Struggle or ceaseless contention whether at the personal or impersonal level and whether it is physical, metaphysical or cerebral, is about the most important aspect of human existence. We see it every day either at the nuclear family level, the extended family, the national, the societal, the global, gender and even at the most intensely personal levels. There can be no progress without conflict. No human advancement is possible without struggle; no civilization is feasible without some antagonistic exertions. Throughout recorded history, humanity has always oscillated between peaceful cohabitation and violent confrontation. Under peace humans covet war and during war they court peace. This is one of the most intriguing paradoxes of human existence.
Penultimate Thursday on the thirty second anniversary of the June 12, 1993 presidential election whose outcome was annulled by a military cabal, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu in his national broadcast unveiled a list of the protagonists of the struggle to rid the country of military despotism. The symbolic import of the moment was lost on many. Following on the protocol established earlier by General Mohammadu Buhari who broke the ice by insisting that Abiola, the winner of the annulled election, was a legitimately elected president of Nigeria, Tinubu’s was a bold and lightning move on the political chessboard which shattered the myth of the old feudal order and prised the lingering limpets of their remaining delusions and tenuous hold on political reality. It was a move which was as disruptive of the last vestigial remnants of the hegemonic coalition which has prevented Nigeria’s emergence as a modern nation as it was redolent of the possibility of a new beginning for Nigeria.
President Tinubu must have struggled with himself and the list, judging by subsequent disclosures. It is no easy task coming up with a list of prodemocracy notables in a nation hobbled by divisions and fractured down the line by intense schisms. There are significant omissions and contradictions galore, apart from one or two curios and political hermaphrodites. For example Ken Saro-Wiwa and his Ogoni nation did not even bother to vote on June 12 1993 as a result of a lingering dispute with the Nigerian state but they are united with the June 12 agitators by their mutual hostility to the authoritarian antics of a harsh, unitarist state. In a paradoxical tribute to the residual powers of the postcolonial state to reorder the life of its citizens some living people were awarded lower honours than the one they already got while others were subject to state vivisection or posthumous retribution.
But that does not vitiate the integrity of the gesture, nor its symbolic significance. There will be rectifications as the pressure eases. It is important to always retain a sense of the longer perspective or what the French call “la longue duree” in these matters. Nobody would have thought this possible twenty five years earlier as General Obasanjo began a deliberate and systematic roll-back of the gains of demilitarization by substituting brutish autocratic rule for fledgling democratic governance until he met his comeuppance in the hands of a resurgent senate led by Ken Nnamani. But here we are with the guns of hilly redoubts funereally silent. The cunning of history cannot be more cunning.
READ ALSO: How we contracted infections using school toilets – Pupils
What is even more important is to retain a sense of struggle as the constant and permanent imperative of human existence. Without struggle, nothing can be gained and all will be lost. Without struggle, a society resembles a stagnant pool with foul and fetid odour oozing from its dark disabled mass totally lacking in restorative energy and dynamism. A stagnant pool cannot move itself forward, not to talk of its contents therein which are trapped in terminal inertia and progressive decay. It is useful to recall that before the whole concept of jihad became militarized and weaponized as an instrument of relentless conquest spearheaded by the Muslim conquerors of modern Turkey, it meant “self-striving” or self-struggle, that is constant self-improvement at the physical, intellectual and spiritual level. But the idea of the jihad as unrelenting siege against “unbelievers” helped the Ottoman warriors to steamroll an enormous swathe of Europe until it met its peril outside the gates of Vienna in 1683. Thereafter, a rapidly industrializing Western Europe infused with the dynamism of new technological advancement and philosophical enlightenment took over the reins of power and began to inflict serial humiliation on the Islamic world, a development which reached its apogee this past week with the remarkable blitzing of Iran by America and Israel.
As we have seen with the June 12 campaign, the struggle for the democratic emancipation of a society is often spearheaded by the most articulate and enlightened segment of the society. But its bounties and dividends do not exclude or exempt any section of the society. The most recalcitrant and vociferous elements who were in support of the annulment are among the greatest contemporary beneficiaries of a democratic Nigeria. Active saboteurs of the democratic ethos and key members of the annullists’ innermost caucus and those who vowed to shoot Abiola the very moment he was declared president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria have since held down important posts in the post-military Republic including the senate presidency without anybody disturbing them or attempting to annul their election despite the glaring electoral malfeasance. Some of them have continued to strut and preen about as if nothing happened and without any sense of shame or remorse.
This is the historic burden individuals, groups and sub-nationals at the frontiers of consciousness and human developments are called upon to bear with grace and nobility. In multi-national nations with uneven and even countervailing modes of economic, political and spiritual productions, it is often the most advanced and the most politically conscious segments of the society that are called upon to carry the burden of civilizational advancement on behalf of the rest of the society. If they are lucky, they escape with hideous scars, if not it is genocide and relentless pogroms or structural and systematic exclusion from power.
The June 12 debacle is illustrative of persistent attempts to undermine or short-circuit Nigeria’s journey to authentic nationhood. In the run up to independence, those who stalled and stonewalled about whether it was the right time for national emancipation from colonial slavery and servitude, those who preferred the unfreedom of medieval peonage to the freedom of postcolonial civilization despite all its troubling shortcomings, were also the first to seize the levers of state power with the active connivance of the colonial powers. Rigged against political, economic and spiritual rationality, it is as if the nation is deliberately programmed to self-destruct. The dire consequences are inevitable. When the risible charade eventuated in pogroms, ethnic insurrections, communal upheavals, military rebellion and a tragic civil war with millions of casualties, it was those who had been discarded whose economic expertise was called upon to rescue the nation from economic collapse.
With no lesson learnt and nothing forgotten, the wild binge and infantile romance with national suicide continued with the short-lived Second Republic. This time around, it was a man who had famously insisted that he desired to be nothing but a federal lawmaker who was adjudged to be the most qualified for the job. Lack of preparation for the job was the most efficient and effective preparation for the job. It was no more than superintending the most stupendous and mindboggling state larceny and unhinged looting of the national patrimony ever visited on modern humanity. After four years, the Bazaar of Beelzebub was terminated by the military that then proceeded to unleash the most horrendous instance of state aggression on the populace including widespread murder of citizens, state liquidation, mysterious disappearances, ethnic cleansing all culminating in a nasty civil war which claimed over two million citizens.
When the whole thing ended in tears and predictable tragedy all over again in 1998 with the mysterious demise of General Sani Abacha, the hegemonic forces that have held Nigeria hostage since independence went back to traditional quarters once again to rescue the beleaguered nation. Unfortunately for the nation and his core supporters, General Obasanjo, due to limitations of character and intellect, mistook the sacred mandate to get the nation back on track with a charter of messianic intolerance and autocratic delusions. Mysterious eliminations persisted. Spellbinding corruption resurged.
With the Owu-born soldier having set the template, Nigeria once again began to list and lurch about like an old ship that had entered uncharted waters and without any certificate of seaworthiness. Such was the unprecedented instances of economic heists and the mismanagement of ethnic, cultural and political diversities that by 2023 Nigeria was facing a seismic implosion. This time around, it appeared as if the nation’s legendary run of luck was about to desert it.
This was the volatile and combustible conjuncture that threw up President Bola Ahmed Tinubu who is himself a veteran of many of the struggles and an epitome of life at the barricades. This time around, the organic crisis of the state has produced a dangerous power void. The old Selectorate, crippled by loss of credibility and historical legitimacy, were too enfeebled to make any serious move. With their wits scrambled and their perception of reality distorted by historic confusion, the hegemonic rump of the extant power bloc could not bring themselves to directly endorse Tinubu. And since heavens help those who help themselves, particularly in a normless postcolonial coliseum, it was Tinubu himself who made a direct power grab in an election that was as contentious as it was also redolent of the possibility of throwing up the hegemonic hub of a new power formation in the country.
What Tinubu’s numerous detractors seem to forget is that an angelic leadership cannot evolve from a demonic environment. In the circumstances and in the absence of substantial elite consensus in a nation already split down the line by the misappropriation of its rich heritage of diversities anybody thinking of completely free and fair elections can continue to live in a fools’ paradise. It will not happen. We should stop putting the cart before the horse in this country. Successful elections are the outcome of intricate pacting and strenuous elite negotiations based on a give and take spirit and continuous struggle for self-improvement. This is not decided on election’s day but well before. Elections are routine manifestation of the state of the society itself. This is why countries such as Ghana, Senegal and Tanzania are enjoying a smoother democratic run than Nigeria.
So far, President Tinubu has managed to contain the economic turbulence arising from the neoliberal prototype he has unleashed on the country with its hints of harsh inequities, brutal neocon social engineering and its Darwinian survival of the fittest. But deep resentments run deep and hunger abides. He has also managed to spring the traps of calculated political blackmail, sustained ethnic baiting and open courting of military intervention emanating from some quarters. Yet apart from the gale of defections which is nothing more than a shuffling of meal tickets among desperate politicians, what looked like the dawn of a new hegemonic power hub appears to have receded into the shadows leaving in its trail a resurgence of inter-ethnic hostilities and murderous confrontations in several northern states. With Benue State foaming in blood, it appears that the old masters of genocidal expansion and lebensraum are back in the game of testing the nerve of the nation to see whether something will give. If they succeed in Benue, they will train their gaze on the South.
The president should not allow it to be said that the tenuous cord binding Nigeria’s fractious nationalities together finally snapped under his watch. There is little courtesy or accommodation one can extend to people who take delight in shedding the blood of their fellow citizens just to gain political advantage. Taking strong bold steps to preserve the corporeal integrity of the nation cannot be incompatible with vote-harvesting. In any case, those who perpetrate such crimes cannot be interested in elections or democracy for that matter. In 2015 at the inception of the Buhari administration, this column recommended the inauguration of a National Commission for Horizontal and Vertical Integration which works at the level of restoring and maintaining economic, ethnic and religious parity for all Nigerians. Unfortunately, the circumstances have since worsened and the country is being gradually returned to a theatre of massive bloodletting.
No rational human courts war and disorder. Yet under peace some people desire war just to satisfy their nihilistic neuroses. If they cannot build civilizations they can help to destroy extant ones. With the most agriculturally productive belts of the nation already a prohibited zone thus inducing astronomical rises in the price of staple food, with our highways swarming with murderous marauders crippling inter-state commerce, it is beginning to feel as if the country is being gradually placed on a war-footing. The merchants of occupational terror and expansionist genocide are back on the prowl and Nigeria might have entered another decisive phase in the struggle for the soul of the nation. With the global order fast unravelling, it is a case of every nation for itself. The nation in itself has no chance.
President Tinubu has shown more than enough political nous and guile not to appreciate the fierce urgency of the moment and how to go about the latest manifestation of the organic crisis of the Nigerian postcolonial state. Let his courage and political pluck not desert him at the appropriate hour. His Gboko Declaration and marching order to security forces will be read as a threat and oblique declaration of war in the appropriate quarters. The president needs to watch his back in the coming months. You can be right and yet be wronged. This is the signal lesson of the June 12 imbroglio.
