First, They Came To the Northeast

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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






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

State of War

Nigerian authorities have been reluctant to describe the ongoing counter-insurgency campaign against Boko Haram in the northeast as a war. This reluctance is by no means unprecedented. Right up till the moment federal forces invaded Biafra, the federal government was still describing its mobilization against the secessionist regime as a “police action.” The tendency to understate security challenges is the state’s way of projecting an unflappable comportment; to reassure the public that “there is no cause for alarm” and that “the situation is under control.”

In this instance, the critical data defies understatement. Conservative estimates place the number of lives claimed by the insurgency at over 4, 000 since 2009. According to the UN High Commission for Refugees, the fighting has internally displaced 470, 000 people in Nigeria with another 60, 000 forced to seek refuge in Cameroon, Niger and Chad since 2013. More than fifty percent of the refugees are women and children. The closure of federal government colleges in the region has affected over 10, 000 students – a number that increases exponentially when the closure of other schools is factored in. The “talibanization” of the northeast is in progress as evinced by Boko Haram’s targeting of schools and preying upon girls.   

Since 2011, Boko Haram has struck the national police headquarters, army and air force bases in the northeast and the State Security Service headquarters in Abuja where inmates attempted a jailbreak last month. It has also attacked public schools including federal government colleges where young Nigerians of diverse faiths and ethnicities are educated. Its hatred for pluralism as embodied in the Nigerian state is unalloyed. Having moved from seeking virgins in paradise to snatching young girls for sexual slavery, the group’s ideological bankruptcy has been exposed. All that it has left is nihilistic sadism as evidenced by its murderous focus on soft targets. This makes it all the more dangerous.

President Goodluck Jonathan has not been able to rally the country against this threat; nor has he articulated a theory of the case that explains our current national security challenges and a grand ideological and strategic response to non-state actors. Instead, his administration has shown itself willing to use the conflict for political ends notably as a means of smearing political opponents. For its own part, the opposition is incapable of nuanced critiques of terrorism and sees an opportunity to promise miracles if elected. We are in a time of national crisis and statesmanship is in short supply.

The administration suffers from a massive credibility deficit. Jonathan’s serial broken promises to end the insurgency have been damaging. Continuing attacks on soft and hard targets such as military bases have undermined public confidence in the armed forces and security services. This is a shame because the military and the security agencies have worked hard to degrade Boko Haram. They have perhaps been undone by a predilection for “truth-bending.” Propaganda is a customary element of warfare but it has to be properly executed. Public impatience is understandable, more so, in the light of a political class that is largely considered insensitive to the plight of the poor – the insurgents’ victims of choice.

The administration has also failed to provide a coherent narrative timeline that explains the origin and evolution of Boko Haram. In January, Aliyu Mohammed Gusau was appointed minister of defence ostensibly to coordinate a new approach to the counter-insurgency. Gusau was National Security Adviser (NSA) from 1999 to 2006. Having been appointed again to that position by Jonathan in 2010, Gusau has been NSA longer than anyone else since 1999. An inquest into the origin and evolution of Boko Haram must surely ask questions of what he knew and did about the current threat when it was still at an embryonic stage in the early to mid 2000s. Gusau’s appearance before the senate for his confirmation hearing provided the opportunity to pose such questions. The senate instead afforded him the luxury of exemption from questioning. The fact that the senate failed to question a nominee penciled down to head the defence ministry in a time of war aptly demonstrates its dereliction of duty. 

The failure to produce an official biography of Boko Haram has been a boon to conspiracy theorists who tap into popular but false narratives to explain the insurgency. Some of the most colourful theories posit nebulous conspiracies starring either the president or his political opponents. However, in this instance, Nigerians are attributing to malice what is largely a consequence of incompetence. When a system long crippled by corruption, mediocrity and dysfunction is confronted by a protean, highly adaptive and asymmetrical threat, it is asking too much to expect an immediate nimble and strategically efficient response. These conspiracy theories continue to cloud the public mind at a time when national consensus is required.

Some of the measures that need to be taken – mass relocation of tens of thousands students to safer places for schooling or the establishment of protected camps for half a million refugees require competent leadership and a  strong state but the Nigerian state is weak and political actors are unwilling to lead.     

The military has scored moderate successes in its campaign at great human cost. Its casualty figures, while closely guarded by the defence establishment, are significant enough to warrant a national memorial and greater effort to commemorate the supreme sacrifices being made by the troops. However, the military is hamstrung by a deficit of numbers with which to adequately cover a theatre of operations which due to the nature of the enemy is highly fluid; a limited intelligence support structure and arguably, a resource deficit that adversely affects its ability to effectively hold ground. These deficits have to be surmounted.

But the military also suffers from being the only instrument in the toolkit favoured by politicians; it is, by definition, a broad sword when, in many instances, what is required is a scalpel. A purely military approach that is apparently devoid of preemptive policing, adequate intelligence gathering and psychological warfare components is bound to have limitations. For instance, the failure to protect moderate clerics that have been targeted by Boko Haram and to deploy them as a first line of defence against extremist ideologies in the communities is a tactical error. The army is also overstretched by its deployment across the federation putting out fires that are really within the purview of the police. The risk of mission fatigue is high.  

The National Security Adviser, Sambo Dasuki, recently unveiled a broader strategy that incorporates non-military options in the counter-insurgency toolkit including greater efforts to win hearts and minds and to address the socio-economic conditions of the northeast. This will require time to work. The administration has also outlined the Federal Initiative for the North East (FINE), a raft of economic, infrastructural and agro-allied rehabilitation measures. Given the region’s scale of ecological, socioeconomic and infrastructural degradation, federal intervention is necessary. But until a suitably hefty security and military footprint is established and order is restored, rehabilitation and reconstruction will be impossible.

From all indications, this will not end soon. Counter-insurgency campaigns are notoriously long drawn-out affairs. This administration has been burned badly in the past by an imprudent eagerness to declare the imminence of victory. However, the nature of the enemy and the nature of its terrain which includes vast ungoverned spaces straddling borders with Cameroon, Chad and Niger, call for a reassessment of what ‘victory’ means. Both the public and the troops on the frontlines will be ill-served by premature triumphalism. Conversely, an open-ended military commitment with no timelines or performance indicators is untenable and carries its own risks. Prolonged militarization with ample occasion for human rights violations and scorched earth tactics will surely radicalize occupied communities and boost Boko Haram’s recruitment drive in the area. This dynamic, at least partly, accounts for Boko Haram’s resilience.  

Boko Haram lost the first phase of the war in 2011 when its attacks on churches failed to elicit widespread reprisals that could have ignited a broader sectarian war in which it would then have postured as an Islamist defence vanguard. Much of the conflict is now contained in the northeast but if the northeast is “abandoned” or “forgotten”, either by reason of paucity of resolve or resources, it would rapidly become a base for the insurgents to regroup and eventually launch attacks on other parts of the federation. The northeast frontier is usually on the fringes of the national consciousness but as the gateway to the Sahel and the Maghreb, it is an area of vital importance where the insurgents must be denied refuge or breathing space. We cannot afford for this to become a forgotten war. At this point, international assistance is necessary to augment the joint military operations by Nigeria and her neighbours. National pride should not stop Nigeria from seeking external help even as it continues build capacity.

In an age of attacks on soft targets, there also needs to be fresh thinking on how to secure public spaces – parks, bus stations, markets and schools. Strategies for this must involve the cooperation between security agencies and the citizenry. Terror is tragically the new normal and we must adopt a permanent posture of vigilance.

Given the foul opportunism of politicians in a pre-election year, it can be easy to forget who the real enemy is. The indiscriminately ecumenical range of Boko Haram’s victims on April 14 in Nyanya, Abuja should serve as a reminder. 

(All Images Sourced online)      

The North-South Delusion

As 2015 draws closer, politicians are ratcheting up their use of polarizing rhetoric in their pursuit of power. The favoured clichéd binary of a “North” ranged against a “South” is already being circulated. These wearisome terms, so often promoted by politicians and media elites as a frame for understanding Nigeria, have to be challenged.

The “North” as anything resembling a monolith died with Ahmadu Bello in 1966 and was speedily interred when General Yakubu Gowon’s regime dissolved the regions into states in 1967 to accommodate restive minorities as well as to break the Biafran secession. What remains of that North is merely the ghost of a dream. The term ‘Northerner’ can be justifiably used to bracket people who inhabit the same socio-cultural universe above the Niger but the ‘North’ as a monolithic political entity with uniform political goals and values is a fantasy.

Since 1967, and most recently since the beginning of the Fourth Republic, that simplistic notion of Northern identity has frayed further with the resurgence of ethnic nationalism. Communities hitherto subsumed in the Arewa collective are now culturally reasserting themselves as a result of the lease of political expression created by democracy. Where previously some people might have self-identified as ‘Northerners’, they are now more likely to identify themselves as Kanuri, Bachama, Tangale or Igala, or even more generically as Middle Belters – an identity often used synonymously and inadequately with ‘Northern Christian.’  Even the Hausa-Fulani construct is now frequently clarified by those who rightly point out that this hybrid identity is more of a political simulation than an anthropological fact. Hausa and Fulfulde do not even belong to the same language group. This trend illustrates the difficulty of typecasting what are in reality fluid conceptions of identity that correspond with the shifting dynamics of power.

In truth, the North has never been a monolith. The most intense ideological rivalry of the First Republic was in the old Northern Region between the ruling conservative Northern People’s Congress and the opposition Northern Elements Progressive Union. The Middle Belt was the site of vociferous resistance against the NPC which was seen as a vehicle of Hausa-Fulani Islamic hegemony. To this day, voting patterns in Northern Nigeria reflect the diversity and complexity of political allegiances in the region.

The problem with the continued use of rhetorical redundancies like “North” and “South” is that they automatically seed a polarizing dynamic into public debate. In fact, there has never been a cohesive Southern political consciousness. In the First Republic, Southern Nigeria was made up of three regions – East, West and Midwest. For that reason, the term ‘Southerner’ has never had the same political resonance as the term ‘Northerner.’

Since the demise of the regions almost a half century ago, the terms ‘North’ and ‘South’ merely conjure up a false contest that squanders our mental and emotional energies for the benefit of those who stand to gain materially and politically by claiming to represent these fictitious constituencies. It also freezes public debate at the level of infantile polemics while the material conditions of the majority of Nigerians, both Northerners and Southerners, continue to degenerate. For the poetry of a “North” requires an opposing concept in a “South” to sustain the melodrama.

Two groups benefit from continually projecting the idea of a monolithic “North.” First, a coterie of failed Northern politicians, contractors and ex-public functionaries, who are in many respects, responsible for the region’s impoverishment, uses emotive appeals to a fictitious Arewa solidarity to rally the faithful in order to negotiate more concessions for itself.

Secondly, there is a clique of Southern media and political elites for whom continually scapegoating the Big Bad North sells papers and guarantees relevance. One understated fact is that 90 percent of the Nigerian media is headquartered in Lagos. Thus, the dominant perspective on Nigeria is mostly both one-sided and one-eyed, supplied by a media that is limited by geography, lamentable ignorance, and not inconsiderable prejudice.

While the Arewa champions and the Southern elites are theoretically opposed, in reality, they feed off each other. Failed Northern politicians are played up in the Southern media as speaking for the “North” and they themselves become the hate figures and exemplars of “Northern villainy” that inflame Southern paranoia while gaining national relevance as a result. Having set up a Northern straw man, some Southern elites then make a career of standing up to the "North" or resisting "Northern domination" or "Islamization." 

An ironic symbiotic relationship has evolved between these Northern elites and the Southern media. The latter highlights the elites that validate the popular caricature of Northern politicians as a perpetually scheming cauldron of slothful parasites. The same politicians, having fed this stereotype, then purport to be offended on behalf of the “North” and then proceed to issue even more cretinous quotes to a gleefully appreciative press. It is a farcical pantomime. In truth, elites like Adamu Ciroma and Ango Abdullahi who have made a public career of speaking for the “North” are politically inconsequential and are relevant only to the extent to which their words are broadcast in the Southern media.

The saddest thing about some of the Northern politicians now saber-rattling about 2015 is that they have eschewed cogent critiques of the present administration, of which there are many, and have settled for the basest one – that it is the turn of the North. This plays into the hands of their kindred cads on the opposing side who will simply counter that it is not the turn of the North. And with the media in attendance, what should be a debate over leading this country with distinction in this century will be reduced to a brawl over whose turn it is to share the national cake.

The fiction of the “North” also feeds a faux discourse in Northern Nigeria that is marked by self pity, elegies to a mythical lost golden age of Arewa, and most dangerously, the self-exculpatory rhetoric of blame that portrays Northerners as victims of a Southern conspiracy.

The reality of the “North” today is not of a geopolitical leviathan but of 19 states with varying economic and political priorities. Benue has different needs from Sokoto; Kano from Kogi and Adamawa from the Plateau. Leaders like Ahmadu Bello were shaped by the exigencies of a different time when Nigeria was a federation of regions. There will never be another leader of his stature to rally the ‘North’ because that ‘North’ has long ceased to exist. The same goes for those who futilely dream of reincarnating Obafemi Awolowo in the Southwest. Rather than trying to channel long dead regional avatars and to simulate their charisma, politicians should focus on building credible national platforms for gaining national power or stick to developing their states.       

In today’s Nigeria, a politician can no more speak for the ‘North’ or ‘South’ or any other region, than I could speak for the Eskimos. Nigeria has grown beyond such reductionist tomfoolery. 

(All images sourced online) 

Child not Bride and Allied Matters

While the controversy over child marriage may be simmering down, there is a much broader conversation that we must have about the fate of Nigerian children in the context of Nigeria’s federal architecture. That debate should revolve around the Child Rights Act. Passed in 2003 by the National Assembly, it is yet to be domesticated in ten states of the federation, most of which are in Northern Nigeria.

The unremarked subtext of the child marriage debate is the fact that a number of our national developmental objectives now fall within the brief of states rather than the federal government. The military era’s unitary command and control governance is gone and along with it any possibility of uniform national development. For this reason, much of the ire directed at the Senate recently in the name of the Nigerian child was misdirected. Whether a girl in Zamfara or Yobe goes to school or winds up prematurely as a wife is entirely up to the states involved.

It is significant that even as the debate has raged in recent weeks, five Northern governors whose states possess some of the most atrocious social indices with regard to children were traversing the country parleying with former heads of state and President Goodluck Jonathan in an effort to resolve the strife in the ruling party. Unofficially, the jaunt is part of the maneuvering for the 2015 elections. It is sadly often the case that governance is at the mercy of politics.

This raises the issue of the dereliction of duty by governors who are rarely found within their states attending to the affairs of their people. The media itself abets gubernatorial truancy by disproportionately focusing on the presidency and the federal government and virtually ignoring what goes on in the states where governors rule in absolutist fashion. Indeed, the presidency though constitutionally powerful, is constrained by the legislature, the media’s relentless scrutiny and even the governors themselves; whereas, the selfsame governors administer their states like private estates with the media uninterested in their deeds and misdeeds. If this were not the case, civil society would have taken the errant governors to task for not having domesticated the Child Rights Act but as things stand all attention is obsessively focused on the federal government. This is an important point because by 2015, a number of governors will be vying for the presidency. We should judge them not by their declared intentions for the presidency but by their gubernatorial records.  

The undue focus on the central government is also a vestige of the imprint made by overbearing military dictatorships in the national consciousness. But since 1999, federal democracy has slowly become more tangible and governors have grown more assertive. The fact is that many of the issues that directly affect Nigerians fall under the purview of state and local governments. The media and civil society have been slow to correspondingly adopt a “federal mentality.”

The key to addressing issues like early marriage is education. The pervasiveness of early marriage is consistent with low school enrolment among females. A high incidence of poverty is also consonant with high female illiteracy which prevents women from being able to function as autonomous economic actors. States that wish to lower the incidence of early marriage should consider enacting compulsory primary and secondary education which would equip girls (and boys) with the tools to be productive citizens. Secondary education should be the baseline for educational attainment.

The preponderance of girl-child education in an area is a fairly accurate predictor of the sustainability of early marriage. A number of the polemicists who argued in favour of early marriage defended it as an institution that protects feminine virtue from social immorality. Some of these arguments were rife with male chauvinism, misogyny and the patriarchal objectification of women. These quibbles aside, it is worth noting that the practice of early marriage is itself increasingly linked to rising divorce rates in Northern Nigeria.

In keeping with the general African view of marriage as a class statement, men in Northern Nigeria tend to see a new bride as a status symbol. According to research findings in 2010 by Dr Ismaila Zango, a sociologist at the Bayero University Kano (BUK), one out of two marriages in Kano ends in divorce. Similar patterns of matrimonial and family failure subsist in Sokoto and Katsina states. Vesico-vaginal fistula, a condition that arises from early pregnancy, is rampant. Over two hundred thousand women nationwide, the majority of them Northerners, suffer from the disease. Paradoxically, sufferers of VVF are likely to be divorced by their husbands and thrown out of their homes. Legions of women divorced for the slightest infraction can be found on the streets of Kano. With no means of economic empowerment these women either succumb to destitution or take to prostitution, thus fuelling the onslaught of HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted plagues. It is a vicious cycle in every sense. In this instance, far from being a guarantor of feminine morality, early marriage only leaves females as vulnerable as ever while not imposing any regulatory discipline on males.

The point of female education is to empower young women to sustain themselves regardless of their marital status. Educating girls would render them less vulnerable to the depredations of male patriarchy and empower them to survive the desperate economic circumstances of divorce.       

It is important to note too that despite the religious colouration given to the debate over child marriage, this is not a religious matter. Child marriage is not a pillar of Islam. The persistence of this cultural practice has less to do with the resilience of Islam than with the low penetration of the North by modernity. In other parts of Nigeria, it is the march of female education rather than any socio-cultural epiphany that has drastically reduced the incidence of early marriage; after all, the betrothal of girls is not unknown to other cultures.  

The early marriage of girls is a vestige of the agrarian social economy which defined early Islamic societies. Economic activity in agrarian economies being labour-intensive was uniquely suited for brawny males who as the main economic actors were enjoined to spread an umbrella of socio-economic protection over the “weaker” womenfolk. Modernization, industrialization and the knowledge economy which favour brains over brawn have been characterized by the increasing education of women and their emergence as competent economic actors. They no longer need the protective umbrella of the men in the same way as it was during the agrarian age. This dynamic has yet to fully penetrate the largely rural agrarian reality of Northern Nigeria where female literacy remains low.

This trend is also reinforced by socio-cultural institutions. It is often the case that male patriarchy thrives by using its dominance of instruments like organized religion to control and manipulate the vulnerable, among them, women and children, whether through early (and forced) marriages or the institutionalized destitution of children known as almajiri. It is therefore important that we reject the use of faith to mask or justify the perpetration of crimes or the perpetuation of retrogression. It is significant that female literacy is far higher among Muslim communities in Southern Nigeria than in the North. Iran is a conservative Islamic theocracy and yet 70 percent of its science and engineering students are women. Across the Middle East, the taboos against educating women are receding as is the notion that Islam is a divine license for female subjugation. One need not be a “feminist” or a “westernized liberal” to appreciate this point. Both Uthman Dan Fodio who advocated the education of women and his daughter, Nana Asmau, who was an accomplished intellectual stand out as irresistible examples of progressive enlightenment.

The objections to the Child Rights Act in the states yet to domesticate it are also about much more than early marriage. There is the matter of the Act’s intolerance of child labour, for instance. Street hawking is something the Act frowns at and yet it remains a fixture of urban life in much of Nigeria not just in the North. The Child Rights Act is at the mercy of the tension between legislation and custom. Politics rarely leaps ahead of culture. When trying to change practices rooted in tradition and culture, the levers of change have to be localized. This is why ideally, driving education and ending early marriage are ultimately matters for state and local governments. It takes agencies of change embedded in the socio-cultural environment in question to effect transformation from within. There is only so much that can be accomplished by proclamations in Abuja. The fate of a young girl in Dirin Daji or Talata Mafara will be shaped less by remote proclamations in Abuja than by transformative actors in her own community and municipality. The economics and politics of developmental transformation are local.

Primary education, in particular, falls under the ambit of state and local authorities. Yet local governments have been reduced by governors to being mere lifeless appendages of state governments thereby crippling their administrative potential. Ironically, the Senate voted against the proposal for local government autonomy (although it was approved by the House of Representatives) that would have unshackled municipalities from the oppressive grip of states and empowered them to drive development from the bottom up. The Senate’s vote demonstrated a refusal to recognize that only empowered communities can efficiently generate and distribute developmental deliverables. The centralized and dysfunctional bureaucracy headquartered in Abuja simply cannot remotely manage the aspirations of over 160 million people.  

The alternative to this is to give the federal government sweeping powers to enforce the Child Rights Act across the board. Any serious enforcement effort would surely involve the establishment of a federal child welfare bureaucracy that sanctions errant families and takes custodianship of victimized children as wards of the state. This would be a vast and costly undertaking that would meet with socio-cultural and political obstruction and likely require authoritarian measures to force through. To avoid unnecessary conflict and confrontation with federal authorities, this challenge is probably best managed by states and local governments. In any case, this administration certainly lacks the enthusiasm, political will and capacity to embark on such social engineering. It also does not seem likely that we will witness the federalization of primary and secondary education in the North to force the issue.     

Under the current federal arrangements, the question of development will be answered mostly by how competently states are run. Given the lackluster performances of several governors and the disparate social indices of states, it is clear that divergence in developmental outcomes will continue to be a facet of our national life. Already, a child born in Northeastern Nigeria will likely encounter a substantially lower quality of life that a contemporary born in the Southwest. These disparities pose a serious challenge to efforts to construct a common citizenship.

How vibrant states are in this new era of greater responsibility and diminishing oil revenues will be determined by the vigour of civil society in those states and a new willingness by the media to interrogate what actually goes on in those states by way of development.

These developmental divergences will either become the basis for a continuation of the slothful politics of entitlement that focuses on revenue allocation, more oil money from the centre, and lazy populist demagoguery or it could lead to the emergence of visionary politics that focuses on transformative governance, wealth creation, entrepreneurship, social and economic justice and the obliteration of retrogressive institutions that entrench poverty.

(All images sourced online)