Neither President Muhammadu Buhari nor his predecessors have correctly read the coded messages embedded in the surging and widespread attacks and killings suffusing the polity. There is indeed no indication anyone of substance in or outside the Buhari presidency is thinking about these rebellions beyond the superficial. As far as many of them are concerned, the eruptions are symptomatic of economic troubles and inadequate or perhaps outdated law and order measures. The Agatu (Benue State) killings attributed to rampaging herdsmen from within and outside Nigeria have caused untold suffering and deaths and the sacking of many villages and farmlands. To counter the problem, soldiers are being drafted to the troubled areas.
Contradistinctively, the Zaria killings, which Shiites insist led to hundreds of their members losing their lives, were blamed on the army’s deployment of disproportionate force against the religious group. A judicial panel is already investigating the clash. There is, however, no indication that such eruptions involving the military and protesting or ‘recalcitrant’ civil/religious groups can be extirpated by the recommendations of any inquiry. The seeds of the rebellion are much deeper than the clashes suggest or the inquiry will find out. The Boko Haram rebellion in the Northeast is blamed on poverty and socio-economic alienation, and is thought to have been fuelled by the Libyan state collapse which made weapons readily available. There is of course a nexus between crime and poverty, but the intensity of the rebellion experienced in that blighted region cannot be attributed to poverty alone.
Just as herdsmen are on rampage in many parts of the country and farmlands, and security agents are sometimes compounding the crisis of insecurity, the practiced recreancy of kidnappers and other sundry criminals has been stretching law enforcement facilities to breaking point. No state, town or village is safe, governments are unable to pay salaries, the private sector is distressed, and cultists, some in their pre-teen years, are subverting the entire society with a fearsome malevolence that ignores a retributive tomorrow.
To tackle these diverse problems, all that the government and the society seem capable of are a series of admonitions anchored on religious platitudes, bigger and fiercer deployment of law enforcement logistics, and increasingly excessive reliance on extrajudicial measures that circumscribe both the criminal and penal codes. In short, there is little or no attempt whatsoever to understand the convergence of the problems threatening the foundations of the society and the body politic. Furthermore, there is no effort to study the complex juxtaposition of Nigerian cultures against the delicate and sometimes antinomian cultures of foreign social and political ideologies. What is even worse is that due to indiscipline and lack of knowledge, Nigeria’s elected rulers have tended to run a federalist constitution along unitary lines, a sort of new wine in implausibly old wineskin.
Though the Nigerian system is proving increasingly unworkable, in fact proving more crisis prone than ever, there is nothing the past few presidencies have done to show they are capable of the kind of futuristic thinking and application of panaceas that led white South African leaders to end apartheid in the fairly amicable manner they did, rather than the fiery apocalypse many doomsayers predicted. Nigerian rulers, including the present one, are determined to retain the unworkable economic and political structures imposed by the 1999 constitution, and the antagonistic social and cultural relations of the major ethnic groups. The current economic model is exploitative and disruptive, while the often antagonistic Nigerian tribes subscribe to a perverse form of ethnic supremacy and clannishness that filter into and corrupt governance at the highest level. The cultural and political iconoclasm indispensable to the founding of a new and sustainable polity, and integral to its smooth-running, is not only absent here, it was disavowed by past military rulers and now spurned by elected civilian leaders.
The situation is, therefore, grim, and the portents deeply troubling. Political and economic alienation will worsen, and insecurity will gnaw at the sinews of the country and sap its citizens and leaders of the energy needed to remould and redirect its fiercely obstreperous young, many of whom have embraced either cultism or joined fringe groups. It will not matter whether the death penalty is provided for these crimes; the anti-social elements are too far gone and too alienated to care.
Despite widespread pessimism about the capacity and willingness of Nigerian leaders to courageously embrace the real change needed to curb the menace, there is really no other choice but to double down and face the problems squarely, imaginatively and enterprisingly. In many parts of the country, the police are already overwhelmed, as the Boko Haram insurgency showed. Soon, the military will also be overwhelmed, as many other countries have demonstrated. To avoid this terrible fate, it is time the president and his team accurately read the codes in the crises and unrest inundating the country. He has done nothing yet to tackle the problems, just like his predecessors unwisely waited until there was no more elbow room to manoeuvre. The president has left the structure of the economy as he met it, with absolutely no hint he recognises its weaknesses, nor any indication he knows what should be done about those weaknesses. He has suggested nothing about the absolutely unworkable existing political structure, which is too enervated and compromised to offer immunity against destabilisation. And he has given no idea what kind of social engineering he proposes to enable the fractious cultures of the country to begin working together seamlessly.
A united Nigeria will not be created simply because a Ministry of Orientation engages in propaganda to engender unity. And a stable Nigeria will not materialise simply because the president has managed to embrace a cause whose propaganda value is productive and all-encompassing. Nigeria needs deep and fundamental changes on the economy and political fronts, and those changes must be administered very urgently. It needs different political paradigms, quite distinct from previous ones; perhaps new paradigms, perhaps a return to a modified past. What is not an option is to do nothing. What is not an option is to pretend that with better law enforcement and perhaps a fairly buoyant economy, the looming anarchy and flow of blood can be stanched. What is not an option is to assume that without help, the system can be self-correcting. It did not correct itself in the past five decades and more; it won’t now. The danger is so huge and imminent, and the task so difficult and complex that the president must imaginatively kick-start the process of instituting real, not sloganeering, change.
The many flashpoints around the country, and the takeover of the streets and back streets and recesses by teenage cultists, kidnappers and hardened criminals are passing series of coded messages about the political and economic health of the country to those presiding over the affairs of the country. They have a historic duty to decode the messages and do something about them. But the fear is that the country’s leaders will meet this historic duty with their customary historic complacency, a complacency bred by decades of incompetence, arrogance, poor vision and lack of judgement, courage and questionable patriotism.
