The Road to Zango Katakata
There is a strong nexus between economics and genocide. In almost all its horrific instances, genocide seems to occur in circumstances of famine, rising economic miseries, the struggle for space in stifling enclaves and brutal lack of opportunity .Throughout the history of humanity, the struggle for economic primacy is often cloaked as political and religious contention.
Genocide can be state directed, that is when a terminally ailing state looks for scapegoats for its failure among its own citizenry. Or it can be society inspired when rising economic misery combines with real and imagined injuries to whip a people towards the mass elimination of fellow citizens. It can also be a combination of the two, a situation in which the state actively encourages its hegemonic citizenry to do the needful.
In a book titled, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, Daniel Goldhagen provides massive compelling documentation to show how the virus of anti-Semitism had already infected the entire German high society rather than being just an eccentric obsession of Hitler’s state.
Goldhagen argues that rather than being coy accomplices, virtually all Germans were willing participants in mass extermination. But since virtually all of European societies, at one point or another, exhibited strong anti-Semitic sentiments, it ought to be an object of historic curiosity that it was only in Germany that this resentment boiled over to outright genocide.
The Ottoman Turkish genocide of the Armenians was a direct response of the emergent Turkish military warlords to looming state collapse and the end of the Ottoman Empire. The founder of modern Turkey, Mustapha Kemal Ataturk, did not wait for the victorious Allied powers before carving out a new nation from the rump of the dying Empire. The unfortunate Armenians who found themselves trapped in the Turkish enclave were summarily exterminated.
Just as it happened in Hitler’s Germany, the genocide of the Tutsi people in both Rwanda and Burundi was state-directed and elite-inspired. In both countries, and particularly in Rwanda, rising economic insecurities spawned by rapidly expanding population and disappearing arable lands in a narrow strip led to an apocalyptic meltdown which became the shame of modern civilization.
Yet in both countries, both the Hutu and Twa populace had for several centuries lived in peaceful and prosperous coexistence with their Tutsi overlords until the grim economics of mutual tolerance no longer added up. Indeed such was the level of peaceful cohabitation that the term Hutu was becoming an economic rather than a racial category. There was a ritual ceremony known as Kwahutura, or shedding of Hutu identity, which was a function of how many cows owned rather than ethnic origin.
It is useful to point out that in an equally landlocked country but one with a vaster landmass and more prosperous economy like Uganda, there is also a sizable Tutsi population. But there has never been genocide in Uganda. The ethnic population is better mixed and diversified. Although the Tutsi are treated with respect and reverence as a result of their royal and aristocratic antecedents, it has never translated into an electoral overlordship. Idi Amin Dada, the crude and syphilitic Nubian crackpot, actually wanted to marry the charming and delectable Princess Elizabeth of Toro.
It is the time of Zango katakata in Nigeria, if filtering reports from Oke Ogun are to be believed. There is an economic, political and spiritual nexus to the grave security challenges currently facing Nigeria which makes the country a prime candidate for genocide or an ethnic apocalypse. That is if care is not taken and the right choices not made by an errant political class.
Advancing desertification in the north which has eaten up both arable and grazing land, rising economic insecurities fuelled by grave incompetence and mismanagement, have spawned a vast and restive Nigerian underclass. All this coupled with the sheer incompatibility of a feudal mode of economic and political production with the dictates of a modern nation-state appear to be snowballing into a major conundrum for a tottering nation.
In the event, the herdsmen have turned their attention southward causing sheer mayhem and bloodbath where they encounter stiff resistance, particularly in the buffer zones of ethnic coexistence. Having discovered that kidnapping and banditry are far more lucrative than cattle-rearing, they have promptly forgotten about grazing routes and cattle colonies otherwise known as Zango. Who cares about a Zango when there is an Ango to be captured?
The result is that vast tracts of the nation have either become no-go areas or have suffered severe elite depopulation. According to reports, huge swathes of Zamfara State are unsurveyed and unsurveillable; a classic case of disembodied and disarticulated territoriality. In plain terms, it means that many areas of the nation are continuously unmapped and therefore ungovernable havens for criminal enterprise.
The heavy presence of undocumented and uncaptured Fulani herdsmen in several forests of the South West has led to a mild form of elite neurosis and hysteria with shrill cries of “fulanization” and Islamization. Except for propaganda purposes, we must learn to separate the two for the sake of analytical and ideological clarity.
While one cannot lightly dismiss this claim judging from the quarters they are coming from, honesty and sincerity demand that we acknowledge that the Yoruba people for centuries have conducted cultural, economic and mercantilist transactions with their far-northern neighbours. Being an essentially sedentary civilization, the Yoruba nation is more likely to feel the impact of unequal exchange as against the nomadic outreach of its competitors.
However, it is only in recent times that the phenomenon of armed Fulani militia has become a haunting and troubling reality in Yorubaland. Despite their pervasive presence and the freewheeling anarchy occasioned by this, there is no clear-cut evidence that this is a structured and coordinated armed invasion. On the contrary, and going by the preceding analysis, it may well be that the armed militiamen are responding to the imploding and abhorrent social conditions in their region, a clear case of one region infecting another with its social anomalies.
The Yoruba culture and civilization are too strong and secure to be summarily suborned and overwhelmed by armed conquest. When the handshake gets beyond the elbow, the Yoruba people and their leadership, that is they have not been overtaken by the law and logic of Asabiya, will know what to do and without any grandstanding or ostentatious sabre-rattling. This is not the time to seek political profit from the miseries of a nation.
What seems to have got through to a section of Southern and even Northern minority leadership, and rightly so, is what is known as ethnic memory of political evil which often predisposes elites to partisan rancour and total lack of objectivity. Bishop Matthew Hassan Kukah and many others often allude to the harrowing experience of their people in the hands of their Fulani overlordship. These cruel indignities are often burnt deep into the political consciousness.
The hubristic indiscretions of Sir Ahmadu Bello and the hegemonic swashbuckling of many contemporary northern leaders have not helped matters. In a modern nation-state, it amounts to an anomalous grandstanding for the elite of a particular section to claim the divine right to perpetual leadership or for its leader to aver that the nation is the estate of his great grandfather.
This is where the threat of ISWA and its relentless and perverse drive for Islamization is a far more potent danger to Nigeria’s survival and ethnic harmony than the threat of Fulanization. It is a well-known fact that the militant Islamic Brotherhood has no truck with the paradigm of the nation-state or its claim to territorial sanctity.
Having been dislodged from the Middle East where it attempted to establish a trans-national Islamic state which completely redrew the map of the place, the rogue sect has apparently journeyed through the open corridor of the Maghreb to contemporary Nigeria. If this is true and the Southern Nigerian forests are already infested by well-armed and well-trained Islamic militants, then the Nigerian post-colonial state has entered a phase of critical emergency.
This is where the international intervention alluded to by General Obasanjo in his recent broadside from the pulpit may become a fait accompli and not just a troubled prognostication. The international community will not sit idly by and watch the militant brotherhood establish a foothold in the south of Nigeria. Even neophytes of the global order ought to realize this. In all likelihood and if care is not taken, Nigeria is likely to be turned into an international battleground with the horrific carnage of Syria a child’s play.
This time around, even far more than his first coming, the retired general from Daura has his work cut out for him. He must seek out an urgent economic solution to the looming social implosion in the north and a swift military solution to the spate of banditry and kidnapping throughout the nation. He must also seek a national dialogue on the best political configuration for a multi-ethnic nation prone to centrifugal forces.
The languid and listless nature of the opening moves on the political chessboard does not suggest an acute awareness of the critical nature of the dangers posed to the country. But if the president cannot see far into the hazy horizon, the empty chairs of significant absentees at his second inauguration on Thursday ought to alert him of the extent of political disaffection within the ruling caste.
General Buhari’s core supporters may see as this as the ultimate triumph of people’s power. Nothing can be more delusional than this arrant nonsense. To push through some of the political, economic and security reforms needed to rescue Nigeria from the jaws of tragedy requires substantial elite consensus and efforts of a truly bipartisan nature. In his second coming, having seen his moral authority wane and wither in the crucible of partisan politics, much will depend on Buhari’s mastery of pragmatic politics and capacity for ruthless realpolitik.
Let us end with a series of global paradoxes which reflects the nexus between economics and genocide and how nations can get it wrong. Despite the pogrom of the Armenians and the cosmetic modernizing bravura, the militarist state left behind by Ataturk has not delivered the best economic and political dividends in the region. That distinction goes to the United Arab Emirate and its unique blend of monarchism and modernity.
Twenty three years after the Rwanda genocide, the country is still ruled by Tutsi elites who retained the discipline, order and cohesion to pick up the pieces after central governance disintegrated. The authoritarian excesses notwithstanding, post-genocide Rwanda is one of the rare economic success stories of post-colonial Africa.
As for the Germans, they finally learnt their lesson that the world does not owe them a lebensraum, or living space—having exhausted themselves and pretty much the rest of the world in the process. Despite their discipline, their thoroughness and capacity for hard work, the Germans were hardly well-served by their leading philosophers, historians and cultural figures that instilled in them notions of Aryan superiority and German Exceptionalism.
It was a compensatory mechanism for historic backwardness, their continental neighbours and English cousins having stolen a march on them in the struggle for political and economic modernity. But once it became obvious to them that what they needed was a rapid modernization of their economic and political institutions and not aggressive land-grabbing, the Germans have never looked back. Today, Germany’s enlightened leadership is at the frontiers of global racial integration while their rivals are struggling with xenophobia and right wing retrogression.
There is a lot to take away from this engrossing drama of national possibilities. Once a nation’s leadership has proved constitutionally incapable of making the right choices, their people are sentenced to long spells of economic, political, intellectual and spiritual miseries.
