(Why the cock will still crow at dawn)
As a people, Nigerians are confronted with an impossible deadline and a deadly dateline. For many local observers and foreign pundits, 2015 is the crunch year for Nigeria. There is a cruel convergence of certitude about it all. The Americans are even rumoured to have produced the equivalent of a manual of political euthanasia for a terminally ailing country. 2015 is seen as the year when Nigeria will finally unravel and go into deserved oblivion, or miraculously survive and be on its way to genuine nationhood.
After four years of what many consider as the most callous, unresponsive and irresponsible government that has ever been witnessed in the history of this country, Nigerians are waiting this morning to see whether their punishment has been further extended or whether the nation has been granted a dramatic reprieve from perdition. This is the moment of truth when all self-protecting illusions are torn to shreds.
An eerie calm has descended on the land as Nigerians await the outcome of the most keenly contested and by far the most “modern” elections in the history of the nation. No matter what happens in the next few hours or days, whether it is an engineered stalemate, an outright victory for the contradictory forces of rational modernity or the final proof that it is impossible for Nigeria to transit to modernity in its current structural iron jacket, it is clear that the nation can never be the same again.
No matter how much longer it takes to terminate and how many more of our dead compatriots we are forced to bury, the Jonathan presidency is a historic terminus for Nigeria. A terminus is the end of a journey. But it is also the beginning of another journey. As a nation, we have been taught a memorable lesson. Goodluck Jonathan has shown what happens when a nation allows the quest for political justice to override the question of social equity.
Four years earlier in an attempt to right the historical and political injustice visited on minorities, particularly Southern minorities in the nation, Nigerians voted overwhelmingly for Goodluck Jonathan, an ethnic Ijaw from the provincial backwater of Bayelsa state without any sterling antecedents of public service. By so doing, the nation and its power barons deliberately ignored the competing claim for social justice represented by the lean spare frame of the pious and astringently ascetic retired general, Mohammadu Buhari.
Unfortunately after four years of incredible misrule which can only be described as organised banditry elevated to statecraft, Jonathan has left the country in a substantially worse shape. Nigerians have never been more bitterly polarised and divided along ethnic, religious and regional fault lines. The quest for social justice has been compounded and exacerbated by Jonathan’s ethical obtuseness and penchant for daring impunity. Nigeria has been dragged into the cesspool of state delinquency. In short, the national and social questions have worsened.
But not even the most horrendous social experience is without its political value. If General Abacha exhausted the political and historical possibilities of military rule based on regional, religious and ethnic arrogance, the Jonathan ascendancy has sealed the possibility of democratic rule in Nigeria based solely and exclusively on minority rights and sympathy for the excluded. Henceforth, and that is if Nigeria survives this modernization of its political ethics and ethos, every one will have to swim or sink based on their individual record and not on the plight of tribe.
After all allowances have been made, there is a sense then in which it can be claimed, the ugly campaigns and hate sermons notwithstanding, that this election represents a victory for the Nigerian people and the Nigerian electorate. In the past years and decades, apart from periods of outright military despotism, the Nigerian electorate have struggled to reassert their sovereignty and the supremacy of the voters despite unrelenting attempts to obliterate and even abolish them by the Nigerian ruling cartel.
In the past eight years, beginning with President Umaru Yar’Adua’s admission that the election that brought him to power was gravely flawed, the Nigerian electorate has been involved in a deadly duel with the ruling elite. The Uwais Panel Report represents a major watershed in the struggle for participatory democracy in Nigeria. Realising that it had procured for itself a throne of bayonets, the government quickly dumped its cardinal recommendations.
The niggardly concessions have been wrested at considerable cost to the nation and the people. It is not because the Nigerian ruling class wants and wills electoral reforms. It has been wrought against their will and wits. In the history of the modern world, no authoritarian cabal has ever been willing to free a nation from electoral slavery. But then no maxim or gun or canon has been made by mankind that can silence the voice of the people when they are ready and when it booms collectively.
It should be noted by those who are sold on ugly ethnic typologies and religious slurs that the current battle for electoral modernity is led by a scion of the old northern feudal oligarchy. Attahiru Jega, up till this moment, has withstood all the attempts to smear his reputation and drag his name in the mud by the agents of a government proclaiming transformation as its national mantra. Some transformation indeed. The situation speaks to the paradoxes of history and the contradictory nature of actual class formations.
It has been noted that with the seeming inevitability of globalizing capitalism, every sane human society must negotiate its terms of entry and the conditions best suited to its people. The irony of it all may well be that this is what the socialist phase of development has done for China, Cuba, Vietnam and to a lesser extent Russia. From an opposing and contradictory paradigm of human development, this is what the recently departed Lee Kuan Yew has negotiated for the Singaporean nation.
By deliberately bequeathing power to a reactionary clique, the colonial conquerors of Nigeria made sure that we entered the struggle with modernity holding the short end of the stick of progress. It was not their fault. There was nothing in Lord Lugard’s vitae to suggest that he was trained or had been made to acquire the skills of nation-building. Lugard was a master of the colonial suppression of agitated natives. Nigeria was not conceived as a nation but as a colonial plantation for the expropriation of indigenous natural resources. It is easy for a colonial plantation to become a Banana Republic.
In the event, it has proved virtually impossible for Nigeria to produce a world-historical leader to lead its people out of the dungeon of colonial retardation to genuine modern nationhood. Anytime a leader emerges who shows the promise and the possibilities, he is immediately hammered into position by hostile forces already primed for reaction. Yet there is enough architecture in the ruins to show what Nigeria can be once it gets its act together.
The miracle of it all is not that Nigeria has survived but that it continues to survive despite the disabling circumstances of its provenance and the damndest efforts of its own leading citizens. There must be something about this huge block arbitrarily hewn out of the heart of a benighted continent that has refused to accept its sorry destiny.
Some observers have pointed out the ironic self-subversion of the colonial imaginary which believes it can create such a rich and impossibly gifted country, the greatest conglomeration of black souls ever, only for it to disappear without any trace, once the original charter of colonial exploitation has expired. It is as if the spirit of Nigeria is insisting that it will not disappear until it has fulfilled its destiny and obligation to Africa in particular and the Black race in general.
That obligation has been long in coming. In the meantime, Nigeria has tested the patience and endurance of just about everybody. The colonial masters hurriedly abandoned Nigeria to its fate after it became clear that the colonial plantation cannot be sustained without its own interior managers.
But as the title suggests, interior managers are not visionary administrators but feisty and ferocious bookkeepers interested only in the balance sheet of expropriation. In the absence of a modernising elite and of a visionary master template to frogmarch the nation to compulsory and competitive modernity, Nigeria will continue to flap and flounder about like a beached whale. Like an elephant and the proverbial battery of blind men, everybody will continue to point at different parts of the mammoth as the real thing.
In retrospect, it can now be seen that what has been going on in the geo-political space named as Nigeria is a struggle for modernity stretching back over two hundred years to the 1804 Jihad of Usman Dan Fodio, the itinerant preacher and gifted Islamic scholar. Affronted by the hedonism and heathenism of the brand of Islam practised in the north of the country, the radical preacher forcibly imposed a process of purification from within. But in a sublime piece of historical irony, the Dan Fodio revolution merely deepened the mode and relations of feudal production in the north, leading to classical feudalism in its area of authority.
And there have been many other modernizing wannabes too, with many perishing in the process. From the Five majors who were sworn on ridding the system of ten-per-centers, Major Orkar and colleagues who were bent on a forcible and arbitrary restructuring of the nation, Chief Awolowo who arguably held the most visionary roadmap, and a line stretching all the way back to Sheikh Alimi, the much maligned Afonja and of course the “Victorian” Lagosians who tried to impose classical western values on the new nation, it will be discovered that Nigeria has never been short of transformers.
In the next few hours or days, we are about to find out whether that critical mass and a truly modernizing elite has really arrived or whether we have to tarry awhile. No matter what, the cock will still crow at dawn, but something tells snooper that after this election, Nigeria will never be the same again.
