The Nation Newspaper

Tag: nationalism

  • Africa’s external relations in age of rising nationalism

    The recent visits to Africa of the president of France, Monsieur  Emmanuel Macron, the German chancellor, Angela Markel and Prime Minister Theresa May and planned visit of the wife of President Donald Trump, Melania Trump, have at least brought attention to the usually  least remembered continent  because of the usual negativity attached to the continent. The European leaders particularly Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel are concerned about the unceasing migration of young black Africans to Europe across the Sahara desert and the Mediterranean Sea. It has become obvious that this migration is not welcome in Europe and it is causing the upsurge of nativism and racism in Europe and causing  negative political effect across that is destabilizing Europe from France to Germany and Italy and across Central Europe. It has become a problem for the entire European Union over sharing of these so-called refugees  if and when they land in Italy or are rescued from drowning in the Mediterranean. Because of this refugee problem, right wing parties are rapidly growing and Italy now has a right wing government that rode to power on the slogan of throwing out the refugees besieging their country.

    European leaders are now beginning to  consider whether the tide of this black peril can be stopped in Africa before it reaches Europe. They have adopted two strategies. One is to help Libya come alive through support, with or without election, some kind of “Egyptian solution” of a military strongman to emerge and hold power in Libya. This is the position of  Emmanuel Macron. This strategy of supporting strong leaders in Africa, whether democratic or not, is the position of the former British Prime Minister David Cameron. This may also be the position of Donald Trump and perhaps Angela Merkel.  The second strategy is to find jobs for young Africans through  creation of  employment by private entrepreneurs. All of these leaders now seem to encourage private investment in Africa to help create jobs to keep their young people at home instead of looking for non existent El dorado abroad. They also seem driven by not abandoning Africa to Chinese enterprises. The Chinese are particularly good in supporting infrastructural development in Africa. But in spite of the hue and cry about Chinese takeover of Africa, they are still behind the USA and Great Britain in  the volume of their private investment in Africa. The Chinese are interested no doubt in Africa’s raw materials such as copper, uranium and land for agricultural development particularly in sparsely populated East African countries. They  are financing the huge hydroelectricity project in Ethiopia, a project that has sometimes  nearly brought Egypt and Sudan into armed conflict  against Ethiopia over the control of the Nile river upstream in the Ethiopian highlands.

    As for the British,  the Brexit problem at home has compelled the government to begin to look for market all over the world including Africa. The countries of the Commonwealth immediately recommend themselves as possible areas of British enterprise and investment. A new policy of the British Prime Minister Theresa May is to tie British overseas development assistance to promotion of Britain’s investment so as to create market for British goods for what she said will be  of mutual interest and benefit to Africans and the British. She has said the budget of the ministry of international development would now become some kind of seed money for Anglo- African private joint partnership. How this will work has not apparently been determined yet. But opponents are already criticizing her for mixing philanthropy with business.

    Africa should embrace increased foreign investment no matter the motives of those investing. African states should in fact make their countries investment-friendly by having proper legal regime to protect their people and their national sovereignty. It is now well known that the best way to eradicate poverty is through private investment. This does not preclude a strong state intervention when necessary. The phenomenal development of China and Southeast Asia has been through private investment coupled in the case of China and Singapore with Chinese discipline and Confucian ethics and determination of the various authoritarian political leaders in places like Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam to leapfrog several stages in development. Whether Africa has a stomach for the kind of strong regime that will facilitate rapid development is a moot question.

    A decade ago, Africa experienced phenomenal strides in economic development following the rise in commodity prices and democratization on the continent. But the collapse of commodity prices and the failure of African states to save against a rainy day has led to general collapse of the economies of African states and consequent loss of prestige, weight and influence internationally. Africa has found itself almost totally ignored in a world dominated by rising nationalism and isolationism particularly in Trump’s America. The situation is further worsened by the coarseness of the international environment characterized by the rise of resurgent Russia and the strive for global influence of the rising economically powerful China. The  situation has not been  helped by the various wars in the Middle East and the rise of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism of which Nigeria and west and eastern Africa as well as the the Maghreb and the Horn of Africa have been victims. Even where there has been political stability on the African continent, it has been at the  expense of democracy. West Africa and in particular Nigeria suffer from threat of Islamic terror and farmer-herder struggle over fodder for cattle. The so-called Democratic Republic of the Congo has remained unstable since 1960 and the country has been carved out into territories run by warlords while a huge UN force looks on. The Central African Republic, Southern Sudan and Somalia remain the most wretched countries in the world with minimum regard for human lives in the absence of strong central governments that can impose their will on their territories. There is now a seeming pessimism globally about Africa and the endlessness of young Africans migration across the Sahara desert and the Mediterranean Sea have become manifestation of the helplessness of Africans in managing their own affairs and  thus creating problems for Europe. This is making European leaders look down on Africa and to ignore its people’s sensitivity about the lack of respect for Africa’s sovereign rights as independent countries. How Africa will emerge from this prostrate situation without a second Colonisation lies in the belly of time.

  • Reverse nationalism and its discontents

    Reverse nationalism and its discontents

    ( Anniversary ruminations on the state of the Nigerian state)

    As Nigeria celebrates its fifty sixth anniversary this weekend in dire economic and political circumstances, it is important once again to return to the foundational blocks of the nation to see where the rains started beating us. Apart from the plague of corruption and the crisis of knowledge production, the more fundamental problem facing Nigeria is the problem of aborted nationhood or what we may benignly describe as reverse nationalism.

    Indeed, there is a sense in which it can be argued that corruption and allied ailments are the mere superstructural offshoots of the foundational crisis of aborted nationhood. The nexus of this crisis is not hard to locate. It stares at us in every department of national endeavour, even as it hobbles every heroic attempt at national self-recovery. But a nation cannot continue to exist in perpetual deferral of organic nationhood. Something is bound to give eventually. It seems as if we may be approaching the dangerous frontiers.

    A simple and elementary test of this failure of nationhood will suffice. Why is it that despite the country’s globally acclaimed prowess in the realm of imaginative exertions, be it in literature, music, fashion or even misdirected ingenuity, Nigerians, a hundred years after amalgamation and fifty six years after independence, have so far been unable to come up with powerful, conjuring myths of nationhood and imaginative tropes of togetherness which will stand the text of time and resonate beyond these shores?

    Let us get this right. We cannot continue to blame our colonial creators. It is not the business or historical remit of our colonial conquerors having created Nigeria to supply Nigerians to fill the territorial vacuum. The Europeans are not Africans in the first instance. They were not in Africa to look in for Africans or to seek out their long lost continental cousins. They were in Africa to further their own economic and historical interests. Lord Fredrick Dealtry Lugard said that much. It is historically impossible to expect the colonial thesis to provide its own logical antithesis.

    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. One of them famously described Nigeria as his great grandfather’s empire, a feudal antinomy which makes it intellectually impossible to imagine or conceive a modern nation-state of free citizens.

    Another, just before wading into the deadly fray, noted that Nigeria was a mere geographical expression which makes it imperative to rally your own people before embarking on federal and federating negotiations. A third avers that Nigeria is made up of people with different cultures and histories without any unifying commonality.

    The fourth a global citizen in his own right, whose long sojourn in the United States weaned him on a transnational diet of the emancipation of the Black person the world over, had even attempted to settle in Ghana which at that point in time —and thanks to a radical leadership —was seen as the rallying Mecca for the total liberation of the Black people. But upon returning to the fierce maelstrom of Nigerian politics, he too was eventually overwhelmed by the reality of ethnic particularism. As he was to be reminded, the stark differences in political habitué cannot be forgotten but must be understood and negotiated.

    In the event, 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.

    The colonial envisioning of Africa did not entail a healthy respect for the historical antecedents or socio-cultural potency of the forcibly co-opted nationalities. It did not occur to them that many of these constituting nationalities were empires in their own right or vestiges of older empires with distinct personalities and different modes of apprehending and making sense of reality.

    Long after the material basis of their existence has been liquidated, long after they have become historically superannuated, the ideological apparatuses of the ancient African states boast of a lingering efficacy which suborns extant consciousness. For example, it will be considered foolish and foolhardy of a Yoruba person not to obey the dictates of the Oro cult or for an Ibo native to disavow traditional rites of passage. It is like boxing the English, the French and the Germans into a colonial cage and expecting them to achieve organic coherence overnight.

    It is thus inevitable that political, economic, cultural and spiritual baggage from the old pre-colonial formations would be brought to play in the new nation-state, creating momentous contradictions of which reverse nationalism is arguably the most outstanding product. 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.

    Yet it should also be obvious that neither ad hoc restructuring and its military and colonial fiat or force, 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.

    Historians will continue to debate whether Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s precipitate and swaggering move to capture the centre in 1959 and rid the modern nation-state of what he himself had described as the incubus of feudalism was strategically well-timed or well-judged. The objective reality was that it panicked the north into a repressive ferocity and brutal intolerance of opposition which eventuated in the historic final solution of January 15, 1966 spearheaded in the main by mid-ranking military officers of Igbo extraction. This in turn led to the savage revenge coup of July 1966 and the civil war which has led to the virtual obliteration of the Igbo bloc and the old tripod arrangement which provided some measure of structural equilibrium for the nation in the run up to independence.

    Every nation that fails to learn and profit from its own history is condemned to repeat the same history.    It bears repeating that in the short history of Nigeria as a nation, every nationality that has tried to impose its own solution on the colonial conundrum has always suffered immensely for its temerity and collective narcissism.

    To achieve purposeful regional coherence, class, ethnic and cultural differentiations must be summarily liquidated. Yet for all its military alertness, its political cunning and strategic wizardry, the north remains economically and politically blighted even as the spiritual hegemony of its old feudal master-class comes under an unrelenting armed critique.

    The west has lost its old cutting edge economic, cultural, technological and intellectual renaissance with its globally acclaimed educational system in tatters, its old vibrant cottage industry destroyed, its technocratic and intellectual master-class demolished and its fractious political class ever more bitterly polarized and full of splenetic rancor.

    The east having been collectively battered, has lost its old jaunty self-confidence, its expansive chutzpah, its genius for genuine innovation and has suffered a drastic erosion of goodwill. In their place is a nasty testiness among a misguided section of its elite which does not conduce to elite consensus or the urgent political re-engineering of a fractured nation. Yours sincerely must say this as somebody who grew up in an NCNC household and who suffered the attendant persecution.

    Unfortunately, it now seems to be the turn of the Ijaw nationality to be given the Nigerian treatment in addition to the massive despoliation of its land. Two years ago, snooper had cautioned this vibrant ethnic formation not to contemplate an armed resistance should it lose its noisy and jarring hegemonic pretensions to political delinquency and power naivete. The Nigerian post-colonial state is an equal opportunity terminator suffering from the old curse of its English forebear in its nascent incarnation. By the time the rubble has cleared the Ijaw nation would have suffered severe collateral damage.

    As Albert Einstein has famously observed, the surest sign of insanity is doing the same thing all over again and expecting a different result. Yet despite the manifest and demonstrated unprofitability to both nation and nationality, Nigerian ethnic formations have continued to fashion preferred weapons of choice in the perpetual war to capture the Nigerian state leading to endemic tension and strife when superior thinking demands a master plan to humanize and domesticate the post-colonial state in order to make it amenable to the yearnings and aspirations of the hapless citizens.

    As it is today, Nigeria is hostage to five major terroristic forces: intellectual terrorism, hegemonic terrorism, economic terrorism, spiritual terrorism and the terrorism of insurgency with each taking turns to pound both the state and the nation into submission even as they seek to mould both in their own appalling image. It is a war of all against all in which no hostages are taken and with the nation as prime hostage. No nation can survive for long in such contentious circumstances.

    Democracy might help and it ought to help. But it does seem as if democracy is no cure for reverse nationalism. As a matter of fact, democracy often exacerbates the fault lines in bitterly divided and ethnically polarized nations as the ensuing struggle for the spoils of office among victors return the nation to its ethnic particularities and regional rancour.

    This is why the argument for a drastic restructuring of the country to devolve power and responsibility from the centre makes eminent and irreproachable sense. Environmental and political structure conditions and in the last instance determines societal character and political behavior. As Durkheim famously avers, whenever a social phenomenon is explained by a psychological category, we can be sure that the explanation is false.

    The current reflex hostility in some sections of the country to any talk about restructuring is a sign of misplaced and misguided political aggression. Perhaps this is due to the fact that many proponents of restructuring have not been able to put their case across with patriotic altruism and without a hint of vengeful grandstanding.

    The argument for restructuring 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 multiethnic nation with diverse people of diverse cultural and political sensibility.

    It is time for a bipartisan congregation to reexamine the structural configuration of the nation. This is the best anniversary gift anybody can give the nation at this critical conjuncture of its existence. Despite some loud mutterings and misgivings about the political and economic direction of the government, there are many who believe that President Buhari has the residual strength of character and resolve to do what is right for the nation. Happy anniversary once again.

  • Rising nationalism and world peace

    As a student of history it is a matter of concern to see incipient nationalism rising all over the world. The connection between this and war is crystal clear to me. In Europe, the then political centre of the world during the period of European imperialism, the clash of interest and the struggle for world domination led to the First World War. That struggle was underpinned by the clash of cultures and ideologies of pan-germanism, pan-slavism and what can also be described as pan anglo-saxonism signifying the desires by Imperial Germany, czarist Russia and imperial Britain to assert their superiority over their rivals. There was also what one can loosely call some kind of racism in the struggle. The argument then usually centred around which country had the largest army or the biggest navy. The strategy then was to ensure no one country had superiority in both arms of the military. The Air Force was still not in the equation then neither were there any strategic forces as constituted today by nuclear armaments. This was going to come into the equation after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

    The unresolved issues of the First World War led directly to the Second World War which exposed the vulnerability of human civilization to self-destruction unless care was taken. Clash between super powers armed with nuclear weapons has become inconceivable and unthinkable. But this has not eliminated the outbreak of proxy wars as had been the case in Korea, Vietnam, the liberation wars in Southern Africa from the Congo to Angola, the two Rhodesias (Zambia and Zimbabwe) Mozambique, Namibia and South Africa itself. Some kind of proxy wars were waged in Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia and Columbia by factions supported by different global military and ideological patrons. We have not seen the end of this trend even after the collapse of global communism. National interests previously camouflaged by ideology has now reasserted themselves in places like Ukraine where a supposedly democratic regime under Vladimir Putin has severed the Crimea peninsula from independent Ukraine and has virtually divided the country into two by supporting ethnic Russians to lay claim to the eastern half of the country as part of Russia abroad. This has led to sabre-rattling by NATO in its preparedness to defend its new members in Poland and the Baltic Sea against resurgent Russia driven by nationalist pride.

    The Chinese too are no longer manifesting proletarian brotherhood in their relation with Vietnam over rival claims in the South China Sea. China is striking out to put feet down in the area by reclaiming land in the sea and building military bases and challenging even the United States in international waters in the South China Sea.   This has led the United States selling advanced fighter bombers to Vietnam with which it fought a bitter war in the 1960s. Shinzo Abe in Japan is seriously thinking of expunging from its constitution the clause against a big military imposed on Japan by the Allies after the Second World War in view of threat constantly posed to it by North Korea under its erratic and irrational young leader. Japan also has its eyes on reclaiming the Kuriles islands seized from it towards the end of the Second World War by the then Soviet Union. No one can predict the future of peace in Asia because of several flash points and the fact that the nuclear weapons states of North Korea, China India and Pakistan may be joined by the technologically advanced countries like Japan and South Korea if the opportunities present themselves.

    The republican presidential candidate Donald Trump recently said he would not be averse to South Korea and Japan having their own nuclear deterrence by becoming nuclear weapons states so that they can defend themselves apparently in a thermonuclear war as envisaged by Trump. India and Pakistan are so much against each other that if there is a place today of likely possible use of nuclear weapons, it will be the Indian sub-continent. The rising nationalism and antagonism there between the Muslim fundamentalist government in Pakistan and the Hindu nationalist government in India  does not augur well for the future of peaceful relations between these largely poor countries of almost one a half billion people in their combined population.

    The most frightening situation is in the USA and Europe. The rise of Donald Trump, an unprincipled megalomaniac who will tell any lie to be elected president of the most powerful country presents urgent and immediate danger to world peace. This is a man who lied about something as simple as the ethnic origins of his parents when he claimed they were swedes when in fact they were Germans. A man who sets up a so-called university simply to rip off unsuspecting poor people he deceived about making them instant millionaires like himself. A man who inherited millions of dollars from his father yet claims he started from nothing and self-made himself. This is the man who claims he wants to make America great again by seeing all previous international treaties like the ones setting up the WTO, NATO and NAFTA and the Paris climate change protocol as chiffon de paper only good for the waste paper basket. He is preying on the discontent of blue collar workers who have lost their jobs because of movement of some manufacturing industries to China and Mexico. His trump card is immigration and Islamic terrorism. He said he would deport all illegal immigrants numbering about 11 million people and build a wall to shut out migrants from Latin America whom he sees as rapists, drug peddlers and criminals taking jobs from Americans. He would bar Muslims from coming to the USA. He also says he would put tariff of up to 40 percent on goods entering the United States. His tirades seem to be good music to the ears of largely white working class Americans who fear that they are being overwhelmed by immigrants thus reducing the relative population of white people to that of non-white peoples. This demographic trend made the former President George Bush to say he feared that he may be the last republican president of the USA. Nativism and nationalism are driving Trump to advocate for fortress America turning its back on the rest of the world in a policy shift of isolationism not seen since the end of the Second World War.

    If Trump wins and disrupts the global economy and existing Defence architecture, then the entire world will be up for grabs by the most powerful countries thus taking us back to a politics of war-lordism seen in places like China in a previous era.

    The recent BREXIT by Great Britain falls into the same pattern of nationalism of blaming other countries and peoples for one’s national problem. Inward looking sometimes leads to lashing out against other people in a rising tide of negativism and nationalism. The most dangerous part of this trend in Europe is that it is spreading and manifesting itself in France where Marine Le Pen, leader of the French right is threatening to take France out of the European Union if she wins the presidential election in France next year. If she tears the EU apart, then the architecture for peace in Europe would have been destroyed. Already Germany’s right wing party is rearing its ugly head and condemning what it calls Angela Merkel’s wilkommenkultur, a reference to Germany welcoming over a million refugees from the Middle East. This Merkel’s policy, in my view, was really an unwise policy by the German government in a country which has not completely assimilated the three million Turks who migrated to the country after 1945. If the right wing parties take over in the European continent and begin to expel unwanted nationals of other countries, there is bound to be reaction. Compounding this problem is the increase in terrorism fuelled by fundamentalist ideology being exploited by some fanatics claiming to be Muslims where as they are simply anarchists with strange agenda. This impending Armageddon may yet be avoided if these right wing elements lose in the elections that are coming up soon or if world leaders realizing the futility of possible conflict begin to rein in their supporters or begin to moderate their rhetoric and instead of policy of hate and division begin to practice and advocate politics of international interdependence, tolerance.

    We in Africa delude ourselves if we think the gathering storm will not affect us. No part of the world will be spared from global melt down occasioned by political differences mercantilist economic competition and policies fuelled by racial or national hatred. This is why we in Nigeria should get our act together instead of dissipating our energies in unending political debates and planning to tinker with the constitution instead of seeing our inability to make any system work as the reason for our seeming developmental inertia. This is the time to build a virile country with a strong economy and defence. We must see beyond our national horizon because we as a country whether willingly or not carry the burden of defending Africa’s interest on our back

  • On statism and economic nationalism

    On statism and economic nationalism

    It is a brand new year. There is a feeling of cautious even wary optimism abroad. At least in one significant respect, Nigerians have a bragging right and the license to beat their chest in accomplishment and self-satisfaction. The nation has survived 2015 in one piece. It is not a mean achievement. Like a historic and mysterious platform whistle blower, 2015 stood between the nation and further meaningless gallivanting. It was the year widely touted by international experts as the final terminus for a giant crawler.

    It has been a close run affair. Nigeria plumbed the depths of horror and state evisceration. If the outlandish revelations currently making the round are anything to be believed, the post-colonial state in Nigeria had actually dissolved into a criminal cartel whose sole purpose has been extractive predation and the wholesale looting of national patrimony. It is worse than  kleptocracy.

    For a long time to come, the sociology of state larceny will be studied and probed for the insights offered into the criminal mindset of a dysfunctional political elite. It calls to further question, the ability of the Black person to nurture vibrant institutions that underwrite the modern state or to will into existence the stellar armature of a functioning nation.

    As this column once noted, twice in his lifetime, President Mohammadu Buhari has been summoned by fate to preside over major ruling class implosions in the nation. But this time around, the rot has been compounded by ethnic, regional and religious animosities fuelled and powered by elite delinquency. The struggle for state control and the misappropriation of national resources has exacerbated the National Question.  The retired general from Daura has his work cut out for him.

    Fortunately, with his budget and the wide-ranging interview of a few days ago, the major economic and political templates of the Buhari administration now appear to the nation and his compatriots in bold relief. Politically, the retired general remains a strong statist hooked on the ameliorative and redemptive possibilities of a powerful, omniscient and omnipresent state, fearsome and forbidding enough to withstand and see off all countervailing and centrifugal forces in a titanic battle of will.

    Given his military background with its harsh centralization, its distaste for disorder and rigid institutionalized hierarchy which sustain authority and stability, Buhari can be forgiven for his statist predilection. Indeed, it can be argued that in the post-empire world order, all the developing nations that have rapidly transited from the Third World to the First no matter their ideological hue have been powered by strong state institutions and the cult of the strong leader. Post-Tsarist Russia, post-feudal Russia, modern Cuba, Singapore, the Asian Tigers and Vietnam all come to mind.

    It is in this sense, then, that Buhari’s current ameliorative and redemptive measures to instill sense and sanity into state institutions in Nigeria must be appreciated by his compatriots. The post-colonial state in Nigeria has become a huge joke: authoritarian but lacking in real authority; weighed down by sheer mass but without any meaningful substance; potent in stealing propensity but impotent in ruling possibility; bullying the cowed citizens while being bullied in turn by ragtag militias, it has been stripped of all its power and aura of legitimacy.

    We can no longer afford to put the cart before the horse. Unlike the strong state and functioning national institutions inherited from the colonial masters, the post-colonial state in Nigeria is so badly weakened that it cannot withstand radical surgery without giving up the ghost. Before we can even broach the possibility of a radical restructuring of the nation, the shell-shocked state has to be reinvented with its fundamental raison d’être restored.

    Experience has shown that when failed states break up, they merely produce more failed states. In Africa, Sudan and South Sudan, Congo and the farcical Republic of Katanga, are classic examples. On current form, even if Nigeria were to split into a hundred nations, it is hard to see how its dysfunctional and factionalized elite-formations with their primitive hunter-gatherer mindset can pass muster.

    In the context of institutional collapse and virtual state failure, separatist and secessionist agitations by sections of a moribund political elite, as if nations are timeless toys in the hands of over-pampered juveniles, merely throw unflattering light on the original sin: the failure of Nigeria’s post-independence political elite at nation-building and their inability to nurture and sustain state-validating institutions.

    Unlike the titans thrown up by the decolonizing project, it is hard to see how the current generation of Nigerian politicians can maintain a functioning and viable nation or state. A thousand Biafras, Oduduwa Republics, Arewa nations will merely reproduce the miseries and traumas of the captive people in a fresh territorial arrangement.

    This fundamental political failure, the inability to succeed at genuine nation-building, also explains the fundamental economic failure of the nation and Buhari’s resurgent economic nationalism. In a sense, this can be seen as a return of the repressed and a throwback to the retired general’s first coming. The failure of deregulation, economic liberalization, market forces and the concomitant rolling back of the state and its vexatious interventions tells its own story. It is a story of state failure and the appalling inability of state actors to rein in a few non-state actors and their cannibal capitalism.

    Let us be clear about one thing. Economic nationalism is another word for regulated state capitalism. No nation ever leaves its economy unprotected and at the mercy of pristine predators bent on bringing the country to its economic heels. This is not a debate about subsidy or its removal for in the final analysis there is no such thing. Subsidy is state rents and slush funds willingly paid to a rentier class for the sole purpose of influencing the outcome of elections and the destiny of the nation. Nigerians themselves broke the yoke in the watershed election of 2015.

    It is strange that in view of the run on the naira occasioned by wholesale looting of our national patrimony and the consequent plummeting of the national exchange median, none of our IMF and World Bank economists is calling for the removal of further “subsidy” even as global prices of oil have fallen to below forty dollars per barrel. Perhaps when the naira plunges into five hundred to the single dollar, petroleum product will also “obtain” at five hundred naira per litre.

    This is the economic canard and the subsidy trap of permanent peonage that General Buhari has perceptively seen through. By heroically refusing any further devaluation of the naira thereby making further subsidies official, the Nigerian president might have sprung the trap. Whatever the authoritarian excesses, Nigerians may soon have Buhari to thank for this.

    Every sovereign nation has the sovereign right to determine which economic policies best suit its people and in specific circumstances. Let us not hear any orchestrated cry of economic illiteracy from western interlopers and their local agents. Singapore, China, Cuba and the Asian Tigers did not triumph by aping western economic policies.

    In a perceptive review, retired Ambassador Dapo Fafowora has described President Buhari’s budget as “neo-Keynesian” and reflationary. This is at should be in the current circumstances. Looted funds do not reflate any economy. What reflates is money put in the pocket of the teeming poor and the economically disempowered.  This is what Buhari has tried to do by the various empowerment schemes. When all the monies stolen from the exchequer are courageously called in, the naira and Nigeria will witness a new dawn.

    This is not to say that there are no contradictions and complexities about political statism and economic nationalism in a country in which the various nationalities are at a stage or stages of unequal and uneven political and economic productions. Buhari will have to fine tune all this without appearing to punish the industrious and enterprising to please the indolent and the compulsively lazy. Let the debate begin. But let us give President Buhari some respite to mend this broken state. It is 2016, and it is morning yet on creation day.

  • Statism, regionalism and nationalism

    Statism, regionalism and nationalism

    I take advantage of a concern addressed to me and a couple of other compatriots early Wednesday morning by a leader whom I trust and respect for his dedication and commitment to the progressive agenda. His concern was about regional development agenda and the effort we make in their pursuit. The concern is apt and timely, especially because we are just transitioning to a new administration which needs all the help it can get in terms of ideas and suggestions.

    Why “regional development agenda?” you may ask? “Is focus on such agenda not inimical to national integration and development?” These are pertinent questions. And as Opalaba would observe, he who asks a question deserves an answer that probes the foundation of the issue.

    The questions are answerable in few sentences. We are regional beings. We were born regional. We grew up regional. We matured regional. Regional development was the source of national development before the reverse gear  was engaged and national development, slow and unpredictable as it was, became the driver of (negative) regional development. But even as we prioritised national development and focus on regional development took a retreat, we were still thinking regional.

    From 1966 till 1979 at the height of national unity discourse and practice, regionalism as a habit of the mind never retreated. Military Governors as representatives of the Commander-in-Chief from Gowon to Obasanjo and from Buhari to Abacha were not immune to the sentiment behind regionalism. Even when they came from different regions or states, they lived among regionalists. They imbibed the ideas that animated the people. They had regionalists in their cabinets. And more importantly, they were under pressure to improve the conditions of life in their areas of jurisdiction.

    Between 1979 and 1983 when different political parties more or less controlled different regions, regional thinking held sway with the Southwest leading the pack and UPN Governors churning out ideas, including the four cardinal programmes of the party, which they aimed at the development of the region.

    Since 1999, regionalism has been championed not just by the Southwest but also by the Southsouth, Southeast and the entire North, which has always considered the North as one indivisible region. Instructively, Arewa Consultative Forum has been more united and more focused than Afenifere or Yoruba Council of Elders.

    In spite of all the available and incontrovertible evidence that we are regional beings, at various times, there has been an incomprehensible ambivalence attitude of affirmation and denial towards the regions. This comes in various forms and from multiple sources.

    On the one hand, every region or zone has lamented its perceived marginalisation one time or the other since 1999. Recently, there has been an unsubstantiated allegation of some zones ganging up against others. This confirms our fixation on regions or zones. Significantly, states have not been particularly vocal in this matter of marginalisation.

    On the other hand, however, some of the same regional advocates who complain about regional marginalisation have confusedly bashed regional (aka zonal) arrangements as extra-constitutional and therefore unacceptable, using regional platform to carry out their assault on region. This came up especially during the Constitutional conferences of 2005 and 2014.

    Now, it is possible to explain such volte-face in charitable terms. There is no constitutional provision for regional or zonal arrangements or institutions for regional development. “Regions or zones are not known to the 1999 Constitution”, they insist. Therefore any regional arrangements or institutions must be private and without governmental imprimatur.

    The reasoning is legalistic; but it fails in two respects. First, it is common knowledge that not every arrangement that we have made since 1999 is constitutionally mandated. We have created institutions and organisations with full budgetary allocations even when they have not been part of the constitutional provisions. We did so because there were urgent problems to be solved that were not anticipated in the groundnorm; and the legislative branch, in its wisdom, gave the proper legal backing.

    Second, we know that states, with their constitutional mandate, have not been up to the task with regards to the development and welfare of their various constituencies. Just last week, we heard about the sorry state of the financial condition of most states and their inability to pay workers’ salaries, and their appeal to President-elect Buhari for federal assistance. The constitution prioritises states as political and administrative units of the federation, but they are severely handicapped because they are practically unequal in their relationship with the Federal Government which controls a disproportionate amount of resources.

    Statism is the belief, sometimes advanced to the level of doctrine, that since states are constitutionally recognised as political and administrative units of the federation, they have a legal autonomy which cannot be compromised and no other arrangements can be allowed or recognised.

    In view of our experience since 1999, it is abundantly clear that statism is wrong and it is the major obstacle to the survival and development of states. It is time to think outside the box of static statism toward a dynamic agenda for national development.

    No one can deny that regions contributed to national development in the 50s and 60s. Groundnut pyramids and cotton sacks in the North, cocoa stores in the West, palm oil barrels in the East, and the various Marketing Boards were the foremost foreign exchange earners even well into the 70s. Development plans in each region benefitted from these sources of regional wealth as was the case in the West which saw a boom in infrastructural development and social welfare programs.

    No one denies the legal reality of states. But thinking out of the box of statism requires the acknowledgement of the present ugly reality which makes it impossible for states to extract a sustainable development from the meager resources accruable to them internally, without running cap in hand to the Federal Government.

    Regionalism doesn’t pose any danger to nationalism. On the contrary, it benefits the nationalist agenda by promoting equitable regional development throughout the nation. We know, for instance, that in the 50s, regions exchanged useful development strategies even when they were controlled by different political parties. But when states are left to their fate, and resources are meager and inequitably distributed, the resentment thus generated could be inimical to national harmony and national development.

    Here then is the choice facing the Buhari administration: encourage regional ideas for national development or dismiss them as unconstitutional. For a progressive administration that focuses on equitable development, the right choice is not difficult to identify in the light of the foregoing.

    How does the administration go about it? There are various strategic options. States still hold all the aces. Already some regions have prototype ideas with the setting up of institutions such as Development Agenda for Western Nigeria (DAWN) in the Southwest and Strategic Agenda for Northern Development (STAND) in the North. While DAWN is a creation of Southwest leadership, including the Governors, it appears that STAND is a creation of the intellectual and political vanguards for Northern development. DAWN is set up as a Commission in which each Governor has a representative Commissioner. Now existing as extra-constitutional entities, each of these development institutions can be given legal backings by an Act of the National Assembly.

    I can then imagine the following scenario. The President invites the Governors to a round table session on regional development and its centrality to national development. Assume that infrastructure, education, and energy are in play. Surely, a good number of the challenges we have had in these areas can best be addressed with a regional strategy.

    Consider for instance the Lagos-Ibadan expressway which had been in a state of disrepair since 1999 until just last year when the Jonathan administration decided it had to do something. The Southwest could have addressed the matter a long time ago if it was ceded to the region with appropriate resource allocation for infrastructural development. To the objection that it is a federal road, I answer that this objection begs the question: Shouldn’t such roads be regional roads for which regions have responsibility that they can discharge more effectively than the Federal Government?

  • What Scottish nationalism teaches us

    The large nation of England and the small nation of Scotland agreed, by an Act of Union in 1707, to form a union. From the very first day, however, there were always some Scots who did not want union with England – who wanted the Scottish nation to preserve its separate identity. Such people were the founding fathers of modern Scottish nationalism.

    Not long after 1711 (roughly from the 1780s), the nationalism of ethnic nations gradually grew into a force in Europe. It started with the French. Emerging from their French Revolution, the French became a strongly unified nation, went forth to try and conquer all of Europe, demonstrated how strong and proud a unified nation could be, and made every other European ethnic nation jealous. In response, the Italians, who had been living in separate small kingdoms, forcibly unified their country together as one country of Italy in 1861. Ten years later, the Germans followed suit and became one Germany. Then the many small nations that were parts of some large countries began to demand their own separateness too. Such demands resulted in the breaking up of such multi-nation countries as Austria-Hungary and the Turkish Empire into smaller countries.

    But the most powerful countries of Europe did not yet fully understand ethnic nationalism, especially the nationalism of small or weak nations. Therefore, when they broke up Austria-Hungary and the Turkish Empire, they grouped some small nations to form what they thought would be viable countries – such as Yugoslavia (consisting of Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Albanians, Bosnians, etc), Czechoslovakia (consisting of Czechs and Slovaks), etc. They also established boundaries that split up some nations – such as the Kurds (today 30 million in population) who were split between Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria. And when European countries came to Africa and Asia to create empires for themselves at the same time, they did what they had done in parts of Europe – they forcibly grouped some nations to form new countries, and they created boundaries that split up many nations.

    Since the beginning of the 20th century, the world has learnt more and more one hard lesson – namely, that these multi-nation countries, and these boundaries that split up nations, are simply unrealistic and, therefore, unsustainable. Nations, no matter how small, are incredibly tough entities, each being a product of many thousands of years of evolution. Nations don’t usually die. Countries that are made up of different nations usually break up sooner or later along ethnic national lines. All the powerful multi-nation empires of the past broke up in that way. All the multi-nation countries of today are in trouble; almost all are unstable; many have broken up; more and more are moving towards breaking up. And the United Nations has ruled that each ethnic nation has the right to choose to be a separate country.

    If a multi-nation country is well-governed, prosperous, powerful and proud (like Britain is), it is not so easy for the nations in it to break away. That is what we saw last week in the Scottish independence referendum. Enough Scots see so much to love in Britain that they don’t want to separate from Britain, but the nationalists are proclaiming that the struggle continues. In contrast, if a multi-nation country is (like Nigeria) poorly governed, corruption-ridden, makes its citizens poor, and makes its citizens ashamed in the world, its chances of quickly breaking up are very high. The Soviet Union was phenomenally powerful, but its central government was, in its relations with its small nations, far too domineering and repressive – and the country broke up, with each nationality becoming a separate sovereign country.

    Realistically, therefore, Nigeria is not likely to live for much longer. Nigeria is too strongly set in its path of crookedness, corruption, unfairness, hopeless poverty for more and more citizens, mutual hatred among nations, conflicts, and stiff-necked resistance to change. Nigeria has become a monstrous agency of destruction of all morality, and even all human virtue. And the result is that more and more Nigerians are retreating from love for Nigeria to love for their own small nations in Nigeria. For Nigeria, the basis for being one country does not exist anymore.

    A couple of years ago, our Wole Soyinka said that if changes didn’t come soon, he could see Nigeria breaking up. We can say today that things are not only not changing, but that things are getting worse and worse. The growing indication now, therefore, is that Nigeria may be entering into an era of separate nationalisms. Igbo nationalism, Yoruba nationalism, Hausa-Fulani nationalism, Kanuri nationalism, Edo nationalism, Nupe nationalism, Ijaw nationalism, Birom nationalism,  and so on – these now seem likely to dominate Nigeria’s near future. And the reason is that more and more of the people of each of Nigeria’s nations feel that their nation is being gradually destroyed in Nigeria, by Nigeria.

    When I wrote in the Gbogun Gboro column some months ago that many of the enterprising Igbo people were fleeing from their “battered Igbo homeland”, one Igbo reader took offence at that phrase. He or she thought I was denigrating or deriding the Igbo people. But I wasn’t doing any such thing. What I was doing was saying what we all know to be true – namely, that Nigeria has seriously battered the Igbo nation. As the Igbo were rising up by the 1950s, the prospects were great that their kind of dynamism could quickly produce a technologically and industrially notable nation in Nigeria and Africa. But the drastic disorientation occasioned by Nigeria has brutalized that prospect. And more or less the same has happened to every other Nigerian nation.

    Concerning my own Yoruba nation, I can say we were broadly and confidently prospering by the 1950s, and that we are poorer today than ever before in our known history, thanks to Nigeria. When I see countless thousands of highly educated Yoruba youths roaming the streets for years without jobs and without hope, when I see large crowds of highly educated Yoruba men and women lining up at foreign embassies every day seeking visas to escape from the Nigerian hell, when I see videos or read about highly educated Yoruba and other Nigerian  youths trying to walk across the Sahara Desert in order to reach Europe though North Africa (with many of them dying in the desert), I, who in the 1970s had excitedly given up my successful career to go and help build a great Nigeria,  am today filled with overwhelming sorrow and worry about my Yoruba nation.

    I know, of course, that there are some of the Yoruba elite who are benefiting, or who hope to benefit, from the Nigerian corruption outfit, and who therefore want Nigeria to continue. But I am relieved that, in all directions, large numbers of Yoruba people are recognizing and accepting that our nation needs to free itself from the grip of destruction and establish an independent existence of its own. I look forward to seeing a Yoruba nationalist movement (like the Scottish nationalist movement) emerge among these masses of patriots, and I desire to march with them in their peaceful but focused and resolute independence demonstrations. That, I am sure, is the path ahead.