rather than the oppressive bundling together that we find in unitary federalism.
While America and many other modern mammoth nations are finely sewn together with every strand and thread made to work for the organic whole, Nigeria and other huge African countries are clumsily lumped and hastily glued together with several components going in different directions as the bundle comes apart. This is the bane of the Democratic Republic of Congo, CAR, Cameroons, the former Sudan, the former Ethiopia and others.
Unfortunately, African leaders in a mass-replay of what is known as the Stockholm Syndrome appear sold on this older model of colonial nation-formation patented by Britain and other western colonial powers during the high noon of imperialism and some of them are even sworn to defending its grosser absurdities.
When you lump incompatible people together in a nation-formation, that is indeed a mere geographical expression of intent rather than a psychological and historical factuality. It is a pity that the Acting President has been misled into slandering his own illustrious grandfather-in-law on this matter. Reading the situation correctly after the founding of Italy, an Italian patriot famously exclaimed:” Now that we have created Italy, it is time to create Italians”.
Nations are not just proclaimed by colonial fiat. They must be also created. Nations are not military garrisons to be arbitrarily sited and forcibly maintained. The concept of the nation as a garrisoned space is a carry-over from the feudal notion of empire in which overseas holdings require constant patrol and occasional show of force.
Even then there is always a limit to how far force can go in suppressing human aspirations, otherwise all empires would have lasted forever. Empire-nations, a contradictory hybrid and genetic anomaly by any means, such as Nigeria appear to be have their work cut for them. The surveillance required to police vast territories stretches the security forces very thin which makes the nation ultimately vulnerable.
Consequently, the trend in modern nations is to disperse and deconstruct the sovereignty and authority of the state in such a way that the nation itself looks like a decentred totality. Central authority still reigns supreme, but it is only a primus inter pares among a micro-pluralism of authorities all intricately imbricated in a seamless web of power and legitimacy. This is the situation in America, Canada, Australia and India.
Even then as we have seen with the recent example of America all the institutional bulwark will not prevent the emergence of a Donald Trump once the nation begins to boil and roil with political and economic insecurities. With the Trump ascendancy, America even witnessed faint secessionist tremors from the ancient Spanish outposts of California and Texas. Yet the smart bet is on America’s countervailing institutions to contain the emergency represented by Trump.
The Nigerian nation requires urgent institutional revalidation to combat emergences such as renewed separatist agitations in the South East, Boko Haram, the endemic restiveness in the Niger Delta, sea piracy, the ritualization of poverty, the massive waves of kidnapping and other horrific criminalities. This makes it imperative that we take a closer look at the structure of power and the organogram of governance in the country. Whatever the name it is called that process must commence without any further ado.
