Why '76 is Definitely Worth Watching

That Izu Ojukwu’s excellent film, ’76 clinched five awards at the 2017 Africa Magic Viewers Choice Awards a week ago – notably earning laurels for best movie and best director – is just reward for one of the most ambitious projects to emerge from Nollywood recently. Starring Ramsey Nouah and Rita Dominic and working off a screenplay by Emmanuel Okomanyi, with a $3 million budget, ’76 was a gamble that paid off and bodes well for the prospects of new generation film makers.

The movie’s strongest point is its rigorous attention to historical detail. It adroitly simulates the sights and sounds of the mid 1970s, through an uncommon diligence in assimilating the right period props and an intelligent use of historical footage. The viewer is transported back in time to an era now increasingly dim in the national memory. By the time, the movie ended to the strings of Bongos Ikwue’s Cockcrow at Dawn, I was positively nostalgic. Part political thriller, part romantic drama, it is the story of a military intelligence officer, Captain Joseph Dewah (Nouah) who is drawn into the conspiracy to topple the Head of State, General Murtala Muhammed.

A key subplot involves his relationship with Suzie (Rita Dominic). As an Igbo, her family, represented by her incensed father and a pesky younger brother, are opposed to her relationship with Dewah, a Middle Belter, who fought on the other side during the civil war and for whom she is now pregnant. Their relationship, fraught with filial mistrust, and burdened by Dewah’s own thoroughbred dedication to duty and his compulsive secrecy, is also a metaphor for the nation’s post-war reconciliation. It is a microcosmic human experiment interrogating the possibility that love can surmount the constant pressure of bitter memories and inter-ethnic antipathies harvested from the grim experience of the civil war.

Shot on location in Mokola Barracks, Ibadan, ’76 realistically portrays the sometimes claustrophobic nature of life in the army barracks; the altercations and rivalries that flare up from having too many alpha male egos in close proximity and the ease with which enemies are made in such circumstances. It also accurately captures the atmospheric dread, mutual paranoia and recrimination that pervade the barracks when a coup plot has been uncovered and its terrible impact on families, especially women – wives, sisters, lovers – who pay a price for the (mis)adventures of the men they love.

In one poignant scene, a fellow army wife tells Suzie that marrying a soldier is akin to accepting to serve the nation along with him. The costs and consequences of the call of duty are shared by the spouses. This is a truth I have seen seared into the eyes of widows that lost their husbands to the lethal inquisitions that followed abortive coups during the military era.  

As one whose family carries the stamp of the failed 1976 coup d’état, I can testify that the movie masterfully projects the thin line between conspiratorial involvement and being in the wrong place and the right time; how the utter caprice of circumstantial evidence and an official vengeful disregard for establishing guilt beyond all reasonable doubt could mean either death by firing squad or an eleventh hour reprieve. In this sense, ’76 is a reminder of a sad chapter of our history when good soldiers were lost not to wars but to insidious vendettas and miscarriages of military justice.

The era of military rule was a bloody episode of Nigeria’s odyssey not just because of the costly civil war but because of the cycle of coups that inevitably followed the military’s incursion into politics. We lost some of our best and brightest in the vortex of violence sprung open by the vaulting ambitions of soldiers who often saw themselves as messianic revolutionaries. The military itself arguably was the institution that was most subverted by its political adventurism. As ’76 shows, treasonous conspiracies destroyed the camaraderie between soldiers and ripped families asunder. Warriors who had fought side by side in wartime, ironically, became enemies because of the intrigues of peace-time coup-plotting.

’76 is not a political thriller in the order of Eddie Ugbomah’s 1983 film, The Death of a Black President which focuses on the political, ideological and mythic significance of Murtala. If Ugbomah’s film deals with the allegedly grand imperialist conspiracy that ultimately consumed the Head of State, Izu Ojukwu’s take deals with the dramatic consequences of such plots on the lives of those further down the totem pole. These are the people who are often unremembered and anonymous. They are the unknown soldiers and nameless civilians and the collateral damage consumed by the internecine coup-plotting and conspiratorial subversion that defined the military era. ’76 is a political thriller told from a compellingly human angle.   

The success of ’76 heralds fresh cinematic possibilities for this generation. Much of our history is uncharted territory and the urgent task of acquainting Nigerians with their own antiquity cannot be left to educationists alone. Film makers can wield their craft and use pop-culture at large as a vital history teaching aid. ’76 also showed what is possible when the government and armed forces collaborate with the creative sectors of civil society. There are many stories that should be told and such collaboration bodes well for the industry. This does not, of course, mean that Nollywood should reduce itself to the propaganda arm of the state. But it does mean film makers have a role to play in the all-encompassing enterprise of nation-building and the government should give them all the support they need

Finally, ’76 marks the coming of age of a cinematic movement that might be described as Nollywood 2.0. Its first shots were fired by Kunle Afolayan’s The Figurine and October 1^st. Movies like Steve Gukas’s 93 Days which deal with serious subject matter are on the same creative arc. We have come a long way from the pioneering days of Living in Bondage. A new generation of film makers is now moving away from the tropes, clichés and stereotypes that have long inhibited Nollywood. They are positively obsessed with high production values, and intent on playing for higher stakes and on grander stages, is keen to push the boundaries of storytelling. It has been long in coming.        

Images sourced from 

reportsafrique.com

pulse.ng

guardian.ng  

First, They Came To the Northeast

History suggests that there are three main triggers of national transformation – moral awakening, political revolution and social trauma. Moral awakenings redefine socially acceptable norms and conventions. The struggle to abolish slave trade in the 19^th century and the civil rights struggle in 1960s America were fundamentally ethical revolutions – transformative shifts in society’s perception of racism and slavery. Campaigns for social justice such as those that promote fundamental human rights, a fair minimum wage and gender equality all represent an evolving moral intelligence on these issues.

National transformation also comes by way of fundamental changes in political reality whether they are revolutions, coups d’etat or electoral regime change. Historical examples include revolutions in Haiti, France and Russia, the Sokoto Jihad and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Political upheavals tend to throw up new leaders who set new coordinates for national progress. 

Where moral traditions and politics fail to deliver change, it often takes an epic national trauma to change the course of a country’s history and trigger a collective catharsis. This usually takes the form a catastrophe – a natural disaster, famine, economic depression, war and pestilence. At such times, societies typically unite to confront their challenges. This is the generally positive outcome. On other occasions, traumas, while transformative, can also yield negative results. The Depression of the 1930s coupled with its defeat during the First World War set the stage for Germany to succumb to the white supremacist lunacies of Hitler and the Nazis. More positively, the Rwandan genocide of 1994 became the background for the ascent of President Paul Kagame and the resurgent East African nation is now one of Africa’s most competently run states.

Clearly, Nigeria’s five year-long insurgency represents both an existential threat and a national trauma. But it has provoked neither a moral awakening nor a paradigm shift in our politics. Religious leaders have failed to chart a moral direction that urges us towards a greater reverence for the sanctity of life to counter Boko Haram’s feral bloodlust. Instead, they have been mostly agents of discord and intolerance. While they bicker over whether the insurgents are killing more Christians than Muslims or vice versa, the terrorists carry on with their mass murder of Nigerian citizens. A fickle, feckless rent-seeking political class cannot marshal the resolve to decisively confront the terrorists or to rally Nigerians across their sectarian cleavages.

Social trauma as a transformative instrument works best where there is a high degree of empathy and solidarity. Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation set off a popular revolt in Tunisia because Tunisians identified with his traumatic humiliation by a state official as a microcosmic representation of their own traumatic alienation from the state.

Boko Haram’s continuing expansion has cruelly exposed our mutual alienation and the exhaustion of our social capital. Scenes from Nigeria’s northeast evoke memories of Rwanda circa 1994 while politicians obsess with winning elections. The continuous barrage of body counts contrasts sharply with the body language of an incumbent president evidently more preoccupied with defeating the opposition in an election than defeating the insurgents even as they unfurl their dark and bloody banners over more chunks of Nigerian territory.  The northeast might as well be another country.        

In a memorable statement, the German pastor Martin Niemoller explained the series of moral abdications and derelictions of conscience that marked the decent into Nazi terror: “In Germany they came first for the communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up because I was a protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time no one was left to speak up.”  By keeping silent, the German population allowed Hitler’s Nazi Party to grow confident in its appalling atrocities until it metastasized into an omnivorous evil threatening to consume everyone.

Boko Haram would never have emerged if we had condemned the culture of violence which for decades targeted ethnic and religious minorities or if we had ardently resisted the idea that violence is justified when it is inflicted upon those with whom we share neither creed nor kinship. The insurgency would have been aborted if the administration had acted as though it were a national problem rather than a northern or northeastern problem.

This empathy deficit is why the abduction of the Chibok girls has not marked a cathartic turning point in the administration’s shoddy handling of the insurgency. It is why the administration has bizarrely tried to criminalize the Bring Back Our Girls protesters whose main crime is ensuring that the girls are not consigned to our mounting trash heap of acceptable abominations, and that we, in turn, do not lose our humanity. It is why twitter trolls have subjected Oby Ezekwesili to abuse for being a southern Christian busy body whose “overzealous” concern for a few expendable girls in the “Muslim North” is embarrassing her “brother’s” government.

The worry is that this ongoing trauma needs to assume a larger scale to shake us out of our apathy. It may well be that these torments have to spread beyond the northeast; that grief and suffering have to be democratized, and that something truly catastrophic has to happen to bestir the national conscience. Perhaps, denizens of Abuja will awaken one morning to bloody battles between government troops and the insurgents on their streets. Such an event would dispel the illusion that Abuja is a fortified city where political frivolities can proceed while barbarians are seizing swathes of Nigerian territory.

Assuredly, if terrorists had abducted 200 young girls from one of Abuja’s elite schools, among them daughters of public functionaries and their cronies, the quality of the administration’s response would have been radically different. The poor northeastern communities simply cannot generate the same response and are paying the penalty for poverty. There is a sense that some epic disaster has to burst the bubble of gilded indifference which currently insulates the high and mighty from the nightmare that has befallen millions of their compatriots.

Perhaps, being constantly bombarded with tragedy has, in the words of Dele Giwa, “shocked” us into “a state of unshockability” or the spirit of the age has warped our moral senses and sharply curtailed our capacity for fellow feeling. Either way, this loss of empathy can only endanger more Nigerians.  

The transformative logic of social trauma suggests that there will have to be more death and destruction. This catastrophe, it seems, must endanger the powerful or perhaps nullify the myth that the Rivers Benue and Niger are impenetrable barriers to the rest of the country, before we are roused to empathic action. Barring a sudden moral rediscovery of our common humanity and shared perils, or the outbreak of a serious commitment and resolve on the part of the government, the political class and the military to win this war, or the electoral eviction of the current administration, this contagion of chaos will probably broaden its geographical footprint. It is a frightful thing to imagine that for all the horrors already abroad, the nightmare may just be beginning. But this is the road we are now taking. 






(All images sourced in order of appearance from www.newsrescue.com, www.tobietti.com, www.news247.com.ng and Harry Olufunwa; @holufunwa) 

The Rebasing Saga

 I posted this on my Facebook page two nights ago:

“Education is a disgrace: according to the World Economic Forum,” the country “ranks 132^nd out of 144 countries for its primary education and 143^rd in science and maths. The unemployment rate, officially 25%, is probably nearer 40%; half of” its nationals “under 24 looking for work have none. Of those who have jobs, a third earn less than $2 a day. Inequality has grown…and the gap between rich and poor is now among the world’s largest” …The ruling party “has sought to undermine the independence of courts, the police, the prosecuting authorities and the press. It has conflated the interests of party and state, dishing out contracts for public works as rewards for loyalty…This has reduced economic competitiveness and bolstered a fabulously rich…elite. As a result too little wealth trickles down…Young people who fail to find work by the age of 24 will probably never have a full-time formal job…Because the stakes are so high, competition for power is bitter and sometimes bloody, particularly at the local level”… The ruling party “has more money than any other party. It can afford to go to townships days before elections and hand out food parcels.”

“This is an excerpt from a report by The Economist from two years back. Can you guess what country it is about?

This report actually refers to South Africa. It was published in The Economist (October 20^th – 26^th 2012) highlighting South Africa’s decline. According to the report, “…South Africa, though still a treasure trove of minerals with the most sophisticated economy on the continent, is on the slide both economically and politically. By some calculations Nigeria’s economy, messy as it is, will overtake it within a few years.”

It seems that both South Africa and Nigeria have their challenges as well as their strengths. What is fascinating is how so many of us, both Naija-pessimists and Naija-optimists alike (including people I met personally), assumed that the report was referring to Nigeria. One overwrought respondent even scolded me for “always finding fault” with Nigeria – a strange assertion since he was the one who was willing to believe entirely without proof that the report applied to his country.  

Is it the case that we are too willing to believe the worst about our country; that we have come to believe that any set of negative statistics is applicable to Nigeria? Has our pessimism become so ultimately chronic and self-defeating that positive news about Nigeria is no longer intelligible to us?  

The rebasing of Nigeria’s GDP which has provoked so much needless disputation is essentially a statistical adjustment factoring in dimensions of her economic life that were previously not included in the measurements of her economic progress. It is a statistical reboot not an economic miracle. It is quite similar to a man who decides to revalue his assets or to recalculate his worth factoring in assets that were not included in previous valuations. His worth will rise but that does not mean that he has a greater quantity of raw cash at his disposal. So, the arguments about how an increased GDP puts money in our individual pockets, while understandable, miss the point.

In summary, the rebasing of the GDP is a good thing; it is not a bad thing. It is an economic map that profiles our strengths and weaknesses and is therefore a valuable tool for data-driven economic planning. It isn’t something for which we should break out champagne and caviar; but in no way does it call for sackcloth and ashes. There is neither need for triumphalism nor negativism. It just puts our economic progress in perspective. What matters is how we respond to this new data; whether we rest on our oars in a self-satisfied stupour or consolidate on it and strike out boldly to enhance our strengths and remedy our weaknesses. There is much work to be done.

A nation is always more than one story; it is a multitude of narratives. This is more so when dealing with a population of over a 100 million people, with diversities, frictions and fault lines of race, religion, ethnicity or culture. India, for example, is one of the emerging market success stories of the past decade but is also dealing with multiple insurgencies and security threats including those posed by Hindu extremists, Jihadists and Maoist guerillas.

The United States has about five percent of the world’s population and has 25 percent of the world’s prison population. Its criminal justice and penitentiary system disproportionately “targets” African-Americans and Hispanics. Yet for all of this it calls itself “the land of the free.” We will find similar contradictions in Brazil, China, Indonesia and Malaysia; in short in any country that is growing with the burden of managing the aspirations of millions.

Nigeria’s most readily recognizable narrative is of a place rife with corruption, poverty and violence but there is also growth and opportunity. Being cognizant of the former need not blind us to the latter. Remember, a nation is always more than one story. There is more to this country at this moment than Boko Haram or corrupt politicians; there are also millions of people who are creating, inventing, teaching, peacemaking, trading, curing, innovating; and addressing our challenges in a variety of ways. They too are Nigerians even though their feats rarely make the daily headlines.

The history of a nation is not the history of its government alone; it is also of its people. And more than anything else, it is the exertions of Nigerians since 1990 that have altered the face of the Nigerian economy. It is the exertions of Nigerians that will continue to propel our progress not only in economics but also in our politics. 

(All images sourced online) 

The Confounded Confab

The National Dialogue may have started but it is not too late to register an objection to the exercise. There is really no need to convene such a conference when there is a National Assembly in place. The common response to this assertion is that the National Assembly does not truly represent us and that its members’ priorities are not ours. This view reflects the pervasive disillusionment with our formal democratic institutions. Our young democracy is afflicted by a crisis of representation wherein Nigerians doubt that elected authorities are looking out for their interests. Advocates of a dialogue say that given the dereliction of those in authority, a national conference is necessary to address our problems.

To start with, the notion that millions of Nigerians troop out every four years to elect people who will not represent them warrants closer scrutiny. True, the quality of those in our legislature could be better. But if, for example, the good people of Plateau Central senatorial district elected Joshua Dariye, who admitted to theft as state governor, to the senate, it is hardly worth complaining about the quality of his representation.

Electoral malpractices do play a role in leadership selection but they are not the main determinant of leadership quality. Democracy presupposes a constant engagement between the governed and the governors by which the latter are held accountable. But our transactional political culture favours election year bargains in which voters trade their votes for short term pecuniary gains or for the ephemeral psychological benefit of being able to claim kinship with the winning party. Once electoral transactions are done, the electorates leave their representatives to their own devices. An ill-informed electorate, too easily swayed by cheap populism and provincial sentiments, is not likely to make intelligent electoral choices.

   

Secondly, the crisis of representation stems from a continued disdain for politics. Many honest and competent people in our society consider politics to be beneath them and have left it for knaves. Thus, it is no wonder that the critical mass of progressives necessary for a transformative shift in our nation is yet to emerge. In the electoral decision matrix of many Nigerians, honesty and competence are not the main considerations. What matters is primarily which person can, as a result of his heritage and identity, symbolically “represent” them in high places and ensure that prebendal channels of patronage to the kinfolk stay open.

Thirdly, one of the legacies of military dictatorship is our veneration of presidential power and our millennial expectations of a political messiah’s emergence in Aso Rock. We are largely indifferent to federal and state legislature elections and focus on presidential and gubernatorial polls. This partly accounts for the unimpressive quality of legislative representation. Even in our authoritarian presidential order, the national assembly retains considerable heft. Were it occupied by more progressive types, it would positively impact public policy-making and also curb executive recklessness.

A federal legislature with the likes of Femi Falana, Olisa Agbakoba and Pat Utomi among others would surely bring more intellectual rigour and sincerity of purpose to bear upon debating our future. But instead, people like Agbakoba, Utomi and lately, Sam Nda-Isaiah, engage in futile presidential bids that are dead on arrival. Due to either hubris or political miscalculation, many smart public figures aim for the presidency, when they should focus strategically on the real engine room of democracy – the legislature. Until we start to take politics more seriously, there will continue to be a schizophrenic gulf between our expectations and the sort of people we choose to fulfill them.

Our crisis of representation is also rooted in structural flaws in our federal architecture. The dialogues we need to be having should not be taking place only in Abuja but mostly in our communities and municipalities. The subversion of local governance by federal and state politicians is one of the most unremarked stressors of our system. Nigeria is simply too vast to be run from Abuja or from 36 state capitals. Municipal governance that unshackles local communities and empowers them to design their own solutions to their problems is absolutely vital. We can debate the efficacy of the uniform local government system but a first step has to be the restoration of municipal authorities to health, granting them autonomy and devolving more power to them.

Our indigenous democratic traditions were defined by a mass participatory ethic dramatized by the village square and the town hall. They were about consultation, dialogue and consensus-building with everyone having a voice in deliberations.

Participatory democracies are by definition micro-democracies; they function best at the grassroots because they ensure that policy and consensus are generated from the ground up rather than imposed from above in contrast to our presently over-centralized order that seeks to micromanage 170 million lives from Abuja. The diminished capacity for dialogue and consensus-building at the grassroots is one reason for the increase in communal conflicts. Without participatory democratic platforms where disagreements can be anticipated, deconstructed and defused, they are liable to escalate into violent conflict. Thus, we need to rebuild our town halls, village squares, market unions and residents’ associations and graft them into the matrix of municipal governance.

  

The cure for our crisis of representation is deepening our engagement with our formal democratic institutions, not creating a parallel legislature which is what the confab effectively is. The charge of non-representation or non-performance hurled at the national assembly can just as easily be thrown at the presidency. Yet no one is suggesting an alternative presidency or a parallel executive branch to run things. As it is, the confab delegates who were nominated rather than elected, do not even meet the test of democratic legitimacy. Demographically, the confab can scarcely be said to be representative of a nation whose young constitute 70 percent of the population. We cannot place much stock in a lot of geriatrics debating a future that they will not be part of. The fact that the confab’s “findings” will still be vetted by the National Assembly indicates that its conveners are aware of its doubtful legal standing and legitimacy. This begs the question – why not simply use the National Assembly as the institution of first resort? Why reinvent the wheel?

 

There is no magic bullet for nation-building. In our plural society with its multiple competing interests and its prebendal governance, democracy is often paralyzed by various rent-seeking demands, and is consequently slow and ponderous. This will continue to be the case until genuine ideological polarities emerge in our politics. If we want better people in our government, then we must put them there. Politics cannot leap ahead of a society’s insecurities, aspirations and prejudices. It is no surprise then that the confab is already mired in controversy over the use of prayers and the supposed numerical advantage of Christians. These are the inanities that Nigerian elites typically bicker and bloviate about.

Nation-building is hard and patient work. Deepening our democracy requires us to test our institutions to their limits and exhaust their potential instead of hastily declaring them useless and unfit for purpose. This confab is an inglorious distraction from the work at hand. 

(All images sourced online)