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) 

The Lynching of Nuhu Ribadu

Nuhu Ribadu’s defection from the All Progressive Congress to the ruling People’s Democratic Party has been greeted with savage personal attacks that have condemned him as a perfidious and opportunistic turncoat. By joining the PDP, the former anti-corruption czar is said to have betrayed his principles. Ribadu, it appears, is being held to a very rigorous standard of consistency – one that could only possibly be met by a political clairvoyant.

The absurdity and unfairness of the moral standard being applied to Ribadu become apparent when applied to the broader political landscape. Take Muhammadu Buhari who is widely lionized by his supporters as an incorruptible paragon. In 1998, he had told the BBC that he believed politics was “full of fraudulent acts.” “I cannot join people who will go and loot the treasury,” he insisted, “I have no plans to participate in politics” (Tell, March 16, 1998). In October 2000, Buhari stridently denied any interest in politics saying, “I have no desire to take part in partisan politics.” He was adamant that he would “not take part in partisan politics” despite being approached to do so (The Guardian, October 6, 2000). Within a few years, Buhari was seeking the grandest prize in Nigerian politics.

After his failed 2007 presidential bid, Buhari told the BBC, “I have been deceived by politicians, by the people who drafted me into politics. I have discovered that the people who drafted me into politics were not sincere after all; they only wanted to use me to get appointments or for their personal aggrandizement and not to serve the nation or the masses” (The News, September 24, 2007). Buhari was referring to, among other people, the All Nigeria People’s Party chairman Edwin Ume-Ezeoke and the then Kano State Governor Ibrahim Shekarau.

Should we not denounce Buhari for lacking discernment and for being serially deceived by corrupt politicians or for being unprincipled enough to team up with the same politicians he had vilified for being rogues? Is he not an inconsistent hypocrite for allying with Shekarau once again in the APC? No doubt, his supporters would prefer to see this as evidence of his forgiving spirit. No matter. After losing the 2011 polls, Buhari called time on his political career stating that there would be no more presidential bids. But yet again, he reneged on this promise. By the measure with which Ribadu has been judged, Buhari would have to be condemned as a congenital liar; a typical politician who cannot keep his word and is therefore no different from the much maligned Goodluck Jonathan who pledged to govern for only one term but has since reviewed his stance.

By the rigorous standards of political morality applied to Ribadu, it would be impossible for the APC itself (or indeed any of our political parties) to have come into existence. It would be unethical for veterans of the 1990 pro-democracy movement like Bola Tinubu and Kayode Fayemi to countenance making common cause with Tom Ikimi, who served as General Sani Abacha’s foreign minister, and Buhari who also served in that junta and persistently claims that Abacha was not the thieving despot that he undeniably was.

In late 2009, Ume-Ezeoke paid a solidarity visit to Shekarau, then governor of Kano State and lauded him for resolutely refusing to jump ship like other ANPP governors that had defected to the PDP – a strange remark since Ume-Ezeoke himself had championed his party’s alliance with the PDP in a so-called government of national unity two years earlier. Shekarau replied that Nigerians were in dire need of redemption from what he derisively called the “property development party” – a party which he said was suffering from a “cancerous ego and political jaundice” (The News, December 7, 2009).  Shekarau is now a PDP chieftain.

The APC chieftain, Nasir El-Rufai, who came to fame while serving in a PDP government, evinces little discomfort at being in the same party with Atiku Abubakar, the former vice-president whom he criticized for corruption in his memoirs. Abubakar’s trajectory in the last seven years has seen him migrate from the PDP to the Action Congress back to the PDP and now to the APC.

It is still unclear why PDP’s poaching of Jimi Agbaje or Ribadu provokes diatribes against these gentlemen while the APC’s recruitment of PDP stalwarts like Rabiu Kwankwaso, Rotimi Amaechi and Bukola Saraki is hailed as a victory for progressives. What exactly makes Ali Modu Sherriff or the catastrophically inept Murtala Nyako progressive? We may now await the defection to the APC of Aminu Tambuwal, a leader of one of the most avaricious legislatures in parliamentary history and his consequent baptism as a “progressive.”  It is worth noting that some of the elements now castigating Ribadu were involved in the ACN’s betrayal of his presidential candidacy in 2011 in favour enabling the PDP’s victory in the southwest.   

In October 2010, El-Rufai issued a scathing public statement asserting that Buhari “remained perpetually unelectable” and that his “insensitivity to Nigeria’s diversity and his parochial focus” are already well known. He cited the draconian record of Buhari’s military regime as proof of “the essence of his intolerance” and rubbished Buhari’s presidential aspirations saying that it was now “time for a new generation of leaders with new thinking and wholesome democratic attitudes to move our nation forward.” Buhari’s ill-tempered reaction to his suggestion that he abandon his presidential quest was “proof enough that a Buhari, the new Democrat, tolerant of views different from his own, is yet to evolve” but it would “take more than attacks on personalities to become electable. Having seen his version of discipline, Nigerians are not likely to cherish an encore.”(http://saharareporters.com/2010/10/04/el-rufai-buhari-should-stick-facts).  

El-Rufai’s acidic comments on Buhari’s electability would later be seized upon by Jonathan’s campaign team. In his memoirs, The Accidental Public Servant, published in 2013, El-Rufai (now a Buhari ally) lamented that his comments on the former head of state were still being brought up incessantly “as if I could not change my views based on new facts, information or emerging circumstances” (p.450). Herein lies the central lesson. Politicians change their views all the time based on “new facts, information or emerging circumstances.” Like Ribadu, Buhari, El-Rufai, Atiku and any political personage we care to name have at various times exercised the prerogative of changing their own minds.

It remains only for voters to decide whether or not these changes in perspective constitute such egregious reversals that they permanently place the politicians in question in terminal disrepute. In making this judgment, it is important that we do not hold politicians to a standard higher than that to which we are willing to subject ourselves. Nor should we confuse prideful inflexibility and our delusions of infallibility for a noble fidelity to principle. Being flexible enough to learn, adapt, and change one’s ways is, after all, also a principle, and a worthy one at that.

It would take people who have never changed their views and never will; people who are either incapable of learning or unwilling to do so, to insist on the exacting standards of consistency with which Ribadu is being bludgeoned. Inflexibility and infallibility are dangerous.

Of course, utterances matter and public figures should be called out on their perceived inconsistencies as a means of keeping them honest. Here, for example, is a scorcher from that erstwhile scourge of corrupt and inept power-brokers, Reuben Abati in The Guardian of October 2, 2005: “Even when a Nigerian leader is openly stupid, a Nigerian in search of his or her own share of the national cake, and who has been invited to come and eat, cannot summon the courage to tell him so. The unfortunate thing is that the people who manage to get to the corridors of power are ever so grateful that they dare not speak the truth.” As self-indicting, self-fulfilling prophecies go, this statement is probably unparalleled.          

Given the melodrama surrounding Ribadu’s defection, it is perhaps necessary to seek electoral reforms that would allow independent candidacies. Letting individuals run on their personal antecedents rather than on nebulous party platforms may give us more clarity in judging their worthiness for public office. It will also save us the histrionics that accompanies these defections. In the meantime, we should weigh the choices before us and vote for good governance regardless of what party label it comes under.

Political nomadism is to be expected in an environment where ideological distinctions are still ill-defined and where self-interest, patriotism, idealism and Faustian pragmatism must necessarily co-exist.  We must also grasp the distinction between political expediency and administrative acumen. The fact that Kwankwaso and Amaechi were once in the PDP does not detract from their administrative accomplishments. Similarly, in or out of the APC, Ribadu remains a superior alternative to Nyako.  

Our addiction to cartoonish heroes and villains warps our electoral choices. Democratic politics is not about canonizing saints. At worst, it is a calculus of greater and lesser evils. At best, it offers a choice between competence and incompetence. The important thing is to choose, on balance, the best man or woman for the job.

(All images 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