The “second independence”: a universal yearning of Nigerians waiting for fulfillment

Biodun Jeyifo

LAST week in this column, my reluctant contribution to the deluge of articles, speeches and discussions around our 60th Independence Day celebrations seemed to have surprised many readers in my call for a “second independence”, especially in the context of my withering comments regarding what I called the eventual emptiness of our “first independence”. Nigerians still have great symbolic and sentimental investment in October 1st as a day of independence, regardless of what I wrote in that article. That much I will admit. However, it is equally true that the evidence is there in abundance that Nigerians are not only yearning for a “second independence” but that this yearning is so great, so universal that it is the glue that holds the tattered fabric of a national community together. As succinctly expressed in the title of this piece, this is the topic that I wish to explore in this discussion. I crave the reader’s patience as I tease out the contours of this yearning from its many dispersed and fractured locations.

Trying, really trying hard not to overstate the case, I nevertheless urge the reader to reflect on the fact that there are few countries in the world like Nigeria where the elites suffer as horribly from the effects of their predatory and dysfunctional governance as do the masses of the citizenry. All hospitals, all roads, all schools and universities, and all places of recreation, work and worship are caught in the vice of grossly inadequate or poorly maintained infrastructures and utilities. Aso Rock, the residential villa of the President, is but a microcosm of this national malaise, even with the bloated funds that the nation expends on it to spare the Head of State and his family horrors that the rest of the country are forced to endure.

Yes, Buhari, his wife and his children often and openly abandon the multi-billion-naira medical complex at Aso Rock and flee to hospitals in the rich countries when they need serious and urgent medical attention and so the First Family cannot exactly be said to “suffer” like the rest of Nigerians. But this is not the essential issue at stake here. What is at stake is the fact that Aso Rock, like all the islands of barely adequate private facilities and amenities of our elites, is fundamentally “Nigerian” in its inadequacy and dysfunctionality. And its absurdity: was it not at Aso Rock that snakes or rats reportedly disrupted power  supply to the presidential villa? If the President and his family, like all Nigerians, are forced to endure this kind of life lived in extremis, can we not be charitable enough to concede that Buhari and his family must fervently wish, again like all Nigerians, to be free from this malodorous state of being of the nation?

At this point, compatriots, a comparison with the struggle for independence in colonial Nigeria would be helpful in clarifying the issues at stake in this discussion. Nigerians of all classes, ethnic nationalities and religious communities were united in the desire, the yearning  for that liberation. Yes, some fractions of the nascent national elite did not want independence as quickly or as precipitately as other groups like workers, bourgeois-nationalist politicians and the radical intelligentsia did. But overwhelmingly, most Nigerians yearned for independence, the elites as much as the masses. The reason for this “unity” was the fact that all Nigerians, no matter how highly placed, found the life of a subject people under British colonization fundamentally the same for everybody. It is of course true that what all Nigerians under colonialism were forced to endure was not the corrupt, predatory and dysfunctional governance that we have today. Nevertheless, to the very end of the colonial order in our country including its so-called “enlightened”, decolonizing phase, all Nigerians, rich and poor, elite and non-elite, in private business or in government employment, all Nigerians wanted independence, the one that I am now calling the “first independence”.

The British were the rulers then; all Nigerians were the ruled. Like most rulers in history, the British did not want their rule to end. And when they finally agreed to end it, it was partly because they were forced to do so by anticolonial and anti-imperialist struggles and partly because they smartly discovered that they could transform colonialism into neocolonialism, thereby prolonging their domination by other means. From this historic scenario arises the question: if the predators in governance in the present Nigerian political order are the rulers, why would they not, like British rulers in colonial Nigeria, indeed like all rulers in history, wish to perpetuate their rule? In other words, why would they want, like the Nigerian masses, the “second independence” for which I am advocating in this piece? This question lies at the core of this discussion.

There is a remarkably simple and uncomplicated answer to this question and there is also a more complex and ambiguous answer to the question. Let us first take the simple, uncomplicated answer. A ruling class that suffers as much – or nearly as much – from the effects of its misrule as the ruled is an aberrant form in history. This is the historic norm: all rulers, to the greatest extent possible, never wish to have to experience or endure the effects and consequences of their misrule. Throughout history, many rulers have imposed terrible suffering on their subjects; rarely have there been rulers who came to yearn for the end of their misrule because they had to experience or endure the effects of their own misrule. But this is precisely what the ruling class in Nigeria now faces; and this is what, fundamentally, the “second independence” entails.

I must admit that it is tough to convince anyone that the ruling class in Nigeria at the present time cannot – or should not – be separated from the universal yearning for liberation from the predatory misgovernance in force in the country. The very idea seems repugnant: the crass, decadent kingpins of the APC and the PDP joining the struggles that will lead to independence from their misrule! Is this a joke? But this is actually not an idea that is strange in the philosophy of freedom and servitude. Take for instance the Hegelian Master-Slave dialectic, one of the most celebrated traditions of this philosophy which posits that only to the extent of being forced to experience suffering can the Master ever truly come to realize that he is unfree and be spurred to strive for freedom. To put this in concrete terms with regard to Nigeria at the present time, this means that only because they themselves have to endure the horrible conditions that they have created can the APC-PDP bosses themselves be free of the terrible conditions of life and living that all Nigerians are compelled to endure. Will it ever happen? This question leads us to the more complex and ambiguous outline of the case for a “second independence”.

Going straight to the issue, I draw the attention of the reader to the following fact that is so common that it is almost a truism of Nigerian politics in the last three to four decades: the clamor for “independence” – or “liberation” or “freedom” – is so pervasive in our country that the only thing that prevents it from becoming our dominant political discourse is the fact that it is extremely fractured or fragmentary. Almost every ethnic nationality is clamoring for “liberation”, not from a foreign power but from internal “oppressors”. This takes many forms, many formulations. The most notable are “restructuring”, “re-federalization”, “state creation”, “state constabularies”, “resource control”, etc., etc. Independence of  one group from all other groups and independence of all groups from one group: these two antithetical propositions coexist precariously in the riot of “independence movements” in Nigeria today.

How do we correlate all these “movements” for independence in our country so that they can become a universal yearning that all Nigerians have in common and not so many fractured discourses in disjunctive loggerheads with one another? I suggest that our guidepost must be a combination of idealism and realism, mixed with pragmatism. Here is the idealism: every one of us in Nigeria (and on planet earth!) is yearning for the same freedom(s). Look, compatriots, at all the groups and communities in our country, is there a single one of them in which the looted and the excluded are not in the overwhelming majority? Do the looters, the predators, not come from all groups and communities? Yes, there is prebendal politics through which looters and predators claim, with some justification, that the resources and assets that they get  from national coffers constitute the only available means by which their ethnic groups or religious communities can gain access to the distributive circuits of the nation. But at bottom this is nothing but cynical predatoriness in the guise of ethic nationalism.

With regard to realism and pragmatism, these are the concrete building blocks from which the abstract idealism of the unity of the human yearning for independence and freedom may be transformed into action and policies. Putatively, all Nigerians became independent of foreign rule on October 1st, 1960, the “first independence”. It is very likely that the “unity” that produced that independence for all Nigerians across the multiplicity and diversity of our ethnic nationalities and religious communities will be tougher to achieve in the struggle for our “second independence”. This is because as we all know, it is far easier to achieve unity against a common external enemy like the British colonizers than in confrontation with an “enemy” that is/are a dominant or dominating group(s) internal to the country.

Although this is perhaps the most vexed issue in this discussion, it should not be unduly inflated into a historic impasse. Nigerian unity, considered as both an index to, and a means of achieving solidarity and justice among all our peoples, has two extraordinarily powerful motive forces. First, there is the fact that all of us, regardless of our class, ethnic and religious identities and loyalties, face a common “enemy” in the external concentration of economic and ideological power in neoliberal, globalized capitalism. Permit me to express this challenge in graphic terms: either Nigeria will engage this powerful external “enemy” as one united economic and political formation or as three, four, five or God knows how many consolidations of economic polity. I hope I have said enough in this discussion to indicate which of these two formations has my preference. Secondly, as quiet as it is kept, as much as our country is wracked by deep and wide divisions of class, ethnic nationality and religion, Nigerians also have a deep investment in an evolving “Nigerianness”, most especially in the urban areas and in the context of economic and technological modernity. I confess that I place great value in the transformative possibilities of these two motive forces. But above all else, the idealism of human solidarity and the struggle against needless suffering are the pillars of the yearning for the coming “second independence” of our country.

• Biodun Jeyifo, bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu