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.          

Who are the Real Enemies of Nigeria?

Judging from the trend of opinion in the media and the tenor of conversations online, it seems that Nigerians have reached a rare consensus on the object of their collective wrath. He is the Northerner, particularly the Muslim “Hausa-Fulani” Northerner with the emphasis of the indictment varying from the generic category of “Muslim” to that of “Northerner” or “Hausa-Fulani” depending on who is doing the indicting and the circumstances. From the barrage of anti-Northern invective online, it is clear that the Northerner is considered the diabolical, greedy and power-hungry embodiment of all that is wrong with Nigeria.

Nigerians have consensually used these same adjectives before about another group – the Igbos. At one point in our history, the Igbos were the national scapegoats. As Chinua Achebe wrote in 1983, “Nigerians of all other ethnic groups will probably achieve consensus on no other matter than their common resentment of the Igbo.”

In a multiethnic and multi-religious society steeped in poverty, part of the competition for group advantage is the quest to identify a common enemy, to dress it in readily identifiable sectarian garments and crown it with thorns as the national scapegoat. In earlier times, the toga of villainy was draped around the Igbo, stereotyped in the national consciousness as grasping, greedy, arrogant and clannish.

From the mid 1980s onwards, it became fashionable to speak of “northern domination.” The designation of national scapegoat has to do with perceptions of power and group advantage in the public realm. During the pre-Independence period when Igbos were prominent actors in commerce, politics and the civil service, they were vilified for plotting “Igbo domination.” The sequence of northern-led military regimes from the 1970s to the late 1990s made a new narrative of northern domination inevitable.  

The demonization of “the north” in the media mirrors the vilification of the Igbo between the 1940s and 1960s. As with the Igbo, the depiction of the north as the arch-villain of the Nigerian tragedy is fallacious. Blaming all of Nigeria’s problems on one region or ethnic group and defining ethnicities as political categories with predictable socio-political habits is an untenable generalization and a prejudicial simplification of the Nigerian situation. This is unfortunately the dominant pattern of social and political analysis. It is one in which public life is interpreted in terms of mutually hostile fractal solidarities perpetually locked in a war for ascendancy.

The practice of identifying national scapegoats is a Machiavellian dark art. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Babangida regime identified “radicals” as the enemy. It was the desire to destroy radical academics that informed the military’s perception of the university as enemy territory and its subsequent subversion of higher education. Academics in the Ahmadu Bello University and the Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU) in particular faced systematic persecution and harassment. In later years, elements within the Babangida regime would identify the OAU as the hub of a “Yoruba opposition.” Similarly, the University of Nigeria in Nsukka was targeted during the civil war as the “intellectual base” of the Biafran secession.  

Following the June 12, 1993 election crisis, the emergence of Sani Abacha, and the incarceration of Moshood Abiola, the Yoruba were cast as the enemies of Nigeria and the chief opponents of the regime. The regime’s propagandists lost no time in dubbing the pro-democracy activists who wanted the June 12 election actualized as Yoruba tribalists even though Abiola’s mandate had been remarkably pan-Nigerian. The June 12 advocates reciprocated, insisting that the “north” was against the emergence of a Yoruba president, even though Abiola had won very handsomely in northern states. Abiola, himself a long time crony of military dictators, never attributed his travails to the machinations of a “north” intent on denying him power because he was a southerner but to what he called “a small clique in the military determined to cling to power at all costs.” But facts pale in the face of mythology.

Eskor Toyo once lamented that ethnic chauvinists in the south would rather refer to Sani Abacha as a northerner rather than as a fascist military dictator. After the near assassination of The Guardian publisher Alex Ibru in 1996, a group calling itself the Revolutionary Movement for Hausa Fulani Interest, (REMHFI), claimed responsibility. Of course, the attempted assassination was the work of the junta’s agents. It had nothing to with Hausa or Fulani interest and everything to do with the prolongation of a fascist dictatorship.  But power mongers have long learned how to manipulate popular bigotries to their own advantage.

By 1999, the scales of enemy definition were weighted firmly against “the North.” Guerilla journalists had riveted Nigerians with tales of the intrigues of the “Hausa-Fulani oligarchy” or the “Sokoto Caliphate” – all metaphorical representations of the “northern enemy.” In his book, This House Has Fallen, Karl Maier reports Bola Ige as disclosing that the real controllers of Nigeria consisted of “not more than two hundred Fulani families.”

With the emergence of Boko Haram, the North is being entrenched as an “enemy other” in the national imagination, aided by the ignorance and malice of a biased media, 90 percent of which is based in the southwest (the so-called Lagos-Ibadan axis); and bigotry of pandemic proportions in our public life. Jingoism as journalism is rendering public discourse between Nigerians mutually unintelligible. It should have been fairly easy to mobilize national opinion against Boko Haram, a terrorist group that murders Muslims and Christians alike, and to cast it as a common enemy – but the media’s insistence on the myth of the “northern enemy” and its prejudicial coverage, which has prevented even sufficient acknowledgement of the fact that as many (if not more) Muslims have been killed by the group, – have negated this. This reportorial slant corresponds with the narrative of a Muslim north ranged against a Christian south – a popular fiction, yet possessed of such apocalyptic sensationalism that it sells papers. Put simply, politicians and the press both profit from demonizing groups and promoting prejudice.  

However, ethnicity and religion possess limited explanatory capacity. According to Obi Nwakanma, northern domination is one of “the most sustained mythologies of post colonial Nigeria.” He argues that “the idea that the north through the military ran Nigeria and underdeveloped it is false… The closer truth is that a very complex alliance of business interests from the North and the South, with their international banking and security links ran Nigeria, and continues to run Nigeria. The ordinary northerner – Hausa or Fulani or Berom or even Tiv – has not benefited in any significant way from the so-called rule of Northerners. Individual northerners and southerners have benefited in immense ways, from their close associations and links with power, and we must pay heed to this fact.” Tam David-West contends that, “Northern Domination is a myth concocted and popularly peddled and perpetuated by lazy politically emasculated Southern politicians and most unfortunately also some Southern intellectuals; a grand alibi to cover up or divert from their  ineffectiveness, ineffectuality and even political harlotry.” “Northern domination” is used in the same way that some northern politicians use the bogey of “southern domination” to mobilize support through fear of the other.  

The great radical historian Bala Usman interpreted the Nigerian condition as a consequence of class machinations rather than contending ethnicities. He argued that a comprador elite of impeccably national character and transnational affiliations armed with hegemonic designs, rather than any ethnic constituency, are the true enemies of the Nigerian nation. Yet, their ascendancy lay in their ability to wear ethnic and religious masks, and manipulate ethnic and religious identities for personal gain.

In 1989, while addressing the Oxford-Cambridge Club, President Ibrahim Babangida said, “By accident of birth and more by education and access to opportunity, a few of us numbering only a few thousand, out of a population of more than 100 million, find ourselves in positions of leadership and influence in the professions and academics, the armed forces, the bureaucracy, industry, agriculture and commerce, in the media houses, in the courts and councils of our traditional and political associations. We equate our ends with the ends of the groups and communities to which we belong. We mobilize others to fight for our individual causes, individual beliefs, and interests as if those were their causes, beliefs and interests, etc.” Critics may justifiably see Babangida’s thesis as a self-indictment but it is accurate nonetheless.

The enduring lesson that political elites learned from the catastrophic failure of the First Republic is that no one ethnic group or region can “dominate” Nigeria. The key to political success since then has been to build multi-ethnic coalitions to share the national cake – an equal opportunity kleptocracy. This was the genius of the National Party of Nigeria (NPN) during the Second Republic and has been carried on by the Peoples’ Democratic Party. The tiresome “north-south” polemics only serve to obscure the pan-Nigerian character of the reigning elites, by provoking provincial passions and diversionary conflicts at the grassroots – in which the poor are expendable.       

Our chances of mitigating such aggressions depend on how mature we become intellectually and politically. The more mature we become, the less need we will have to externalize our failures upon other ethnicities and faiths, and the more discerning we shall be of who the real enemies are.  As the great political scientist Claude Ake once said, “There is no north that is anybody’s enemy and there is no south that is anybody’s redemption.”

In the 2011 PDP convention, Atiku Abubakar sought the party’s presidential nomination as the “official northern flag-bearer” and failed to muster a complete following even among northern delegates. His failure was no mystery. Political power obeys dynamics other than accident of birth. Geography is not always destiny. As Chidi Amuta explained, “In a free market Nigeria, the brotherhood of the naira is fast overtaking the bonds of tribe and religion.”

Despite Muhammadu Buhari’s popularity on the northern street, many northern elites, being beneficiaries of the current order did not support his presidential candidacy. Nor did they support the other two northern contenders, Ibrahim Shekarau and Nuhu Ribadu. The media with its tunnel vision fixation on a mythical northern solidarity failed to note that a monolithic north no longer exists (If indeed it ever truly did). The blame for our woes lies squarely with “the brotherhood of the naira” – a national fraternity of politicians far more united by their appetites than divided by ideology – and also with our own lack of discernment. Ethnic and confessional allegiances matter but they are subject to the supervening calculations of class interest and are nowhere as definitive as believed when it comes to the intrigues of “high” politics.

In fifty years, the actual enemies of Nigeria have not changed. As one soldier declared on a fateful day in January 1966, “Our enemies are the political profiteers, the swindlers, the men in high and low places that seek bribes and demand ten percent; those that seek to keep the country divided permanently so that they can remain in office as ministers or VIPs at least, the tribalists, the nepotists, those that make the country look big for nothing before international circles; those that have corrupted our society and put the Nigerian political calendar back by their words and deeds.” The righteous fury of this indictment was to be lost in the series of tragic events that collapsed the First Republic. But the truth of the diagnosis remains unimpeachable.   

Thus, while we slander and stereotype each other, our leaders continue in their unregulated feasting, secure in the knowledge that we are too distracted by petty bigotries to surveil their conduct. We must realize that this season of turbulence is also a teachable moment – one in which we should share perpectives, listen to and learn from each other while building a front to salvage our common future. We must not squander it. 

All images sourced Google Images. 

Reimagining Nigeria: Beyond A Sovereign National Conference

Of late, there have been strident calls for a sovereign national conference of Nigeria’s ethnic nationalities to discuss the state of the union. Its champions believe that such a dialogue has become necessary given the recent spate of terrorism in the country. This dialogue is often portrayed as the long-awaited panacea to Nigeria’s crises in the same vein as other magic bullet arguments that have been made before in our history about “democracy”, “return to civil rule” and other concepts that were supposed to magically transform Nigeria. The clamour for a sovereign national conference (SNC) is basically wrong-headed.  

A civic republic (which Nigeria both claims and aspires to be) is based on a social contract between the state and citizens. In Nigeria, we have crafted a drama of politics around a fictitious contract between the state and “tribes.” Individuals are therefore denied contractual agency as citizens. Indeed, they are infantilized as mere nodes of tribal networks that have no legitimate claim on the state as individuals but only as members of tribes. However, the constitution allocates no rights to tribes; the state’s defined responsibilities are directed towards citizens, not ethnic groups.

As Simon Kolawole has observed, SNC advocates offer no specifics as to whether the conference would be based on wards, councils, states, ethnic groups or dialects or whether it would be convened on the basis of equal representation or whether the summiteers would be elected or selected. But there are even more fundamental problems. 

In The Misrepresentation of Nigeria, the historians Bala Usman and Alkasum Abba contended that Nigeria’s ethnic nationalities have never been monolithic, fixed and separate entities. They are each unique, complex, multifaceted, interconnected and ever-changing at various levels and paces. Ethnic identity is only one factor in human political organization. Furthermore, it is practically impossible to demarcate the boundaries between most ethnic groups and their neighbours because these communities “actually have no boundaries as they intermesh into one another at the level of language, culture, identity and territory. Any attempt to carve out ethnic territories or to create ethnically-based federating units would lead to violent conflicts and sustained civil wars.” These issues not only demonstrate the complexity of our ethno-cultural geography but the inadequacy of the tribal idioms popularly used to interpret our political reality.

Usman and Abba also argued that the sovereign rights which the British seized when they imposed imperial rule, were only recovered with the independence struggle conducted not by ethnic or religious groups but by a broad-based nationalist movement consisting of several organizations and parties. The constitutional conferences at which the decolonization process was negotiated were summits between the British and Nigerian political parties, which, even when they were regional or local in scope, attended the summits as part of national alliances. On 1^st October 1960, the sovereign rights seized by the British were recovered by the government of the federation of Nigeria on behalf of the people of Nigeria and not on behalf of any ethnic or religious community. Independence came as part of an “anti-colonial liberation movement sweeping the world, marking the end of the age of empire and the birth of new nation states and on our shores, transforming erstwhile colonial subjects into Nigerian citizens.” Thus, sovereignty in Nigeria today does not lie in the domain of tribe or religion but in the citizenry. Political parties and not tribes are the legitimate and authentic vehicles of political action. 

The calls for SNC are flawed because they make tribes the fulcrum of political action in contravention of the republican doctrine that makes the individual’s right to freedom of association the basis of politics.  These calls trumpet the false assumption that tribes are political monoliths with uniform interests held by all members. In fact, as Mohammed Haruna once wrote, “A tribe can have uniform interests only if all of its people belong to the same religion, the same social class and speak only one dialect etc. This is well-nigh impossible.” An ethnicity is not an ideology; nor can political interests be divined from tribal marks.

Obi Nwakanma has rightly argued that “the fact that a man or a woman answers your father's name, wears the same tribal marks; speaks in the same familiar tongue, does not make his interests same as yours. Your interest is closest with the man or woman who sends his children to the same schools as your children; who goes for treatment in the same hospitals; who worries about the security of the same neighbourhood; who goes to the same grocery store; who drives on the same roads, and who you meet on the same frequency to talk about the vital security of the same social and natural environment.” Our mutual aspirations for the future rather than ethnic origins should determine our political affinities.

We should have dialogues but they should be ordained by citizens rather than tribes. We should convene town hall forums and village square meetings where we can invigilate issues that matter to us. The political momentum for structural and systemic changes should be generated through institutional channels such as via the National Assembly. We should join or establish pressure groups and political parties and use them to democratically actualize our ideals. Nation-building is arduous, often slow and particularly challenging for a post-colonial polity. There are no magic cures.

 

We cannot negotiate a new Nigeria with the same polarizing terms that the present dysfunctional order is built on. The SNC proposal is dead on arrival because it is based on the defective tribal logic of the current order. Nigeria’s current system, while flawed, is the best arrangement that can be arrived at with an ethnic constituency framework of representation. The constitution is heavily weighted in favour of the desire to achieve a strategic parity between ethnic groups. Using affirmative action, quotas and the desire to reflect federal character, we have created a representative bureaucracy in which merit has disappeared into the vortex of politically correct ethnic balancing. Not even the armed forces and the security services are exempt from the need to balance ethnic representation. Each state is required to have a minister in the federal executive council thus duplicating the representative function of the national assembly. The constitution guarantees a majoritarian presidency electable only by a two-thirds majority in two-thirds of the states of the federation ensuring that the Nigerian cannot, despite contrary rhetoric, be regarded as the property of any particular region or ethnic group. The spectre of ethnic domination has been shackled effectively. Under the current arrangement, virtually every “tribe” is guaranteed access to the national cake. A tribal parley cannot achieve better than the current order of things.

However, the present order has exhausted itself and is now paralyzed by its inherent contradictions. We have a thoroughly representative bureaucracy which is hyper-sensitively attuned to the nuances of ethnic and religious identity but it is plodding, incompetent, bloated and corrupt. Paralyzed by its obsession with representational politics, the civil service clearly cannot serve as an engine of national transformation. We have forged political parity between ethnic groups and regions yet poverty in Nigeria is a national phenomenon with the federal government’s own figures classifying 112 million Nigerians as poor. Elites from all over the country partake of the national cake but their rhetoric drowns out the more serious crisis of socio-economic inequality in which according to the World Bank, 80 percent of Nigeria’s oil wealth is enjoyed by a mere one percent of Nigerians.

Rotation and zoning of political offices and privileges has not solved the problems of corruption and failed governance. We have simply created an equal opportunity kleptocracy. Indeed, the plagues of our republic are of such a scale that they defy the conventional sectional terms of analysis. Terrorism, AIDS, social injustice, graft, crime and insecurity do not apply federal character or zone their consequences exclusively to particular ethnicities; they afflict us generally as Nigerian citizens. Our responses to these plagues must be framed in civic-democratic rather than in tribal terms. We cannot combat universal plagues with sectarian weapons.          

Implicit in the renewed calls for tribal summitry is a failure of imagination on the part of self-described progressives. It is the failure to imagine Nigeria as anything other than a mosaic of conflicting ethnicities and to craft an alternative ideology to the reigning philosophy of national-cake sharing among ethnic elites.  Other than the clamour for tribal summitry, there is scant difference between SNC advocates and their fellow tribal fundamentalists. The ruling faction simply sees governance as a means of pork distribution among elites who purportedly eat “on behalf of” their ethnic groups while the “SNC progressives” use the same tribal polemics as a moral bludgeon to gain political leverage.  Many SNC advocates are either unwilling or unable to attain legitimacy through the ballot and now want to do so as tribal representatives.

The persistent tribalization of political discourse is partly generational. Political conversation is still dominated by the generation of Nigerians that saw the civil war and who were actors in the First Republic. The tenor of polemics in the media is still informed by their view of Nigeria as a combustible arrangement of warring tribal enclaves. As such, even the solutions canvassed by the self-described “progressives” of this particular generation carry the fatal stamp of tribalistic myopia. This view of Nigeria has its intellectual origins in the ethno-federalist polemics of Obafemi Awolowo who advocated that the Nigerian federation be rearranged along ethnic lines to correspond with the aspirations of its ethnic nationalities. Nigeria has evolved beyond such balkanization.

Seventy percent of our population is under 35 years which means that the majority of Nigerians alive today did not experience the civil war yet their political thoughts are significantly influenced by civil war polemics of north vs. south and by inherited prejudices. We need a new narrative and a new understanding of our nation. Nigeria is crying out for a pan-Nigerian democratic movement to grapple with the perfidies of an equally pan-Nigerian confederacy of kleptocrats. Creating this movement is the defining political task of our generation.  

All Images sourced online.  

Why Nigeria Can't Break Up

No bad idea is regurgitated as constantly as the notion that the solution to chronic violence in Nigeria is for her to “break up.” The case for Nigeria’s disintegration surfaces routinely after tragic episodes of violence and has emerged following the recent increase in sectarian terrorism. Some perspective is necessary. Since the days before the Civil War, beating the drums of separatism has become a sort of pre-programmed response to national calamity. Rumours of our impending divorce attended the 1964 elections, the June 12 1993 crisis, the death of Moshood Abiola in 1998 and the Sharia controversy in 2001. In 1990, a gang of over-ambitious soldiers attempting to oust the Babangida regime even purported to evict five northern states from the federation. Thus, current debates about the durability of Nigeria are nothing new.

It is intellectually lazy and astonishingly parlous thinking to suggest that the solution to our national crisis is disintegration. It is true that much life has been expended on the Nigeria project to no apparent redemptive effect but what we owe the dead and the unborn as well as ourselves is clear-minded thinking on the fate of our union rather than just emotive polemics.

The usual suggestion is that Nigeria be divided between a “Muslim North” and “Christian South” or among its so-called big three – the Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo. Beyond these imprecise propositions, there is little specificity as to what shape post-Nigerian nations would look like except perhaps for the preposterous suggestion that every ethnic group should become a nation. These arguments are fallacious. Nigeria is not and has never been a country of monolithic religious halves. Christians and Muslims are scattered in substantial proportions and ethnic variety across the country. There are Fulani Christians and Igbo Muslims. Millions of Yoruba families contain adherents of both faiths. Nigeria is far more complex and diverse than the Hausa-Yoruba-Igbo tripod. Making each ethnic group a nation throws up problems. What would we make of Ijaw communities who hug the coastline stretching from the south to the south west? The sheer diversity and interlocking spread of hundreds of ethnic nationalities makes tidy disintegration a virtually impossible proposition.

A popular fallacy is that prior to the advent of the colonialists, Nigeria’s ethnic groups existed in self-contained cocoons of utopian bliss unburdened by the necessity of interaction with others. But many of the ethnic and regional identities which are now presumed “sacred” are in fact colonial creations. For instance, it was only after colonization, that the term “Yorubaland” began to be applied to the realms of all rulers who claim descent from Oduduwa, instead of only to the Oyo Kingdom. Before the British came, the Egba, Ijebu, Ekiti, Ijesha and Ilorin peoples fought costly interstate wars among themselves. The longest pre-colonial civil war was the sixteen year Kiriji war which was fought between Yoruba city states. Yoruba nationalism was forged by Obafemi Awolowo who rallied the descendants of Oduduwa as a political force in the new nation. Similarly, Igbos were organized into separate and autonomous republics. Many of them had scant contact with each other with some entirely oblivious of others before the advent of colonialism. Consequently, Igbos fought no wars as a collective. Igbo national consciousness was largely the handiwork of Nnamdi Azikiwe who at one point preached the manifest destiny of the Igbo in Africa. Hausa city-states co-existed through times of war and peace. Even when Uthman Dan Fodio’s jihad established the Sokoto Caliphate, the new emirates were never synonymous with “the North” which was a later British invention and was fortified as a political identity by Ahmadu Bello.

Significantly, pre-colonial societies were not based on ethnic units but rather on age groups, occupations, residence and settlements. Instead of monolithic tribal blocs competing for a share of the national cake, city-states, inclusive kingdoms and republics for the most part made up the area that was eventually christened Nigeria and experienced centuries-long commercial links and cultural cross-pollination.

Dissolving the Nigerian federation will not resolve the violence that bedevils places like Jos, the conflicts between the Ife and Modakeke in Osun, the Aguleri and Umuleri in Anambra or the Ezza and the Ezillo in Ebonyi, the Jukun and the Tiv or the Itsekiri and the Urhobo. Nor will it end conflicts between nomadic Fulani pastoralists and agrarian communities stretching from the north to the south. These are essentially either local or intra-ethnic conflicts.

Ethnic homogeneity cannot indemnify society against conflict. Somalia, the world’s poster child of failed statehood, has only one ethnic group, the Somali, only one language and is one hundred percent Islamic. South Sudan which only recently celebrated its divorce from Sudan is now embroiled in inter-ethnic conflict within its borders. Back home, we need only look at Bayelsa State and other ethnically homogeneous states to establish conclusively that ethnic homogeneity is not a predictor of peace, social justice or smart governance.

While prodigal political elites practise divisive politics, the Nigerian people themselves live in a socio-economic reality of interdependence and integration. The use of oil wealth from the Niger Delta in sustaining state bureaucracies all over the country may be the most obvious example of this. Less remarked is the dependence of southern urbanites on northern produce for food. The Fulanis are the main custodians of Nigeria’s livestock population, holding over ten million cattle, twenty million goats and millions of sheep. Their industry significantly accounts for protein consumption in the south. The north remains Nigeria’s food basket.

We are so captivated by the witchcraft of separatism that we fail to appreciate the fortuitous or providential alignments of ecological, geographical, cultural and economic factors that have fostered interdependence and integration. For example, if violence in the north was simply about anti-Igbo hatred then it would be saner for Igbos to stay home in the east. But the east is disadvantaged by its erosion-prone poor soil which cannot sustain the population density of the area and which accounts for the comparatively high level of migration of Igbos to other parts of Nigeria. Despite everything, Igbos (and other Nigerians) continue to migrate and mingle because human coexistence dictates it. No man is an Island. Aliko Dangote, Africa’s richest man is from Kano but has most of his investments in the south and employs more southerners than northerners. Millions of Nigerians have become socio-cultural hybrids through intermarriage, cultural adoption and transplantation.   

Nigeria’s problem is not her diversity but the failure of the state to affirm Nigerian citizenship as the ultimate identity superseding all other allegiances. It is our failure as citizens, intellectuals and politicians to articulate an all-embracing Nigerian ethos. Rather we waste valuable time and energy rebooting hackneyed definitions of Nigeria as an artificial creation or a mere geographical expression. Yet all nations, possibly except Australia, being creations of human political will, are artificial and begin as geographical novelties; they are not received from heaven. It falls on succeeding generations to transform them from mere geographies into socio-political moralities; to create transcendent solidarities where none existed before. This is what nation-building is about and this is what we have failed so spectacularly to do. Sectarian politics thrives largely because of the dazzling scale of ignorance that Nigerians demonstrate about their history, geography and each other.  

It is foolhardy to believe that the failure to treat ourselves as citizens rather than as ethnic and religious partisans will disappear if we dissolve Nigeria. If we cannot treat each other humanely now that we are compatriots, how on earth are we going to do better if we become foreigners? Last year, the Abia state government fired thousands of Igbo-speaking “non-indigenes” from its employment to make room for equally Igbo “indigenes.” Significantly, most conflicts in Nigeria are between so-called “indigenes” and “settlers,” a dichotomy that at times seems to defy ethnic or religious solidarity. These petty bigotries and manifestations of apartheid will not disappear with the Nigerian union. The challenge of civic security is inescapable for there is no possible post-Nigerian construct that would not contain either religious or ethnic minorities. It is worth noting that Biafra, the most serious separatist effort in our history was undermined both by the superior power of the federal forces and the reluctance of ethnic minorities who feared for their own prospects as citizens of Biafra. The problem remains creating a just, fair and equal citizenship that shelters all of us regardless of creed, ethnicity, class or gender.    Nothing suggests that new ethnic republics would in any way be more peaceful, stable or more prosperous than the current Nigerian reality. In short, it would require less effort to renew the Nigerian enterprise than to construct afresh new polities.

Having said all this, nations are not eternal but finite, expiring when they have outlived their usefulness to history and humanity. Nigeria is no different. Nigeria does not currently face immediate disintegration but a slow and steady erosion of federal authority by sundry paramilitaries, warlords and terrorist gangs, until the nation slips inexorably into failed statehood. Already we see signs of this in the brazen terrorism of pseudo-religious extremists who seek to establish alternate governments as well as the rise of oil-bunkering pirate gangs in our southern coastal waters.

It would be a pity if we were to let Nigeria fail. No one who has studied her history, encountered her acute humanity, sampled her cultural riches and researched the dreams of her founding fathers can fail to sense her ordination for higher purposes. For us to abort this purpose would be nothing short of cosmic treason. As Eme Awa once remarked, “If we were to dissolve the federation, a future generation of people will pass the verdict that the Nigerian elites committed suicide while of unsound mind.” Nigeria has not been tried and found wanting. We simply have not invested enough of our intellectual and moral energies into actualizing her promise. 

(All Images are sourced from Google Images.)

We Must Stop Politicizing Terrorism

The tragic Christmas Day terrorist attacks portend a long drawn-out conflict that could rapidly degenerate into a sectarian cycle of destruction and retribution. The slaughter of worshippers in a church, a choreographed act of murderous sacrilege clearly intended to ignite conflict between Muslims and Christians, calls for a revision of our conceptual and strategic responses to Boko Haram.

The militant sect formerly led by the slain cleric Mohammed Yusuf, strengthened by the assistance of foreign terrorists, has coalesced with the large pool of bandits retained by local politicians as thugs during elections but cut loose afterward. It is likely that what we call “Boko Haram” no longer describes a single organization but a culture of nihilistic violence and anarchic rebellion with aims and demands so diffuse and nebulous as to be practically unattainable, but which will nonetheless continue its campaign of terror, spreading destruction, hate and fear. In a very real sense, Boko Haram and similar groups are agents of chaos who swell their ranks by feeding on the profound alienation and discontent in the society.

The scale and spread of the devastation we are witnessing does not suggest an organization with a centralized command and control structure but a program of destruction that has taken on a life and a momentum of its own. “Boko Haram” has become an umbrella term that covers everything from suicide bombings and bloody bank heists to targeted killings of police and military personnel. It is highly unlikely that any politician or cleric can now control this phenomenon. The genie is well and truly out of the bottle and can only be put back in by a reasoned application of moral and martial force; a synthesis of soft and hard power.  

                    

The continued reference to Boko Haram as “Islamic fundamentalists” or “Islamists” is a major flaw of the government’s counterterrorism strategy. These arguable definitions should matter for sociological analysis only. People who shoot and blow up citizens should be properly defined as criminals, specifically, murderers. Describing them as “Islamic” militants legitimizes them by linking their goals to the millions of Nigerian Muslims who do not share their aspirations. Their claim to Islamic orientation is irrelevant. Throughout history, terrorists of all shades have festooned their crimes with high-sounding causes. Boko Haram should not have been allowed to define itself and the terms of the conflict.

There are also geostrategic considerations involved. There are more than twice as many Muslims in Nigeria as in Saudi Arabia, Islam’s birthplace. By reason of demographics, Nigeria could play a very significant role in shaping the complexion of Islam in Africa. It is not in our national interest to allow an ultraviolent anarchist group become the face of the faith on our shores.   

                             

There seems to be this idea that bandits cease to be criminals and evolve into political activists once they can explain their crimes with ethnic or religious motivations. We have seen this approach before with Niger Delta militant groups and the Odua People’s Congress. These species of terrorism were apparently legitimized by their actions purportedly on behalf of their ethnic communities. Terrorism is a description of means not ends. Seeking greater resource control or a wider application of Sharia Law does not make one a terrorist; Murder and undermining public safety to achieve these goals does. The intelligent government’s response is to address the legitimate grievances proclaimed by the terrorists and also to stridently punish them for their methods.

Sadly, the Nigerian state in its dealings with various armed groups over the years has acted as though religious or ethnic sensibilities can sanctify violence. The result has been a disastrous consecration of violence as a tool of political negotiation. It should be immaterial whether a mass-murderer claims to be a Muslim or a Christian. What should matter is the crime itself and implementing swift unequivocal justice to honour the memory of the dead and give meaning to our citizenship.

Unfortunately, the Jonathan administration has continuously acted as though the terrorists are more important than their victims. Its willingness to negotiate with Boko Haram – even when the group had repeatedly expressed its non-recognition of the federal government and the non-negotiability of its demands – not only reflected weakness; it fostered the dangerous impression that terrorism is a passport to political relevance. The government by opting to negotiate with the killers over the dead bodies of their victims demonstrated an utter lack of value for the lives of Nigerian citizens.

We must cease the practice of inviting religious clerics to take center stage after each terrorist outrage. It fortifies the ill-informed myth that Nigeria is composed of hermetically sealed off blocs of Northern Muslims and Southern Christians and validates Boko Haram’s propagandistic self-definition as an armed wing of the Muslim community. Urging Muslim leaders to condemn Boko Haram as if it is exclusively “their” problem is beside the point. We all should be condemning Boko Haram. The fact that the group claims Islamic justification for its crimes may place an onus on Muslims to denounce them but then what? Boko Haram kills Muslims as well as Christians and has killed several Islamic clerics.

                                                                 

No amount of condemnation will dissuade a bloodthirsty band of nihilists from their anarchic agenda. We should not allow the government to shirk its responsibility of securing the citizenry by suggesting that the terrorists would stop if only clerics issue obligatory rebukes after every attack.

For the past two years, rural communities on the outskirts of Jos have suffered repeated nocturnal attacks with great loss of life by marauding bands of Fulani herdsmen. Yet, one wonders about the reportage of these incidents. Often the identity of the murderers as Fulani herdsmen is trumpeted in such a way as to render it synonymous with “Muslim” and to create a portrait of generic sectarian violence affecting the entire Plateau area. In fact, there is no evidence that the violence in these rural communities has anything to do with the chronic clashes in the Jos metropolis.

But should the ethnic identity of these marauders make any difference at all in apprehending them as criminals? Is it not enough that families have been slaughtered and communities terrorized? Should we not be thinking of them simply as murderous bandits and deal with them as such, rather than calling them Fulani Herdsmen, both to see that justice is truly blind and also to avoid the unfortunate slander of an entire ethnic group by association?

In what other instance would it be necessary to refer to the perpetrators of a crime by their faith or ethnicity? How often do the media ask us to think in terms of “Igbo” drug dealers or “Yoruba” kidnappers or “Christian” fraudsters? In the eyes of justice, crime is what we do rather than whom and what we are or what we believe. 

We must now change the terms of discussing conflict. What we call “ethno-religious violence” should be distilled, for the sake of moral clarity, into crimes – arson, terrorism, rape, mass-murder, etc. Terms like “ethno-religious violence” are useful for socio-scientific purposes but their popular usage can deodourize their true meaning and desensitize us to them.

To address recurrent violence, we must identify it as crime rather than as politics. The application of religious and ethnic labels to conflict is a pretext for politicizing terrorism, with the implicit and at times explicit proposition that there is nothing wrong with violence so long as it is done in the name of God or kin; and that it is equally agreeable to murder people for the crime of being “infidels” or “non-indigenes.” Sectarian violence recurs without its perpetrators being punished because we have come to accept such violence as a necessary aspect of our politics rather than a breach of law and a crime against our collective humanity and citizenship.

By characterizing conflicts as religious or ethnic even when they are patently about resources and power, terrorists are encouraged to escalate their violence by claiming heavenly or historical motivations for their profane agendas. From being susceptible to solutions rooted in good governance, justice and social security, the hostilities mutate into intractable generational cycles of strife and vengeance. Because the combatants perceive not only their lives but their souls and identities to be at stake, conflict becomes an existential continuum, impelling communities to seek their salvation by destroying others.  We must “secularize” these conflicts by stripping them of their ethno-religious labels. This will delegitimize warlords who rely on myths of sacred identities to foment conflict.

Nigeria’s war against terror will be arduous. It must be fought intelligently.