(Excerpts from a paper delivered at a one-day summit on the underlying causes of insecurities in the nation organised by the Savannah Centre for Diplomacy, Democracy and Development, Abuja, Thursday, 2nd March, 2017)
When views hitherto considered to belong to the margins begin to find mainstream acceptance and accommodation, it simply means that rigid positions are shifting and there is a convergence between the margins and the centre.
This is a welcome development which ought to be applauded by all well-meaning patriots who wish Nigeria well. Binary divisions often dissolve and evaporate as we gain new realities of our true condition in the push and pull of conflicts and national contradictions. To this end, I must applaud the driving spirit behind this centre: Professor Ibrahim Agboola Gambari, an international civil servant of repute and a Nigerian statesman of tireless vision and boundless energy.
The problems of Nigeria are not insurmountable. What appear insurmountable are ego-driven fixations on old ideas of the modern nation and the collective hubris of political elites who insist that it is either their way or the highway. In a multi-ethnic and multi-religious nation willed into existence by an outside power, opinions and notions of the nation are bound to differ and occasionally mutually incompatible. What is important is to find the will and humility to distil and aggregate these divergent opinions into coherent core values which will drive the nation in its commonalities and diversities.
The current crisis and its origins
Please permit me to come to the section of this paper which deals with the current crisis and its origins. Nigeria faces centrifugal forces on many fronts: political, economic, cultural, religious and intellectual. Yet it is remarkable that only two of these armed conflicts, the Nigerian civil war and the Boko Haram insurgency, have led to a direct challenge to the primacy, authority and supremacy of the Nigerian state, that is discounting the 1966 Isaac Adaka Boro uprising which was swiftly and summarily put down by the new military regime of General Thomas Aguiyi-Ironsi.
However, it is obvious that the collective cost of these armed conflicts to national cohesion, stability, progress and prosperity has become quite prohibitive. The civil war led to the loss of at least two million people. The Boko Haram rebellion has devastated the northernmost eastern fringes of the nation, leading to massive displacement of citizens, refugee camps, forcible demographic shifts and a virtual collapse of the local economy.
It should worry all of us that these violent confrontations of nationalities against nationalities and groups against the state have intensified since the advent of the Fourth Republic and the formal end of military rule. Beginning with the Kaduna mayhem of 2001, the bloody and protracted confrontation in Plateau State between “nationals” and “expatriates”, the Ijaw versus Itsekiri feud dovetailing into the Niger Delta insurgency, the violent restiveness in the South East as epitomized by the rise of IPOB/ MASSOB, BOKO HARAM, the Agatu crisis and the growing confrontation between nomadic herdsmen and sedentary farmers in several parts of the country and the current return of the barely repressed and unfinished business in Kaduna State, it has been a harvest of death and destruction.
We must worry. Even a modern sophisticated state does not have an elastic capacity to contain such multiple and simultaneous threats to its existence, not to talk of a post-colonial state in its embryonic infancy. It should be recalled that the Roman Empire did not die of a single fatal wound but from a thousand injuries.
Superficially, it is often advanced that these eruptions can be traced to the formal cessation of military rule and the fact that military rule brooked no nonsense. Hence, these crises owe much to the paradoxical liberation from military rule and the opportunity for self-expression which has given free rein to national contradictions forcibly suppressed and bottled up by authoritarian rule.
Others have fingered the polarizing and divisive nature of the Nigerian political class who often exploit the national fault lines for political advantages and whose nationalistic zeal and commitment do not seem to match or even approach the ardent patriotism of the military faction who have been institutionally drilled to see the whole nation as their constituency, for good or bad.
Yet not a few analysts have cited the worsening economic circumstances of the nation as being responsible for this upsurge in communal violence and inter-ethnic conflict. According to this narrative, since humankind is principally homo economicus, adverse developments in the political spheres are nothing but a dialectical reflection of worsening developments at the economic base.
Thus the phenomenon of desertification which has laid waste vast swathes of hitherto arable land in the north of the country, the fierce struggle for dwindling resources and the imperative of modernizing both farming and grazing methodology have led to bloody confrontations among the nation’s diverse nationalities with the state often powerless to act decisively.
In the light of these upheavals, the central thesis of this paper is the need to re-envision the nation in all its current messy and chaotic amalgam. To re-envision is to re-imagine. We cannot even talk of restructuring or reconfiguring the country without first having an imaginative or conceptual image of what is to be reworked. The political visionary must dream first before attempting to turn his dream into reality.
All nations are artificial entities or what Benedict Anderson has famously called imagined communities willed into existence by sheer power of human will and creativity. From disparate and even conflicting strands, nations cohere and congeal into an organic community of shared values.
But in order to forge a true nation from a commonwealth of disparate communities, certain things must be in place. First, the state itself must reflect the collective will and aspiration of the people and the nation, of which it is an organic extension despite the dialectical tension between the two.
Second, even where and when it is modulated and moderated by unfolding historical events it is important for the state to keep the National Question in permanent perspective and constant review. This is because no nation is made once and for all. Any nation that freezes at the advance of fresh historical developments is bound to dissolve into its historic components. All nations, as the framers of the American constitution presciently put it, must strive towards a “more perfect union.”
It is our contention in this paper that the Nigerian post-colonial state, like virtually all its counterparts in contemporary Africa, has so far proved itself incapable of handling the erupting contents of a nation in a state of flux not to talk of firmly adjudicating in unfolding dimensions of the nation in question. This is why it is important at this point to beam our searchlight on the related concepts of statehood and nationhood.
The state in question
When is a state? The state is critical to the emergence of human society. Although it can be argued that the society created the state, it is also obvious that there can be no society without the state. From its rudimentary beginnings of providing protection for farmers and securing their products, the state has evolved as the ultimate guarantor of security and safety in any society no matter the territorial rationalization, be it fiefdom, kingdom, empire or the modern nation.
In its modern incarnation, the state is often seen as the theatre of elite arbitration and the management of conflicts and disagreements among various factions and factions of the ruling class. When it fails in this role, as it is usually the case in Africa, the state is premordialised and becomes a principal source of insecurity and instability in the nation.
Moreover, certain types of states (e.g., neo-authoritarian states characterized by “crisis of leadership”) can actually be the source of threats, rather than protector of individuals, just as traditional security agents of the state are often inadequate for dealing with security problems affecting the people of that state. The following observation by Robert S. McNamara is germane to the issue at hand.
Any society that seeks to achieve adequate security against the background of acute food shortage, population explosion, low level of productivity and per capita income, low technological development, inadequate and insufficient public utilities and chronic problems of unemployment has a false sense of security. Security is not military force though it may involve it; security is not traditional military activity though it encompasses it; security is not military hardware though it may include it; security is development and without development there is no security.
The Nigerian state has proved remarkably incapable of providing the basic economic needs of the people. The struggle for these basic needs among and across various communities and nationalities when it can no longer be regulated or controlled by a weak state hobbled by an endemic crisis of leadership can have dire consequences for inter-ethnic harmony and cohesion in a multi-ethnic nation.
In the absence of state-driven economic buoyancy, government and politics become big business. Consequently, the scramble for office and its spoils particularly in multi-ethnic local states such as we have in Nigeria can lead to ethnic scapegoating and profiling. This mutual loathing, driven by mindless propaganda, finds easy outlet for violence and bloodletting.
Often politicized memory of ancestral feuds compounded by the state impairment in economic matters comes in the aid of political delinquency. Early In the Fourth Republic, a governor being hunted and harassed by the EFCC told his people to give his Fulani tormentors the same “dog treatment” his ancestors had given their ancestors in a memorably savage encounter on the plateau. It was a short step to ethnic confrontation.
In a haunting allegory of looming genocide, Franz Kafka, a German speaking Czechoslovakian Jew, has given us a story of a man who wakes up only to find that he has become an insect. When you de-humanize fellow human beings, it is easy to complete the rest of the job. The German supremacists did not believe the Jews were human. In Rwanda, the cries of kill the cockroaches or Uyensi presaged savage genocide.
Examples also abound in the Fourth Republic of how the hallowed arena of the modern Nigerian state is turned into an ethnic coliseum in order to secure maximum political advantage. Between 2002 and 2003 General Obasanjo was driven into the warm embrace of his Yoruba compatriots in a bid to forestall a determined attempt by the opposition to oust him.
Between 2009 and 2010, there were rumours that a cabal was in active operation at Aso Rock to prevent the presidency from falling into the wrong hands. Despite the pan-Nigerian coalition that brought him to power, it was obvious that Mr Goodluck Jonathan spent his last days in power in the stultifying embrace of some ethnic hegemonists.
Now, there are rumours of another cabal operating inside the presidential villa. With the presidency thus perpetually ethnicised, it is virtually impossible for the state to act as a neutral and objective arbiter when ethnic conflagrations flare up. Indeed in some instances, the state itself is often fingered as the instigator of ethnic uprising.
An ethnicised state and presidency must be a source of concern to all and anxiety among all. In a sustained and clinical analysis which has since become a classic of its genre, Mahmood Mamdani, the noted historian, has located the origin of the Rwandan genocide in the ethnicisation of elite politics which was to have dire consequences for the nation.
Before colonisation, Rwanda was evolving into an organic pan-ethnic society of shared national values. The king, or Mwami, was seen as a symbol of national unity. There were much inter-marriages and mixing of disparate cultures. Racial categories were being transformed into a class category. Indeed there was a ritual ceremony known as Kwahutura, or the shedding of Hutu identity, in which a Hutu notable, having acquired enough cattle and means, publicly abjures his former identity, to become a member of the ruling caste.
It took the intervention of middle class dissident Belgian colonial officials profoundly disaffected with the class hierarchy in their own native country who began to insinuate into Hutu politicians the fact that they had the number and the mass solidity to determine their own destiny and consequently the fate of the country. The result was a rise in rabid ethnic revanchism and resurgence of Hutu nationalism which was to eventuate in genocide.
To be sure, in a world convulsed by political and technological modernity all feudal systems have their appointed dates with destiny. But the traumatic transition could have been better managed in a spirit of give and take supported by political institutions already in place without the Belgian shock and awe therapy. It is worthy of note that since 1994, Rwanda has been ruled by the descendants of Tutsi people sent into exile. But the psychic horror remains with the people.
Nigeria must avoid what this writer once described as the road to Kigali. To do this, we must take a more sober and serious look at the National Question. A brief excursion into the sociology and history of this elusive phenomenon is now in order before we conclude.
The nation in question
In its modern incarnation, the National question arose from a feeling of marginalization and oppression by distinct nationalities who felt cheated or short-changed by the forcible imperialist restructuring of their territorial space. Some of them were rendered stateless or technically nation-less. But in some embryonic forms, the national question has been with us since the beginning of civilization and modern warfare.
It is captured for posterity in the Israelite dirge of loss and traumatic captivity. How can we sing King Alpha’s song in a strange land? Today, there are many children of Alpha crying for freedom even in their own land. With floods of refugees sacking the most secure bastions of the nation-state paradigm, with America virtually fractured along racial lines, it is the return of the repressed. The National Question has returned to haunt the global order. It has become the International Question.
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 , 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. 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.
To replace genuine and authentic nationalism, Nigerians have substituted a reverse nationalism, a situation in which the myths of constituting nationalities are more powerful and alluring than the myth of a new nation forged in the smithy of harsh colonial repression and biblical suffering. In such a fractious and combustible polity, the myths of ethnic Exceptionalism trump the myths of Nigerian Exceptionalism before cancelling out each other in a violent dialogue of the deaf.
This problem dates all the way back to our founding fathers. If only they had devoted a fraction of the imaginative and intellectual powers they had use up in protecting and projecting ethnic supremacist myths, perhaps the story of modern Nigeria would have been different. But there is no point in continuing to blame our founding fathers for the plight of the nation. They were products of their time and children of the midnight of the colonial state in Africa.
The post-colonial state that has evolved from this colonial incubation and conquest is a violent coliseum of contending, competing, countervailing and finally colliding political, economic, cultural and spiritual interests in which no hostages are taken. And this primitive warfare takes place under the veneer of modern governance. Without any guiding lodestar or fundamental amity among the constituting nationalities about the destiny of the new nation, it is inevitable that ascendant ethnic groups will try to impose their own solution to fill the yawning vacuum.
Concluding remarks: Re-imagining Nigeria
In the light of the foregoing, it can now be seen why there is an urgent need to re-envision Nigeria. Just as it was said by a famous philosopher that an unexamined life is not worth living, it is equally true that a nation which fails the test of constant self-examination is not worth living in. Yet we cannot rebuild without first re-envisioning what type of nation this greatest conglomeration of Black people ought to be.
It should also be obvious that neither ad hoc restructuring and its military and colonial fiat, nor hegemonic aggression and spiritual blackmail by ascendant ethnic formations have been able to rein in the polarizing and divisive tendencies hobbling the Nigerian nation-state. As a matter of fact, history has taught us that any time a hegemonic nationality has tried to impose its own solution on the National Question, it has always suffered disproportionate retribution.
The argument for re-envisioning the country is not about hatred for a particular section of the country but about love for the whole country. No section of the country can claim exemption from the tragedy that has befallen us. In a hostile environment in which ethnocide is never far away, it is only natural for people to look out for their own and to use their God-given resources and advantages to tame or negotiate the looming Leviathan while keeping others in medieval peonage.
But as we have seen, this can never and will never work in a multi-ethnic nation with diverse people of diverse cultural and political sensibility. It is often said that Nigeria is too big to fail. The grand irony is that the same thing was said of the Titanic which promptly sank without trace. No one would wish such a fate on the most gifted and promising Black nation on earth. But to whom much is given, much is expected. It is time for a bipartisan congregation to re-envision the structural configuration of the nation. I thank you for listening to me.
