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  • The Nigerian state as ‘a country without countrymen’? (1)

    The Nigerian state as ‘a country without countrymen’? (1)

    The day was Thursday, August 14, 2025. The time was 3pm. The venue was the Rev. Chris Oyakhilome Auditorium of the Ambrose Alli University, Ekpoma, Nigeria. The event was the 133rd in the inaugural lecture series of the over four and a half decades old institution established by the administration of the former governor of the then Bendel State, Professor Ambrose Alli, in the Second Republic. The lecturer was none other than the revered scholar of Comparative Politics and Strategic Studies, Professor Babatunde Olusegun Agara. The intriguing topic of his intellectual disquisition was ‘The Nigerian State: A Country Without Countrymen’ and for nearly two hours he held the audience spellbound with his penetrating interrogation of the dilemmas, uncertainties and challenges of the contemporary Nigerian condition.

    Professor Agara kicked off his cerebral offering with a declaration of the credos constituting what he described as ‘My three guiding principles in life’ stating directly, unpretentiously and unrepentantly that: “In religion, I am a Christian and hence I believe passionately in God, the Almighty; In politics, I am a radical humanist, I believe in bringing about radical change that positively affect the masses through the instrumentalities of violence (if need be); In economics, I am a committed Marxist and hence I believe in revolutions”. His affirmation of belief in and support for revolutionary change in society if necessary may sound sacrilegious to conservative defenders of the establishment and advocates of continuity of the status quo. But inherent in variants of Marxist theses is the belief that it is only rational to respond to what is perceived as the disguised and structural violence imposed on society by a ruling class or elite with a counter violence designed to engender a more just, equitable and fair social order.

    It is thus not surprising that Professor Agara ‘s lecture is suffused through and through with concerns about the challenges over the years of inept governance, paucity of leadership vision, structural inequities and debilities among others contributing to what he perceives as the deepening fragility of the Nigerian State even if it is yet to degenerate to the condition of total state collapse. On his choice of the topic of the inaugural, he explains that “The Nigerian State is seriously under a siege being plagued by what I have referred to as ‘the evil triad’ of insecurity, threats of secession and herders’ invasion. All these are simply due to the fact that we, Nigerians, do not see ourselves as countrymen, rather primordial sentiments and loyalty have created a divisive fault-line among us. Our argument is that it is  our inability to see ourselves as countrymen that have not only brought the evil triad, but is escalating them on a daily basis”.

    Critical to Professor Agara ‘s characterization of the Nigerian State as a country without countrymen is the stalled progression of the polity from mere statehood to a more cohesive sense of nationhood. Can Nigeria be said to be any more organically viable today than she was when the great statesman and first Premier of the Western Region, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, described the country nearly eight decades ago as ‘a mere geographical expression’? Are there not still many Nigerians who would not disagree with the reference by Sir Ahmadu Bello, Sardauna of Sokoto and Premier of Northern Nigeria in the First Republic, to the colonial amalgamation as ‘the mistake of 1914’? With virtually every component of the country seeing themselves as marginalized and some groups advocating the outright breakup of Nigeria through secession, can it be plausibly contended that ours is indeed a country without countrymen?

    When he speaks of the absence of countrymen in a country, Agara obviously refers to a deficient emotional bond between citizen and state and the lack of patriotic commitment of the vast majority of Nigerians to the structural entity known as Nigeria. While noting that what he describes as ‘the evil triad’ – insecurity, threats of secession and herders’ invasion – have reached an international dimension, he states that the situation is complicated and worsened by “the domestic problems of governance with virtually no opposition party, recycling of wasted political elites, lack of ideological convictions and a lack of political accommodation for the minorities within the state as it is presently structured”.

    This, he argues, “has led to some questioning the legitimacy of the state and consenting to the fact that a state thus construed and not in total control of the means of violence added to the fact of its gross inadequacy in ensuring the security of its populace, is already a weak state on the path of being a failing, failed or collapsed state. These are the informing motifs for the choice of this topic”. Professor Agara interrogates the subject through an exhaustive examination of the concept of nationalism which, he states, “implies a national sentiment be it political, economic, religious or symbolic that unifies a people together and for which they are ready to sacrifice anything to sustain”.

    Some of the dimensions of nationalism x-rayed by the lecturer include cultural nationalism which “stresses the need to defend or strengthen a national language, religion, or a way of life rather than achieve overt political ends”; liberal political nationalism predicated on the belief that, just like the individual, all Nations have a moral status and right to self-determination; conservative political nationalism which stresses social cohesion, public order and deployment of the sentiment of national patriotism in defence of traditional values and institutions; ethnic nationalism which “emphasizes the commonality of ancestral heritage thereby implying a stronger and perhaps more intense sense of distinctiveness and exclusivity” and expansionist nationalism rooted in a chauvinistic world outlook and value system difficult to distinguish from racism.

    The political scientist sheds light on the notion of a country without countrymen when he submits that “Within a federal pluralist society filled with much sentiment of ethnic differences and more heterogenous factors than homogeneous, ethnic consciousness and differentiation becomes ‘natural’ and is ‘real’. In cases where some set of people feel that they are marginalized and that the political arrangement and structure does not provide enough or sufficient political accommodation for them to feel that they ‘belong’, primordial instinct of identifying with their ‘kind’ kicks in and national loyalty is transferred to ethnic loyalty expressed through ethnic identification and nationalism. Thus, ethnic nationalism and identification becomes an intellectual response to political, social and cultural problems of integration and legitimacy”.

    One of the theoretical frameworks or anchors through which Professor Agara analyses his subject is that of political accommodation which is particularly central to federalist theory and practice. Thus, he posits that in a complex, ethnically, culturally and religiously plural society, the adequacy of the arrangements for political accommodation and coexistence of diverse groups in the polity are critical to the achievement or otherwise of harmony, peace and stability. He submits that federalism as a political format provides a framework for managing differences and that “political accommodation is only possible within a context where competing demands and claims by constituent groups are reconcilable and the various groups making up the federation are agreed to stay together”.

    Critical to the viability of sustainable and productive political accommodation, the professor points out, are the mode of allocation or distribution of material and fiscal resources among component groups of the polity which must be reflective of justice particularly with reference to contributions to the polity’s collective resources; the opportunities offered the diverse component groups for peaceful, systemic and Judicial articulation and resolution of their demands as well as the imperative of achieving a balance between national cohesion and the desire for autonomy and self-determination by the federating units.

    Read Also: Fed Govt to remap Nigeria after 50 years, says Surveyor-General

    The second theoretical framework around which Professor Agara’s thesis revolves is that of contentious politics and violence which encapsulates such concepts as contentious collective challenge, contentious political behavior and social movements. He explains that contentious collective action through aggravated social movements comprising complex underlying social networks offers a critical avenue through which “the oppressed can draw an unresponsive state’s elites’ attention to their plight, or better articulate their grievances and confront the better equipped opponents or the state. Contentious collective action brings ordinary people together under the same umbrella, for the same purpose and to confront opponents, elites’ or authorities”.

    In this regard, Professor Agara cites ethnic militias as examples of a form of social movements mobilized to pursue or undertake a collective challenge against state authorities for failing to address collective grievances of, for example, the peoples of the Niger Delta or the Igbo nationality of the Southeast region. He avers that the easiest and readiest recourse of components of aggrieved social movements desirous of social change is ‘the power of disruption’. According to him, “Social movements employ the power of disruption basically because this draws attention to them; enables the social movement to spread uncertainty while giving them the necessary leverage they need against powerful opponents such as the state”.

    However, the deployment of the coercive apparatus of the state including the police, military and intelligence services to contain escalation in disruptive activities of social movements and eliminate their offensive capabilities tend to split the latter into two – moderate elements who tactically withdraw from the struggle and the more extremist and militant who resort to continuously intensifying acts of outright violence. Professor Agara makes profuse references in the literature to demonstrate that (1) political violence tends to progress from the onset of mild discontent to the politicization of discontent and ultimately the actualization of violence against political actors and structures; (2) political violence challenges the monopoly of force which is the defining essence of state authority while destabilizing normal political processes and (3) political violence tends to be directed not just at incumbent governments and their functionaries and facilities but also opposing political actors, forces and groups thus constituting a threat to the extant political order.

    In this inaugural lecture, we have a most exhaustive and rigorous analytic interrogation of the various incendiary and destabilizing groups running rampant in Nigeria today including terrorist organizations, separatist agitators, extremist religious proselytizers, invading expansionist herdsmen and criminal cartels with detailed examination of their comparative organizational structures, internal value orientation, diverse modes of operation, assorted psychological motivations, extraterritorial organizational linkages as well as inter-organizational relationships.

  • Nigerian state and its many orphans: Reflecting on Helen Paul

    Almost every Nigerian knows who Helen Paul is. She is that star comedienne. Just one out of the few ladies in the trade, who burst the male dominated genre to prove the age-old saying that what a man can do, a woman can do even better. And Helen Paul is very good at stand-up comedy. I have listened to her jokes several times. Her uniqueness derives from her capacity to mimic the piping voice of a teenage girl. One that is widely celebrated is where she presented herself as a child who caused trouble between her parents because she told her mum that when she called her dad, it was a female voice that responded. On hearing this report, the mother went into a fit of tantrum: “This man is cheating on me!” Helen Paul delivered this “mother’s” lament in a mother’s voice before reverting to the child’s voice. When properly queried by a neighbour about what the female voice on the phone said, the “child” responded that the female voice always says “the number you are calling is not available at the moment.” This is hilarious! And what is all the more so is the perfect mimicry of innocence the comedienne is able to generate through the voice of the child.

    However, Helen Paul is far from being an innocent child. Or, to put it more brutally, her innocence was dashed immediately she surfaced into the world from a society that stigmatized those who have been unfortunate to have fallen to society’s twisted sides. From her own testimony, her mother gave birth to her as a child of rape. We live in a society that is so puritanical but so hypocritical that it polices rape and immorality which it permits within its dark crannies. This is a society that allows the raped to be traumatized while the rapist goes free. When the woman caught in adultery was brought to Jesus, the man she committed adultery with was not there for persecution. When a rape occurs, the victim is compelled by the prospect of society’s scorn and stigma to hide in shame and remained traumatized by forced silence and the consequent inner psychological agony. The society forces the victim of rape to blame herself. All those who take delight in Helen Paul and her comedy would never have known about her mother’s many years of pain and shame. They would never have been able to imagine the horror of giving birth to a child conceived out of rape. No one would be able to imagine the pure agony of raising Helen in silence and without the full joy of being able to narrate the circumstance of her conception. Maybe only mothers would be able to imagine the trepidation with which the mother behold her child every day, always wondering what she would turn out to become.

    Well, Helen Paul broke free of that stigma and rose high as a stand-up comedian. She brought laughter to many hearts and home whereas her mother never had the benefit of laughter while raising her. If this story had ended here, it would not have merited more than a first glance as one of those stories that come out of Nigeria as a postcolonial state. We came to know about Helen Paul’s mother’s situation because Helen herself bagged a doctorate in creative arts at the University of Lagos, the first comedian that I know to have achieved this feat. And she went on her Instagram page to celebrate and dedicate the degree to her longsuffering mother. I cannot reproduce the message here, but it is a piece of heart-wrenching message that speaks beyond her mother to the Nigerian state at large: “I Helen Paul dedicate this to my mum. You gave birth to me out of rape. They told you I wouldn’t amount to anything.” She narrated that she grew up being called a bastard, and people taunted her always that she would not amount to anything in life. Yet, she declared, her mother was confident that if the child of the mentally challenged can survive, God will watch over Helen. Well, that God watched over her not just to grow to be tops in her chosen profession, but to be able to get a doctorate as well, and to dedicate it to her mother.

    Helen Paul’s story is just one out of thousands that comes out of Nigeria. Indeed, her success is just a rare one out of millions of children—abused, helpless, hapless, orphaned, homeless, raped and born out of rape—that are narrated on the daily news as a staple for already bruised consciences. Nigeria is home to abandoned children, single mothers, pregnant teenagers, miscreants, vagabonds, the mentally, physically and visually challenged, armed robbers, thugs, touts, destitute, drug addicts, party hoodlums and so many other socially impoverished persons that now serve as the badge of Nigeria’s profile of misery. Despite Nigeria’s return to democratic rule in 1999, and the flag off of democratic governance, there is no definite transformation of the country’s productivity profile in ways that could empower its citizens to transform their own conditions. Unfortunately, democratic governance in Nigeria comes with the added crises of unbridled killings from ethnic rivalry, unmitigated bloodshed as a result of terrorism, unending electoral violence everywhere, and the unceasing looting of the common weal by those saddled with the affairs of state.

    In the 2018 Hanke’s Misery Index, Nigeria is rated as the sixth most miserable country in the world, behind Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Argentina, Iran and Turkey. This Index demonstrates that the happiness of the citizens of a state, and their prosperity, is linked to the state’s capacity to generate economic growth. This point is made in a much more expansive manner by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson in their 2012 bestseller, Why Nations Fail. The authors’ simple argument is that the difference between prosperity and poverty in nations is a function of the kind of politics and decisions that the leadership of those countries decide to play and to make. If a country decides to open up its political space and therefore build participatory democracy, it would lead to democratic institutions and probably generate good economic decisions. On the other hand, if a country decides to close up its political space and become authoritarian, there is the likelihood that it will build an extractive structure that will impoverish the state and its people. This argument tells us a lot about those nations that have failed. And the Misery Index is the profile of failed states in which the leadership have consistently made decisions that consigned the citizens to untold misery.

    When you drive along any major Nigerian highway, in itself a glaring index of underdevelopment, you will see Nigerians in various states of misery—young children either begging for money or selling wares and running after potential customers; mentally ill Nigerians in various level of nudity and degradation; poverty-stricken Nigerians trying to make ends meet; and a horde of the unemployed and the unemployable, together with thugs and touts and pickpockets. The fundamental question which goes to the very heart of Nigeria’s policy architecture and governance framework is: How many of these miserable citizens are able to rise above the limitation of a postcolonial context like Nigeria? How many deaths does the Nigerian state record daily from existential limitations and from pure misery and poverty? The trajectory of misery is that it represents a vicious cycle: misery and poverty reproduce themselves in Nigeria. A child born on the street or into poverty stays in it till death.

    The Helen Paul narrative is a story of grit and determination, and of breaking free from the shackles of social limitations. It is the story of running with a vision in a postcolonial context where the state is incapacitated but hostile and rapacious. On the one hand, the mother who suffered the agony of rape believed that her child would turn out as a star, despite society’s shaming and stigma. On the other hand, the child born of rape somehow took the baton of hope and ran with it until she got to the point of applause. Helen Paul made herself a solemn promise not to be incapacitated by the Nigerian state and her gloomy youth unemployment statistics. She picked up on her passion of comedy and her intellectual aspiration for a doctorate. Today, she has both, and the sky and Nigeria are no longer a limit to her glory. But the story is also a warning to the leadership of Nigeria. For every Helen Paul that rises to the top out of the dark depth of postcolonial obscurity and crippling deprivation, there are many more that perish in silence and in the dark places of the silenced graves.

  • FG urges states to enact laws to ban open defecation

    The Minister of Water Resources, Mr Suleiman Adamu on Sunday called on states to enact bye-laws to ban open defecation in the country.

    Adamu, who made the call at the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) Forum in Abuja, said the call became necessary following continuous practice of open defecation in parts of the country.

    He said that it was a matter for regret that Nigeria is the second largest country after India with over 66 million of its population defecating in the open.

    According to him, when this law becomes operational, it will check the practice, fine offenders and also encourage people to construct and use their toilets.

    He said that Nigeria had developed a Roadmap and Action Plan to reposition the water and sanitation sector, saying there was a pledge to end open defecation by 2025, before the end of the Sustainable Development Goals.

    “One of the key issues we are asking the states to do is to put up a legislation to ban open defecation, state governments must look at their building codes to enforce the need for people to build toilets, the appropriate kinds of toilets in their houses; there must be more public toilets, public buildings should be able to open up toilet facilities for people, this is what is happening all over the world.

    “We are lucky to have engaged the wife of the president on this because we need champions to help us campaign against open defecation and she has accepted to lead the campaigns along with wives of state governors.

    “I am sure very soon, you will begin to hear us making waves in all of our campaigns, our communication strategies has been in place, and they are trying to mobilise the country against open defecation.’’

    Adamu said that the campaign for ending open defecation could not be run under a ministerial department alone, calling for priority of attention to be given to it just like ending Polio and HIV and AIDS.

    He added that the ministry would encourage water and sanitation enterprises to encourage private sector investment in toilet business.
    He said that there was the need for all water supply component construction to have a sanitation component, adding that this would go a long way to promote hygiene and end open defecation.

    A projection of the Joint Monitoring Progress Report 2015 and MICS 2017 data revealed that Nigeria is unlikely to achieve the target of completely eradicating open defecation by 2025 and universal use of safe sanitation by 2030.

    According to a World Bank 2012 Report, about 122,000 Nigerians including 87,000 children under-five years die annually from diarrhea, nearly 90 per cent being directly attributed to water, sanitation and hygiene.(NAN)

  • Reinventing the Nigerian State ( For Gabriel Adetunji Ajayi 1947-2018)

    By way of introduction:
    The piece you are about to read was written and published in 2001. Seventeen years after, it remains as relevant as ever. The piece is dedicated to the memory of our friend and former comrade in arms at the iconic battle-joyous Nigerian Tribune, Col Gabriel Adetunji Ajayi, who this week became the latest casualty of the Nigerian post-colonial state leaving behind the remains of his mother in the mortuary. While Gab was heading for the military academy in 1971, I was heading for the University of Ife. In 1995 Gab was sentenced to death while I proceeded on exile. In what turned out to be our last conversation a few weeks back, Gab, a much decorated former combatant colonel in the Nigerian army, was stoically complaining about the prohibitive costs of drugs needed to manage critical post-surgery. Now he is gone. For strategic reasons, we will leave out a proper tribute to this illustrious son of Nigeria till a later date. The atmosphere is just too foul and murky. We are in a delicate situation.

    IN much of sub-Saharan African, the post-colonial state is in a profound crisis of identity and transformation. It disappeared completely from Liberia for most of the nineties only to be replaced by a bandit state organised along the lines of primitive extortion. In Sierra Leone, its ghost presides over a traumatised populace. In Somalia, after a brief intervention of sanity, it is business as usual for the warlords and a return to murderous contention. In the former Zaire, nation and state are effectively defunct.

    There are no citizens or subjects, only refugees, survivors and the dead, to put it in the memorable words of a leading authority.  In Nigeria after decades of military misrule, the state faces a traumatic transformation irrespective of the wishes of its ruling elite. A state with an untrammelled Sharia ethos emblazoned on one side of its flag and the ethics of resource control engravened  on the other faces insurmountable centrifugal forces. It is an epic gridlock because the flag bearers are travelling in opposite direction.

    In a sense, there is a historic justification for this. States are always an unfinished business, a perpetual project-in-progress, and they tend to come under intense pressure as they confront new realities of history and competing claims. Many of them founder in the process and more still undergo a qualitative transformation or mutation..

    The English state moved from a single-nation –state to a state presiding over a forcible union of nations , then to an empire state and back to a multi-nation state. Several centuries later, they are still tinkering with it in the name of devolution. In this sense, a nation’s constitution  is never a finished product, subject as it is to unending amendments, adjustments  and endless reconstitutions.

    Nation-states may be new to Africa but not state-formations. The Songhai, Mali, Kongo,  Bornu , Oyo, Benin, Zulu   Kingdom/empires were state-formations with a high degree of cohesion and sophistication. When the Portuguese arrived at the Kongo Empire at the turn of the fifteenth century, they met a society in many ways politically superior to the one they left at home. They loitered around a bit before they could subjugate the place, not knowing whether its fire-power could match its organisational prowess. This was why imperialism took its time subduing these empire-states, particularly those around the coast.

    To be sure, it was not that Africa was a haven of peace or a paradise of political stability before colonisation. Neither was it the case that the internal boundaries of its constituting ethnic nations a fixed and immutable affair. Indeed, the phenomenon known as the mfecane and the Yoruba civil wars changed the internal composition of contemporary South Africa and current day Yoruba nation irreversibly.

    One still wonders what might have become the fate of the old Oyo Empire. By the time the British ordered the combatants to go home and fight no more, the empire—or its rump— was already at the mercy of the Ibadan military machine and its redoubtable war-lords. These were the original grandmasters of palace coups.

    Twice, their leading generals unilaterally assumed titles they were hardly entitled to. Once, when the great generalissimo and military genius, Ogunmola , assumed the title of Basorun and told the incumbent Alaafin to go to hell. Again, when Latosa invested himself with the title of the supreme military commander, the Aare Ona Kakanfo, even while there was a living, if helpless, incumbent. But by then, the Ibadan army was the backbone and the heroic saviours of the entire race against the marauding horse men from the plains.

    In the light of the foregoing, and in order to face the reality on ground, it is now imperative to explode certain myths about Africa. First, pre-colonial Africa was not a paradise lost. Second, it was not a state-less lump in which natives luxuriated in rural idiocies. The nation-state might have been a colonial imposition, but some variants of statehood were in evidence. The degree of durability, cohesion and sophistication of these pre-colonial state-formations depended on history and its unfathomable equations.

    This gives the lie to the third myth of pre-colonial Africa as a politically, economically and culturally homogeneous entity. Finally, with the inevitability of war and concomitant dispersal , the ethnic boundaries were not a fixed and immutable affair but subject to perpetual flux. The Fulani have not always domiciled in the northern tip of contemporary Nigeria, and neither have the Itsekiri, the Urhobo and the Ijaw resided in its southern basin from “time immemorial” for that matter.

    Whatever their inherent flaws and weaknesses, the old African states, almost without exception, developed internal mechanisms for hedging and hemming in the overweening excesses of the state and its temporary custodians. The colonial imposition of the alien nation-state paradigm not only destroyed these anti-autocracy disincentives but generated a new form of state enslavement.  The unmediated collision of contrary forces often led to civil wars.

    The grim reality, in the light of such pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial accretions, is that each contemporary African nation has become a unique specimen which will have to solve the crisis of the state in its unique way. Some will falter and disappear. Many will undergo a qualitative transmutation.

    A few will be faced with the stark choice between devolution and dissolution. With the war-cry of resource control renting the air, Nigeria, which miraculously limps along while avoiding the greater human tragedy of the post-colonial state in Africa, deserves a special focus.

    Ever since its test-tube conception and clinically induced delivery, the battle for the Nigerian state has been fought under many guises, diverse fronts and different platforms. The latest, and arguably the most inevitable, is  the contention for resource control.  Such has been the partisan fury, the fierce intellectual bombardment, the emotional blackmail, the towering contempt for the Geneva Convention of warfare, that it is virtually impossible to wade through the trenches without ending up as a hostage.

    In a scene reminiscent of the prescient conclusions of the authors of  The God That failed which argued that the death of communism was inevitable but that the greatest battle would be between socialists and ex-socialists, Nigeria’s former Marxist fraternity have been at each other’s throat. Owing to the ideological occlusion under which such a battle must take place, given the moral and political eclipse on the field of contention, partisans often confuse their base, opportunist motives with noble, altruistic campaign on behalf of their oppressed people or embattled state.

    In the smoke of battle, combatants often confuse friends with enemies and enemies with friends; once and future betrayers of their people’s will to the federal might pose as generals of the salvation army. Needless to add that the end result is often vastly dissimilar from what was set out to achieve.

    So it is that in a provocative monograph , Yesufu Bala Usman, celebrated radical historian, , argued that the  petroleum resources of the Niger Delta derived from the geological debris of his people in the north of the nation washed down across age and time. Bizarre as this may sound, it is still within the bounds of respectable geochemistry.

    But why such arboreal refuse should refuse to be washed into the open sea, why they should get stuck in Peter Ekeh’s homestead, and why they could not have come from the Sahara desert which was once a lush and verdant plain , is a source of intellectual mystery to some of us who retain a measure of admiration for the left-wing prince of Katsina.

    Perhaps the geological garbage was waiting for the federal government littoral suit before it could be safe to venture into the open sea. It may be that this was a mere rhetorical trope that went beyond the content, but for Bala Usman to contend that his people have been in the north of Nigeria since geological time is an affront to the intellectual honesty and fastidiousness for which he made his reputation.

    But let it be acknowledged that Usman’s position approximates orthodox Marxism in all its statist and commandist ferocity, even though there are parallels between this and the absolutism of feudalism. The problem with this orthodoxy is that it could not have foreseen the advent of globalisation, the stunning capacity of capitalism to reinvent its operational procedures and the impact of its own noble critique on the qualitative transformation of capitalism.

    The all-powerful, all-centralizing state is an unavoidable precondition for socialist political and social engineering. The husbandry and judicious allocation of national resources must proceed from this central organ and strong state. Although in Marxist mythology, the state was supposed to wither away, it never did or showed any sign of waning in its controlling ardor. It collapsed with a thud, imploding from its own internal contradictions and the scuttling of human initiative.

    The little local difficulty with Usman’s position is that it ignores or wishes away, the predatory and extractive nature of the Nigerian state , its thieving incompetence and the despoliation and ecological disaster this has wrought on the oil-producing areas of the nation in the last twenty years.

    The fact that the worst culprits of this executive malfeasance are military despots of northern extraction demands tact and sensitivity from the defenders of the status quo,  particularly from that segment of the country if the whole thing is not to degenerate into an intellectual justification of eco-ethnocide. It is this seeming lack of sensitivity and tact that has overheated the polity and led to the war-cry of resource control.

    But then, the Nigerian state did not become an absolutist monstrosity overnight. When General Yakubu Gowon famously announced that the problem for Nigeria was not lack of money but how to spend it, he was celebrating not merely the arrival of petro-dollar , but the vanquishing  of the old regional giants both as centres of political initiatives and as units with outstanding productive capacity. Henceforth, the state doubled as a huge economic almshouse doling out stipends to mendicant-states or paying the public service bill of some Caribbean nation.

    In order to focus properly on the task ahead, it is important to remind our crusading compatriots of the role of many of their noted siblings in the absolutist fiasco, either as conniving super permanent-secretaries, palace intellectuals and propagandists of the super state, regional agitators for self-determination and shadowy decoys for armed destabilisation of the old regions.

    What then is resource control? It simply means the  self-management—and mismanagement—of resources by the authorities in whose domain such resources are located. Such authorities then determine and decide what goes in to the national coffers from their resources based on need and the imperative of development.  On the face of it, it is a simple, logical and straightforward business.

    But on another level, it is not as simple because it ignores the overbearing reality of the modern Nigerian state molded in the image of its colonial forebear where the constitutive components surrender their economic and political rights in exchange for certain expectations from the central authority. All states are by nature and instincts  centralizing forces. Even the old African empire-states extracted tributary from vassal-states, satellites and their immediate constituent assembly.

    Being its arterial lifeline, the custodians of the Nigerian state would not be nearly as dumb as not to vest the issue of resource control firmly within the exclusive preserve of the state.  The duty of the judiciary is to interpret the constitution and not to change it, hence all appeals to it are forlorn, null and void.

    In the light of this, three options are open to those clamouring for resource control. First, to strategise for an upward review of the resource allocation formula from its current thirteen per cent, which can be achieved through a legislative amendment.  Second, to join forces fully with advocates of a sovereign national conference which will overhaul the constitutional impediments to Nigeria’s march to greatness.

    Thirdly, to continue to heat up the polity until  protests mutate into an armed critique of the state or a guerrilla insurrection in which the initiative will pass from them on to more radical oppositional forces. Given the ever  present factor of enlightened self-interest and the privileged insertion of the executive arrow-heads of resource control agitation in the current hegemonic politics as members of the dominant conservative party, one would have expected them to use their leverage to achieve the first option. That they have not shows one of three possibilities:   a political gambit that might have gone too far, severe pressure from below , or an apostolic radicalisation of Damascus-like proportions.

    Whichever way the drama unfolds, it should now be clear that the cry for resource control, the agitation for a national conference, the rise of ethnic militia and even the Sharia gambit are nothing but a shorthand for a greater ferment:  the contradictory struggle to reinvent the Nigerian state. How to domesticate the errant state to suit the aggregate Nigerian reality, how to humanize it and make it responsive to the yearnings and aspirations of its captive-subjects, is the battle royale of our time.

    The current assembly —and even republic—may do their bits and pieces but being products of the old Nigerian state in its last gasps, it is obvious that the major brief is beyond their historic will and capacity.  After decades of economic and political violence against its own nationals, the old Nigerian state suffered a fatal cardiac arrest on June 23, 1993, in the process of annulling the collective will and aspirations of Nigerians.

    In the face of such a historic watershed, it is no use hiding behind the constitution. A constitution aggregates the sovereign will of the people of a country. When that will changes as the current ferment demonstrates beyond reasonable doubt , so must the constitution. Let the regents of the current transition note that and commence the process of realigning Nigeria with civilization and the twenty first century accordingly.

    • First published in Africa Today, March, 2001.

     

  • Vandals Vs Nigerian state

    Vandals Vs Nigerian state

    • Oil thieves’ ambush and killing of 9 DSS operatives are a killing too many. High time these vandals were crushed

    Oil vandals’ wilful murder of security operatives — the latest being the Directorate of State Security (DSS) 9 — is the fatal audacity of a dog in hot pursuit of a wolf: what the Yoruba would call Ajanlekoko. It is high time the Nigerian state cracked down and crushed this criminal scum.

    The murder of the DSS 9, at Konu, a creek border settlement between Ikorodu in Lagos and Arepo in Ogun State, was a climax of such wilful and despicable killings of citizens and security agents. The oil thieves, who don black vests and black pair of trousers, with red bandanas tied round their heads, probably did so, so they could be stealing our collective patrimony in peace.

    The vandals had, on September 16, in the thick of the night, ambushed and shot the nine DSS operatives dead in cold blood — with the mindless vandals carting away the bodies of their victims. That mindless killing put the virtual fear of God — or well, naked fear of the vandals! — in the nearby Oke-Oko community, near Ikorodu, Lagos State, with panicky residents fleeing. The state was well and truly captured in the vandals’ net; and even the bravest of citizens had genuine reasons to fear.

    That DSS killing was reportedly less than six hours, after another set of security agents were felled, by the same suspected thieves, at Ishawo, also in Ikorodu.

    At Arepo, it would appear a standard gory fare, of criminals always breaching pipelines belonging to the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), routinely killing citizens and security agents alike that dare to stray into their den, and burying them in shallow graves in the surrounding creeks.

    The Nation had a close shave, when one of its photo-journalists, in Arepo to cover a pipeline fire incident, escaped death at the last second, after he had virtually said his last prayers — he, with a professional colleague from another newspaper house.

    Even before, after a particularly gory campaign against security operatives, the police fled the area, virtually conceding it a no man’s land, a Hobbesian jungle, where the oil vandal was king. That has been the setting for this continuous anti-citizen outrage; and these criminals’ devil-may-care contempt for the Nigerian state.

    The question is: when will all this nonsense stop? Right now, we say without any hesitation. The Nigerian state must impose its will on every inch of the Nigerian landscape and, once and for all, give these free-killing criminals a bloody nose, and completely pacify the areas where they perpetuate their heinous crimes.

    But to get the most effective result, planning, cold meticulous planning, is key. For starters, intelligence. That the criminals have struck at will is, perhaps, because of two terrible reasons: intelligence leaks from the security plane; and little or no intelligence glean on the vandals’ enclave.  That should explain criminals ambushing security agents, when the reverse ought to be the case.

    Then there is the absurdity of the secret police storming a crime scene, totting arms. If DSS has to be that visible, then there is something terribly amiss. Let DSS concentrate on its intelligence-gathering business. That is the value it can add to the campaign. If the police are too soft to counter these murderous vandals and the military is too hard, what about a special security outfit — perhaps inside the police or outside of it — like the coast guards in the United States, being formed to take charge of this menace?

    With intelligence leaks blocked and the DSS penetrating the vandals’ haven, neutralising their plans even before they are hatched, smashing this disturbing crime empire can only be a matter of time.

    So, let managers of Nigeria’s security apparatus sit up. The oil vandals’ murderous impunity must not be tolerated for a second more. We must wipe out this collective shame; and safeguard the lives of law abiding citizens against marauding pipeline criminals.