It is beyond speculation that the Nigerian state faces a crisis of grave magnitude. But the absence of a critical interrogation of officialdom in relations to the fundamental principles of modern governance leads to an even more terrifying moral and political void. In the circumstance, some fundamental principles on which modern governance is anchored which always seem to elude us must now be brought back to the front burner.
One of these is the honourable and noble art of resignation. Resignation, like preferment itself, is an integral part of the arcane rituals of domination which preserve the integrity of governance. Without integrity, there is no hegemony. This is because domination cannot be based on force and coercion for long.
It is with sadness and weary resignation that we note that the noble and honourable art of resignation is a stranger to these climes. Africans simply don’t resign. They are forced out. Even when they are recalled from the Diaspora, resignation is not part of their social framing. The culture of resignation always seems so strange and un-African simply because it is a product of politics with principle and public service powered by visionary self-sacrifice and the suppression of ego.
Yet in moments like this even as the state appears a hopelessly lost case, a few resignations might help. In civilised climes, whenever a government suffers a major public policy reversal or retreat, a few resignations are inevitable. Resignations are the secret elixir for a failing government. Like a magic balm, they help to soothe frayed nerves and reassure the public that the sacred covenant between them and the rulers is intact. More importantly, resignations help to restart the stalled clock of governance. A national project is, after all, not a one-crisis wonder.
Accompanying this festival of fear and trembling and in fact prompting its dark arithmetic, is a tectonic shift in public awareness and citizen participation in governance. Since it was caught napping by this paradigm shift, it is obvious that this government needs help from concerned and patriotic Nigerians about how to get going again.
Enlightened self-interest dictates so. This is not about any transformation agenda. That is gross self-delusion. But there are fates worse than imaginary transformation. Having shot itself in the foot by a badly misjudged public policy and with its major economic plank consumed by public adversity, this government must be helped back to its feet in the national interest.
At no other point in our history have ethnicity and the ethnicisation of the presidency become more obvious and damaging to the national spirit. To be sure, this is a phenomenon that predates Jonathan. Every presidency that Nigeria has produced, from Shagari to Jonathan through Obasanjo and Yar’Adua, has resorted to playing the ethnic card when the going gets rough. But with Jonathan, this tribal caterwauling has reached its crescendo and ultimate nation-disabling possibility. This is not a sensible game for a minority group just coming into its own. Jonathan must rein in the antics of his excitable rabble-rousers. .
In looking out for help, the government must first help itself. Humility dictates that the Jonathan administration must now go back to the drawing board. But it must shed some ethical baggage. For some of his advisors to go about pokerfaced as if nothing has happened is infuriating and damaging to the logic of public order and responsibility. Even in Stone Age societies, arrogant incompetence and lack of elementary wisdom could not be rewarded with cosy preferment. The wages of public obloquy is swift resignation.
All those officials who staked their prestige, authority and dubious acclaim on a misbegotten public policy that has badly backfired at such a huge cost to the national fabric must now resign and give way for Jonathan to inject fresh blood into his team. However skewed and rigged against the poor and the wretched of the earth, even neo-liberal economics is predicated on a certain western rationality.
That rationality has its obligations. Margaret Thatcher, the hand-bagging matriarch of monetarist economics who once famously pronounced that there was no such thing as society, was forced to resign when it became obvious that she had become a disruptive and bitterly divisive figure in British society. It is only in the heart of darkness that public officials want to eat their cake and have it.
Honour is a major platform for the national project, and a major plank for a truly nationalist ruling class. Without honour, there can be no national project or a nationalist class for that matter. The Nigerian nation is predicated on a series of overlapping and interlocking paradoxes. The paradox of the Nigerian post-colonial polity is that honour has become an essential commodity.
An essential commodity is a necessary commodity. But in the cruel semantic irony introduced by military rule, an essential commodity is a rare commodity that is not readily available. Yet without honour anchored on core values and a fanatical adherence to their dictates, there can be no coherent or cohesive national project or a Nationalist elite worth its salt.
It is only in rare and extreme cases that you find people resigning from public office on their own volition or out of respect for personal and public integrity. Resignation is simply out of it even where the official has become a hazard to public health. The problem is that public offices are often viewed through the prism of ethnic quota or tribal census. You are not in office to represent or project certain ideals but to promote and project certain primordial loyalties. Nobody ever willingly spits out a juicy morsel.
In the ethical void, certified thieves are often given a hero’s welcome when they return to their ancestral homesteads. As the Americans famously said of Mobutu, he may be a bastard, but he is their bastard. As long as primordial loyalties override national interests and core values, there will be no nation or a national elite class that is worth its salt. In that case, the very idea of Nigeria as a nation will be a mere notion or notification of intent for a very long time. This is not some grim prophesy but a statement of fact. Without a pan-national ruling class to drive its core values, the nation is a nullity ab initio.
Painfully, it must now be added that our major religions and some of their principalities have not been of any help to the nation in driving its core values and building a nationalist ethos. When religious notables romance with political notables who have swindled their way to power, and who have brought their nation to economic ruins, doubts prey on the minds of ordinary folks about the efficacy of honour and principles.
In the north, a feudal protection racket based on organised religion has allowed the scions of the oligarchy to get away with blue murder. But it is now obvious that this protectionist racket has overreached itself as political sharia has mutated into the real thing, threatening the base and very basis of the theocratic order imposed by Usman Dan Fodio.
As it is at the moment, only the hard-pressed Nigerian military is standing between the north and a blood-soaked enactment of Afghanistan on African soil. The twelfth imam will not come from the Sultanate but from the old empire of Idris Alooma.
In the south, particularly in the roiling urban centres, the phenomenon of Pentecostal predation in the guise of prosperity preaching and other forms of spiritual racketeering have led to massive alienation and a dazed withdrawal from the state as a source of succour and solace. This has led to all kinds of anti-social activities ranging from violent robbery, kidnapping, extortion and the rise of mafia-like criminal cartels. Since this is based on the spiritual magic of wealth without hard work, the negative radicalism of it all keeps everybody very busy and both the rich and the poor permanently awake.
The question must now be asked as to whether our extant religions can drive a nationalist ethos without being adapted and subordinated to local conditions. But it is also obvious that because of its transcendental message, religion goes beyond nation space and time. In fact Islam is implacably contemptuous of the nation-state paradigm. Yet it was not until certain European nations overthrew the colonial suzerainty of the Catholic Church that they came into their own as the true embodiments of the will of new states.
If a political elite cannot overcome political and economic difficulties, it is hard to see how they can overcome spiritual contradictions and religious roguery. In fact as it is evident in contemporary Nigeria, religious roguery is an ideological apparatus of the state often deployed in hegemonic battles for the consciousness of the populace. Once the state is absolved of the responsibility for the prosperity of the populace, penury becomes a marker of personal worthlessness and divine disgrace.
In the light of this multi-dimensional elite failure spread across spiritual, economic and political realms, there are those who believe that a national elite that cannot manage national integration will also mismanage national disintegration. The Nigerian political class is so corrupt and incompetent that it is simply incapable of the cultured and civilized procedure that led to the dissolution of the old Czechoslovakia.
It takes empire builders to build an empire even where it has lapsed into disgrace, just as it takes genuine nationalists to build a nation even in ruins. Those who cannot build anything cannot maintain anything. This is why we must return to first principles. One of these is the culture of resignation. Let us return to the honourable art of resignation.
