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)

Democracy in a Glass House

The moral imperative that confronted President Goodluck Jonathan at the inception of his administration was clear. At the time, public debate revolved around the outsized remunerations of members of the National Assembly. President Jonathan was expected to challenge the culture of unbridled acquisition and unhinged entitlement that is ballooning the cost of government. Had he done so, he would almost certainly have ignited a civil war within the Peoples’ Democratic Party since he would be endangering the party’s sacred cult of patronage. But Jonathan could then have rallied the people behind him and served as their knight in the battle to deepen accountability and probity in governance.

Instead, Jonathan took the opposite course of action. His decision early this year to abolish subsidies on fuel amounted to raising taxes of poor and middle class Nigerians in order to fund a broke government – a government that is being bankrupted by the uninhibited appetites of avaricious politicians. Rather than cutting the waste and extravagance of his co-travelers, Jonathan elected to increase the burden of the people. That decision provoked a weeklong strike action and nationwide protests that assumed the shape of a public inquisition into the character of governance.

Sensing the potential for a broader anti-government backlash, federal legislators, have since then, undertaken a series of high-profile investigations of the executive branch. These probes have had public support because they assuage a popular desire to see a cleansing of the Augean stables of the state. They have also enabled the federal legislators to outflank the president, deploy populist rhetoric and deflect attention from their own misdemeanours. Theatrics aside however, the House of Representatives investigation of fuel subsidy payments uncovered a festering edifice of fraud. The representatives’ report indicted senior administration officials and placed the onus on the president to cleanse his government of compromised figures. In some other climes, the scale of fraud uncovered would have led to mass resignations, the prosecution of indicted officials and would certainly have ended the administration.

It is a measure of how much grief the representatives caused that the chair of the investigatory committee, Honourable Farouk Lawan became the target of a sting operation involving the oil baron Femi Otedola and the State Security Service. Honourable Lawan now stands accused of soliciting and receiving a bribe from Otedola. In recent weeks, news of his alleged corruption has displaced the urgency of implementing his panel’s recommendations from the news cycle. The probe report brimming with scandalous disclosures of how government officials and their business cronies defrauded the country to the tune of billions of naira may not be completely discredited but it risks being forgotten even as we are titillated by the salacious renderings of Lawan’s alleged escapades.      

Lawan’s travails, now dubbed “faroukgate,” correspond with a culture of political intrigue that can only be described as the doctrine of mutual incrimination. The most pungent dramatization of this principle came in 2006. President Olusegun Obasanjo accused Vice President Atiku Abubakar of corruption, tried to evict him from the presidency and ultimately disqualify him from contesting the presidential elections in 2007. Atiku’s response was not to exonerate himself, but rather to discredit Obasanjo by arguing that he was equally complicit in the theft of public funds. The former governor of Plateau State, Joshua Dariye’s riposte to being charged with money laundering was to argue that he had funneled much of the loot into the PDP’s campaign treasury thereby effectively incriminating the top hierarchy of the party including Obasanjo.

In 2008, Honourable Ndudi Elumelu, who chaired the House of Representatives probe of the Obasanjo administration’s power projects was himself subsequently prosecuted for contract fraud by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, along with Senator Nicholas Ugbane, the chair of the Senate Committee on Power. Honourable Herman Hembe who chaired the Representatives’ investigation of the Stock Exchange Commission earlier this year was removed after the commission’s director-general, Arunma Oteh accused him of soliciting a N40 million naira bribe from her.

The logic of mutual incrimination is not only that politicians who live in glass houses should not throw stones; it is that our democratic institutions are glass houses. In an equal opportunity kleptocracy, it is the height of moral arrogance for a politician to presume to invigilate his brethren. As Obasanjo once put it, “There is honour among thieves.” At the time, the then president was explaining why Anambra Governor Chris Ngige should turn over the state’s treasury to his political godfather, Chris Uba, who happened to be Obasanjo’s aide. By this understanding, the political consensus under which Nigeria is governed is a pirates’ covenant which requires “fair” and “just” distribution of plunder. Those who question the piracy itself are vilified as traitors or spoilers. It is no surprise that government increasingly resembles a criminal consortium.

Democracy rests on the principle of checks and balances yet the executive and the legislature, paralyzed by mutual incrimination, cannot check each other. The net effect is the delegitimization of our institutions. A presidency crippled by its equivocation in fighting corruption has shrunk; while the National Assembly is seen as a citadel of sleaze. This has resulted in a widespread public loss of faith in civil institutions that makes our young democracy extremely vulnerable to extra-constitutional shocks.

The senate’s deliberation on the recently uncovered multi-billion naira pension fraud was revealing. The senators cursed the perpetrators and their descendants and committed them to eternal damnation in the hottest part of hell. Not one senator raised his voice in favour of prosecuting the perpetrators of the fraud right here on earth. The pseudo-spiritual histrionics disclosed the bankruptcy of a political class so morally paralyzed by its own indiscretions that it cannot summon the will to address crimes against the Nigerian people.

It is often the case that when political elites cannot regulate themselves and lose legitimacy, new agencies of political sovereignty emerge to do the job. We are in a familiar and treacherous historical environment. Three decades ago, public faith in the Shehu Shagari administration plummeted as the entire government became synonymous with unfettered graft. The military struck terminating that democratic experiment. While there is currently no potential for similar military intervention today, there are other threats. Consider the deepening hold of cynicism on the national psyche. Young Nigerians are observing the shenanigans of politicians and internalizing a nihilistic view of life and politics as a Machiavellian domain where high values and ideals do not apply. This is not the sort of outlook that will raise the quality of governance or prolong democracy. The rise of non-state violence and anti-state militancy in recent years is an index of public nihilism and loss of faith in government.

Politicians who are customarily preoccupied with their own ends should care enough about the institutions they presently inhabit to realize that they cannot survive popular apathy. Should President Jonathan find the courage to vigorously and unequivocally challenge the strongholds of graft, he would be saving not only his presidency from opprobrium but preserving Nigerian democracy as a whole. But can he? 

All images sourced from Google Images

Beyond Ballots and Bullets

Hopes that Nigeria’s 2011 elections would proceed peacefully and without incident have since vanished, replaced by trepidation as to what the electioneering and post-electioneering period hold. Arson, murders, abductions, terrorism, bomb attacks and other acts of violence have marked the electioneering campaign. Well-meaning Nigerians have dutifully expressed the usual mix of outrage and concern but the violence should have been expected. The very nature of Nigerian politics makes violence a necessary component. Nigerian politics is a quest to privatize the enormous fiscal resources disproportionately invested in public office. An investigation of electoral violence should take into account the huge amounts of petrodollars used to subsidize official sloth.

Simply put, the excessively high financial reward for political office incentivizes the violence that marks the scramble for Abuja. And we are talking about the legal remunerations that politicians take home every month, not even the quantum of public funds which is stolen. The stakes involved in electoral competition are so high as to discourage fair play. Consider that the chance of becoming a federal legislator is the opportunity to become a multimillionaire. Nigerian legislators are among the highest paid in the world and are among the top earners in one of the world’s biggest kleptocracies. Combine the scale of poverty and inequality with the fact that politics now offers the surest route of upward mobility, transforming middle class strugglers into members of a super class, and we begin to understand why politicians cannot approach elections with the bonhomie of the golf course or a tea party. 

Political office offers an irresistible level of social security in a realm where life has become terrifyingly arbitrary and uncertain. Hoards of youths have plunged into politics to participate in the putrescent dream of astronomical returns for little or no labour that characterizes high office. But as more and more people flood the system in search of its outsized rewards, the cost of sating the hungry, pacifying the angry and indulging the greedy is making our democracy ultimately unsustainable. There are far too many people to be settled; the scale of avarice is beyond what the system can reasonably accommodate. And the ranks of restive outsiders excluded from the fest who are willing to violently pull down the temple of sleaze have swelled.

However, we must also look beyond the polls to a larger context. We live in an age of deregulated violence. Militant non-state actors like MEND and Boko Haram have demonstrated their ability to wage asymmetrical warfare against the Nigerian federation. Too often, we focus on episodes of subjective violence – the recurring bouts of sectarian strife in Jos, the occasional shooting at a rally, clashes between rival party supporters, etc. – and we miss the framework of objective violence, the supervening dynamic of repression and strife that makes conflict recurrent. Objective violence is institutional, invisible and thus difficult to spot but its portents are discernible. Any society in which 70 percent of the prison population is incarcerated without trial is a violent society. A realm in which politicians in sirened convoys can whip and run other citizens off the road is a violent society. A realm that permits extrajudicial homicides by state agents is a violent society. Our kleptocracy is a classic embodiment of objective violence. Official graft is depriving millions of healthcare, food security, employment and education – with catastrophic humanitarian consequences that rival the casualties of any deployment of guns and bombs. I argue that the objective violence of this kleptocracy fuels the subjective violence that we see around us.

There are three other dimensions of objective violence which lubricate the engines of conflict. Prebendalism, the personalization and privatization of governance and the transformation of offices into economic resources to be invested in communal allegiances, negates meritocracy and subverts the state’s capacity to deliver good governance. Over the years, prebendal politics has been institutionalized as the quest for strategic parity among ethnicities and regions in terms of control of federal resources. This quest informs the use of quotas, zoning and “federal character” in everything from determining admissions into public schools to staffing government agencies. In fact, these devices have created a bloated government bureaucracy and nurtured the cult of equal opportunity embezzlers that run Abuja.

Secondly, there is the electoral fraud which nullifies the civic will and generates unaccountable state power. The direct result of this is the culture of impunity that marks elite behaviour. Election rigging is, in effect, a stealth coup d’état and displays similar pathologies of violence as military rule. The third dimension of objective violence is the framework of legalized apartheid that we describe in blithely colloquial understatement as the “indigene-settler dichotomy.” It is basically a discriminatory regime that creates cadres of citizenship based on the lowest common denominators of kinship. In the lexicon of power, the term “settler” denotes the categorical exclusion of whole communities from civic life and political representation based on a calculus of identity, blood ties, ethnic and geographical origins. This regime sustains bloody ethno-communal conflict across the federation.

The chain of causality is clear. Kleptocracy triggers political violence. Due to the high stakes of electoral contest, elites adopt extreme measures to slither up the totem pole of political relevance and economic security. When these politicians recruit youths and arm them with cash and guns to execute electoral heists, they create the next generation of militants and terrorists. When these politicians take power, their impunity creates the material conditions that gestate yet more delinquency.

            

Because political offices are also seen as resources, the competition to occupy them rapidly moves from the personal to the ethno-communal terrain, pitting ethnic and religious groups against each other. This is how kleptocracy and prebendalism sire ethno-religious conflict. The “indigene-settler” dynamic kicks in as rival politicians use apartheid in a bid to divide the opposition and to monopolize power. The more conflict spots there are, the greater the number of guns in circulation. Yet once there is a lull in political violence or ethno-religious conflict those guns remain in circulation, often finding their way into the armouries of urban gangsters and thus escalating urban crime. Just as armed robbery spiked after the civil war when hoards of youths proficient in the use of arms streamed into urban areas, political and sectarian violence are similarly fuelling urban insecurity, with former political thugs and hired muscle striking out on their own as independent gangsters.

Violence organically feeds itself. The Umuleri-Aguleri communal conflict in Anambra during the late 1990s created a generation of combatants who, after the war ended, moved to Onitsha where they promptly inaugurated a reign of terror as gangsters. Following the abject failure of the police to contain them, Anambra retained the services of the Bakassi Boys, an ultraviolent vigilante group that used terror to cast out terror. Beginning from 2001, they executed over 3000 suspected criminals over a period of eighteen months in an orgy of public lynching. The group was disbanded after they had evidently been co-opted by unscrupulous local politicians and turned into enforcers for special interests. The subsequent proliferation of gangs of ransom kidnappers in the southeast led to the deployment of the army to Aba in 2010.  

Similarly, homicides have spiked dramatically in Jos, the once serene city now sundered by sectarian tensions. Because the police force is woefully ill-equipped to address the new gangsterism and terrorism, the military has been deployed to police the city. Across the federation, the escalation of urban crime has led to the creation of joint military-police task forces. This militarization of constabulary functions is a recipe for disaster. It is doubtful that democracy can be nurtured in the presence of tanks and guns. Similar militarization of the Niger Delta in the 1990s led to the growth of militancy in that region and will most likely produce similar outcomes in this instance. Even so, as more citizens realize that the state can no longer provide security, the cardinal commodity of governance, they will take to self-help. We will see a continued increase in the spread of firearms as families undertake to protect themselves, as well as a rise in vigilantism.   

How do we stop this cycle of violence? Presidential assurances of free and fair elections are inconsequential as long as the kleptocracy remains in place. De-escalating the armed scramble for Abuja calls for the drastic reduction of the entitlements of public functionaries. The costs of government must be scaled down and the culture of extravagance that accompanies high office abolished. This should be the basis of government that is truly accountable to the people.

In the mid to long term, we should demolish the framework of racist identity politics by abolishing the indigene-settler dichotomy and affirming an inclusive and unconditional citizenship. We should also seek to decentralize governance by distributing more resources and responsibilities away from Abuja to rejuvenated local government authorities. Political and sectarian violence have intensified over the decades in tandem with the centralization of power in the unitary command and control system of military rule. As power shifted from regions and local authorities to the centre, the scramble for Abuja came into being with politicians jostling for one centralized power source. If the locus of power is restored to municipalities, creating multiple centres of democratic authority, it would not only restore the relationship between power and the public, but also reduce political hostilities.

These mid- to long-term measures are goals for the near future around which a political consensus should form. In the meantime, as the terrifying outcomes of objective violence manifest, there is a need for vigilance, for voices of reason to stridently highlight structural injustices and root causes rather than flail at mere symptoms. Politicians must show uncommon resolve and statesmanship to defuse a building incendiary discontent. And people of faith are perfectly entitled to be prayerful. Difficult days lie ahead.