(Four pillars of instability)
In its extreme formulation, the title of this column can be recast as “Nationalities against the Nation”. Nationalities are groups or people(s) with distinct cultures, linguistic coherence and a homogeneous spiritual, political and economic worldview who inhabit a nation-space. Nationals are bona fide citizens of a nation-state. But there ought to be a distinction between nationals and nationalists.
Nationals are in the nation, but nationalists are both in the nation and for the nation. In other words, while there have been a sizeable number of worthy and illustrious Nigerian nationalists many of whom have lived for the nation and a few of whom have died for it, there is as yet no Nigerian nationalist class in the proper sociological sense of that term.
Yet every nation requires a true nationalist class to move from being a nation in itself to a nation for itself. It was not for sheer brinksmanship that Admiral Horatio Nelson of Trafalgar presaged every naval battle with the memorable summons: “England expects every man to do his duty”. It was a call to martyrdom in the service of a nascent nation. With one hand already lost in battle, Nelson himself eventually succumbed to a solitary enemy rocket.
In effect, then, what Lord Lugard created was a nation in itself, which was the best he could do in the circumstances. To become a nation for itself requires the sterling and heroic efforts of a truly Nigerian nationalist class that would then transform the chaotic amalgam to a coherent and organic nation. One hundred years and much momentous bloodshed and upheavals after, this has proved a costly and illusory mirage.
A nation-space in a perpetual and permanent state of becoming is vulnerable to certain nation-destroying tendencies and activities. With the carnage in Kano this past week and the discovery of active cells in Lagos , it is clear that the Boko Haram insurgency is bent on tipping the nation into an orgy of religious and ethnic bloodbath the like of which has never been seen anywhere in the world.
This is a dire moment for the nation. As it is currently constituted, the Nigerian political elite, particularly its dominant faction, is organically incapable of handling the challenge. The unforeseen contradictions of post-military anarchy and anomie have rendered the ruling party statutorily incompetent and incapacitated by its lack of transformative imagination and vision.
Given the structural and systemic disfiguration of the nation, the PDP may win many more elections, but it is incapable of holding the nation together for much longer. A fixation with elections is electoralism in its worst and most berserk form. This is the time for the emergence of a truly nationalist class which will save Nigeria from political, economic and spiritual predators. Unfortunately for now, there seems to be none in the horizon. So by the time we all wake up from this nightmare in all its bloodthirsty absurdities, Nigeria may be gone.
As it is at the moment, Nigeria is prey and hostage to four main predatory groups whose activities, wittingly and unwittingly, are mutually reinforcing in their nation-evaporating possibilities and potentials. Although they may have their arrowheads and clusters among certain ethnic groups, it is juvenile and delinquent bêtise to reduce this complex issue to a question of ethnicity or of some nationalities against the nation. Whenever and wherever nationalities have risen against the nation, it is always an elite-driven phenomenon.
The four groups that Nigeria is vulnerable to and that have rendered the country virtually ungovernable are the following. First are the political terrorists who are using the power of political ascendancy and incumbency to unleash a reign of terror on the nation in order to secure and safeguard their temporary and transient advantage. They have broken all the rules of sober and civilized governance in this country and we are still counting. With their boorish and undemocratic conduct, they constitute the gravest nuisance to the nation.
The second are the spiritual predators and religious terrorists who will stop at nothing in recreating the nation in their own image even if entire swathes of the country is laid waste and the nation itself is foaming with blood. They are savage and medieval tyrants who will stop at nothing in turning Nigeria into a theocratic state of their torrid hallucination. To their Stone Age and fundamentalist mindset, the very idea of a secular state is a horrific anomaly. Yet this is the very fundament of the modern nation-state paradigm.
It is the theocratic state that is a modern anomaly, the exclusive preserve of societies transiting from first degree feudalism to modernity. Goodluck Jonathan is right to call Nigeria a secular state. A nation may be a multi-religious nation with freedom of worship guaranteed to its citizens but when a state becomes multi-religious, it means that every ascendant religious group can take its turn in spiritually gang-raping the nation without any regard for the core values that bind it. This is a classic enactment of Hades on earth.
The third group are the economic terrorists who are bent on bringing Nigeria economically to heel. At the level of state actorship, they are those who believe that Nigeria is a sinking Titanic to be stripped of all valuables before the might hulk topples over. They are like raiders of a lost Ark. At the level of economic society are the petty and petit predators : hegemonic amputees who had lost potency and feel hardly done by a nation that had castrated them politically. As a result, they are engaged in all manner of economic sabotage against a nation for which they nurse nothing but seething animosity and volcanic resentment.
The last group are the logical progeny of the first three, intellectual counter-terrorists and anti-state actors who deploy superior knowledge and advanced political consciousness to mount a devastating siege on the Nigerian post-colonial state in all its startling inadequacy and bankruptcy. They are products of the global rise in counter-hegemonic knowledge by which those who are outside of government know far more than those who are inside.
Whether from home or from abroad, they deploy their intellectual firepower to telling effect forcing the hunter to become the hunted. In its extreme and adversarial version, it is an anti-terrorist terrorism whose aim is to exclude the excluders and which will stop at nothing but the reconstruction of the nation and the reconstitution of the state. After each encounter, the government looks so weather beaten and punch drunk that you have a sense that only gluttons for scarifying punishment would like to remain in power no matter the perks and perquisites.
With all these forces ranged against themselves and against the nation and the state, it is not surprising that Nigeria often gives the impression of a nation permanently at war with itself. It is to be noted that apart from minor border skirmishes with Cameroons and Chad, Nigeria has not fought any external war since amalgamation.
Yet the history of the country is a history of epic bloodletting arising from civil wars, coups, countercoups, civil uprisings, religious insurgencies, invasions, massacres, pogroms, tribal feuds, state executions and economic genocide. The enemy is entirely within, and Nigerians have been killing Nigerians ever since amalgamation.
All lucky countries are not the same and every unlucky country is unlucky in its own unique way. In the crucible and roiling contradictions of national evolution, adversities often turn into advantages just as advantages turn into adversities. The ANC was founded in 1912, changed its original name in 1923 but did not come to power until the last decade of the last century. With all its ugly scars, apartheid turned out to be a unifying factor for the diverse and disparate ethnic groups of South Africa.
The Sotho people who were subordinates within the context of the mighty Zulu empire simply turned to education and Christian modernity and were able to turn the table with their massive manpower. Yet unlike the Gikiyu/Luo/ Kalenji/Masai maelstrom which continues to hobble modern Kenya and the majorities/minorities struggle for power which has stymied Nigeria’s march to authentic nationhood, nobody ever hears of the ANC fracturing along ethnic lines, despite the worst efforts of the Mangosuthu Buthelezis.
This was because the ANC was primarily and principally a politically conscious intellectual organization waging an ideological warfare against apartheid. Forged in the cauldron of an unjust and ungodly system, the ANC acquired the discipline, the fortitude and the political clarity which promote national spirit and consciousness above the petty demands of ethnic animosities. Apartheid was an equal opportunity barbarity and not even the fair skinned Indians could pass.
Nigeria may not be lucky in the lottery of colonial conquerors. But it is to the credit of the British colonial masters that after decades of neglect and negligence, they finally roused themselves to provide the institutional framework by which the new nation would be governed. The constitution so bequeathed was not, and could not have been, a perfect document since the colonial masters themselves were not altruistic arbiters.
But at least there were nascent institutions. It was left to a Nigerian nationalist class to improve upon for the greatest benefit of the greatest number of people. This was unlike what happened in Portuguese overseas possessions. As the first true nation-state and founding colonial power, armed with raw brutality and without the intellectual sophistication of later modes of modernity, Portugal simply regarded its overseas possessions as forcible extensions of the metropolitan mainland. Indeed at a point in history, the entire Portuguese royalty relocated abroad and ruled from Brazil until the bubble burst.
This was why in virtually all the Portuguese overseas holdings, from Angola, the Cabinda enclave to Mozambique through Guinea Bissau, a national war of liberation had to be waged to rid the nations of their colonial incubus. It has proved very costly and draining for the countries and for Africa. Till date, Guinea Bissau which was conceived as a Portuguese overseas plantation remains without any viable political institution with armed bandits parading as soldiers while political warlords and drug cartels rule the roost.
Nigeria has not been so unlucky. But there is a limit to legendary luck without commensurate political praxis. The four pillars of national instability enumerated above, in combination or as individual calamities, can tip the nation into a sudden implosion or engender its catastrophic dissolution into warring ethnic nationalities. This is particularly so of the Boko Haram war against the state and the nation.
Despite the bluff and the bluster, Goodluck Jonathan appears to be at his wits’ end. The national hopes invested in his administration have all but evaporated. You know a ruler is beaten black and blue when he begins to make offensive and insensitive noise against the spirit of the nation. He has been hinting darkly about the removal of the “remaining” phantom subsidy even when the national uproar caused by the last is yet to subside.
The president has shown a bizarre and inexplicable prodigality in expending social and political capital both at home and abroad. The ship of state is once again at the mercy of elements. This week, the Americans tellingly excluded Nigeria from a democratic summit. By virtue of its size, military and economic might, Nigeria ought to be an automatic choice. If this is the international verdict on Jonathan’s tenure, the national verdict is bound to be more devastating.
