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) 

Natural Disasters and Leadership Catastrophes

There is a reason why the theme of leadership failure has remained a resilient explanation for our national woes after several decades. Apocalyptic floods have displaced 2 million people across several states north and south of the country. To put this figure in perspective, consider that it is the population of Botswana. The true number of casualties remains unknown. Kogi State says it has lost 40 billion naira in the disaster. Torrential rains and floods are expected to continue till November and more states will probably be affected. Sadly, yet more will die from drowning, disease or starvation. Farms and whole agrarian communities have been wiped out meaning that there will be food shortages. The collateral effect of displacement on this scale will surely include a subsequent spike in crime in neighbouring areas as people who have lost everything struggle desperately to survive.

In an ideal universe, the occurrence of a natural disaster that has afflicted Nigerians from North and South, Christians and Muslims and from various ethnic communities provides an opportunity to emphasize solidarity and brotherhood while galvanizing an empathic national response to the tragedy - especially at a time that political discourse in our country is so fractious. At present, this is not the case.  

Despite the devastation suffered by his fellow citizens, President Jonathan still embarked on an utterly inconsequential trip to the United Nations. He is yet to visit the disaster area. It is one of those strange Nigerian paradoxes that the more an administration demonstrates domestic impotence at home, the more it indulges in delusions of global importance abroad. it is a sure sign of our declining geostrategic relevance that we could not even work with Cameroon to prevent the release of its dam’s waters that has decimated several Nigerian communities. But Jonathan isn’t the only leader that has dropped the ball. Three days ago on Channels TV, Kogi State Governor Wada turned a visit ostensibly meant to provide relief supplies into a photo op grinning into a camera in the face of the terrible tragedy suffered by poor Nigerians. The spectacle of violently dispossessed Nigerians genuflecting in gratitude to receive as privileges what should be theirs as rights was especially jarring as was that of some National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) officials looking like they were there to dole out Christmas gifts.   

There should be an inquest into the lack of emergency preparedness by federal and state governments even after meteorologists had predicted high intensity rainfall. What sort of coordinated emergency response protocols, if any, were put in place? At what level is the federal government engaging with Cameroon over the release of waters of from its dams which have caused much of the flooding?  Surely, a state of emergency ought to be declared in the worst hit areas and the military drafted in (as Senate President David-Mark has proposed) to use its logistical capabilities to bring aid to the disaster areas. The problem is that the military which is dealing with everything from terrorism and insurgency to gangsterism and kidnapping may be over-extended. But it is probably the best chance of alleviating an unfolding humanitarian catastrophe.

In the long run, there is only one way of making elected officials responsive to the people in a democracy. If the incompetent US government response to Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of New Orleans in 2005 virtually ended the Bush presidency in 2005 and helped kill off the Republican Party's chances in 2008, then some Nigerian politicians will have to pay for the derelictions of duty that have put millions of their compatriots at risk. Until elected officials begin to suffer stiff penalties for their ineptitude and delinquency, Nigerians will remain at the mercy of man-made and natural calamities. 

All images sourced from Google Images