There is a Country

Chinua Achebe’s much anticipated civil war memoir, There was a Country, has been released to much acclaim and indignation in some quarters. I pass no judgment on the book because I have not read it yet save for serialized excerpts. At this time, I am more interested in the reactions to the book which have predictably corresponded with the default mode of public discourse in Nigeria – the ready, enthusiastic and often blind defence of one’s ethnic group and ethnic heroes. Old habits die hard. In response to Achebe’s book, the tribal troops have been rallied. Many public figures have dived into ethnic trenches and public debate for the next few weeks will be choreographed along sectarian lines. But the context of this debate and its audience are remarkable.

Seventy percent of Nigerians are under 35 years. This means that most Nigerians were born after the civil war and have no memory of that era. For Achebe and his generation, understandably, the civil war was a defining event that forever coloured their view of Nigeria and her possibilities.

For us, the post-civil war generation, it is not. We are defined by a different set of events – the 1970s oil boom and its long recessionary aftermath, the repressive military dictatorships of the 1980s and 1990s, the Structural Adjustment Program, the virtual decimation of public services ranging from healthcare to education, chronic suburban sectarian conflicts and the ascent of a hyper-individualistic ethos that has made our society more Machiavellian and cruel.  Above all, we are haunted by the refusal of previous generations to inter their antipathies, and risk becoming prisoners of inherited animosities.

As one born after the civil war, it is simply impossible to speak with the raw passion of participants and veterans about an event that I, like most of my compatriots, did not experience. What concerns me is that despite the demographic dominance of the post-civil war generation, public discourse is still framed by the issues, terms and experiences of those who fought the war. These warriors have been dubbed “the class of 1966”; they are the generation that came of age as the First Republic collapsed with the heady promise of Independence and degenerated into war. National issues are still largely discussed through civil war blinkers and coloured by long, deeply held prejudices in ways that suggest that Nigeria has not moved on since 1970. Assuredly, it has, for despite its obvious challenges, this is not the same nation that was convulsed by internecine hostilities in the 1960s.

But the conception of Nigeria as a nation in fragments is obdurately promoted by the class of 1966 and its acolytes in the media fossilizing public discourse in the amber of antiquity. Even worse, young Nigerians who have enough contemporary troubles to address are subtly and overtly recruited to re-fight the battles of long ago. 90 percent of Nigerians on Facebook and Twitter belong to the post-civil war generation yet these social media platforms risk becoming battlegrounds where the ignorant, the misguided and the bigoted will duel as tribal pugilists vicariously re-enacting the past.  

The danger is that we are wasting our own epoch, blinded by the bequest of tribal antagonisms, we are ignoring the moral imperatives of our own time and risk passing to our children an even more chaotic mess of a country than our parents left us.

The temptation to reincarnate historical perspectives and to assume the mutually antagonistic roles seemingly ordained for us by fate and history is understandable. Young Nigerians live in a country where the political leadership has overwhelmingly failed to present an overarching transcendent vision of our national destiny. With no portrait of the future to engage us emotionally, we have responded in two ways.

Some of us have adopted a vision of personal success that damns the society at large while emphasizing a privatized prosperity despite the surrounding dysfunction and anomie. This is a philosophy so individualistic that it is no more than a narcissistic nihilism and it is tragically the core of our popular theology.

For others, the absence of a vision of a shared future has prompted refuge in a sectarian past. Given the debilities of our education sector, history is simply a dark blank canvas to most Nigerians. In most of our schools, where history is taught at all, it is essentially the colonial narrative of Mungo Park discovering the River Niger and of Nigeria as an infernal patchwork of perpetually feuding tribes. Despite the immense work of great historians like J.F. Ade-Ajayi, Bala Usman, Elizabeth Isichei and J.C. Anene among other intellectuals, we are yet to domesticate our own history and as Bala Usman proposed, “decolonize perceptions” of our past.

The bid to reclaim the “settled” past rather than inherit an uncertain future drives religious extremists who revel in the pristine and thoroughly mythical visions of 7^th century Arabia or tribal fundamentalists who celebrate the nativist and xenophobic ecstasies of long dead kingdoms or simply fabricate ethno-racial identities that never even existed.

Where there is no intelligent and active imagination of tomorrow, the future becomes hell and the past becomes paradise. This is why young Nigerians are so easily recruited to fight for the presumed certainties of a past that they never experienced – oddly enough, by the same elites who have aborted their future – thereby deepening divisions and damning the unborn with a heritage of discord and strife.

I am not, for one moment, advocating amnesia. By all means, we should revisit our history but we should do so knowing that human experience is often subjectively perceived and that war, that most acute of experiences, is even more subjectively perceived. There are many sides, many angles and many perspectives belonging to victors, victims and innocent and guilty bystanders. The wise inquisitor finds safety in a multitude of narratives understanding them to be a symphony of inflamed passions. To accurately interrogate our nation’s history, we must accept that the ties that bind us to our ethnic kin often become lies that blind us to their sins as well as to the sufferings of others.

History is like the elephant and we are like the blind men, feeling and groping in the dark to define it and give it coherence, yet each achieving only a limited perspective. Of all the dimensions of reality, history is where we are most liable to look through a glass darkly. As Chimamanda Adichie has perceptively observed, “A single story creates stereotypes and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue but that they are incomplete.” No single narrative can capture the complexities and ambiguities of ours or any nation’s dramas.

Four decades after the civil war should give us an emotional distance that enables a clinical inquest into the past. But this seems beyond too many of our leading public voices who are all too often inclined to mangle public conversation with pre-programmed primal responses in defence of their tribes and tribal icons. The jaundiced portrayals of our founding fathers – Azikiwe, Awolowo and Ahmadu Bello – have long prevented us from appropriating the lessons of their lives and times. Our need for absolute saints and absolute villains has reduced them to caricatures whose names are casually invoked but who have been so canonized and demonized as to be unreal.

As Abubakar Tafawa-Balewa once said, “No man is wholly evil.” Like all of us, the patriarchs were complex, conflicted and flawed; by turns, weak and strong, cowardly and courageous, petty and charitable. They were capable of both noble and ignoble acts. In short, they were simply and terrifyingly human. If they were all angels then Nigeria would be a paradise and if they were all devils then there would be no Nigeria today. They were as limited by their times as they shaped it. I recommend Dike Chukwumerije’s book One Nigeria as a superbly clinical and empathic examination of these patriarchs and their legacy.

All nations write their history in blood, sweat and tears and in the syntax of tragedy, joy and hope. Nigeria is no different. Emeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu wrote, “The civil war in Nigeria was not a cataclysmic conflict between St. Michael and Lucifer. Rather, it was an inevitable milestone in our journey to nationhood.” The civil war was a tragic chapter in our national odyssey but there have been other chapters and yet more will be written. At some point, we must let the dead bury their dead.

In the end, when this fog of mutual recrimination clears, (and when the class of 1966 is gone) we, Nigeria’s children of deferred hope, will still be left with a country of such immense potential yet wounded by its heirs, a land scarred by low deeds in high places awaiting the redemption that our generation can and must begin to deliver. The question that should animate our pursuits is not what our ancestors did, should have done or would do in our situation. Their circumstances were theirs even as our time is ours. The question that should possess us now is what sort of country we will leave for our children. 

All Images sourced online.          

Nigerian Dreams, Visions & Nightmares

There was once a Nigerian dream. Nigerians believed that through diligent study at school and hard and honest work, they would live better than their parents had, and give their children the tools with which to secure a better life. Indeed, if one phrase could summarize the essence of the Nigerian dream, it is “the better life”; an optimistic resilience in the face of sundry challenges in the belief that tomorrow’s harvest will exceed that of today. It is a progressive cycle in which one generation’s expectations become the experiences of the next. This, in a nutshell, was the classical Nigerian dream. It was a blend of a neo-Calvinist work ethic and our traditional communitarian ethos which held that individuals were the children of the whole community. In the mainly Muslim north, the same dream found expression in Ahmadu Bello’s proclamation of the region’s guiding values as “work and worship.” The dignity of a productive life would be anchored to the spiritual imperative of a life of faith. Economics would be balanced by ethics.

Over a half-century ago, this dream inspired communities to pool resources to build schools and send their most promising children abroad to study. It led them to transcend the boundaries of rural life and aspire to the armaments of modernity. It produced a generation of nationalists who fought and won the struggle for independence. For those nationalists, the classical Nigerian dream became the ultimate objective of national liberty. Independence promised a new expansive space within which Nigerians could aspire towards a full creative life. They believed that the moral purpose of the state was to underwrite the pursuit of the better life. This belief found powerful expression in the premium they placed on education. Obafemi Awolowo, one of the most articulate exponents of this moral purpose, dubbed his political vision “Life More Abundant” – and defined it as freedom from want, ignorance, disease and British rule. His emphasis on universal education, universal healthcare and full employment essentially summarized the political priorities of the nationalist patriarchs.

This notion of the state as an empowering force and enabler of human potential is a thread running through Awo’s democratic socialism, Aminu Kano’s democratic humanism and Azikiwe’s pragmatic socialism. The progressive consensus was that government existed to enable citizens become autonomous social, political and economic agents. This socialistic impulse bore good fruit. Between the 1950s and the early 1960s, regional governments built schools, hospitals, and roads and invested in enterprises in which they had comparative advantage, leveraging their natural resources while developing their human capital.

Two momentous events altered the course of Nigerian history – the discovery of oil in 1956 and the military intervention of 1966. Nigeria shifted from the competitive communalism that had seen regions drive growth, to a unitary military government that centralized control of oil resources. As successive military regimes tightened their grip on oil resources, the central government became a leviathan dispensing alms to beggar states. The post-civil war oil boom sparked a rural-urban drift with hoards of youths streaming into chaotic cities in search of their share of the national cake. Federal control of petrodollars transferred the locus of power from the regions and states to an alien and alienating governing entity at the centre. Whereas politics previously had been localized and municipal, with regions running basically on tax-based social economies, the new politics necessitated a scramble for the centre where a new form of wealth was shared out amongst lucky partakers.

Thus was born another Nigerian dream – the pursuit of wealth without sweat squeezed out of remote oil-rich creeks at human and ecological costs that most Nigerians were blissfully unaware of. But it was a dream for the few and a nightmare for the many. Communal values and Calvinist ethics were displaced by new Machiavellian moralities that perceived boundless possibilities for the self. Pentecostal prosperity preachers have essentially appropriated and apotheosized this dream. Where the first Nigerian dream at least attempted to supply a sense of citizenship, the second dream has informed a radical self-interest that reduces civic being to conspicuous consumption.

The old Nigerian underclass of domestic servants, house-helps, guards and drivers who were shaped by the classical Nigerian dream were exemplars of contentment and longsuffering. While they toiled in the gilded corridors of the affluent, they held resolutely to the belief that their educated children would ascend the greasy totem pole of upward mobility and eventually reach down and ransom them from the stygian depths of want. But the structural adjustment programme of the 1980s brutally annihilated the old middle class that was shaped by the Calvinist ethos of dexterity and sacrifice. Today’s aspirants to upward mobility are less fatalistic about their prospects. Encouraged by the prophets of prosperity and nouveau rich kleptocrats, they have acquired a taste for instant gratification, a raging sense of entitlement and personal fiscal possibility, unhindered by the prudish constraints of “archaic” moralities. Thus, the rich plunder the state while a desperate underclass in turn robs the rich. 

            The second Nigerian dream has found expression not only in the grand larcenies of rogue politicians but also in the delinquencies that haunt the Dickensian cities over-populated by the scramble for a piece of the national cake. These delinquencies are apt symbols of our political degeneracy. Armed robbery, which grew alongside the metropolitan chaos of the oil boom era, symbolized the militarized capitalism purveyed by messianic soldiers who essayed to redeem the country at gunpoint but ended up simply looting it.

The 1980s introduced hired assassins to our society – mystery gunmen that slew their victims without stealing a dime before melting into the shadows. Death itself had become a marketable commodity deliverable on demand with extreme prejudice. A new growth industry of murder contractors emerged to embody what Niyi Osundare described as a “culture of mayhem.” The era also spawned ritual killers that preyed on innocents for use as sacrifices in rituals for wealth. The emergence of the fraudster by the 1990s was an apt metaphor for the long con that was messianic militarism. It is no accident that these three archetypal villains – the hired assassin, the ritual killer and the fraudster – emerged during the Babangida years, when a martial kleptocracy in the garb of a neo-liberal reform regime eviscerated the public infrastructure of the classical Nigerian dream. They were manifestations of society’s descent into Mammon worship in an age of recessionary hysteria and repressive politics.

Today’s burgeoning ransom kidnap industry is perfectly symbolic of a society held hostage by vampire elites that extort multi-billion petrodollar ransoms from state coffers. For the commoditization of human life is the logical consequence of the apotheosis of wealth. Finally, the emergence of sectarian terrorists detonating bombs indiscriminately in the midst of unsuspecting crowds signals the nihilistic consummation of the second Nigerian dream. The zero-sum politics of greed and Machiavellian self-interest has culminated in the self-destruct sequence of anarchic violence. In addition to being sold for profit, human lives are now extinguished for nothing with clinical efficiency and in the perversely democratic anonymity of mass death. Many of our cities and towns, turned into de-industrialized wastelands by decades of socio-economic holocaust, are now theatres of warring sectarian militias locked in the cycle of mutual assured destruction. How do we pull back from the abyss of anomic horrors?

Our challenge is to recover and re-interpret the classical Nigerian dream as a progressive social vision that leaves no Nigerian behind in the quest for moral and material betterment. A new generation of progressives must now articulate a politics of meaning that restores moral purpose to governance. They must undertake the rebuilding of our civic infrastructure – public healthcare, universal education and those systems that foster a common citizenship. We must reconstruct our social capital that was depleted during the years in which privatized selfishness became ascendant. We should recapture the cooperative spirit that enabled communities to establish schools, dispensaries and scholarships for their brightest children. New generation ethicists must extricate Nigerian spirituality from the grip of materialism, the stranglehold of charlatans and its incest with anti-intellectualism and redefine it as a social spirituality that rekindles our best moral instincts – empathy, enterprise, community values, social justice, a sense of the dignity of the other and a notion of the common good. Recovering the classical Nigerian dream is the calling of our times.

The Future of Progressives

The most urgent question in Nigerian politics at the moment is not the outcome of the 2011 elections. It is the possibility of forging a viable progressive alternative to the extant political order. Several analysts interpret Nigerian politics as a Manichean drama between the “evil” ruling Peoples’ Democratic Party and an angelic opposition. This portrait is simplistic to the point of silliness. What ails Nigerian politics is bigger than a single political party; it is a militarized and parasitic political culture of which the PDP is only the most obvious example. It is a system, poisoned by the long years of military dictatorship, which cuts across party lines. The PDP is its most visible manifestation because it is the dominant party. Therefore, it would be a mistake to reduce political change to simply changing parties in power. Ejecting the ruling party will count for nothing if we do not change the reigning ideas.

A second view of Nigerian politics shared by many of its practitioners and analysts is that ideology is inconsequential; that tags such as ‘conservative’ and ‘progressive’ are passé. Again, this is a legacy of military rule which virtually eliminated ideas from politics and redefined it as a contest of cash and brigandage. It is true that Nigerian politicians mostly do not reckon with ideology. Indeed, to the extent to which political parties are ideological communities, we do not have authentic parties at the moment; only protean constellations of interests ever changing in accord with personal fortunes. The PDP is thus the biggest and the most successful congregation of strange bedfellows in the field. But ideology does matter. Over the past two decades, governance has been shaped by what can only be described as a free market kleptocracy entrenched by a raft of neo-liberal reforms that emphasizes untrammeled liberalization, huge cuts in social spending, privatization and the devaluation of the naira.

These measures are consistent with the structural adjustment programmes that were promoted by western governments and Bretton Woods Institutions during the 1980s and were discredited by the 1990s. General Ibrahim Babangida fundamentally altered the fabric of state-society relations by imposing SAP in 1986. Within the context of military dictatorships and our quasi-militarized illiberal democracy, and in the absence of regulatory inhibitions, these measures amount to simply vandalizing the state, cannibalizing federal assets and sharing them among cronies. The contradictions inherent in effecting a radical shift in socio-economic priorities under a totalitarian regime was glossed over by architects of SAP. In effect, even though, it affected a consistency with capitalism, what emerged can only be called a kleptocracy or more charitably, crony capitalism or predatory capitalism.

To be sure, Nigeria’s economic woes predated Babangida, but his socio-economic engineering deepened the consumerist maladies of the society, accentuated social injustice and corruption, and destroyed civic trust in government. The perverse neo-liberalism that generated these dysfunctions remains the dominant philosophy of government. The state has lost its meaning as a provider of public goods – social infrastructure, roads, bridges, education and healthcare etc. Government’s responsibilities have shrunk dramatically, while it has tightened its grip on national resources and redefined itself as a profit machine for its operators. For the vast majority of our compatriots, governance is denoted by its absence except for the nuisance value of sirened motorcades and allied formats of reprobate pageantry. It is this culture of predation for which a progressive alternative must be found.

In the quest for a progressive alternative today, it is sensible to look back and to reclaim the vision of the progressive patriarchs of yore. Nnamdi Azikiwe, Obafemi Awolowo and Aminu Kano were the leading luminaries of the progressive tradition in the fifties and sixties. It may be argued that their inability to win power, due to British colonial intrigues, internecine squabbling and ethnic mistrust, was the most significant political mishap in the early stages of the Nigerian project. For without a doubt, the course of Nigerian history would have turned out very differently if they had directed it. Zik, Awo, Aminu and their cohorts were not doctrinaire socialists despite their left-leaning rhetoric. British colonialists saw them through the blinkers of the cold war and deemed them to be a “red danger” but they were nothing of the sort. Rather they were “third way progressives” who envisioned a synthesis of an enterprise economy and a welfare state.

Their ardent advocacy of universal public education reflected their belief in the moral purpose of the state as an enabler of human potential and national prosperity. They were welfarists who were as interested in wealth creation as they were in social justice. The philosopher, Chinweizu has characterized their ideology as “communalism” rooted less in Marx than in the communal ethos of African society which emphasizes inclusion and collectivity. It is a vision of the responsible society that leaves no one behind in the quest for moral and material progress. The state is thus necessary to underwrite the mutual wellbeing of the citizenry while reining in the inequities and inequalities that result from unbridled capitalism. Certainly, surrendering society to the caprices of market forces would have been anathema to the patriarchs.

Nigerian progressives today are suffering from a number of plagues. The ascendancy of right wing military regimes throughout our history severely limited progressive fortunes. It also meant that right wing politicians were the favoured parties in military-sponsored transition programmes. Babangida’s particular persecution of so-called “radicals” nearly destroyed the progressives and left them too exhausted to mount a feasible challenge for power in 1999. Thirdly, the fall of the Berlin wall and the collapse of communism in 1989, unleashed a sense of ideological bankruptcy which buffeted the Nigerian left. The left has long supplied the moral energy of progressivism and with their weakening the progressive community also atrophied.

But the progressives are also reeling from self-inflicted woes, chiefly, their congenital inability to build a truly national movement. Progressive forces have been undermined by factional infighting, bigotry and sectarian prejudices. Progressivism is not synonymous with any ethnic nationality even though some politicians and commentators of the south west persist in making this unfortunate assertion. Their potential for a national victory has been nullified often enough by the irredentist reduction of progressivism to an ethnic enclave. In his seminal book, Africa in Ebullition, Adegoke Adelabu argued that the Action Group was limited by its “self-imposed provincialism and its petticoat of shabby parochialism.” The same criticism is valid today against those who deem themselves heirs of the A.G., and its later incarnation, the U.P.N. For years, an odious narrative has made the rounds casting the south (and the southwest in particular) as the bastion of progressivism and the north as the seat of feudal conservatism. This bogus narrative assisted by bigoted and ignorant commentators has long prevented progressives on both sides of the Niger from linking hands and rising to the defence of their constituency – poor, disillusioned Nigerians who are in the majority.

Secondly, progressives seem incapable of subsuming ego and personal ambition in the quest for greater collective victories. Internecine dogfights splintered the Peoples Redemption Party and reduced a potential national progressive movement to a skeletal organization located entirely in Kano. Too often, progressives prefer to operate as lone-rangers so convinced in the justice of their own cause that they wind up in a cul de sac of their self-righteousness, high on puritanical fervor but electorally impotent. This is a shame because when they make their case rightly, the progressives have the most compelling vision for Nigeria; one which should enjoy greater mass appeal but which for these reasons does not.

Of late, progressive ideals have disappeared from the public square. We live in an age of intellectual famine and ideas are rarely given space to manifest. Militarized politics ensures that public debate is frequently “won” by the hecklers and those who make the loudest noise. Reasoned, sober voices are drowned out. The triumph of cash and carry politics has sapped progressives of their confidence. There is presently no recognizable progressive party. Creating a national movement calls for progressives to rediscover their political identity and re-establish their pavilion in the marketplace of ideas. If they can regain their faith in themselves and in their values, overcome expired prejudices and provincialisms and find new young and energetic leaders, Nigeria could very well experience a national renaissance.