(A review of Odion-Akhaine’s Political Power in Nigeria –Excerpts)
By the turn of the sixties, Frantz Fanon, the Martinique-born psychiatrist and social theorist, had noted that the new African elite were afflicted by terminal weariness and historical disorientation. It is a condition that has taken on perplexing aggravations. By beaming his formidable intellectual lens on the vexed issue of regime-change at a particularly tense and fraught conjuncture in Nigeria’s post-military evolution, the author has opened up the topic for discussion and further scholarly dissection.
It is in this respect that this book, emanating from a collection of the author’s column written on the topic for The Guardian newspaper, is an important and critical contribution to the emerging literature on the politics of succession in post-independence Africa, particularly its Nigerian dimension
Sylvester Akhaine-Odion writes with the quiet and understated authority of personal suffering. An intellectually alert professor of Political Science and committed patriot, he was the Secretary General of the defunct Campaign for Democracy in Nigeria during the murkiest and most tragic political transition programme that the country has ever witnessed.
As General Babangida’s political chicanery gave way to Abacha’s frank and brutal despotism, Akhaine-Odion himself, for his pains, was impounded and kept away in detention in horrid circumstances. But he has kept faith with his beloved country, successfully transiting from the urban political warfare of civil protests to the equally punitive gymnasium of academic exertions.
The passion for his country, his faith in the immanent destiny of the troubled giant and his sustained intellectual engagement shine forth in this collection of essays, particularly in their tone and tenor. But they are not enough to redeem the collection from a certain structural levity or what can be more forthrightly described as an organic incoherence of organization.
There was always going to be a problem in trying to graft a unifying theme on what is essentially a loose collection of random reflections. The situation is rendered all the more desperate and precarious when it is obvious that Akhaine-Odion is writing on the hoof in a manner of speaking, that is trying to make sense of events as they unfolded, giving the impression that serious column writing cannot be anything other than scholarship in a hurry.
In the circumstances, the most charitable and profitable thing to do is to engage this collection of articles on their own terms and terrain, without ignoring the conceptual lapses and theoretical lacunae brought about mainly by trying capture a historical phenomenon still unfolding. According to the author:
“The first point of analysis is to look at the power perspective to understanding Nigerian politics in the context of the preponderance of pollster projections ahead of the 2023 general elections.”
As this passage indicates, and rightly so, it is all a question of power. Power is the principal organizing mode of all societies since the dawn of human civilization. Power is the capacity to enforce compliance or ensure submission without necessarily resorting to physical force.
The production of power is the ability among owners and wielders of power to create conditions for its own reproduction down the line. This is what allows power to be transferred from generation to generation and within dominant groups as it happens in larger entities, societies, guilds, peoples and nations. This continues until there is a signal rupture in the production of power chain and the falcon no longer hearkens to the falconer. The old order crumbles.
Sometimes, the end comes with a shuddering and apocalyptic halt which takes many by surprise. More often than not, it is a final whimper after a series of disruptions which often appear unconnected and uncoordinated reminiscent of the multiple wounds which finally put paid to the Roman Empire.
The capacity for brutal exertions often of a violent physical nature over dominated entities is a sine qua non for the perpetuation of hegemony by dominant factions. This is particularly so in multi-ethnic nations in which mutually unintelligible people of diverse and occasionally countervailing cultures are boxed together by exploitative colonial necessity and its cruel political economy.
Quoting Odia Ofeimun, the notable Nigerian poet and political activist with warm approval, Odion-Akhaine concurs that the Lugardian Architecture of the colonial state foisted on modern Nigeria by the departing colonial masters is “a sacral writ which requires power to reside only where the colonial mandate wanted it to be or in favour of British exploitation”.
Despite its fascinating allure for Nigerian intellectuals, activists and political theorists alike as a theory of power domestication, there is nothing strange or unique about the “Lugardian Architecture of the colonial state in Nigeria”. You cannot give what you don’t have.
As it has happened almost everywhere else and in consonance with their own history, the British colonial masters sought for a master-nationality around which the new nation could cohere and congeal even as it facilitated the real business of economic exploitation in favour of the metropolitan centre.
This was what happened in Kenya with its Kikuyu master-nationality and in virtually all of their colonial franchises everywhere else. Where it has failed, it was because the local elite were considerably unified, cohesive and acutely alert to their historical responsibility. This was the case with Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana.
As long as this fundamental impulse and impetus of the imperialist mission is not disturbed, the natives can get on with the business of sorting themselves out often in bloody confrontations which leave death and utter destruction in their wake. Colonization is not a tea party or a benign adventure on behalf of humanity despite the civilizing razzmatazz.
In his second and third installment about what he termed as the receptacle of power or the warehouse of power, Akhaine is on surer ground when he brings in the concept of the state-nation as an analytic category for capturing the production and distribution of power in the Nigerian postcolonial dominion.
He quotes himself and quite rightly too: “State-bearing nation refers to the strategic control of state institutions by a nationality , not necessarily dominant demographically in a plural society, but capable of dictating the content and direction of state policies.”
The difference between the nation-state proper and its state-nation simulations is that whereas in nation-states, national institutions evolve alongside state paraphernalia with forces of civil and political society acting in concert to modulate and moderate the excesses of the state, in state-nations, the nation owes its life and continued existence to the state which often act to impede or stall its democratic aspirations.
The colonial conquest of Africa and the subjugation of its people was not an act of friendly persuasion. Force—sheer minatory violence—was the organizing principle. Unlike what obtained in the Westphalia nation-state in which the military acted at the behest of the nation, it was the army that founded and owned the colonial nation. All the subsequent anomalies that have hobbled Nigeria’s march to organic nationhood can be traced to this fundamental aberration.
The litany of colonially induced woes is quiet extensive and benumbing. Odion-Akhaine dredges them up with painstaking assiduity. They include rigged census, rigged elections, rigged recruitment into the armed forces and political organizations to ensure the northern veto and the manipulation of religious and cultural fault lines.
Odion-Akhaine writes with persuasive force and unimpeachable logic about the nation-disabling antics of the colonial masters. According to him: “Statecraft trumped nation-building. The former is about central control, while the latter is about bridging, merging, and realigning the identity forces, normalizing them, and ensuring the inclusivity of the component nationalities of the Nigerian state. Instead, the Lugardian Achitecture ensured that policies were mainstreamed to ensure the domination of the northern elite.”
This was the poisoned chalice the departing colonial masters handed down to the Nigerian elite in the guise of a new nation. Yet it ought to be obvious that without elite reorientation and the re-engineering of political ethos leading to a new national consensus about the immanent destiny of the greatest conglomeration of Black people anybody thinking that peace, stability and genuine liberal democracy would follow must be living in a fool’s paradise.
As we have said many times, Nigeria is structurally rigged against rationality and peaceful order. The state is at war with the nation, and the nation is at war with itself. The colonial terror machine bequeathed to the nation is an impersonal, equal opportunity terminator which does not recognize anybody except its extant handlers.
Any wonder, then, that after the series of coups, civil wars, mutinies, social and religious upheavals and the summary annulment of the freest and fairest presidential election in its post-independence history by a military cabal and its oligarchic enablers, Nigeria again almost suffered a fatal implosion in the last presidential election?
Nigeria is like a serial political gambler whose luck has continued to hold. But it should be obvious to the discerning observer that this legendary reprieve cannot go on forever unless the critical issues are critically addressed.
Many critics believe that this is a crisis of democratic succession rather than a crisis of fundamental state impairment. They cite mundane ephemerality such as the “Emilokan” Syndrome as famously propounded by the leading candidate who is now the president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.
Yet it should be obvious that the “Emilokan” outburst was itself a mere symptom of an underlying serious ailment. Given the legendary capacity of the Nigerian political class for mischief and haymaking, it is a miracle that the political reapproachment and elite consensus which underwrites the post-military dispensation beginning with the Obasanjo civilian regime has lasted for twenty four years before it began to show signs of terminal weariness or the need for repacting.
Even then, it was not for want of spirited attempts to undermine it. In 1999 despite the prevailing atmosphere of conciliation and compromise after the tragedy of June 12 and Abiola’s demise, there were still some rogue elements of the Nigerian political class who insisted on exercising their fundamental human rights by contesting both the PDP primary and presidential election itself.
By 2003 when he began contesting for the presidency in a serial losing run which lasted till 2015 when he finally won the laurel, General Mohammadu Buhari exhibited an unwavering disdain for elite consensus.
Inside the PDP nest of intrigues itself, it is a well-known fact that President Obasanjo barely survived the spirited efforts of Abubakar Atiku, the Vice President, to unhorse him. Having survived the scare, Obasanjo himself went on to attempt a tinkering with the constitution in a doomed Third Term bid.
By 2023, the wheels finally began to fall off the clattering locomotive of elite consensus. This was against the backdrop of certain ominous developments in the polity. There was the Sharia gambit of 2001 which suggested that the core north was very uncomfortable with losing power and was bent on doing something about it.
There was the Boko Haram religious insurrection which began as a local discontent only to snowball into a regional conflagration. The east became a hotbed of separatist agitation even as flashes of economic sabotage persisted in the Delta.
As growing insecurity and the menace of Fulani herdsmen began to undermine the peace and security hitherto enjoyed by the region, the old west and its radical intelligentsia began to champion the cause of negotiated separation or some drastic reconfiguration of the extant unitary structure of the country bequeathed by the feudal/military complex.
It was against this background of the polarization of the nation and the return of the National Question in a sharply accentuated form that the game of thrones of 2023 opened. Under General Mohammadu Buhari’s watch, the old north appeared to be in danger of losing its fabled and much rhapsodized magical touch and the power of ethnic cum religious veto with which it has railroaded the rest of the country into electoral compliance.
Two significant developments in the polity showcased the scary possibilities of a looming electoral debacle. First the PDP, panicked by the possibility of becoming a permanent opposition party, opened up its presidential sweepstakes to all comers in flagrant contravention of the founding clause of the party which stipulated that power must be rotated between the north and the south.
In similar manner, and not wanting to become a sitting electoral duck, the ruling APC opted for a same-faith ticket in open defiance of an unwritten clause that has operated throughout the post-military Fourth Republic, thus igniting a ruckus of discontent in several sectors of the country, particularly among northern minority Christian groups who felt betrayed and even persecuted by the arrangement.
To complete the millennial meltdown, Peter Obi, sensing an electoral shellacking by Atiku, his former boss and running mate, suddenly decamped from the PDP only to show up in the supposedly leftward leaning Labour Party, a party for which he had never shown any ideological affinity or political consanguinity. The stage was thus set for a political duel unto death without any higher political ideals or ideological and moral probity.
It is intellectually rich and a grim misapplication of the Biblical code to assign any higher morality to the decision of the group of northern governors to support Bola Ahmed Tinubu in their party presidential primary after General Buhari put his boot in against Tinubu’s aspiration on the floor of the party primary. It was borne out of grim survivalist calculation and a brave attempt to stem the tide of electoral anarchy which would have put paid to the Fourth Republic.
General Buhari’s aloof contempt for conciliation had become legendary. To the more discerning among his younger gubernatorial colleagues, he had become a political liability to both party and nation at that point in time.
To do his bidding would have been tantamount to signing a collective death warrant. In a strange drama of political self-abnegation, he himself had acquiesced to being summarily put to the sword even before the ink had dried on his presidential proclamation.
If it were not for the pained grimace of stupefaction the former infantry officer wore that long night and the hint of surly distaste for what was unfolding, one could have thought that a master political illusionist was putting on a major show.
In such circumstances, it is the presidential candidate with the least baggage who was bound to prevail. In a stunning dispersal of electoral fortunes and forcible redrawing of map similar only to what can be described as the interpellation of forces in politics, no candidate had been able to impose his might on the populace.
Such was the cliffhanger that electoral upsets were recorded in strange and unfamiliar places. But by the same token, those who were hoping for a major disruption or an electoral deadlock which would have put paid to the system eventuating in an extra-constitutional interim government could not muster enough votes to achieve their anti-democratic agenda.
The presidential election of 2023 represents a watershed in Nigeria’s electoral evolution. With the apparent breakdown of the old elite consensus giving way to a new multi-plurality of voices, the hitherto centralized monolithic production of power yielded to a multi-valence and micro-pluralism of power vectors. In the process, an emerging national consciousness , quaint and conservative in nature and orientation, has suffered a drastic pushback.
This may well be the greatest achievement of the ethnic cum religious cum social combustion known as the “obedient movement”. But in a great irony the greatest beneficiary of the obedient commotion has been the current administration. The post-commotion quietude has allowed the Tinubu regime to strike out in its own peculiar and idiosyncratic manner without the fear of any hegemonic bugbear chafing and snapping at its heel.
If the administration maintains its calm despite the possibility of a fearsome backlash from the outraged and outfoxed forces of the old order, we may be witnessing the crystallization of a new elite consensus. One thing we can reestablish from the last election is the fact that it is impossible to gain electoral ascendancy in a vast and chaotic ensemble like Nigeria without substantial elite compliance.
This is the lesson the core Buharists learnt in 2011 after the resort of their rabble to carnage and destruction. It is the lesson other groups aiming to rule Nigeria must now take to heart. Even a revolutionary reconfiguration of the nation under the current template can only come from elite consensus. In attempting an intellectual excavation of his country in a testy moment of electoral disquiet, Sylvester Odion-Akhaine has carried out a yeoman’s assignment. He ought to be commended.
