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Tag: national question

  • The PBAT administration and the national question

    The PBAT administration and the national question

    This is one of the most critical periods in the history of Nigeria particularly since the commencement of this dispensation in 1999. The old Nigeria, sustained largely on fuel subsidies that had become hardly sustainable and parallel exchange rate markets that bred criminal and humongous accumulation by a privileged elite, is dying. A new Nigeria is struggling to be born under the midwifery of the President Bola Ahmed Tinubu administration which has introduced far-reaching reforms to correct fuel subsidy and exchange rate distortions, with painful birth pang consequences for the populace.

    Sections of the citizenry have severely criticized international financial institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank, which have endorsed the economic policies of the administration as being essentially on the right course and admonished that current hardships manifesting in inflationary spirals in food, healthcare, fuel, transportation, and electricity costs among others, be borne as a necessary condition for the economy transitioning to a more productive and prosperous phase. Beyond reflexive ideological opposition to the reforms, perceived in some quarters as IMF and World Bank inspired, there have been little of alternative pragmatic and realistic policy offerings to transform the nation’s economic course and unleash her latent potentials, by vehement anti-reform voices.

    Meanwhile, the administration continues to intensify its efforts to make palliatives available to cushion the sufferings of the most vulnerable sections of the populace while an increasing number of state governments are channeling their significantly enhanced revenues as a result of the fuel subsidy removal to ameliorate the plight of substantial numbers of their people. It is important that the federal government periodically briefs the public on the impact the various amounts it has channeled to micro, small, and medium enterprises are making towards boosting their operational and job-generating capacities.

    It is only natural and understandable that at a time of harsh economic hardships such as the country is currently experiencing, challenges around the national question will become more accentuated with some anguished voices questioning the rationality, desirability, and utility of our continued national coexistence. This is particularly so against the background of the intensively competitive and contentious nature of the last presidential elections, the outcome of which some are yet to come to terms.

    The national question refers essentially to the conditions for and dilemmas arising from the exigencies of diverse ethnocultural groups cohabiting in a complex, plural polity like Nigeria. Only recently, the Yoruba ultranationalist gadfly, Sunday Igboho, led a seemingly theatrical procession to No 10 Downing Street in London in a quixotic quest to seek support for what was described as the desire of the Yoruba to exit Nigeria. The group has not responded to queries on what confers legitimacy on it to speak for the Yoruba and at which forum such a mandate was given.

    On its part, the most clamorous and insistent voice for the secession of a part from Nigeria, the Indigenous Peoples of Biafra (IPOB), has apparently modified its strategies, for now, to secure the release of its leader, Nnamdi Kanu, from detention from where he is currently facing trial for treason. There is no guarantee that should it succeed in this endeavor, IPOB will not return to its erstwhile uncompromising and sometimes violent campaign for the secession of eastern Nigeria even though the degree of its support base among the Igbo people is difficult to ascertain.

    Given his antecedents not only as a pro-democracy activist but even more a fierce advocate for true federalism and the affirmation of state rights as governor of Lagos State between 1999 and 2007, there are those who expected a radical disposition to the resolution of the national question by President Bola Tinubu. The President has however been quite cautious and tentative on the issue since his assumption of office and the reasons are understandable. For one, he is the custodian of a national electoral mandate comprising disparate political constituencies with divergent attitudes, understandings, and orientations to the national question. His must consequently be a balancing act, particularly in a democratic context in which his party needs broad pan-Nigerian support to retain power at the centre.

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    If there was any doubt about the unwavering commitment of the President and his administration to Nigeria’s continued cohesion, the Minister of Defense, who was a former governor of Jigawa State, Alhaji Mohammed Badaru Abubakar, dispelled any such notion at a recent peace meeting among feuding communities in Plateau State. Reaffirming the indivisibility of the country and the unwillingness of the federal government to permit any form of balkanization, the Minister said, “The federal government will not entertain such demand capable of causing division and disaffection among Nigerians. Therefore, living together is not an option but an obligation. This is evident in Mr. President’s resolve to fight any secessionist agenda in any part of the country. My presence here is to fulfill my mandate as the Minister charged with the responsibility for the protection of our national territory both from external and internal aggression. Therefore, I will not relent until the Federal Government and the Ministry of Defence deploy all assets to ensure our people sleep with their eyes closed”.

    There is nothing new or strange about Badaru’s submission. An elected government does not have the mandate to endorse the balkanization of the country. Referring to his oath of office to defend the territorial integrity of the United States, President Abraham Lincoln, in his first inaugural speech on March 4,1861, bluntly told those seeking to secede that “In your hands my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not mine, is the momentous issue of civil war…You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to ‘preserve, protect and defend it’”. Continuing, he argued that “Plainly, the central idea of secession is the essence of anarchy. A majority held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations, and always changing easily with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people. Whoever rejects it does of necessity fly to anarchy or to despotism”.

    However, the PBAT administration must not create the impression that the component parts of the country are being kept together by compulsion and the force of arms. It is a far more costly and ultimately unsustainable approach to nation building. Rather, the idea of Nigeria must be made such an attractive and mutually beneficial proposition that its components will not only willingly and proudly identify with it but will also be at the forefront of voluntarily defending its continuity.

    Current disaffections with Nigeria by diverse groups stem essentially from the steadily worsening economic crisis of the last two and a half decades and the deepening impoverishment of the vast majority of the people. This is why PBAT struck the right note when he recently told a delegation of the eminent group, The Patriots, which visited him that his priority was seeing his economic reforms through before dealing with their demand for a new constitution.

    Of course, the administration must pay attention to the need to amend or reform those aspects of the extant constitution that hamper optimal economic productivity and efficiency, particularly of the sub-national units just as it has done with seeking greater financial autonomy for local government councils. But its central focus must be strengthening and fine-tuning its economic policies until the economy turns the tide and begins to deliver prosperity and dignified living standards for the vast majority of Nigerians.

    At the root of dilemmas posed by the national question are the economic problems of pervasive poverty, debilitating inequality, widespread ignorance and illiteracy, mass youth unemployment, desperate hunger, corrosive disease, chronic infrastructure deficit, inadequate and inaccessible power supply among others. As Chief Obafemi Awolowo asserted with characteristic perspicacity over five decades ago, “My case then is that, in order to keep Nigeria harmoniously united, and, at the same time, fulfill the natural, ultimate, supreme, and inalienable purpose of that unity, the present and future rulers of this country must place the most crucial emphasis on, and attach the utmost importance to, the advancement of the economic prosperity and social well-being of the individual Nigerian citizens”.

    Apart from staying the course in the implementation of its core economic reforms, the PBAT administration must also urgently address ancillary issues that have implications for the economy. For instance, if the cultural, psychological, bureaucratic and structural impediments to the speedy implementation of state police are proving difficult to surmount, the administration should fast-track its promised establishment of well-equipped, trained, and motivated forest rangers to protect farmlands and farmers across the country and help boost agricultural productivity to stem current food costs spirals.

    Again, the anti-graft agencies should be further motivated and spurred not only to proactively prevent corruption but also to trace and retrieve humongous amounts of stolen funds in private hands. The President has shown a commendable sensitivity to public opinion in his recent cost-cutting reforms to the machinery of government and reshuffling of his administration’s personnel. It is a path that should be maintained and intensified.

  • Hegemony and the National Question

    On modernity without modernization

    Now that the periodic menace of presidential election in a country beset by more fundamental problems of cohesion and survival as a multi-ethnic polity appears to have receded, we can resume the quest for a just, fairer and more egalitarian Nigeria. As we have said many times in this column, elections do not resolve fundamental national posers. They merely drive them temporarily underground, or in some cases they rouse sleeping demons.

    In the circumstances, it can be logically argued that whoever is eventually declared winner in the presidential sweepstakes may yet turn out to be the historical loser.  As the momentous events of the Fourth Republic have so far borne out, the cocktail of crises bedeviling the nation are so vast and humongous that they defy old solutions, ancient mindset and archaic political, economic and spiritual values. Nigeria requires a fundamental shift of leadership paradigm.

    There is a sense, then, in which it can be argued that this presidential election marks a watershed in the political evolution of the nation. As this column noted last week, never in the history of the nation has a presidential election taken place amidst such a din of hate and hysterical frenzy with the Nigerian political elite sharply polarized and split along the fault lines of ethnic, regional and sociocultural divisions.

    It should be more troubling to wary observers that this particular contest has been, in the main, between two leading scions of the northern military and paramilitary feudal complex. One can then imagine what would have been the case had the election been framed as a confrontation between the north and south, or a collision between the two major religions in the nation.

    Yet despite that fortuitous reprieve, we must not fail to discern the climate of international hostility and disdain in which the election took place. It is certainly not a heartwarming experience for many patriots who have fought for the redemption of this nation to have the presidential contest of the most populous and gifted black nation on earth reduced by international observers to a contest between an unreconstructed autocrat and an irredeemable kleptocrat.

    It doesn’t get more humiliating than that. The ugly slur and the sly insinuation of a Hobson’s choice are very well noted. It must also be admitted that this humbling putdown finds peculiar resonance in many informed and influential circles in Nigeria itself. The postponement of the election is bound to compound the national angst.

    But whether its international dimension is a sign of benevolent frustration and disappointment with Nigeria’s perpetual under-achievement or a subtle intellectual blackmail to forestall the emergence of a new Nigeria through draconian re-engineering is a question that will be answered in the next four years.

    It is intriguing and interesting to note that no less a personage than former president Olusegun Obasanjo, a perennial and endemic kingmaker in Nigeria’s chaotic medieval circus of royal enthronement and dethronement, has stressed the need for a paradigm shift in the leadership recruitment process of the nation.

    This was at the launch of a massively-documented book that chronicles the political travails of President Buhari’s old party, the CPC in Abuja. If this is the retired general’s new thinking, then given his less than sterling antecedents on the matter, he owes Nigeria some major restitution in the twilight of existence.

    Perhaps the icing on the cake of national ferment and why this presidential election marks a watershed in the political development of Nigeria is the resurgence of youthful idealism and political dynamism on the Nigerian political scene. The revelations of the season have been youthful presidential wannabes in terms of ideas and intellectual flair. Never has the Nigerian presidential scene been so charged and electrified by sheer possibilities of change.

    One may regret and bemoan their strategic naivete, their callow absurdities and opportunistic gaming, but there can be no doubt that their registered presence presages a seismic shift of political consciousness in the nation. For now, they might have been suborned and steamrolled by the sheer heft and might of the old electoral order. But there is no doubt that they will be back to press their claim more forcefully and strategically, that is if they do not succumb to the ancient national malaise.

    How will Sir Ahmadu Bello, the primogenitor of modern caliphate hegemony over Nigeria view this development? He would have been critically contented that despite severe stress and storm, the hegemony is holding up in most of the things that matter. He would have been bemused by the fact that the current presidential contest is between two scions of the feudal oligarchy.

    This was not how he would have wanted it, but it was a result of military engineering and there was little he could do to control that from beyond the grave. He himself had been a prime casualty of a military rebellion which devastated the oligarchy and almost ended its suzerainty over the nation. The rebellion germinated right under his nose and he could not forestall it.

    But far more ominously, the late Sardauna would have noticed an atrophy of vision that has reached an advanced stage as a result of the decline and degeneration of the pool of human resources available to the oligarchy as it negotiates new and unforeseen historical developments and fresh challenges. It is not the business of this columnist to speculate on the reason for this.

    However that may be, what should be noted is that the urge to dominate others is a human compulsion. However much we resent feudal hegemony in our midst, we must bear this in mind. In any society, the construction of hegemony is an arduous and painstaking task. This is because it is an attempt to reset and re-order a society in its material, martial, intellectual and spiritual totality.

    Hegemony is not mere dominance. It is structured and systematic domination relying on persuasion and a combination of force and spiritual coercion if and when the need arises. Since consent is not exclusive of coercion, hegemony oscillates between brutal force and persuasive blackmail. The Russian word, eggemonia illustrates how a group (In this case, the Soviet workers) can claim to be acting on behalf of all the oppressed and marginalized forces in the society.

    But whether you like him or not, you must give it to the great grandson of Othman Dan Fodio who through sheer force of personality, inclusive vision of immediate society and capacity for ruthless exertion was able to weld a vast and disparate region together into a cohesive entity primed and poised for competition or confrontation as the case might be with the rest of the country.

    During the Cameroonian plebiscite while his southern colleagues were quarrelling and bickering among themselves, Sarduana took men and material to northern Cameroon in order to persuade its leaders to remain in Nigeria.  They did, while the southern Cameroonians opted to be merged with their French-speaking neighbours. Today, the old Sardauna Province is a veritable source of block-voting for the maintenance and perpetuation of hegemonic sway.

    The story was told by the late General Joseph Garba of how his father, a local ruler in the old Plateau, finally succumbed to the Sardauna’s proselytizing zeal and skills to become a Muslim after years of fierce resistance. Interestingly, Garba’s memoir is titled, Why They Struck, a polemical riposte to Major Ademoyega’s Why We Struck. There should be no further explanation about why the revenge coup of July, 1966 had to assume an extremely bloody and savage nature. Hegemony is not a tea-party.

    But hegemonies do not and cannot last forever however valiant and proactive their last defenders remain. Hegemonies lose their grip when their founding vision and ethos become too narrow and circumscribed to accommodate emergent realities on ground, when their sole purpose has become the protection of the narrow privileges and preferment of the founding elite and when their scope and outlook cannot expand fast enough to cope with contending visions of the society and countervailing worldviews.

    In the First Republic, feudal hegemony got a bloody nose while trying to bring to heel societies with different and distinct trajectories and equally well-developed and robust ideological worldviews. It met its intellectual if not political match in a man called Awo who did not hide his disdain and contempt and in the fiercely republican ethos of the emergent acephalous Igbo society whose impatient and rebellious middle-ranking officers eventually supplied the firepower.

    Fifty years later, the battle ground has shifted to the purely intellectual plane with counter-hegemonic knowledge putting the old order to sword through sheer cerebral firepower and entrenchment in the knowledge society. This revolutionary stirring can be seen in the robust ideas canvassed about how to move the nation forward by the various youthful and forward-looking presidential candidates in this last election.

    These progressive notions of a modern secular nation-state even where they come with contradictory nuances and appalling idealism have put the old anti-feudalist war-horses of the First Republic in the shade with their jaded and outworn formulaic chanting of restructuring. They portend a nascent Nigerian nation in embryonic ferment.

    The future of Nigeria belongs to the new generation of detribalized youth and the crystallizing critical mass. They point at a different direction for the nation and the resolution of the contradictions thrown up by the National Question in a way and manner that cannot be imagined. The problem with feudal hegemony is that in order to survive, it must wage a covert and overt war against the forces of modernity and modernization. But for Nigeria to survive, it must embark on a national project of modernity and modernization.

    As it happened in all African societies whose natural trajectory had been forcibly derailed by colonial conquest, feudal hegemony has been aided in its sway over post-colonial society in Nigeria by the fact that colonization merely slammed a veneer of modernity on Nigeria without working it through the indigenous terrain.

    The colonialists did not deem this as part of their historical remit. It was the historical task of the Nigerian political elite who took over from the colonial masters to work through the thin layer of modernity by embarking on a process of modernization that must take cognizance of the traditional structures on which the thin crust of modernity was spread and which still exert powerful pressure on the extant structure.

    The result of this lapse of nation-building and national engineering has been political schizophrenia on a scale that cannot be imagined in human history. It has led to a thoroughly dysfunctional polity. Once the colonial masters handed down to them this mere rubric of a nation-state, the new indigenous elite thought they were home and dry when it ought to have been morning yet on creation day.

    Yet a cursory glance at our current political, economic, educational and legal superstructures will reveal why the nation is embroiled in a permanent crisis of identity with all our institutions engulfed in chaos. The latest is the judicial nightmare evoked by the Onnoghen saga. It is surely a first in African post-colonial history. Indeed if Nigeria were to be a medical patient, it will be diagnosed as verging on multiple organ failure.

    Our next leader must realize that he has a very sick nation on his hands. If the nation is to survive, the next four years should be devoted to an urgent modernization of our political, economic, legal and educational structures in order to align the nation with the imperatives of a truly modern nation- state.

     

  • The national question of identity

    The national question of identity

    Title: Where Are You From?
    Author: Lola Akande
    Reviewer: Uzor Maxim Uzoatu
    No of pages: 306
    Publishers: Kraftgriots, Kraft Books Limited, Ibadan
    Year of Publication: 2018

    Restructuring is all the rage in the Nigerian political space. Prominent Nigerian politicians always mouth the ideals of “One Nigeria” but they happen to be the greatest apostles of clannishness, nepotism, prebendalism and all the sundry isms that divide the people. Being a so-called indigene trumps being a bona-fide Nigerian citizen in many parts of the country. It is indeed a daring venture by the irrepressible novelist Lola Akande that she presciently puts Nigeria’s fault-lines on the front burner in her novel Where Are You From? From the first sentence – “Optimism was my friend” – Lola Akande presents a plucky protagonist, Anjola Adeniyi, who dares to engage her beloved country Nigeria in all multiform dimensions.

    A sprightly graduate of English from the University of Ilorin in her native Kwara State, Anjola Adeniyi embarks on an eventful National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) programme in Anambra State. The challenges of the Nigerian ethnic mix of Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo are sucked into the demanding whirlpool of survival in a dire landscape.

    Starting from her place of birth, the identity question rankles given the history of Ilorin, and indeed, Kwara, in the 19th century when Afonja “liaised with the Fulanis, who were Jihadists led by Alimi, to help him fight Oyo in revenge for his technical expulsion from the Oyo dynasty… After killing the Afonja, the Jihadists fully established the first administration in Ilorin in 1837 and began to overrun, one by one, all the towns and villages in Kwara.” It is thus incumbent on the young one to ask the father: “What about us, Father? What and who are we? Fulani? Yoruba? What?”

    The identity issue cuts across the Nigerian terrain. People must perforce change their bona-fides to fit into the needs of divergent moments. For instance, Anjola’s boyfriend and eventual husband, Ifeanyi, Ify for short, and his entire family, originally from the Igbo state of Anambra but born and bred in Jos, Plateau, “had to hide their links with Anambra to be approved. They were educated to believe that they had to renounce their father’s native name and state of origin and acquire Plateau State Citizenship certificates before they could advance their interests. They had also had to discard their Igbo names – at least officially – and adopt Plateau-sounding English or Biblical names.” She thus becomes Mrs. Anjola Jeremiah upon her marriage.

    In the hunt for a job in Kaduna, Anjola is made to undergo the problematic process of going to the Kaduna High Court to swear to an affidavit of Change of Name, thus becoming Angela Adnoyi of Zango Kataf in Kaduna instead of Angela Adeniyi of Kwara! She discovers that she even needs to go further by claiming to become a Muslim with hijab to be fully accepted, whence her adoption of the name Hajia Zainab Abubakar! Of course the move goes awry as her tribal marks easily give her away. She confesses to coming from Kwara State and it is put her face thusly: “You are obviously Yoruba by descent.” She is compassionately not arrested and prosecuted for forgery but gets this advice: “Go o Ibadan. I have it on good authority that Oduduwa International is on recruitment drive and will hold a selection interview in December.” Getting to Ibadan to vie for the job she gets this ouster: “This is Oduduwa International. This interview is for applicants from the western region, not for northerners.” She is dismissed as an alien, only for the outraged Anjola to cry out: “You called me an alien in my country?”

    Anjola can only wallow in lament: “I can’t find a job, Father. Nobody seems to know where to place Kwara in the comity of states in Nigeria; and it tears my heart to think that I’m lost in a country of my birth, I’m a complete stranger in my own country.”

    The novel Where Are You From? by Lola Akande spans the period of July 1985 to September 1998. Divided into five sections, the first four sections are narrated in the first person point-of-view by Anjola while Part Five is rendered in the omniscient view. The General Ibrahim Babangida coup of 1985 and the embargo on employment somewhat shape the life of Anjola Adeniyi.

    A patriotic Nigerian per excellence, Anjola dares all travails to forge ahead with her inter-ethnic marriage to her Igbo lover Ify despite the evil machinations of Ify’s elder brother Cajethan. She triumphs in the end as a teacher of the community in the dear “home” of Magaji Njeri in Kaduna State.

    The schisms in Nigeria point to the fact that Lola Akande’s Where Are You From? needs to be made recommended reading for students and political leaders alike across board. In getting married to Ify the Nigeria of Anjola’s dream runs thus: “In my mind’s eyes, I saw how our union would offer hope and engender greater harmony between our different ethnic identities just as the marriage between the parents of Maj-Gen Ike Omar Sanda Nwachukwu did. Nwachukwu was born to an Igbo father and a Hausa-Fulani mother and he grew up in Lagos. In no distant future, Ify’s blood and mine would form a formidable connection and we would have adorable children who would be true specimens of Nigeria. Through our children, a new generation of Nigerians with a common identity would evolve and it would be difficult for people to take up arms against one another.”

  • New books re-open issues on National Question

    New books re-open issues on National Question

    Some new books at this year’s Lagos Book and Art Festival (LABAF) re-opened salient socio-political issues that have always bedeviled the nation. In a session to talk about the books, more turbulent facts were discussed, reports Edozie Udeze

    Jahman Anikulapo, convener of Lagos Book and Art Festival (LABAF) described the session as a forum for literacy campaign.  It was a forum also to make books known to the general public and raise new issues on the national question.  Basically, it was a colloquium predicated on the issues that trouble the Nigerian society at the moment.  Titled Narration of Distrust, the books discussed centred mostly on some certain socio-political and ethnic tendencies that have been the bane of the entire Nigerian society – from the North to the West, from the East to the South.  These are issues that can tear the nation to pieces if care is not taken now to correct them.

    The moderator was Sam Omatseye, chairman of the editorial board of The Nation Newspapers and the author of My Name is Okoro and Crocodile Girl.  The authors were Jimanze Ego-Alowes, a columnist with The Sun Newspapers.  The title of his book is Genocide Against The Igbo-The Generals Murtala Mohammed and Olusegun Obasanjo’s Diktats, Edify Yukussak, whose work is: After They Left and Chudi Offodile’s with the title, Biafra and the Making of Nigeria.  The three books looked critically at the various issues of the civil war, social strife and ethnic killings that have been militating against the social cohesion of the Nigerian nation.  Anikulapo said the concept of the discussion was to use the colloquium to encounter through the books the development of human capital and to equally see what numerous communities in Nigeria have been experiencing.  He described Omatseye, the moderator, as someone who has seen it all; a seasoned journalist with vast experiences in terms of his travels, his interaction with various sets of people both locally and otherwise.  “Therefore this is why he has been chosen to handle this session because we know he can probe the authors and allow the people to see our problems clearer through these books.”

    Omatseye did not hesitate to hit the nail on the head.  He hinted on the fact that the society is walking on the precipice and the sooner the drifting is arrested the better for the entire nation and its people.  He also reminded the people that his book on the Nigerian civil war – My Name is Okoro – became inevitable because certain unreported or neglected facts had to be corrected.  “Mine is on the role of the minorities and what and how they were treated by the larger ethnic groups while the war lasted”, he enthused and the audience cheered.  Yet today, it is to look at some new works not only on the civil war but on the persistent massacres of people in some parts of the North.  The situation is more horrible and pathetic in places in Plateau, Kaduna, Benue and so on, where the Fulani herdsmen have sworn to exterminate other ethnic groups and forcefully establish their hegemony in those areas.

    On hand to respond to this horrifying situation was Yukussak whose work is a fictionalized literary treatise on the ceaseless killings in Kaduna and Plateau States.  She said, “After They Left is a novel.  Yes, it is.  But it is a fictionalized narrative about the constant killings of thousands of natives by the so-called settlers among Christian communities in mostly Kaduna, Plateau and Benue States.  More so, it is centred on obnoxious roles of settler Muslim hordes who tend to resort to endless killings to instill fear in others”.   Yukussak who read a portion of the book described the situation in these areas as harrowing and pathetic.  “In Kaduna where I come from, there has never been a steady social progress.  You will do one project today, and then these troublemakers would come again to destroy it.  Each time we travel home it is the same travail, the same old story of backwardness.  There’s fear everywhere and no one seems to be ready to protect and safeguard the natives from the rampaging hands of these marauders”, she explained as her face registered her pains.

    Omatseye quickly noted, however, that the terrible development was accentuated by General Ibrahim Babangida who emphasized on the issue of the natives and sojourners.  He gave undue recognition to the settlers or sojourners to the detriment of the original owners of the land.  Beyond that, they went to Warri to sow another seed of ethnic discord when they created two local government areas out of Warri with Ogbe Ijoh being given an unprecedented status.  “Since then this issue of native-settler imbroglio has become a bigger problem”, he said, noting, “this also happens in the north.”

    In his own book, Ego-Alowes alluded extensively to the intransigent nature of Murtala and Obasanjo that have necessitated the Igbo race to be on the receiving end.  “This book deals with the frontal attacks on the Igbo essentially as spearheaded by two former leaders of Nigeria.  By way of imposing the monarchical system of government on a people who are predominantly republicans is to look for trouble.  They, the Igbos resisted that imposition in the form of warrant chiefs when the colonial masters were here.  But now, why does it continue even when the people obviously do not want it or do not even need such an obnoxious system?”  Ego- Alowes asked shaking his head.

    Then Ego-Alowes, known for his fearless writings, asked, “Will the two generals escape justice?  That is better left for judges.  Tellingly, I have not made reference to any data that is not already in the public domain,” he posited.  For him, this work totally embodies, “in a sense then, all I have done is to make less hidden, what is already in the open.  And our purpose?  It is that of the lay historian.  It is just to unearth that which is hidden and to bring into perspective that which is already in the open.  And would that be treason?” he asked a bit perplexed as to why people should now be threatening him for writing a historical account that has been injurious to the interest of the Igbo over time.  “If the duty of the historian is to bring this account into focus, then that is what I have done,” he said.

    The discussion then shifted to Offodile, a former member of the Federal House of Representatives whose work – Biafra and The Making of Nigeria – harped more on the gnitty-gritty of the political intrigues between Ojukwu and Azikiwe while the civil war crises lasted.  “My work is in two parts”, he began.  “In the main, it discusses some of the issues people have been peddling concerning the roles of Ojukwu and Azikiwe in the cause of the war.  It is looking at Nigeria now and what it portends in the future.  But the analyses centres more on the events of 1966 through the civil war.  It dwells on the pogrom, the Aburi Accord and what should be done to make Nigeria a better place”.  Offodile posited, saying, “this also includes how restructuring can go to help the country move forward.”

    On the issue of whether Azikiwe betrayed the Igbos as a traitor during the heady days of the crises, he retorted “No, Zik was never a traitor.  Zik was Ojukwu’s special envoy who helped to make a few nations to recognize the Biafran State.  At a point in 1968, Zik only suggested that a dialogue could help to resolve the impasse, to which Ojukwu wasn’t really amenable to.  Zik was of the opinion that the direction of the war should be redefined.  This was to also show his ideals as a true Igbo man who needed peace for his people”.  Offodile averred, insisting, “both Zik and Ojukwu seemed to be straddled with the Igbo problem together.  Even when Ojukwu insisted that Biafran Sovereignty was not negotiable, Zik followed it up with efforts to douse the sufferings of the people.  It was when this could not work with Ojukwu that Zik defected in 1968.  He went to England where he remained until the war ended”, he clarified.

    The roles played by other prominent Nigerians in this matter were equally highlighted.  These people included Colonels Okonkwo, and Victor Banjo, Professor Chinua Achebe and others.  However, it is clear that what Nigeria needs now are ideas to move forward. Chief Abdulazeez Ude argued that the continuous debate of the wrongs and rights of the war would not help anybody.  “It is now time to discuss the issue of restructuring”, he asserted.  “We need to restructure now.  In this world you can go and live anywhere you like so long as you meet the conditions to live there.  Discrimination has to stop; this is the time to stop it.  Equality for all is what should guide the world.  What are the Federating units when it is not properly being implemented?  That is what we should be asking ourselves; where state of origin and the like do not matter.  Does it matter in more civilized societies?” he quizzed.

    On the whole, Omatseye tried to rationalize one of the major reasons the Igbos lost the sympathy of the minorities, when he noted that when Igbo soldiers entered the Midwest, they deliberately embarked on all sorts of wanton and atrocious acts.  They raped, they killed; they maimed”, he said.  “Oh, no”, Offodile countered, “It wasn’t Okonkwo.  Why not blame Col. Victor Banjo who was entrusted with the sole responsibility of the Mid-west.  If we put these perspectives right, then we can move forward,” he said.

    The colloquium ended on the note of new issues to pursue to make for a new Nigerian society.   But understanding the past will help to fashion a better tomorrow.

  • Feudal dimensions of the National Question (Prebendal princes on the prowl)

    Feudal dimensions of the National Question (Prebendal princes on the prowl)

    While one was growing up, one of the more remarkable nicknames of illicit gin, also known as Ogogoro, Sapele Water or kainkain, was push-me-I push you. Known for inducing manic aggression or Dutch courage, it could also bring about acts of extraordinary valour or human recklessness and stupidity, depending on how one is viewing it.

    Nigeria is a push-me –I push-you country; a permanent tug of war and turf of hostilities; a faint proposition for the weak-hearted.  Here, it is obvious that the meek will not inherit the earth—or the oil-blocks for that matter. Everything is thrown into the contention. There are no half-measures. The golden mean is that there is no golden mean.

    It would be a remarkable irony if the colonialists who put the country together did not have an idea of the devil’s brew they were concocting.  While figuring out what to do with the largest conglomeration of Black people anywhere in the world, they encountered enough “little local difficulties” to put them in the know of the uneasy cocktail simmering ahead.

    There were the early Niger Delta merchants they encountered who could easily outfox them in their own game of violent cunning and sly duplicity. Some of them they banished, others they outgunned. There was Jaja of Opobo, the fabulously rich and fiery one, they exiled to the West Indies after subduing him. There was Kosoko who fled to Epe, having been dislodged from his domain by fierce frigate bombardment.

    There was the ill-fated Oba Ovoramwen Nogbaisi of Benin Empire who was sent to Calabar after his army was routed and decimated. Just before then they had taken apart the Ijebu army and put the reigning monarch, Oba Fidipote, to flight. In 1903, Sultan Attahiru was dethroned and summarily executed. Years later, Ogedengbe, the great Yoruba generalissimo, was frogmarched to Ibadan and detained on the orders of Captain Bower.

    Given this heritage of turbulent ancestors, modern Nigeria is a wizard’s apothecary indeed, a colonial Babel with several fingers permanently poised on the nuclear buttons and with the threats of mutually assured destruction cancelling out each other. There is no other country in Africa with such a high concentration of robustly individuated nationalities who still cling to old principles and primordial prejudices even after being put through the furnace of colonial re-engineering.

    Yet the beauty of this roiling cauldron of violently contending nationalities is a poetic equilibrium in which the myth of exceptionalism of one ethnic nationality is summarily cancelled out by the exceptional myths of other nationalities, As the Yoruba will put it, it is when you have not been to other people’s fathers’ farm that you tend to think that you father’s farm is the biggest in the land.

    Thus the myth of an educationally inferior and politically backward north is challenged by the reality of the north’s continuing political dominance over the rest of the country. On the other hand, the myth of the north’s superior cohesion and outstanding political acumen is worsted by the reality of its economic backwardness and inability to match the enviable social strides and developmental progress taken in the South, particularly the cluster around Lagos.

    In the absence of creative political engineering which expertly canalises the divergent strengths into a formidable union of complementing diversities, or a homogenizing Leviathan like the military which smashes everything together in the name of some higher nationalism, it is impossible for a country like Nigeria to cohere into organic nationhood. In this dark void of aborted nationhood, the worst experiment in human suffering anywhere in the world is currently subsisting.

    Like a perpetually accident-prone child, the nation will continue to run into heavy weather until we get it right or until the contradictions sharpen to the point that something gives. Last week, as it ever so happens on a regular and routine basis, these contradictions played out again as the nation barely avoided a political meltdown only for it to be overwhelmed by an ethical sandstorm.

    The IPOB train suffered a massive derailment as the north rallied, and after almost two years of tragi-comic exertions, the Saraki trial finally reached its terrifying denouement. The war on corruption ran into a major hitch. A dialectically trained mind can see the point of convergence between the two seemingly disparate incidents. In both, prebendal princes on the prowl.

    The first point to note in all this is that a sizeable proportion of our current political class are steeped in an anti-democratic feudal mind-set mind which simply has no conception of modern nationhood and the obligations of the modern state and its principal state-actors to inhabitants of the nation-space so delineated.

    They simply do not care a hoot about the feelings of the citizens of this country. In fact as far as they are concerned, the idea of Nigerian citizenship is a violent oxymoron which collides with the abject reality of feudal subject-hood. Self-liberation is not served a la carte. Experience from other countries has shown that people do not simply become citizens of a nation by virtue of state proclamation. They do so by asserting and affirming their right to freedom and independence.

    It is on record that a serving senator of Nigeria once claimed that since she paid through her nose for the votes that took her to the upper legislative chambers, she has no obligation to discharge to any phantom electorate. With this kind of mind-set on both sides of the political divide, it is obvious that the feudal conundrum complicates the National Question in the way and manner dangerously conjoined Siamese twins complicate life for each other.

    But while feudalism is dominant in one part of the country, it is only residual and historically attenuated in other parts and in fact virtually non-existent in a few. Consequently, in the zero-sum game of feudal politics in which citizenship is a myth and obligation to civilized procedure a pious fiction, it is those who have much to lose that must beware of those who have little to lose. This is what played out last week in the confrontation between the “ youths” of the north and the IPOB/ MASSOB separatists.

    In an awesome display of its mastery of the game of push-me-I –push –you and political brinksmanship, the north delivered a sucker punch to Biafran agitators by serving them a quit notice which also doubled as intent to summary eviction.

    To all intents and purposes, the quit-notice was supposed to help the secessionist agitators realise their dream of a separate homeland by fast-forwarding the process for them. But in reality it was a deadly ploy; an implacable collision of fundamentalist platform positions. You cannot eat your cake and have it. The reality suddenly dawned even the most obtuse of the agitators that the republican and relentlessly dynamic spirit of the Igbo people depends on unhindered and unfettered space rather than the claustrophobic milieu of a land-locked dystopia.

    Like a nasty and turbulent toddler that has been put in its place, the raucous noise about secession and Biafran exceptionalism evaporated into a loud whimper and quietly sulking remorse. This is what happens when you fight a war of attrition without an enduring strategy but with hate-filled and emotive blackmail of others. You have no one to blame when your opponents rally and respond in kind.

    Yet the northern offensive raises critical issues about the state of the country and its current structural configuration. Forget about the statement coming from the Arewa Youth Wing. A seventy year old man cannot be regarded as a youth. The master-puppeteer is lurking somewhere in the background. This is the north at the top of its game and the summit of cloak and dagger politics and it has proved to be very devastating indeed.

    The crude irony of it all, however, is that the north may be using its economic underdevelopment and feudal backwardness to blackmail the rest of the country in general and the east in particular. It is a classic case of chutzpah, of a person who killed his parents pleading for mercy on the grounds that he is an orphan.

    Rather than mouthing secessionist baloney, this is the real structural battleground for the redemption of Nigeria. Everywhere and everyone is hurting. The structural lop-sidedness of the nation allows the north to continue to exercise a political veto power over the rest of the country in a condition of blackmail and political extortion. But it is an equilibrium of terror with other sections of the country retaliating with a combination of economic, social and intellectual terror.

    The sharp individuation of nationalities and their discrete cultures makes the case for a structural unbundling of Nigeria very compelling. It allows the north in particular to work out the economic and political contradictions of regnant feudalism in a modern nation state on its own terms and within the parameters of its cultural sensitivities rather than inflicting the burden on the rest of the country, particularly those who have figured out how to outflank the forces of local feudalism through confrontation or evasion.

    But this structural unbundling of the country is possible only if progressives or a combination of progressive forces are in control at the centre. Unfortunately at the moment, genuine progressive forces appear to be on the retreat. With the acquittal of its Taoiseach last week, the Saraki Senate appeared to have smelt blood and is advancing on all fronts, consolidating its position and mopping up political stragglers in the process.

    Politically and ethically, the presidency has its back to the wall. It is a measure of the confusion that has engulfed the ruling APC that while its Kwara segment was openly jubilant at Saraki’s victory, its presidency was said to be up in arms against the judgement. It is very instructive that shortly after its legal triumph, the Saraki Senate called on the presidency to forward the report of the 2014 Jonathan conference in a strategic breach of the political and ideological flank of the ruling party.

    The longest legislative coup in the history of the country is now winging its way to a shattering climax. If the Saraki Senate goes ahead to endorse the recommendations of the confab against a more compelling case for a fresh exercise which avoids the sordid intrigues and anti-democratic shenanigans of the Jonathan confab, it would have succeeded in thoroughly besmirching the image and integrity of the Buhari administration. Just as it happened with PDP, the coroner may return the verdict of death by internal sabotage on the APC.

    Events unfolding in Nigeria bode ill for democracy and self-determination for its component nationalities. You cannot even begin to talk about accountability and transparency in the context of the resurgence of the old feudal order, neither can you be pleading for devolution of power to a mode of political production that thrives on stiff centralization. It is a contradiction in terms. Corruption and nepotism are the engine oil that lubricates the feudal machine.

    When Senator Olubukola Saraki usurped the senate presidency against the will and wish of his party, this column noted then that a complex political and legislative coup might be unfolding which may completely alter the equations and calculations of the Fourth Republic. The APC and the nation are about to reap the fruits of the failure of statecraft and its inability to rein in its own.

    But as it is always the case with Nigeria, there is also a lot of hope in hopelessness. The situation is not as bleak as it appears. The northern blackmail, the infantile response of IPOB/MASSOB which shows them to be completely out of intellectual and political depth, and the deft handling of the potentially explosive situation by the federal authorities, has restored the balance of influence to the traditional political elite of the Igbo people.

    The Igbo elite should now leverage their renewed authority into seeking with other like-minded groups across the country a new initiative for a fundamental overhaul of the state architecture through a repeal of the 1999 military constitution and the immediate convocation of a popularly legitimated National Conference. In the alternative, the government should set up a National Restitution Commission which will take a look at all preceding conferences and come up with salient recommendations.

  • National question or just gaming for relevance?

    Sometime in October 2016, a colleague on The Nation Editorial Board asked if Ripples would be available to review a book, soon billed for launch, on Nigerian contemporary politics and history.
    The book’s title was provocative – how a people who never fought a war became the losers of that war.  It promised something, if the author could rigorously pull off his argument.
    But it turned a damp squib – for the author just went on a fanciful binge of emotive bombast and ethnic slurring, though he was very careful, on the surface, to project formidable erudition.  Still, it was all to a skewed end.
    On launch day, a captive and zestful audience was eager to hear what they wanted to hear.  But it was Ripples’ duty, based on facts from the book, to pronounce the exact opposite.
    It ended civil enough, though it could easily have turned another “civil war”.  In fairness to the zesty author, he was just a soul brimming with ideas and eager to joust – but not shy of unabashed self-exhibition.  We parted shaking hands.
    But why this long preface?  It is the umpteenth matter of the national question, among Nigeria’s many ethnics; which has become a cacophony, parallel to the nationwide hangover of hisses, grunts and moans, after decades of wild parties and wanton waste.
    Indeed, while misery is democratized (for hunger boasts no ethnic monopoly, just as the mindless sleaze that resulted in this present meltdown was a pan-Nigeria rot), the parallel privation-driven dissonance, is leading many ethnics to re-examine, even more acutely, their place in the Nigerian common wealth.
    Indeed, it echoes a grim paradox of the modern state, particularly the post-colonial states of Africa, as examined by Prof. Wale Adebanwi, in his new book, Nation as Grand Narrative: The Nigerian Press and the Politics of Meaning.
    In that analysis, Adebanwi, citing sundry authorities, painted a classical state-nation dichotomy of African states.  Whereas the African state looks so real (“densely corporeal”, he dubbed it) in its physical might,  it is so ghostly and flighty, if its claim is nationhood, with any common core (“elusively spectral”, he called it).
    That, of course, offers a robust intellectual foundation for Nigeria’s “re-structuring”: from a dysfunctional unitary state masquerading as federal, to a functional federation, where all of the ethnics are more sure-footed about what they pool into, and what they get from, the common wealth.
    So, the issue is not if “re-structuring”, or “true federalism” or any of its much bandied variants is desirable.  After languishing in the jungle of military rule for eons, and moving round in circles, on the federal question, in almost 18 years of continuous civil rule, it is clear Nigeria’s eventual salvation is in a vibrant federal state.
    But can the agitators measure up to the strict muster of the ideal?  That is doubtful, which is quite reminiscent of the author cited at the start of this piece, who promised, via his new book, much vigorous thinking but delivered instead flabby emotions!
    First, it would help to start from the recent beginning, before moving to the very genesis.
    The renewed clamour for a restructured Nigeria came immediately before the 2015 general election; and reached new hysteria after that election was lost and won.
    The one fancied the fond hope to gain from the pre-election gaming of “restructuring”, which turned forlorn by decisive defeat.  The other was sheer hysteria to cope with — or more aptly, cunning escapism from — the shattering angst of electoral wallop.
    That about captures the portrait of the newfound Salvation Army of “restructuring” from the South-South and South East, and their brash orchestra.
    The curious irony, though, is that mainstream elements from these parts of Nigeria had been most comfy with the ancien regime from 1999 — and even before — and its arch-centralist ways.
    What might have changed?  A Saul has turned to Paul, with the speed of light, even without the blinding lights on the way to Damascus?
    Even more curiously, the South-South, under President Goodluck Jonathan, had an ample, if not golden, opportunity to push for restructuring.  But their elite-in-power manifested the same avid rapacity, for which they lampooned and excoriated the “Hausa-Fulani”. With frenzy, they gobbled up the national barn – bumper harvest with tender seedlings, restructuring be damned!
    An extremist strain of the South East now puts its faith in “Biafra”.  The moderate mainstream now embraces “restructuring”, with the ardour of a neophyte clasping his new dogma.  Yet, more than any other, the South East elite had, pre-2015, been the most zestful collaborators in the Nigerian power racket, which suddenly has become a hateful gargoyle!
    With talks of a putative Igbo presidency, would the restructuring ardour cool after, just as it did with the South-South, under Jonathan?  Time, as Jimmy Cliff, the reggae superstar crooned, will tell.
    That returns the discourse to the South West battalion of the restructuring Salvation Army, in a patriotic blitz to save Nigeria!
    On restructuring, not even the meanest or most cynical of foes could doubt the resolve and constancy of these war-hardened South West veterans.  From time immemorial, that had been their regional anthem.
    But pause and ask: what drives the message of this contemporary army?
    Yoruba nationalism?  That’s legitimate.  The Nigerian crisis of nationhood stems from the fact that each component ethnic projects its essence as the exemplar for a cobbled state, yearning for a winning formative ethos.
    So, Yoruba nationalism cannot be bad, any more than Igbo, Hausa, Itsekiri or Tiv nationalism. In any case, Nigeria craves a sound federation because of its many proud but competing nationalities.
    Yoruba irredentism?  That is bad.  Irredentism is a precursor to domination, for it projects a superiority complex that suggests domination is a divine duty, for which the dominated must be grateful. That was absent from the Yoruba pristine push for federal Nigeria, from the Obafemi Awolowo era.
    But now? Many South West veterans, in this patriotic war, sound nativist, if not outright irredentist. That is to be decried — for irredentism cannot be bad for the Fulani, but good for the Yoruba.
    Still, that might well be strains of frustration, borne out of phobia for a clear receding influence, on this polity of many pathologies. So striking a blow for federalism, and fighting off creeping irrelevance, might just be two sides of the same coin.
    Which calls on the starry-eyed to be wary. Restructuring for a productive federation is the straight-and-narrow way to Nigeria’s salvation.
    But beware: there also appears a parallel wide and merry way. It teems with gamers, for personal or group relevance; and leads the naive, bristling with innocent ardour on the federal question, straight to nowhere but perdition.

  • New frontiers of the National Question

    Almost everybody is on edge these days. There is a foul and murky distemper abroad.  There is so much bile and bitterness around. This new National Charter of mutual loathing is an equal opportunity employer. Individuals, groups, ethnic categories, youths, old people, men, women, rulers, the ruled, pastors and pastoralists are all implicated in the gridlock of national disaffection. Welcome to the new frontiers of the National Question.

    In a multi-national country, whenever there is a rise in ethnic consciousness, you can be sure that it is accompanied by a corresponding recession of national consciousness. There is so much ethnic profiling, group-baiting and tribal scapegoating in this country that one may tend to agree with the American missionary who glumly concluded after a recent tour of Nigeria that God is probably  putting the worst set of people on earth together in a nation-space to conduct an experiment.

    Boxed together in the same territorial space by alien conquerors who consider them an inferior race, it is hard for the diverse people of a colonial contraption like Nigeria not to feel like enemy combatants forced to observe a tense truce. The National Question remains as long as it is impossible for the disparate entities to congeal into organic nationhood, and as long as the political elite are incapable of coming up with certain core values which drive the destiny of the nation.

    This is why MASSOB is massing and sobbing, and why hitherto peaceful Fulani cattle people have suddenly transformed into herdsmen of the new apocalypse armed with AK Kalashnikov. While this is going on, normally circumspect and reflective Yoruba notables are threatening fire and brimstone. In response some northern notables have resorted to ethnic baiting and an irresponsible trivialization of the issues at stake. Meanwhile as the nation’s economic misery is compounded by a looted treasury and falling oil price, there is a vicious and deliberate sabotage of the economy by some groups as a weapon for settling old and recent political scores.

    It is tempting and comforting to dismiss many of these disaffected nationals as belonging to a lunatic fringe of extremists who have lost the battle with reality and who must exhibit certain anti-social pathologies. The problem with this rosy view is that the lunatic fringes are often an uncomfortable manifestation of the deepest political unconscious of a group, a race, a nation or an ethnic formation, that is what everybody thinks but which they are afraid to say,  and what everybody wants to do but which are better left to affronted  voices from the margins who are not afraid of the consequences of their actions and pronouncements.

    In a relentless, mercilessly documented landmark publication titled, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, Daniel Goldhagen has shown how Hitler’s hate-suffused fantasies could not have been the private delusions of a solitary madman or the antics of a lunatic fringe but the manifestation of a group-think which found deep resonance in the political unconscious of the people and made them compliant accomplices and collaborators in Hitler’s genocidal heist.

    Goldhagen has been slammed by some major authorities for first constructing a theory and then looking for compliant evidence to fit into this. But this does not detract from the major thrust of his construct. In most societies, the genocidal impulses of the lower masses are usually held in check by elite social engineering which tries to abolish or neutralize societal divisions based on race, creed and region and religion and through philosophical constructs which sets premium by racial harmony and the fundamental oneness of all humanity .

    It is when the elite of a nation give vent to the baser impulses that darkness looms and an apocalyptic meltdown inevitable. This is the origin of genocide in Rwanda and Burundi, of pogrom in Nigeria and of the madness that hobbled Europe in two memorable world wars.

    There are sections of the Nigerian political elite bent on toying with the apocalypse. Just how we came to this sorry pass after a landmark election that was supposed to usher in a new beginning for the nation must remain a mystery to the uninitiated. But they are merely the return of the repressed.  As this column has repeatedly warned, elections do not resolve national questions. They often bring them into bold and bitter relief or exacerbate them as the case may be. Elections can never unite or unify a political elite bitterly polarized along regional, religious and ethnic fault lines.

    Grappling heroically with corruption in all its systemic manifestations, President Mohammadu Buhari can be forgiven for being peeved and miffed by these centrifugal forces and the attempts to distract or wrong foot him. For now, he has decided to ignore them, or to treat them with the stoic contempt and disdain he thinks they deserve.

    But this is not going to be enough, for they stand a chance of dead-ending his economic reforms. The economic reconstruction of a collapsed nation cannot succeed without its political reconfiguration, for in the final analysis it is the political foundation that determines the economic configuration of a nation after allowances have been made for the modulating pressures of economics on politics.

    Given the economic ravages of the Jonathan years and the total devastation of the Nigerian treasury, the retired general from Daura can be forgiven for behaving like a brutal and candid physician who must first open a festering and purulent wound before cauterizing it. This is the correct surgical procedure even though it may not be sweet music to the ears of those responsible for the nation’s economic adversity in the first instance.  And those lot have been singing like canaries.

    But General Buhari must be reminded that the economic carnage of the Jonathan dispensation cannot be divorced from the unjust politics that threw him up in the first instance and the structural delinquency of the nation’s political architecture. Gazing exclusively at the nation’s hideous economic wounds is a good sign of probity but it can also skew Buhari’s  adamantine disposition in the direction of an unhelpful inquisition which may in turn induce dangerous  countervailing group reaction.

    This is where the president needs the political dexterity and the cosmopolitan gamesmanship much more than he has been able to muster so far. Rather than being constantly nagged about his hideous injuries, a badly wounded patient also needs tropes of hope and narratives of possible redemption. The outstanding surgeon must not only cure the wounds he must also procure hope for the badly mauled. President Buhari’s speechwriters have their work cut out for them. They must infuse the narrative with tropes of hope and the conceits of the heroic stirring of Nigeria’s manifest destiny which threw up the president in the first instance.

    Just as all great and exceptional leaders do in moments of grave national emergency, it is time for President Buhari to engage the nation in critical and introspective soul-searching.  There is too much hatred and bitterness in the land. In the event, it may be discovered that the curious resurgence of MASSOB and its delinquent antics is nothing but a political ploy with an economic foundation which resonates with the deep political unconscious of the Igbo elite or its dominant faction, whether they care to admit this or not. Ditto for the resurgent restiveness in the Niger Delta.

    Yet no one ever knows just when dire economic straits could factor itself into an unstable political equation tipping the balance in the direction of anarchy and chaos. Who would have thought that the phenomenon of hostage taking and economic kidnapping which was thought a southern preserve would achieve a cultural crossover with some urchins abducting an outstanding patriot like Chief Olu Falae on his farm? If that economic misadventure had gone awry, we would have been grappling with a major political disaster.

    But in the prevalent climate of cultural hysteria, notable Yoruba elders also succumbed to ruinous politics. First, by unilaterally ordering the expulsion of Fulani herdsmen from Yoruba space within a stipulated timeframe, they gave an ultimatum which could not be enforced given the subsisting balance of power in the old region. Second, their knee-jerk reaction gave room to the prevalent suspicion that the kidnapping outrage is merely a pretext for a more fundamental animus: the loss of relevance and political hegemony.

    This is not how Awolowo would have handled the situation. The great sage and outstanding political thinker would have closet himself in his study and come up with an original prognosis of the National Question in all its new dimensions. If they want Buhari to take them seriously as altruistic statesmen, they must not give the impression that they are still bickering and smarting over the outcome of the last election when they backed the wrong horse for the wrong and most bizarre reason.

    The election has come and gone and Buhari will be there for the next three and half years. It is time for Yoruba notables to engage him in the quest for the redemption of the nation for which they have sacrificed a lot. And they cannot give precondition for this. Insisting that Buhari must implement the recommendations of the Jonathan Confab is a whimsical nullity.

    Buhari did not order the conference and it was not part of his campaigning manifesto. In any case, despite the reality of the virtual economic collapse of the nation, if the proliferation of unviable states as recommended by the Confab is their main preoccupation at this point in time, then it is time to summon the appropriate protocols.

    But if the reaction of the grand old men of Yoruba politics shows how far ruinous politics can damage the collective health and wellbeing of a nation, the response of certain northern notables reveals the devastating damage to the Nigerian commonwealth and the wide divergence of cultural nous. They range from peevishness to sheer political perversity.  While our friend, Shehu Sani, turned the whole thing into a Suya joint yabis, Rabiu Kwankwaso broke a cultural taboo by openly insulting and slandering elders from a different ethnic formation.

    The issue of cattle grazing factors deeply into the Indigene-Settler segment of the National Question. Even after we have established autonomous grazing zones as an interim measure, it should be clear that this deeply cultural habit cannot be sustained in a modern nation-state. But it is a habit that is part of the cultural identity that has defined and sustained our nomadic compatriots for generations and epochs and hence cannot be summarily abolished without far-reaching ameliorative and radical measures being put in place. Perhaps it will take the advent of a modernizing Ataturk.

    Meanwhile, we must get on with the colonial conjoining and imperialist mish-mash which has brought   hardy Sahelian lifestyle to bear on tropical latitude. If we found the resolve and the creative resources to bear on the National Question, the sheer diversity of Nigeria may yet turn out a source of strength and a unique African brand. If not, the unresolved National Question will eventually resolve itself in its own unique manner. Let President Buhari find the time to be in a hurry.

  • Nwabueze on corruption and national question

    My attention was drawn to Prof. Ben Nwabueze’s write-up on the Buhari administration’s war on corruption by Steve Osuji in his Friday, October 23 column in The Nation  titled: Nwabueze on Buhari: Elders as critics? The write-up may have appeared as some advice for President Muhammadu Buhari, but to the discerning, it was another tirade against the president’s anti-corruption crusade from the so-called Igbo Leaders of Thought of which the esteemed constitutional scholar is its public face – if not its sole member – going by the fact that the elder statesman is the only signatory to the organization’s always negative stance either through articles or advertorials on policy issues of the Buhari administration.

    The first strand of Nwabueze’s piece was his patently odious plea to Buhari and Nigerians in general that “corruption is not Nigeria’s Number One Enemy.” The other leg was his tutorials that our inability to recognize that the socio-cultural underpinning of Nigeria’s ethnic nationalities has always been the bane of our growth and development and not corruption, which he crystallized into what he called the “National Question.”

    For starters, Nwabueze marshaled all the strengths he could muster to advance his argument that eradicating corruption should not be our over-arching priority, but finding a lasting solution to the National Question. Like the strength of an octogenarian, Nwabueze’s vigorous defence of his National Question at the expense of the most egregious, in-your-face, and heaven-may-fall corruption never witnessed in Nigeria’s history that happened under Jonathan’s watch became feeble at best. It beats one’s imagination why Nwabueze would continue to discount the mood of the Nigerian electorate who wanted corruption to be concretely tackled once and for all. More importantly, our erudite statesman may have inadvertently frittered away his moral authority with his position on corruption. Nwabueze it was who, before the presidential election, told his Igbo nation that it would be in their best economic interest to re-elect Jonathan even when it had become very glaring to Nigerians and the international community that the “shoeless boy” from Otuoke had made corruption the fundamental objectives and directive principles of state policy. Before his first trip to the United States after his inauguration, it was the same Nwabueze who told President Buhari to “let bygone be bygone” by not lifting a finger against this hydra-headed corruption monster.

    As much as it is within the rights of our eminent scholar to weigh in on issues of national importance with a view to giving the nation his perspectives that comes with age and rigorous intellectual analysis, the heart of the matter may be that Nwabueze is finding it very difficult to live down the fact of Jonathan’s electoral loss. It’s baffling that the same Nwabueze, who admitted that “the revulsion against corruption that has involved trillions of naira worth of crude oil pirated from the country’s oil wells by government officials and their agents/associates… [that] reached the highest pitch of outright thievery in the last years of the President Goodluck Jonathan administration, and has given rise to widespread yearning for decisive action against it” would call the president’s war on corruption a “make-belief” that “rests less on concrete actions and results actually accomplished and more on propagandist talk…purposely designed to charm the minds and hearts of people, already eagerly yearning for action.”

    It is not uncommon for an octogenarian such as our revered legal luminary to have forgotten so soon that it was not his personal or intellectual influence, nor the votes of his South-east region of which he’s its Leader of Thought that threw up Buhari to once again attempt to clean the Augean stable, but the Nigerian electorate that gave Buhari the clear electoral mandate strictly on account of the “three fights” he said he would engage in if elected, which included wrestling down the corruption monster in accordance with democratic tenets. For Buhari to now act otherwise which is Nwabueze’s preferred option in his latest write-up, would have been grossly irresponsible and out of character for a leader who has been lauded around the world as having the highest integrity quotient in Nigeria’s leadership history. Buhari does not need “propagandist talk…designed to charm the minds and hearts of [the] people” who handed him the incontrovertible mandate to do something about corruption.

    It’s difficult for one not to wonder that Nwabueze’s ‘injunction’ to PMB to abandon his corruption war is not some frantic and insidious attempt to protect certain geo-political interest that predominated in the Jonathan administration and had used the opportunity maximally to cash-in. Otherwise, why was Nwabueze unhappy that Jonathan and some of his key ministers are being demonized with what Nigerians now know as facts? Nwabueze may have been relieved that Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala has shamed her enemies because she was not the Jonathan’s minister that allegedly carted away as much as $6 billion. But our former Minister of Finance and the Coordinating Minister of the Economy may one day have her day in court because even though $20 billion may not be missing as alleged by the erstwhile Central Bank governor, now the Emir of Kano, she admitted that what was missing was $10 billion, which was never accounted for before the termination of a government in which she held the country’s purse strings.

    Since “President Buhari does not qualify to be hailed and idolized as liberator and national hero…unless and until he effectively and successfully comes to grips with the National Question which Nwabueze went further to describe “as Nigeria’s predominating and daunting problem [that have] been left largely untackled over the years”, one must wonder why our renowned constitutional scholar did not advise Jonathan to set up a real and authentic national conference that would have addressed the National Question once and for all when he had the golden opportunity to properly reposition the country in the six years he was in the saddle.

    Nwabueze’s allusion that the president’s “inadequate educational qualification, which disables him from understanding fully…the complex ideas and issues involved in governing Nigeria” was most disingenuous. It was a deliberate disregard and wanton disrespect for a man who had not only held all the important positions in the land including its chief of state, but a man adjudged by world leaders as having the right leadership credentials of integrity, discipline and incorruptibility. It’s such an unfortunate irony that these attributes were first identified in Buhari not by our acclaimed intellectual powerhouse like Nwabueze, but by some stark and hopelessly illiterate Nigerians from the arid north who would probably first turn a book upside down before they would struggle to pronounce even a word. Sometimes we can learn a thing or two from those we call ‘dummies.’ For Nwabueze to be asking President Buhari to focus his energy on the National Question at this material time is akin to a doctor first spending his precious time asking a patient on life-support about his relationship with his neighbours. Nigeria must be stabilized first by Buhari’s surgical operations of obliterating the Boko Haram insurgency, the killing of corruption before it kills her, and recalibration of the economy that will open up job opportunities for our teeming jobless youths. It’s only then that the nation can have the strength and energy to seriously address Nwabueze’s National Question.

    • Odere is a media practitioner. He can be reached at femiodere@gmail.com
  • On the Northern Question: two exemplary positions

    On the Northern Question: two exemplary positions

    If you ignore the National Question, it will not ignore you. This is because nations are never a settled, unquestionable affair; they are forever in question. As we have seen with some of the world’s oldest nations, particularly Spain, Great Britain, Canada, Russia, the Philippines and many Latin American countries,  affronted nationalities are questioning the very basis and essence of the nation, often in scary armed critiques and bloody confrontations.

    But as we have seen in the many brutal and bloody civil wars in post-colonial Africa, particularly in Nigeria, the two Congos, Central African Republic, Somalia, Mozambique, Angola and now the two Sudan, National Questions are never settled by force but by exemplary statesmanship and visionary pacting which address the fears and grievances of political elites.

    Often, many of these elite formations use the National Question as a mask and platform for bitter power struggles and deep state intrigues, or as rearguard rallies after electoral shellacking. That is neither here nor there. It is in the nature of politics and politicians to complicate and problematize the National Question, particularly in the absence of a genuine nationalist elite formation and its overriding ethos.

    The creation of a nation particularly by colonial fiat does not and cannot come with the creation of nationals. That task is left to visionary nationalist elite groups. An Italian patriot famously snorted after the Garibaldi unification by sword: “Now that we have created Italy, it is time to create Italians!”  Many African nations were created by the colonial overlords with enemy nationals deeply embedded, making the task of genuine nation-building a forlorn Sisyphean quest.

    In postcolonial Africa, particularly multi-national Nigeria, these nascent colonial creations continue to roil in crisis and contradictions with mutually incompatible nationalities in a war of all against all. Like a stubborn and unwavering limpet stuck to a rock, the nationality question is deeply embedded in the National Question, implicated and furiously implicating. The tsetse fly does not kill a cow, but it can make life very uncomfortable and worthless indeed.

    This is not a question of tribe or tongue. Either as a regional bloc or as individual entities, most Nigerian nationalities are permanently engaged in a driven quest for self-validation or self-determination which often erupts as an armed critique of the state or the nation itself or a determined bid to bend or break the nation to their private will. But in the absence of a powerfully driven and historically motivated national elite formation, it is like trying to feel your way out of a funeral sack; it often feels like being buried alive.

    For example, in the old west, despite the bravest visionary efforts of Obafemi Awolowo and his progressive successors to collar the region and drive it in the direction of western modernity and modernization, the lingering ideological efficacy of its old powerful feudal structure still continues to play lead violin with the Yoruba nationality forced to feel and probe its way towards modernity like a stalled caterpillar. This can be seen in the cultural politics surrounding the transition of the Ooni, the spiritual father of the Yoruba people.

    In the old east, the general conviction is that the Igbo nation has never been able to throw up a visionary and purposeful political elite to match and valorize the republican dynamism, entrepreneurial brilliance and outstanding creative gifts of the people.  The result has been perpetual perfidy and betrayals which in the tumult and turbulence of a dysfunctional nation often eventuate in unhealthy bitterness and tantrum-throwing which in turn jeopardize inter-elite harmony and cooperation.

    As for the Ijaw nationality and its failed hegemonic bid, discerning Ijaw nationalists will for long rue the postcolonial incubus which has foisted an inept and corrupt leadership on the ethnic group at its most critical hour of need. As General Obasanjo recently hostilely averred, this leadership lapse will haunt the ethnic formation for quite some time to come. But as Kafka once noted, “it is not that what you say is false, but it is so hostile”.

    Yet of all the regional blocs and nationalities in Nigeria, it is perhaps the north that has been most critically shortchanged and left holding the wrong end of the stick. Political success is the mother of economic and cultural failure.  Unlike other regions, colonial conquest and occupation met a ruling class which had by dint of its own internal conquest and occupation leavened by political guile and astute engineering imposed a measure of order, stability and cohesiveness on the entire region. If this superior feudal politicking has allowed the north to dictate the political terms in post-independence Nigeria, it has also left some hideous social contradictions in its wake.

    Colonial occupation met the north stoutly facing the Middle East and Islamic civilization for succor and political guidance. This is a fact of historical congruence and spiritual consanguinity which cannot be wished away. The problem is that after it was thrown out of Spain and after the debacle of the Ottoman Turks in modern day Serbia in the fifteenth century, Islamic modernity has been reeling relentlessly from the hammer of western modernity and modernization.

    As this relentless western modernity impinges on the north destabilizing and compromising its classical Islamic feudal political structure and economy even as it hammers away at its Wahhabist spiritual hegemony through the advent of western education and the menace of globalization, we have been witnessing a horrid reenactment of the Middle East horror in Sahelian Nigeria. It has even occasioned the rise and hegemony of a northern officers’ class reminiscent of the occupation of Egypt by slave soldiers of the Mamluk caste for almost five hundred years. Welcome to Boko Haram country.

    It is just as well, then, that the Boko Haram threat is about to be completely degraded by a rejuvenated and re-engineered Nigerian military. But unless the root political and economic causes of this scourge are addressed and in the light of relentless globalization which is an equal opportunity transmitter and transmission spacecraft for spiritual merchandise and Islamic radicalism, we may witness the advent of even more horrid and murderous mutants in the future.

    Luckily for Nigeria, There is a breath of fresh air and optimism blowing across the country which is kindled by President Mohammadu Buhari’s return to power and exemplary personal example. It is unfortunate that age is no longer on the retired general’s side. Buhari’s announcement of a multi-billion naira rehabilitation plan for the ravaged north east is a step in the right direction. This project must now include a holistic plan for the compulsory education of northern youths and the economic empowerment of its underclass which will wean its desperate peasantry and disoriented hoi polloi away from the sedulous and seductive lore of the paradisiacal paeans of Islamic militancy.

    What the north and by extension the rest of the nation need is a modernizing Ataturk who will take the entire country by the scruff of the neck and push its political, economic and spiritual structures into compulsory modernization. A primitive economic structure can only breed primitive corruption and mammoth greed associated with hunter-gatherers not sure of the next meal. One does not need to like Buhari’s face or stern visage to associate with what he is doing. This is Nigeria’s last chance. Whether his shameless traducers are willing to admit it or not,  Buhari has got many things right.

    Yet the National Question, like an old impertinent and unwanted guest, persists and subsists. It will not go away. Turkey was a culturally and religiously homogenous nation which made it relatively easy for Mustapha Kemal Ataturk to deal with rump of the Ottoman Empire he bravely carved out. But the modern world is no longer driven by arms and their bearers but by the force transcendental thinking.

    A modern Nigerian Ataturk must combine the visionary modernizing genius of the old Turkish hero with the cultural and intellectual nous and sensitivity which must allow him to see Nigeria as a multinational nation with nationalities in relatively autonomous and mutually incompatible stages of political, economic and spiritual  developments. This not only requires astute political engineering, but simultaneous synchronic and structural discriminations and rigorous differentiations. Whether Buhari has these or is driven by a solitary messianism without commensurate conceptual scaffolding remains to be seen.

    But the national question waits for nobody as it aims at the jugular of fragile and inchoate nations. As if to remind us of unfinished business, the northern in the national Question reechoed recently in a stormy collision of ideas between two of the brightest political stars the northern Nigerian firmament has thrown up in recent times.

    Malam Nasir el-Rufai , the governor of Kaduna State, needs no introduction. Brilliant, bold, tempestuous and with a hint of temperamental irritability with opposing ideas, the pesky, pint-sized accidental politician does not take hostages. Often controversial but with a cause, el-Rufai has established quite a reputation as a radical iconoclast and northern gadfly who does not care a hoot about protocols and procedures for political hostilities. In a starchy conservative milieu, this may come across as impish arrogance, but there is considerable merit in el-Rufai’s hell raising.

    Ever since he became governor,  el-Rufai has seized the central northern state by the scruff of the neck dragging the bull screaming and kicking to the watering hole of modernization. When he is not severely downsizing the bloated and unsustainable structure of governance, he is busy abolishing the customary practice of state Sallah munificence. When he is not busy pruning down and “rationalizing” the unwieldy ministries, he is tirelessly scissoring the mammoth workforce.

    There are faint hints of the infamous IMF conditionalities about these reforms and more than a whiff of text book monetarist economics. Nasir el-Rufai often comes across as an unfeeling, hard-hearted patrolman of the World Bank autobahn. But it is better to do something and be wrong than to do nothing and be right. Corrective measures often come from the collision of proactive errors and practical insights.

    It is a desperate situation indeed. It is however el-rufai’s attempt to banish beggars (but not begging) from the streets of Kaduna that has drawn the ire of Shehu Sani, his fellow party man and senator from the same Kaduna state who has accused the governor of pursuing anti-people policies. Urbane, courteous and impeccably well-mannered, Sani  comes from an illustrious line of radical civil society activism and high wire political networking.

    Begging and its corollary of alms giving, particularly in the north, is a culturally sensitive and spiritually explosive affair which should be handled with tact and caution. But it should be noted that begging was never a profession until alms giving was religiously codified as a sign of spiritual ennoblement and charity towards the perpetually impecunious and begging itself is spiritually transformed as a symptom of honorable poverty. Dishonorable poverty breeds revolutions and republican perversities.

    But for the distinguished senator and civil rights activist, these selfsame beggars and despised mendicants form a considerable part of his constituency.  They are his people. He was not elected by beggars to abolish beggars –and begging. In a conservative society, this is the politically correct stance to take. In the event, it is el-Rufai’s monetarist conservatism with its echoes of brutal modernization that tilts at the edge of radical iconoclasm and visionary innovation.

    It is intriguing however that neither Shehu Sani nor Nasir el-Rufai has come up with a holistic and  comprehensive programme about addressing the phenomenon of begging in the north which strikes at the root of the problem. This must involve a regimen of drastic reorientation, compulsorily mass-education and what the great Brazilian sociologist has called “conscientization” of the people. But this is tantamount to striking a fatal blow at the vital artery of the old northern ruling class.

    If it is sufficiently scaffolded and theoretically integrated to become a coherent ideology, President Buhari’s messianic populism may be of help here. It has been established in political philosophy that the greatest good that can come from government is the maximum happiness of the maximum number of citizens. From different ideological spectrums, the Lula advent in Brazil and the Lee Kuan Yew experiment in Singapore have shown how it is people for bold visionary governance to lift a nation and its people from the trough of poverty and indignity to global reckoning.

    How this will pan out in Nigeria remains to be seen. But that this debate is taking place at all between two of the northern luminaries of their generation is a pointer to the political and intellectual ferment that has seized hold of Nigeria and the first astral sign of a post-PDP Nigeria. In sixteen years of misbegotten rule, this kind of intellectual contention that is potentially regenerative in its sheer disruptiveness of the existing order never took place on an inter-party basis not to talk of within the same party in the same region and the same state.

    Once again, we wager that the APC has its work cut out for it. What the “thrilla in Kaduna” is showing is that the new ruling party cannot afford to slam arbitrary textbook policies on the whole nation without first coming to terms with the political, cultural, economic and spiritual peculiarities of its constituting units and mutually contradictory constituencies. The National Question is still very much alive and kicking at us.

     

  • The National Question – and the many ‘nationalities’ of Nigeria

    The National Question – and the many ‘nationalities’ of Nigeria

    whenever ‘the National Question’ is mentioned in the context of Nigeria, the figure that comes to mind is Professor ObaroIkime, distinguished academic, historian of the Ibadan school who made the theme famous following his celebrated 1986 lecture titled ‘Towards Understanding the National Question’. The discussion, often heated and intensely polarizing, has tended to focus on the competition and conflict between different ethnic groups to control the political power and resources of the nation.

    The origins of the issues are often traced all the way back to the amalgamation of the Northern and Southern Protectorates into one nation under Lord Lugard in 1914.

    The economic factors that have exacerbated ‘the National Question’ have been traced to the discovery of oil in the Niger Delta, the consequent focus on this as the ‘national cake’, and the neglect for decades of other actual or potential sources of income which, before the advent of oil, had been the major economic resources of the different ‘Regions’ of Nigeria.

    To quote a recent contribution to the discourse from Professor ItseSagay, Constitutional lawyer and Human Rights advocate,

    ‘Today the National Question has taken the form of a struggle to control the Federal Government in order to gain access and control to Niger Delta oil and gas proceeds. The outcome is the subsidy scam, unremitted billions of dollars scam etc. Nigeria as a whole has been a tragic victim of total dependence on oil, but the North has suffered more from this syndrome…’

    The Nigeria project has moved on somewhat since the days of military rule, when the controversy was first given air. Only the most die-hard separatists now talk about ‘the mistake of 1914’. The Nigeria project has come to stay, for good or for ill. The option of any of the components hefting their luggage and hitting the highway’ is confined to the fevered imagination of militant groups who must provide justification for their existence in the Nigeria of 2015. Seriously, Nigerians are destined, or doomed, to stay together. In the heady aftermath of the new beginning, represented by the first ever civilian to civilianchange of government through the ballot box and the ascendancy General MohamaduBuhari and the APC, it behoves the citizens of Nigeria to put some energy into making the union work. Nigerians not only have to make the economy work, they also have to make their emotions work for the Nigeria project. Nigerians need to learn to be happy with one another.

    Well – maybe ‘happy’ is too strong a word, representing too lofty an ambition. Perhaps its better to rephrase and say that Nigerians need to learn to get along in reasonable harmony.

    That is not going to come by fiat. It is not going to be delivered through a profuse outpouring of pious platitudes from political, religious, traditional or ethnic leaders. It is not going to be delivered by the Police – whether an Mbu-style ‘shoot twenty civilians for every downed policeman’ force, or even the well-trained, socially responsive psychologically savvy police force of our dreams. It certainly will not be delivered by the Army, which has no business with such matters. No. It will have to come through the creation of an ambience in which every man in word and deed shows respect and understanding for his fellow man, even where he does not necessarily agree with his ideas, his life-style, or his aspirations. It means eliminating from the culture any sense that anybody is ‘superior’ to another, has a ‘greater’ destiny than the rest, or is somehow not bound by the standard cultural and ethical laws that forbid the heart of man or child to be filled with hubris.

    Reading through the Nigerian Constitution, the good intentions of the framers jump at the eye from virtually every line. It is easy to assume that in a nation-state bound together on such terms, the attainment of the generalities outlined above is a given.

    The reality is that in the Nigeria of 2015, it is not. Nothing has demonstrated thisunsavoury reality more than the events and exchanges of the past few weeks in Lagos.

    Now that the elections are over, the nation could seek refuge in platitudes, as it usually does, or take a fresh look to see how it can improve the relationships between its nationalities, so that they are not perpetually in one another’s face.

    In doing this, it would be useful to look at an aspect of the National Question that has received scant attention.

    Every Nigerian comes from somewhere. Every Nigerian resides and makes a living somewhere. Every Nigerian feels allegiance somewhere. The ‘somewhere’ in each of those descriptions is often not the same for all three for the same person.

    The definition of ‘citizen’ is clear from the constitution. What about the definition of ‘indigene’? Afterall every Nigerian (except those who are citizens by naturalization) is an indigene of somewhere. Indigene-ship and ethnic identity are crucially linked to every individual’s sense of self, and to deny it is to be mischievous or ignorant. Every human being’s sense of self is linked to their roots. Nobody feels this more keenly than members of groups who have been ‘uprooted’. The example of African Americans spending time and fortune searching for their roots is instructive in this regard. In reality they are looking for their long lost ‘tribe’.

    The Nigerian constitution gives every citizen equal rights to live, work and own property anywhere in the country. Of course this is a stipulation that is observed more often than not in the breach. In many parts of Nigeria, it is impossible for a non-indigene to get a Certificate of Occupancy on landed property. The ‘indigenes’ make hay out of this by selling ‘strangers’ land that remains in their name, and effectively continuing to charge ‘rent’ for the land, long after the non-indigene has ‘paid’ for it. In some places it is almost impossible to find non-indigenes in government services, such as the Civil Service and the hospitals, even where there are critical gaps that need to be filled. Until relatively recently, in some places, children of non-indigenes paid higher fees in some government educational facilities than indigenes.

    What at first seems to be a blanket leveling of the playing field by the Constitution turns out in reality to be a bland and imprecisely detailed provision that everyone pays lip service to, with a wink and a nod, while recognizing that it is unworkable until it is populated with more exact and enforceable details, and until its implications are fully thought through and agreed upon in a national consensus.

    What for instance are the protections available to indigenes?And indigenous cultures, including language and practice?When does a ‘settler’ become a more permanent category of resident, and what is the description for that category? What are the rights, privileges and DUTIES accruing to the citizen from that transition?

    Lagos the city and Lagos the State have from the very beginning had the culture of welcoming visitors, including large numbers of other Nigerians who choose to make a life and a living there.

    For its pains, it has recently endured the profoundly insulting experience of being labeled a ‘no man’s land’. The very notion is of course deeply offensive, even racist, and perhaps calculated to be so. At the very least, the description, widely bandied about in certain triumphalist circles who felt they were poised to ‘capture’ Lagos just before the elections, was an expression of the sort of gross hubris and insensitivity that is the polar opposite of the basic requirement for people of different nationalities to get along peaceably in a federation.

    Which brings us to the question of the heretofore unattended aspect of the National question. What are the duties and rights of people, when they move outside their indigenous areas to settle elsewhere? Before going into international dimensions of this problem, and before looking at practical expedients different sections of the country have resorted to in dealing with ‘strangers’, it is instructive to ask – Why do people migrate?

    And the common answer is ‘To seek a better life’.

    A central unspoken requirement from the dawn of human history for successful migration from one place to another is that one should feel a certain sense of affinity with the host community and culture, a readiness at least to empathise with their world view, and a certain amount of readiness to ‘acculturate’. The earliest internal migrants in the Nigerian entity were fine exemplars of this. It is said that the great Zik spoke fluent Yoruba. Other people who migrated to other places acculturated to the point of ‘going native’.

    Unfortunately our latter-day migrations – which are based almost entirely on economic reasons, have not taken cognizance of this need to be ready to ‘love your neighbour’ in determining where to migrate to. The object is just to make money.

    This has already led to quite invidious consequences in some places across the world. Up till recently there were ‘Little Pakistans’ in some parts of the UK such as Birmingham. The migrants, though they were in England, showed no interest in the English or their way of life. If anything, they despised them openly. They spoke very little English, taught their children in Urdu, and carried on for all the world as though they were back in their homeland. Which raised the question – if your homeland was so good, why did you leave it? If the English were weak, stupid and unfriendly, why come to their land to settle?

    This dissonance was forced rudely unto public attention when young ‘Britons’ began to blow themselves and other people up, began to slit other peoples throats and behead them, and began to provide a steady stream of volunteers for extremist groups.

    Psychologically the settler deprives himself and his future generationsof one of most enriching benefits of migration when he cannot bring himself to see anything good in his host, cannot empathise with his world view, or take on at least a little of his life-style. When migrants from a particular area cluster in and ‘take over’ certain places (sometimes because the ‘natives’ leave because they cannot stand their ways) they create the atmosphere of ‘Little Pakistan’. Many Lagosians discovered only for the first time in their lives, in the nastiness of the argument generated by the Aso-Rock sponsored contractors who were ‘promoting’ (and in effect taking over) a candidatein the recent elections for Lagos Governor, that there were ‘Little Pakistans’ in Lagos, and they could be cobbled together into a power block to take Lagos in their preferred direction, irrespective of how the indigenes felt about it.

    The Nigerian Constitution is incomplete, in so far as it has not yet addressed the touchy issue of ‘indigene-ship’. Interpreting the Constitution literally as it is could lead to some bizarre scenarios. Lets takeDaura as a random example(the choice is pure coincidence, I asserverate!). Assume for the sake of discussion the population is half a million (it was actually twenty-five thousand thirty-three years ago, but obviously has grown since). There is suddenly the discovery of a rare mineral in the place. To catch the economic boom, there is a flood of Nigerians from all over going to settle in Daura. When you count, they suddenly have a population of one and a half million, with one million being ‘non-indigenes’. What would happen? Would this new majority take over Daura, representing it at all levels? Since they are in the majority, would they need to bother with the Emir or any part of the traditional establishment, or pay attention to the ‘indigenes’’ world view, aspirations or way of life? Afterall, ‘Politics is a game of numbers’!

    The various improbabilities make the hair stand on end in the nape of the neck.

    But of course many cities in the northern partof Nigeria have all along had a pragmatic expedient for dealing with ‘strangers’ –  penning them inthe Sabon Geri. The Sabo is like the world outside the traditional city walls, where anything goes, virtually.

    Is this the solution to the issue of the non-indigene in Nigeria – the ‘Sabon Geri-nisation’ of settler populations?

    Unfortunately it is not the solution, because what Nigeria seeks, and what the Nigerian Constitution says, is that Nigerians should integrate, interact, intermarry, and over time evolve a common Nigerian bond, even while keeping their ‘native’ identities.

    The ‘Little Pakistan’ in AmuwoOdofin will not work, just as the Sabon Geri option will attenuate over time. But these will not happen until Nigerians tackle the National Question honestly, fairly, and NATIONALLY. There cannot be ‘State’ solutions, and no state, not Lagos, not any other, should be expected, or compelled, to give benefits its own citizens will not receive elsewhere.

    What is to be done about the National Question – the indigene versus settler?Even the descriptions sound awkward. Because Nigerians had not thought it was important before, they had not applied their best minds to it. Or perhaps because it is a nasty, ‘primordial’ topic, we all feel it demeans us if we ‘talk tribe’. We are, afterall, ‘detribalised’. This of course is the biggest, most dangerous nonsense of all.

    Our best elements are true to themselves. Chinua Achebe, the father of Nigerian literature, was not ‘detrabilised’. He was proudly, unapologetically and most emphatically an Iboman, as well as a patriotic Nigerian. Wole Soyinka won the Nobel Prize using images derived essentially from his Yoruba essence, and he is clearly a Yorubaman and a proud Nigerian. There is no contradiction, and no ambiguity.

    Two approaches to the ‘indigene-ship’ matter in two related high-profile nations may be quickly examined here. Dr Mahathir Mohammed, founding father of Malaysia, reserved exclusive privileges, including political control, for the ‘indigenes’ of his country – the ethnic Malays, because he felt that if they were not so ‘protected’ they would be ‘overrun’ by the Chinese, who controlled most of the country’s economy. The very character of the nation would change inexorably. To this day the protections are still in place, the Malays are still in power, and the Chinese play an important role in a thriving national the economy. There is inter-marriage, and the face of the nation is changing, but very slowly.

    Literally down the road from Mahathir’s capital, Kuala Lumpur, isSingapore, whereDr Mahathir’s contemporary, Li Kwan Yu was compelled to build a nation from scratch using whatever human material he found ready to hand. There were Chinese, Malays, and Indians mostly. He discountenanced their various histories, was not interested in whether you were Chinese or Indian (he was himself of Chinese stock). He ‘disappeared’ their origins, and, over time, ‘re-invented’ them as proud Singaporeans. Today Singapore is a world economic power, but it does not have a lot of History. Malaysia is not doing badly, either, but it is clearly not in the same league.

    So whose is the better solution to the indigene-ship issue – Mahathir’s or Li Kwan Yu’s? Would Li Kwan Yu’s ‘detribalised’ solution have worked in Malaysia, and made it even better?

    Probably not.

    More probably the Malays, an ancient people, and the owners of the land, would have woken up one night and murdered the Chinese in their beds, and stuffed their money in their faces.

    What is the solution to the National Question in Nigeria, as it concerns Indigene-ship?

    Nigeria needs to face it, and face it down.

    There is a legal aspect, and there is an emotional aspect.

    After residing continuously in a place for a stipulated period (or as soon as he commences paying his taxes there, if that is the preference), a person should be entitled to ‘full citizenship rights’ there (whatever that means). It should also mean that he should give up at least some of the duties and entitlements in his ‘native’ land. Or perhaps the law that evolves will allow ‘dual’ citizenship, with criteria, entitlements and duties clearly spelt out.

    As much as possible, people who settle outside their ‘native’ lands in a future Nigeria should go to places they have a genuine affinity for. The people of that future Nigeria should not live in ‘Little Pakistans’ or even be confined to the Sabon Geri – no matter how well-intentioned the original formulation was. People should learn the culture of destinations they want to emigrate to in advance, and be sure they can learn to be accepting of them, whether this has to do with traditional institutions, festivals and celebrations, manner of dress, and so on.

    The emotional part is basic. Don’t live with people you don’t like. Or perhaps like the people you live with, assuming that this is something that can be done by deliberate will rather than gut instinct. Allow the children to mix. Learn the language. Teach the children respect.

    Already it is beginning to sound like pious platitudes. Perhaps that is the nature of the subject, because it is so basic, and yet so fundamental.

    It should be the fond hope of every patriot that the meaning, and value, of Nigerian-ness will be defined, standardized, and assimilated buy all in the era of President MuhammaduBuhari. It is wholesale Behaviour Modification, a much tougher task than penning an idealistic Constitution.