- Further reflections on the Nigerian paradox
As Nigeria entered the week of its sixty fifth birthday anniversary, the mood of the nation is sombre and deeply unoptimistic. There seems to be no time for frills or fripperies. The people are not impressed by rousing figures of economic redemption and statistics that suggest a return to fiscal sanity as long as they do not translate to immediate cessation of hunger and amelioration of crushing poverty. If you tell them it could be worse and that under the watch of Robert Mugabe, the old wizard of Harare, Zimbabwe transited from buoyancy to national foreclosure, they retort that Nigeria is not Zimbabwe and that anybody aspiring to rule the country must have the basic skills and competency. Like the human organism, nations also grow old and weary from exacting punishment and unrelenting cruelty. But unlike human organisms that die and disappear forever into the cosmic void, nations can actually be revived and even resurrected.
It is this abiding hope and optimism in the magical possibilities of Nigeria as the greatest conglomeration of Black people and the charmed life the nation has lived so far that must inform contemporary politics of goodwill irrespective of faith, creed or ideological suasion. Without this hope, optimism and suspension of disbelief perhaps, no union of contraries like ours can be sustained or kept alive for long. After over a century of slavery, discrimination against the indigenous Black people and other manifestations of economic injustice, Sudan finally unraveled, the contradictions dramatically accentuated by military rule. Following on its heels is South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and many other flashpoints of disaffection and discontent on the continent.
Franz Kafka was a writer of rare originality and pained integrity. All his life, he felt insecure and not up to it. Feelings of worthlessness and unworthiness gnawed at his tortured soul. Shortly after his engagement, he wrote to his future wife promising her only a future of “unadulterated unhappiness”. “Unadulterated unhappiness” is unhappiness at its summit, pure, concentrated and undiluted. Sensing mortal danger that is immediate and pressing, the poor woman broke off the engagement and fled. Thus ended the marital career of a lonely and alienated genius even before it began.
Kafka remained a model celibate for the rest of his life. He was a victim of multiple identities each cancelling out the other leaving an empty shell at the heart of it all. He was a German-speaking Czechoslovakian Jew, a convoluted identity which merely reinforced his burden and misery since he was neither a German, nor a Czech or a Slovakian. It was little surprise that the whole post-Habsburg contraption unraveled with the Czechs and Slovakians being the last to bail themselves out in a courteous and friendly parting of ways.
As a result of the endemic crisis of nationhood and unviable identity spawned by the whimsical malevolence of the colonial cartography of Africa, there are many Nigerians who believe that they have been at the receiving end of unadulterated unhappiness in the hands of their country. A lot of people believe that the coerced marriage of the mutually incompatible has produced nothing but protracted misery and retrogression. Many have gone to their grave regretting the nationhood imposed on them by the colonial masters. “What type of a country is this?” Ken Saro-Wiwa was known to have muttered after several crude attempts to hang him failed, before he finally gave his soul to his maker. The rudimentary and primitive execution contraption was reported to have been hurriedly flown from Sokoto Prison that same morning.
The late Justice Adewale Thompson was justly celebrated as a mystic, aficionado of arcane mysteries and exemplar of Black Exceptionalism. He believed that Nigeria and the Black race were the greatest things to have happened to humanity. But towards the end of his life when he was asked whether he would like to return to Nigeria to continue with his great work as he often hinted, the great man retorted that he had suffered enough. When Wole Soyinka, the Nobel laureate, was asked whether he could distinguish between hell and heaven, he responded that having lived in Nigeria for most of his life, he had a fair idea of what hell would be like. Before he died in exile, Chinua Achebe had already buried Nigeria.
These dismissals and disavowals of Nigeria by some of its most illustrious citizens ever are fairly representative of widespread disillusionment among the elite of the country. Yet there are many dissenting voices who also contend that the inability of Nigeria to cohere and solidify as a holistic and organic nation with a rock solid national identity is a result of the fractiousness and poverty of vision of its corrupt, avaricious elite. They must not be allowed to wash their hands off the problems. In an acidic reformulation of Count Leo Tolstoy’s original aphorism about all happy families being the same, some political theorists have expanded the vista to incorporate nations: all happy nations are the same it is only unhappy nations that are unhappy in their own unique way.
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To corroborate the startling insight of this daring inversion, it is said that all civilized nations feel the same : tap water running, electricity flowing, the unsheltered reduced to a minimum, public transportation zooming ceaselessly and with clockwork efficiency, insecurity reduced to the barest minimum, public safety guaranteed by an efficient policing system and adequate medical facilities available to all citizens with affordable food available to all. It must be added that all these countries have also put in place systems of governance which guarantee free and fair elections and which allow the people to choose their leaders and representatives.
Apart from failing in all or most of these verifiable indices of modern civilization, a country like Nigeria is also seen to be plagued by its own unique combo of internal discontent and disaffection with the entire system. Multi-dimensional insecurity, with economic, political and religious insurrection in the entire north combined with urban terrorism in the South West and generalized disorder in significant sections of the South East have become the main drivers of agricultural collapse in the rural areas, particularly in the former food belts of the Niger-Benue confluence and the smooth transportation of goods in the entire country. Despite some heroic efforts to stem the tide, unfettered corruption and mismanagement remain rife and have hobbled industrial growth, stymied educational development and crippled innovative instances of infrastructural development. The only significant exception is Lagos and one or two of the old LOOBO states.
Yet with this dismal and dreary picture painted, it is easy to overlook some of the heroic and herculean efforts that have been invested in redeeming and sanitizing Nigeria over the decades, the June 12 struggle for example. But they appear too little and far between. When subsumed within the context of generalized incompetence and startling failure of leadership, the labours of our heroes and avatars appear to be in vain. For example, the first generation of Nigerian leaders, in particular a visionary and developmental genius like Obafemi Awolowo, who was touted by western experts as belonging to the front ranks of leaders anywhere in the developed world and the string of economic wizards such as the remarkable Odutola brothers, Louis Odumegwu-Ojukwu, Aminu Dantata and Odulate of the Alabukun fame who built industrial empires from scratch, would be weeping in their grave at the plight of their nation.
As it has been observed by Louis Althusser, it is only the production of new heroes keeps old heroes alive. This is why it is important at this point to make a brief detour to some important conjunctures in our journey so far in order to plot the way forward. It is said that when youths stumble, they cast anxious gazes at what lies ahead, but when elders falter, they cast a retrospective glance at what led them to where. In early 1985, forty years ago, this writer was approached by the duo of Dele Giwa and Ray Ekpu of Newswatch magazine fame to contribute an article to commemorate Nigeria’s twenty fifth anniversary later that year. So important was the project to them that both drove down to Ife where one was based then to seek out the columnist.
The resultant effort was a landmark publication on the journey of Nigeria up till that moment with so many contributions of rare insights by distinguished writers that explored many aspects of the Nigerian condition in their multidimensional perplexities and overdetermined contradictions. Our own contribution explored the maddening paradoxes, ironies and ambiguities that have dogged the Nigerian condition since amalgamation. In the opinion of many, it was a rousing tour de force. Ever since, the concept of paradox has entered the Nigerian imagination and public discourse both as a framing referent and as a diagnostic tool for plumbing the depths of postcolonial disorder.
Four decades after, one continues to be astonished and astounded by the magnitude and acuity of the insight. How else can one classify the plight of a nation blessed with the most arable land mass and such contrasting climatological conditions that it could produce anything under the sun yet is unable to feed its populace? How does one describe a nation that sits atop the most spectacular array of mineral riches that any society has been blessed with since the dawn of civilization but which has become a byword for multidimensional poverty? What would the Malaysians think each time Nigeria demands for the palm oil which they now produce with industrial ease? Are these not the same people that gifted them with the seedlings with which they took off a few decades earlier? Given its spectacular human endowments and natural resources, the nation ought to be in the front rank of leading nations but is instead dismissed as a monumental joke; a gross caricature of authentic nationhood.
The paradox even extends to the game of soccer so beloved by most Nigerians. Despite having thrown up some of the greatest soccer prodigies the world has seen in the last three decades, the country has so far been unable to come up with eleven men that will cohere and congeal into a solid national team that will be a global sensation. In the end, it is obvious that nothing can beat Henry Kissinger’s great insight that a nation’s football team is willy-nilly a reflection of the national character. With the problem now thrown into bold relief, it should be obvious that any government that hopes to make a significant dent on Nigeria’s acute dysfunction must roll up its sleeve to tackle the foundational problems of inauthentic nationhood.
More obvious is the fact that this cannot be done without significant political reforms which will broaden the narrow and severely limited base of the current national consensus, tackle the problem of corruption and misappropriation of national resources in a holistic and systematic manner and press for a more inclusive and egalitarian economic programme which conduces to more social harmony and national peace. The current government has tried to tackle these problems which presuppose that its instincts are in the right direction. But it will require far more integrative rigour, mental discipline and theoretical sophistication which allow us to borrow ideas from other places without having to subject ourselves to their cultural enslavement. Nations perish not because it is their destiny to perish but because they have refused to adapt their ways to changing times.
