State of Denial

With each terrorist outrage, opposing partisans volley conspiracy theories back and forth, accusing either the federal government or the opposition of masterminding the attacks. Confronted by an unprecedented threat and unable to respond effectively, we have resorted to conspiracy theorizing. We seem to be in denial that a terrorist insurgency is upon us.

 
This denial stems from a typically Nigerian hubris. During the 1970s and the 1980s, Nigerians believed that their country was too sophisticated to produce an Idi Amin or Mobutu and were blind to that possibility right until General Sani Abacha seized power and plumbed hitherto uncharted depths of savagery. Similarly, we have long believed that terrorism and suicide bombings are exotic lunacies confined to foreign lands even though our social indices and derelict governance all pointed towards the eventual emergence of an organized insurrection as we have since witnessed in the Niger Delta and the Northeast. 

In fact, Nigeria was institutionally unprepared to deal with a terrorist insurgency. There is more than a hint of cognitive dissonance in our evaluation of the situation. Nigerians generally agree that the state is fundamentally inept, incapable of providing basic social services, crippled by endemic corruption, patronage politics and perverse affirmative action gestures. But they inexplicably expect the same state to readily “deal with” a highly adaptive, protean threat like the current insurgency. Officials admit that Nigeria’s borders are unguarded but express amazement at the proliferation of weapons. Nigerians are attributing to malice, several things that are sufficiently explained by incompetence.  

When ineptitude, mediocrity and graft attain epidemic proportions, their manifestations seem like a conspiracy to the unwary eye. But it is really years of institutional decay, inept governance and official kleptomania finally catching up with us. The results are brave but poorly-resourced, ill-motivated troops put in harm’s way, security lapses, failures of intelligence and martial resolve, and mutinous rumblings at the front lines. Insurgencies are fiendishly difficult to fight but corruption, incompetence and incapacity have also ambushed us. It is impossible to swiftly shift gears from institutionalized dysfunction to five-star efficiency in a national emergency. The real “conspiracy” is the pervasive belief that we could continue business as usual in the face of an unusual threat and not run aground. 

Nigeria’s law enforcement and security institutions are weak. The five year old insurgency has consumed over 4,000 lives and multibillion naira security budgets but there is no coherent national security doctrine that synergizes our security agencies. Both the national security adviser and the president have bemoaned the lack of interagency cooperation. Even the government’s response to Boko Haram’s demand for the release of its members in exchange for its release of the girls it abducted a month ago was met with contradictory responses from various functionaries, reflecting the administration’s strategic incoherence.  

Our institutional vulnerabilities are compounded by ineptitude. President Goodluck Jonathan’s defenders insist that he is the victim of a conspiracy aimed at aborting his second term ambitions. Even if such a scheme is afoot, his failure to act decisively against his “enemies” and protect Nigerians does him no credit. 

The nationalist Adegoke Adelabu once wrote, “At the supreme crisis in the history of every nation, there emerges spontaneously from the ranks of the common people, a leader and a saviour to pilot the ship of the state.” National crises often transfigure political leaders, endowing them with steely purpose. Jonathan has not been so endowed. Nigerians, regardless of their partisan, ethnic or religious allegiances, would be rallying round the president if he was providing strong leadership. As St. Paul wrote, “If the trumpet gives an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to battle?” We are at war but Jonathan’s leadership has been uncertain and uninspiring.  

Boko Haram’s indiscriminate blood thirst makes it an enemy against which a more competent politician would have galvanized the whole country. Instead, the administration has opted variously to play the victim, to milk terror acts for political advantage and to libel political opponents with unsubstantiated allegations of treason. It is true that the chain of negligence for many outrages extends beyond the presidency; a host of federal agents and state authorities are also culpable. However, the lack of penalties for official delinquency is telling; as is Jonathan’s preference for raising redundant committees instead of demanding results from his team and firing inept functionaries. 

This indulgence is worlds apart from the stone-cold realities of the front lines where the cost of failure is immediate and unforgiving. A mediocre officialdom has failed even to weave the successes and heroic sacrifices of the military and security services into an inspirational narrative and persisted with its victimhood. 

We are facing challenges that require bold leadership and strong institutions. We need fresh systemic thinking on how to police a population of 170 million people when our men and women under arms number less than 1 million. We need new strategies for urban planning and the protection of critical infrastructure and soft targets. We need to move away from analog security management protocols (roadblocks and checkpoints) and utilize human and electronic intelligence. The insurgency has displaced half a million people who have been abandoned but need to be placed in protected camps.

Boko Haram is eminently beatable but we must overcome our denial and face the reality of rebuilding our institutions, enhancing our crisis management capacities, redefining our leadership selection processes and entrenching meritocracy in public service. Without profound conceptual and practical changes in our approach to governance, our enemies will continue to find joy in fomenting anarchy.  



(Thisday, Sunday May 25, 2014)
(All images are sourced online)

The Meaning of Chibok

Whether the abduction of over 200 girls from Chibok is a tipping point remains to be seen. It took the self-immolation of a Tunisian street trader to spark off the Arab Spring. The Chibok debacle may yet unleash seismic repercussions. There have, of course, been other abductions by Boko Haram and over the years, several soul-destroying abominations across the land that have gone unremarked. The case of the Chibok girls is remarkable because of the impunity of its perpetrators, the scale of the crime, the number of victims and the mindboggling ineptitude of those in authority.

At first, the government responded with typical indifference. Scenes of President Goodluck Jonathan cavorting at a political rally a day after the April 14, Abuja bombing and the abduction of the girls incensed many. However, there was a deeper institutional psychology at work. The dreary inescapable truth is that defending the sanctity of human life is not a core value of the Nigerian state. The state is an entity that elites compete to capture and privatize for personal gain rather than for public interest. It is government of some people, by some people and for some people.

Consequently, politicians tend to emphasize the chasm between the state and the society. Witness the semiotic violence of officialdom. Reckless motorcades piloted by snarling speed demons and whip-wielding goons are known to run citizens off the road. The unmistakable message is that the powerful are a different breed from “the masses”. This medieval model of governance renders it both alien and alienating. Most Nigerians do not actually expect the government to serve their interests. This is why state governors are serenaded for their rare provision of basic amenities which is seen as the beneficence rather than the obligation, of elected officials. The tribulations of the powerless are hardly the priority of the powerful.

In the three weeks it took Jonathan to speak on the missing girls, foreign leaders had pronounced on the issue with the sort of resolve that Nigerian officialdom is incapable of mustering when Nigerian lives are at stake. Leadership is not only about providing those basics which Nigerian politicians like to preen and brag about. It is about defining the ethical boundaries that separate us from the animal kingdom. Like previous outrages, this debacle was another spurned opportunity for leaders to make emotionally-intelligent and unequivocal moral statements. These silences betray an empathy deficit and belie our claim to belong in the precincts of modern civilization.   

The World Economic Forum (WEF) was supposed to be the administration’s triumphal exhibition on global primetime. Instead it was rightly overshadowed by the missing girls. Having rebased Nigeria’s GDP, we must now revalue Nigerian life. Assuredly, were it not for the rising protests, international pressure and the increasingly global ubiquity of the #bringbackourgirls# campaign, the administration would have ignored the missing girls and steamed ahead.

Yet, it is instructive that the official interventions on the matter have been characterized by defensiveness, dissembling and evasiveness. The subtext of the first lady’s cringe-worthy melodramatic intervention was the accusation that the Chibok community was to blame for the abduction of its daughters. The administration and its sympathizers have shamelessly sought to portray the abductions and the ensuing protests as a plot to embarrass the president. Some promoted a sterile debate about whether the abductions actually happened. It has always been demonstrably difficult for officialdom to empathize with “lesser” compatriots.

This low valuation of life is why the criminally negligent Interior Minister remains in office despite overseeing a fraudulent recruitment exercise in which several young Nigerians died. It is why on May 1, the police was more exercised about dispersing protesters in Lagos than pre-empting the deadly bombing that later shook Abuja’s outskirts; and why communities like Chibok can only dream of seeing the sort of resources expended to fortify Abuja during the WEF. Undoubtedly, if Boko Haram was targeting VIPs, the official response would have possessed more urgency and intensity. Ordinary Nigerians, the denizens of Chibok, Nyanya and other such places, are only marginally less expendable to politicians than they are to terrorists. Politicians, at least, require their votes.

Government functionaries have displayed a puzzled irritation verging on a persecution complex at the scrutiny provoked by the Chibok girls’ inconvenient disappearance. But the real problem is that Nigerians are starting to demand more from their government and that the world is taking keen interest in a heinous atrocity that would have been let slide.

Chibok, a remote nondescript community, represents the sort of plebeian anonymity that is easily forgotten but the travails of its daughters have captured local and international attention. It has survived our weekly news cycle’s payload of body counts. Even in their harrowing captivity, the stolen girls have refused to go away. Their ordeal has rekindled a protest movement that can only deepen our democracy. It has also thrust their captors into international infamy. The video of a gloating and evidently drug-addled Abu Shekau threatening to sell the girls raised hackles worldwide and may have sealed the fate of his anarchist enterprise. Boko Haram will be terminally damned by the girls it has stolen.  

Beyond bringing back our girls, our challenge is to humanize and domesticate the state and convert it to the service of the common good. It is to instill a culture of accountability and responsiveness to public opinion and make officialdom more accessible to the people. It is to affirm the sanctity of life above all other considerations.

(All images are sourced online) 

Thisday, May 11, 2014

The Rebasing Saga

 I posted this on my Facebook page two nights ago:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(All images sourced online) 

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.