Tag: the nation

In its modern incarnation, the National question arose from a feeling of marginalization and oppression by distinct nationalities who felt cheated or shortchanged by the forcible imperialist restructuring of their territorial space.  Some of them were rendered stateless or technically nation-less. But in some embryonic forms, the national question has been with us since the beginning of civilization and modern warfare.

It is captured for posterity in the Israelite dirge of loss and traumatic captivity. How can we sing King Alpha’s song in a strange land?  Today, there are many children of Alpha crying for freedom even in their own land. With floods of refugees sacking the most secure bastions of the nation-state paradigm, with America virtually fractured along racial lines, it is the return of the repressed. The National Question has returned to haunt the global order. It has become the International Question.

If gold can rust, what will iron do? The public climate in contemporary Nigeria is of such burning hostility and ferocity that it has proved impossible to achieve consensus on any matter, be it the wobbling economy, fiscal federalism, restructuring, appropriate federalism, the nature of the nation itself or the transformation of the paradigm of change. It is an enervating Bedlam which reminds one of the film, One Flew out of the Cuckoo’s Nest. The Tower of Babel itself would have been a model of moderate and modest exchanges.

A lot of this reflex hostility is based on myths presenting themselves as grand actualities and on ethnic and regional fears masquerading as facts. Yet it should also be obvious to the various gladiators that without some minimal consensus on the destiny of the nation, moving it forward is an impossibility. We can continue to rave and rant till the end of eternity and we would still be where our colonial masters left us.

The problem with the politics of change leading to a change of politics is that it does not advert our mind to certain changes taking place in the polity without any prodding or prompting from the government. Certain emergent forces, both national and international, are beginning to take away the resolution of both the national and the continental question from the political elites of Nigeria in particular and Africa in general.

Hunger and burning resentment do not conduce to rational and respectful citizens. If President Mohammadu Buhari expected the Nigerian populace to show gratitude and admiration of for the new “Change begins with me” campaign, he must have been appalled and dismayed by the fury and ferocity of the return to sender response.

With many citizens charging the government with a betrayal of fundamental obligation and poverty of emotional intelligence, this new effort at national mobilization is dead on arrival. The renewal and rejuvenation of national consciousness cannot begin at the deck of the pyramid of fraud. It is a top/bottom affair. That is why you have the political elite in the first instance. The dominated cannot be made to bear the burden and dereliction of the dominant.

Perhaps the problem has to do with the conceptual hiatus at the heart of contemporary governance in Nigeria. With the “change begins with me” mantra, the weaknesses and intellectual limitations of the Buhari government are in bold and open display. You cannot whip the people into line when you have not convincingly whipped the political elite into line. When the first Buhari administration inaugurated the war against indiscipline campaign, many citizens openly and willingly bought into it because the body language and the opening salvoes suggested that the unsmiling duo meant business.

But not so this time around. First unlike WAI, this one is coming rather late in the day and as an afterthought; a mere response to grave political pressures from civil and political society. It does not portray the government as a proactive and active organ but as a tentative and temporizing entity probing and feeling its way forward without any conceptual organogram or ideological master-plan.

Although so far nobody has had the courage and audacity to query General Buhari’s personal probity, controversies continue to dog the integrity of the current campaign against corruption and the lop-sided nature of sensitive national appointments. The problem really is that the government appears to feed on a daily calorie of paranoia and paralysis. Paralysis as a result of its intellectual deficiencies and paranoia about the kind of help and friends it must seek to help it move the nation forward.

But to dwell on all this is a tad unfair without also mentioning some positive developments such as the overall improvement of power supply, the humongous and staggering nature of loot recovered and the valiant efforts to secure the nation against sundry miscreants. The presence of conflicts is not synonymous with the absence of development. All human societies evolve in conflict and dynamic contradictions. Since the National Question resonates through these developments, they bear close monitoring and conceptual clarifications.

With “Operation Crocodile Smile” extending its theatre of operations and with General Buhari warning Biafran separatists for the umpteenth time that the unity of the country is not negotiable, what is crystallizing is a law and order administration which will go to war to defend the territorial integrity of the nation and to provide security for the citizens. In other words, a super-security state is attempting to impose territorial order and security on Nigeria at a time when the economic, political and spiritual insecurity of Nigerians has never been more severe and crippling.

A super-security state which does not address the political architecture of the nation or the devolution of economic power to more vibrant sectors of the polity is bound to come into potentially prohibitive contradictions with forces spawned by these foundational anomalies. This is why it is important at this point to offer some conceptual clarifications about the vexed National Question. There are three important issues to isolate.

Although the International Question is present in the National Question, the two are often in conflict and they sometimes exist in a state of paradoxical and contradictory reciprocity. The International Question came into being with the hegemonic dominance of the nation-state paradigm imposed on the rest of the world by European civilization. Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and the Americas were forcibly restructured in compliance with the dominant paradigm of envisioning the global order.

After the Second World War, the League of Nations transformed into the United Nations. This was in direct and dynamic response to German, and to a less extent, Japanese nationalist militarism. In the case of the Germans, they felt that The Treaty of Versailles which imposed punitive retributions on a proud and warlike people was unfair and unjust. In the case of the Japanese, it arose from indignation at the global dominance of western powers and the abiding resentment arising from Commodore Perry’s humiliating trip to Japanese shores at the close of the nineteenth century.

The United Nations is an example of how the global order can restructure itself in response to international pressures. But this has not stopped international conflicts as new forces of history come into collision with old forces. The colonial cartography of Africa and the Middle East which resulted in a posse of unstable and often unviable nations, the rise of a unipolar world with America as supreme power and the pressures from a resurgent and resentful Russia powered by Slavic nationalism, have concentrated the mind of the international community.

Thus the Colonial Question which was solved but not resolved by the forcible restructuring of Africa and the Middle East in the national image of their European conquerors has turned out to be the greatest threat to global peace as seen in the violent flashpoints of Syria, Yemen, Kuwait, Iraq, Congo, Nigeria etc, They all speak to unfinished business and the need for constant repair works.

To be fair to the colonialists, they maintained fidelity to the home culture of permanent maintenance in their attitude to their overseas possessions. Whether this maintenance was for the right purpose or in the right direction is another matter. The reason for the amalgamation of the northern and southern protectorates of Nigeria is suspect. Thereafter, Nigeria was ruled very much like a dual-state nation only for a flurry of restructuring exercises to take place in the final run to independence.

It was during this period which lasted until military intervention in 1966 and the collapse of the First Republic that what approximated to many observers’ ideal of a beneficial and benevolent federalism was practiced in Nigeria. According to the romantic lore of federalism, this was Nigeria’s golden epoch when regional autonomy and fiscal federalism reigned supreme. The three regions were in dynamic competition which spurred growth and meaningful development.

At this point in time, the demon of forcible cohabitation for the purpose of surplus extraction which spurred the original amalgamation of the various protectorates appeared to have been exorcised. However, a more vicious mutation of the demon emerged thereafter. Using the nation’s vulnerability to centrifugal and polarizing forces as an excuse, the military realigned the nation with the statist and centralizing worldview of its original colonial conquerors. The structure of federating units was forcibly restructured and de-federalized into dependent, feeding bottle vassals of a neo-feudal state.

Those who claim not to understand what restructuring means must now be told in bold and bald terms that restructuring is a reconfiguration of a polity in such a fundamental manner that it affects its subsequent destiny for good or bad. In Nigeria’s history, the three agencies of restructuring have been the colonial overlords, the military and the political formation.

But unlike the first two agencies which rely on forcible acquiescence, you cannot have restructuring in a civilian dispensation without substantial elite consensus. This is why since the First Republic, no civilian administration has had the courage or audacity to embark on a restructuring exercise. Agitators hoping to steamroll the rest of the country into compliance should note this fundamental conundrum, particularly in the light of General Buhari’s statist revanchism.

Drawing conclusions from the above, it can be seen that the International Question is permanently embedded in the National Question. But more importantly, we can see that both cannot be wished away nor are they amenable to a once and for all time cure or “final solution”. As Britain continues to lick its wounds from the “Brexit” debacle and as America, the world greatest democracy, lurches and thrashes about in uncharted waters, National Questions will remain with us as long as nations remain. This is a lesson for contemporary Nigerian leaders. {c, 2016}