It's Time to Reimagine Nigeria

 (Text of my speech at the commemorative national centenary edition of the Abuja Literary Society’s Night of the Spoken Word on Friday, January 24, 2014)

The idea at the heart of this nation’s birth was racial redemption. At the beginning of the 20^th century, race was the barrier that divided the world. The colour line split humanity into an allegedly superior white race and a supposedly inferior black race. The generation of agitators that formed the nationalist movement saw Nigeria as an opportunity to register the black man’s presence in the modern world. They wanted to show that Africans could build a pinnacle civilization of their own. Nigeria was to be a showpiece state and an exemplary nation – incontrovertible proof that blacks had something positive to offer humanity.

In order to achieve this, our founding patriarchs had to have a certain kind of faith. They believed in a cosmic sovereign will operating in history. They believed that this being had impelled diverse communities from far-flung places to migrate over the course of centuries and eventually congregate in this space that would one day be christened Nigeria. They also believed that a force greater than Frederick Lugard’s penmanship had ordained the nation’s existence. Consequently, they did not see Nigeria as a whim of the British Empire but as the will of providence.

Now, the patriarchs were usually fractious on many issues but they were of remarkable agreement on one matter: Nigeria was unique and exceptional. Thus Nnamdi Azikiwe declared that Nigeria would be “a country of consequence” and “a force in world affairs.” As he took office as Nigeria’s first indigenous Governor-General in 1960, Azikiwe declared that Nigeria had a duty to “revive the stature of man in Africa and restore the dignity of man in the world.” Adegoke Adelabu described Nigeria’s independence as “a cosmological imperative.” Ahmadu Bello, who at one point famously described the nascent Nigerian nation as a mistake, predicted that with independence she would rise to become “first among equals in Africa.” Chinua Achebe once described Nigeria as a nation favoured by providence and burdened with a historic purpose that no other nation can fulfill

This belief in Nigeria’s manifest destiny energized the nationalist struggle and earned us independence from the British in 1960. This ended the first chapter of our national odyssey.

Our learning curve as a nation since that time has been steep. We have since learned that liberation is different from nation-building. It is one thing to achieve freedom from colonial bondage; it is another thing to seize control of the post-colonial Promised Land. The journey from servitude to sovereignty has been very challenging. We have been through so many traumas – the fall of the First Republic and the abortion of the heady promise of independence, the civil war, the cycle of coups and counter-coups, the oil boom that gave us more wealth than we knew how to usefully spend, the subsequent era of recession and austerity, the age of SAP, the structural adjustment programme, decades of military dictatorship, chronic ethno-religious violence, terrorism – through all of these plagues, we have survived resiliently against the odds. We are still here. And that fact alone gives us the impetus to face the future boldly.

Here are three lessons from our national odyssey that we must take to heart.

1. Nations are not transformed in electoral cycles but in generational cycles. It took a generation of nationalists to earn our independence from colonialists. It took another generation of nationalist pro-democracy activists to confront military despots and win us democracy. And now it falls on another generation, ours, to expand the borders of the freedom that we have now. For democracy means more than just the right to vote. Ultimately, it must mean that everyone has the means to live their dreams and be makers of their own destiny.

For our purposes, a generation is not defined by the coincidence of belonging to the same age bracket. A generation is defined by shared values. So however young or old you are, if you believe that this land can and should be better and will work for its progress, then we belong to the same generation.

2. We live in a society that constantly reminds us of our differences – distinctions of creed, clan, tribe and language. ‘Divide and rule’ was a weapon that the British used against the nationalists and delinquent political elites have long used it against the Nigerian people. But the fact is that from Talata Mafara to Brass, Shendam to Oshogbo, Nigerians want the same things. They want to dwell in peace and raise their children in safety. They believe that no condition is permanent; that tomorrow’s harvest will exceed today’s; and that the stars are ever in their favour. They believe in ‘Live and Let Live.’

We should certainly understand our differences, such as they are, but they need not define us or limit us. There is a meeting of hearts and minds that transcends geography and genetics. The diehard nativists and tribal fundamentalists may insist that blood is thicker than water but a nation is much more than a bloodline. It is as Edward Renan said “a spiritual principle” and “a moral consciousness”. We do not have to be kin to be kindred spirits bearing the burden of a common destiny. The fact that we do not speak the same language does not mean that cannot find solidarity in our suffering.

Throughout our history, our finest moments as a nation have occurred whenever we transcended these so-called differences. All our transformational struggles – the struggle for independence from colonialists and the struggle against military tyranny for democracy – were waged and won by movements that transcended our differences. These movements triumphed by welding northerners and southerners, Muslims and Christians, humanists and agnostics, the faithful and the faithless together in the patriotic agony of shared purpose. This is what we must do in our time.     

3. Thirdly, Nation-building is an act of constant imagination and re-imagination; of constant invention and reinvention. The soul of a nation is forged in the crucible of its imagination. It is poetry and prophecy, prose and propaganda; it is faith and praxis. We are all moved by the majestic proclamation of the U.S. Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men were created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

But when these words were written, these truths were not at all self-evident. The Declaration had fifty-six signatories, all white males. There were no African-Americans. At the time, blacks were considered less than human and fit only for slavery. Indeed, some of the signatories were themselves slave-owners. There were no Native Americans. The Native American civilization had been virtually wiped out. And, of course, there were no women. Now, we can look at this contradiction as an act of high-sounding hypocrisy on the part of those who wrote the declaration. But I suggest it was something more. When those men wrote those words, they were reimagining their nation and reaching for an ideal that could inspire generations after them.

It is possible for us, as a generation, to re-imagine our social, political and economic realities. It is within our powers to declare new possibilities and to reach for new ideals that will shape the next one hundred years. The future will not come until we become it; in our words, creativity and craft, in our activism, in our politics, in the narratives we are producing about ourselves and the examples we are setting for our children. Franz Fanon said that each generation must discover its calling and either betray it or fulfill it. Tonight our calling is clear. One hundred years after Lugard’s amalgamation, fifty-four years after independence and fifteen years into the Fourth Republic, it is time to re-imagine Nigeria. Thank you.      

 

Mr President, What is Your Message?

When Senator Chuba Okadigbo complained some years ago that three years of the Olusegun Obasanjo administration had yielded “no quotable quotes,” he was lamenting the inspiration deficit of Nigerian leaders. Listening to President Goodluck Jonathan’s inaugural speech, I was struck yet again by how abjectly bereft of inspirational powers most of Nigeria’s top politicians are. An inaugural speech is traditionally a defining proclamation of a president’s agenda. What we heard on inauguration day was a drab, colourless, soporific recital unworthy of recall. It left no memorable fragments to warm the heart or quicken the spirit. It was forgettable and I would wager that few if any Nigerians can recall any part of that address.

President Jonathan’s oratorical challenges have long been obvious. He was not the most eloquent of the four main contenders for the presidency. (In fairness, his closest rival in the election is possibly an even worse speaker). Jonathan’s predecessors, the grumpy, gravelly-voiced Obasanjo and the dour Umar Yar’Adua were far from stellar public speakers. The problem goes beyond eloquence. It speaks to the inability of leaders to inspire Nigerians with their words.

In fact, this is a contradiction of our political traditions. The nationalists of yore considered rhetorical sophistication an essential part of their political arsenal. In our indigenous cultures, the art of eloquence and the spoken word was a key part of education for public life. The nostrums of our culture were orally transmitted. The creative and destructive power of words is recognized in African moral traditions. “Proverbs are the palm oil with which words are eaten,” Chinua Achebe wrote. His axiom conveyed the truth that in African culture, the spoken word was a form of spiritual and mental nourishment. Accordingly, the nationalists practised oratory as the dispensation of soul food. Nnamdi Azikiwe, Aminu Kano, Kingsley Mbadiwe, Mbonu Ojike, Adegoke Adelabu, Mokwugo Okoye, Raji Abdallah among others were renowned for their fluency. Our first Prime Minister Abubakar Tafawa Balewa was acclaimed as “the golden voice of Africa.”    

I believe that military intervention which ruptured the liberal tradition and inseminated Nigerian history with a lineage of soldiers more accustomed to barking commands and decrees than winning hearts and minds through the power of persuasion is partly to blame. Even so, among the soldiers, Emeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu and Murtala Mohammed were notably fiery speakers. Simply wearing khaki does not impede eloquence.

The oratorical limitation of our leading politicians also has a great deal to do with the context of elite selection. The nationalists had to rally multitudes to their cause in order to gain political significance, whereas political leadership today does not depend so much on inspiring multitudes as on buying the favours of godfathers. It is less about persuading the electorate than placating special interests. The absence of a real public debate before the polls between the leading presidential contenders denied Nigerians the opportunity of seeing them match wits against each other. Instead of watching the aspirants to the most significant office in the black world arguing their respective cases for leadership, we had to settle for a dire presidential monologue. If you never have to make a case for your leadership before the people, then your ability to inspire their confidence at any other time will be nil.

It is significant that many of the most powerful public speakers in Nigeria today are either pastors or imams. Their leadership, being devoid of any coercive sanction, rests entirely on their ability to persuade, to inspire voluntary loyalty. If they cannot speak to the inner consciousness, they rapidly lose their audiences. There is a reason why the numbers that fill our crusade and prayer grounds have yet to be matched by any voluntary gathering for a party rally. Multitudes still drift towards the wells of inspiration and words fitly spoken still set hearts aflame. In these days of religious extremism, the president and many politicians are in a rhetorical contest for hearts and minds with charlatans who use their influence over the multitudes for evil.        

The ability to inspire people matters, especially since the task before us is mobilizing Nigerians with a sense of common purpose. It will take the right words to resurrect people from tribal tombs and raise them to a new level of national consciousness. It will take inspiration to pierce through the veils of cynicism and pessimism that separate the citizenry from the leadership. It takes rhetoric to build bridges of empathy to connect the powerless with the powerful. It will take rhetoric to motivate Nigeria’s teeming young population, many of whom are without jobs and see no prospects for the future.  

The power to inspire and influence is basically rooted in conviction. People are more likely to follow leaders who display passion. It has been a long time since a Nigerian leader displayed fervency. Murtala was not a rhetorician in the league of the nationalists but his fervour was undeniable. His ‘Africa Has Come of Age’ speech was memorable not just for its words but also for the passion with which he delivered it in 1976 at Addis Ababa. Nigerians remember his time in office as one of governmental resolve largely because of his ardour.

We have yet to decipher what Jonathan stands for and what ideas command his passions. He has no record of strongly-held positions, either oral or written, on any of our pressing national issues. Even his repudiation of the PDP’s zoning arrangement which some had hoped would be a springboard for asserting a new post-sectarian meritocracy in our politics has turned out to be opportunism with the president now reaffirming zoning. His inaugural address was replete with the usual clichés about “patriotism” and “resilience” and getting “Nigerians to dream again.” But presidential sermonizing on patriotism would be more compelling if it were delivered with conviction. There is as yet no message or big idea, no core value or principle around which the president can mobilize Nigerians.

In a presidential democracy, the centrality of the chief executive means that the president is the prime town-crier, the nation’s narrator and storyteller-in-chief. We look up to him to put our times in historical context, to instruct us as to where we are going as a nation and to create a dramatic symmetry between our collective past, present and future. When the president speaks, it should be with oracular gravity. As such, legitimate criticism may be leveled against the president’s speech writers. The inaugural speech failed to strike the right chords even when dealing with the historic significance of being the first Nigerian from an ethnic minority to assume the presidency. Sometimes, even when assailed by stilted and wooden delivery, the right words uttered at the right moment can do a profound work – but the president had no ammunition.

Of course, eloquence is not everything. For instance, it is not a substitute for character. Adolf Hitler was charismatic and eloquent. In the last elections, Kano State Governor Ibrahim Shekarau impressed many watchers as the most articulate of the main contenders. But his performance in Kano did not quite rise to the level of his rhetoric. There are some who might argue that the president can compensate for his oratorical limitations with his character and competence. That remains to be seen.

Still, a measure of eloquence matters. A dexterous public communicator can translate a crisis into an opportunity for national self-transcendence. In times of crisis, leaders come forth to give utterance to the groans of their people. Nigeria is in crisis and requires voices to articulate its yearnings. Some would say that it is asking too much for Nigerian politicians to sound like Barack Obama or Tony Blair. This view not only contains a derogatory insistence that we keep accepting the average, but misses the point. Azikiwe thought that leadership should be reserved for an aristocracy of intelligence and Obafemi Awolowo wrote that only those who possessed “mental magnitude” were fit to lead Nigeria. Alas, Nigerian leadership has plummeted from those lofty standards.  We can refer to the nationalists because there was a time when politics was about words and ideas not just cash, bags of rice or frivolous pageantry. The president has to raise his game.

The Nigerian presidency is not merely the leadership of a small West African country; it is the leadership of a quarter of the black race. There are more Nigerians on this planet than Britons, Germans or the French. A Nigerian president is well-positioned to champion Africa and the black world’s cause in the conclaves of the world’s most powerful nations. It is important therefore that we begin to raise our standards in terms of what we expect of our leaders. The quality of a nation’s leaders is directly connected to the public expectation and definition of leadership. The time for settling for the barely average and tempering merit with mediocrity is over. The 21^st century will punish us harshly if we persist in doing so.     

The End is Not Nigh

Following Goodluck Jonathan’s presidential victory and the subsequent post-election violence in some parts of the country, local pundits and the international media have returned to familiar habits – trafficking apocalyptic predictions of Nigeria’s imminent collapse. Some analysts have declared the country “deeply divided” and have called for its breakup to preempt its certain meltdown in the near future. The pessimists are ascendant. To these evangelists of misery, we must say, ‘the end is not nigh.’

Nigeria has always been allegedly poised on the verge of ruin. For as long as we can remember, we have been falling short, falling behind and falling apart. The jeremiad is a national tradition. Coup speeches were jeremiads announcing the imminence of disaster and the necessity of salvation at gunpoint. The agonistic disposition of Nigerians to Nigeria is born of serial disappointments. It serves as an emotional shield against heartbreak in our engagement with an immensely frustrating country. But we have now translated our justifiable dissatisfaction with inept governments into an unjustifiable disdain for the land itself.

Let us consider the history of America which offers compelling parallels with our own circumstances. No other country exercises as much influence on the Nigerian imagination and political architecture. Both nations are former British colonies. Both fought civil wars and in both cases the union was saved. They share the eagle as a national symbol. Our system of government is a clone of the US federal presidential model.

Many of our statesmen, notably the Zikists, were influenced by their experience of the US. It was the site of Abubakar Tafawa-Balewa’s Damascene conversion from pessimism about Nigeria’s prospects to a commitment to be “a Nigerian and nothing else.” General Yakubu Gowon drew inspiration for his prosecution of the civil war from studying Abraham Lincoln.

America represents the summit of our republican aspirations. It is the country that Nigeria most wants to be like. The Kenyan scholar Ali Mazrui has described Nigeria as Africa’s “closest approximation to the United States”. That the US hosts Nigeria’s largest diasporic community is no accident. Incidentally, many of the slaves that ended up on American plantations were from present day Nigeria.

Nigerians see the US as a mirror of social perfection by which to measure their own advances. In reality, America had to evolve from the point in which political power was the monopoly of the landed elite in the 18^th century through the 19^th century when the suffrage was broadened to white men beyond the traditional gentry. Women and African-Americans were finally included in the civil mainstream only in the 20^th century.

The instability of 1960s America is strikingly reminiscent of Nigeria. Then, America was reeling from the legacies of slavery – institutionalized racism and segregation. Race riots were common. In the southern US, African-Americans were liable to be lynched and their churches and homes torched or bombed by racist terrorists. So pervasive was state-sponsored and supported racist violence that Malcolm X was not alone in foreseeing a racial civil war. While running for president, John F. Kennedy’s most cited disadvantages were his Catholicism and his Irish ancestry – an indication of the ethno-religious bigotries of the day. The climate of intolerance ultimately consumed President Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and Robert F. Kennedy among others in a spate of assassinations.

America has since moved on but there remain deep veins of bitterness stemming from historic white Anglo-Saxon violence against African-Americans and other minorities. Issues like the 1992 Los Angeles Riots, the decay of inner cities, the disproportionately black population of US penitentiaries and Hurricane Katrina in 2005 depict the sordid underbelly of race-related poverty and injustice. Elements of the opposition to President Barack Obama, particularly the “Birther” movement and those who peddle rumours that he is a closet Muslim reveal the lingering currents of racism in the American psyche.

Some watchers see America as deeply divided and foresee the cultural and ideological conflict between liberals and conservatives igniting another civil war. The red state- blue state divide is as pungent as any that we have in Nigeria. Even so, America continues its quest to achieve “a more perfect union.”

Those rightly frustrated by Nigeria’s sectarian polarities and inequities can observe US history for parallels in ethno-religious and political violence and social injustice. Sectarian violence in Northern Nigeria today recalls the racial violence of the American south in the fifties and sixties. Debates over ethnic quotas and federal character in Nigeria mirror the contention over affirmative action in the US.  

Just as America struggles with its plurality, Nigeria also grapples with its diversity. The difference is that America is older and consistently projects its most positive narrative as a republic founded on truth and justice while downplaying its equally valid narrative as an empire founded on slavery, racism, white supremacist destruction of aboriginal cultures and expansionary militarism. We, on the other hand, have mainstreamed a self-destructive pessimism that we virtually revel in.  

Pessimistic pundits typically invoke the most skeptical utterances of our founding fathers while ignoring their more affirmative declarations on Nigeria’s destiny.  Obafemi Awolowo did say, “Nigeria is a mere geographical expression” in 1949 but in 1958, he said, “Let us cross the Rubicon into independence and burn the boat. Nigeria is a noble purpose and a venture worth fighting for.”Ahmadu Bello did indeed once describe Nigeria as “the mistake of 1914” but later said in 1953, “Whatever the Nigerians may say, the British people have done them a great service by bringing all the different communities of Nigeria together.” In early 1960, he declared that with independence Nigeria would rise to become “first among equals in Africa.”

Like the nation itself, these leaders’ views on the viability of the Nigerian project evolved over time. However, we have frozen our patriarchs in their most skeptical phases and made them oracles of our own faithlessness. We have made cynicism our national religion, thus subverting our quest for a better society.

At his 1962 treason trial, Awolowo prophesied a “twilight of democracy” in Nigeria but also an eventual “glorious dawn” after the darkness. Azikiwe who lived in Jim Crow-era America when Negroes were subjected to systematic violence wrote that the “racial intolerance, bigotry and lawlessness” of the period was “a passing phase in the saga of American history.”

The patriarchs had an insight that we need to recover and apply in evaluating our national life. A nation is not static but holds within itself the seeds of its constant renewal. It is an odyssey in space, time and spirit from one state of being to a higher plane of existence. Each generation of citizens must write its own chapter of this odyssey, either progressing or regressing, but never standing still. And their children bear the burdens or blessings of what has been written. The question is whether our own children will inherit a scorched wasteland or a garden of civic concord and opportunity.

Through their proclamations, the patriarchs offered a political eschatology of infinite promise and unyielding hope. They understood that transforming a post-colonial state into a sovereign republic is an arduous struggle.

Admittedly, Nigeria faces grave plagues in venal politicians and the ubiquitous portents of state failure. In a bid to drive home the urgency of our crisis, we are often prone to shrill exaggeration and defeatist doom-mongering.

A society’s prophetic faculties include a capacity for self-criticism but we have degenerated into self-loathing and self-flagellation. To be truly prophetic, it is not enough to uproot and overthrow with our critiques; we must also build and plant. We must move from agonizing to organizing. If we stop at destroying and deconstructing without designing new social and political architectures, we are no more than anarchists and nihilists. We must not only proclaim the end of the undesirable, we must also declare a future and a hope. We do not need saccharine fantasies of a God-willed Utopia miraculously delivered from on high but a constructive optimism about our nation.       

It is impossible to nurture democratic potentialities in a climate of despair. If Nigeria is already doomed, why bother voting or engaging? Why bother with activism if all possibilities of change have been foreclosed? Democracy flowers where there is hope while antidemocratic forces thrive in an atmosphere of hopelessness. Indeed, by promoting a toxic pessimism about our future, we unwittingly sustain the longevity of retrograde power-mongers that have outlived their usefulness. We concede the public square to entities that prosper only because we believe that change is impossible.

Nations are not built by colonialists, military strongmen or oligarchic cabals, but by citizens. Yet we persist in outsourcing our civic responsibilities to the most unregenerate of our compatriots. Nigeria will not be saved by any political messiah but by citizens with redemptive values and habits and the organized political expressions of these positive energies. The challenge is for us to overcome the temptations of despondency and bigotry and articulate a progressive politics of hope and common purpose.  Our fate is in our own hands.