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.     

Nigerian Dreams, Visions & Nightmares

There was once a Nigerian dream. Nigerians believed that through diligent study at school and hard and honest work, they would live better than their parents had, and give their children the tools with which to secure a better life. Indeed, if one phrase could summarize the essence of the Nigerian dream, it is “the better life”; an optimistic resilience in the face of sundry challenges in the belief that tomorrow’s harvest will exceed that of today. It is a progressive cycle in which one generation’s expectations become the experiences of the next. This, in a nutshell, was the classical Nigerian dream. It was a blend of a neo-Calvinist work ethic and our traditional communitarian ethos which held that individuals were the children of the whole community. In the mainly Muslim north, the same dream found expression in Ahmadu Bello’s proclamation of the region’s guiding values as “work and worship.” The dignity of a productive life would be anchored to the spiritual imperative of a life of faith. Economics would be balanced by ethics.

Over a half-century ago, this dream inspired communities to pool resources to build schools and send their most promising children abroad to study. It led them to transcend the boundaries of rural life and aspire to the armaments of modernity. It produced a generation of nationalists who fought and won the struggle for independence. For those nationalists, the classical Nigerian dream became the ultimate objective of national liberty. Independence promised a new expansive space within which Nigerians could aspire towards a full creative life. They believed that the moral purpose of the state was to underwrite the pursuit of the better life. This belief found powerful expression in the premium they placed on education. Obafemi Awolowo, one of the most articulate exponents of this moral purpose, dubbed his political vision “Life More Abundant” – and defined it as freedom from want, ignorance, disease and British rule. His emphasis on universal education, universal healthcare and full employment essentially summarized the political priorities of the nationalist patriarchs.

This notion of the state as an empowering force and enabler of human potential is a thread running through Awo’s democratic socialism, Aminu Kano’s democratic humanism and Azikiwe’s pragmatic socialism. The progressive consensus was that government existed to enable citizens become autonomous social, political and economic agents. This socialistic impulse bore good fruit. Between the 1950s and the early 1960s, regional governments built schools, hospitals, and roads and invested in enterprises in which they had comparative advantage, leveraging their natural resources while developing their human capital.

Two momentous events altered the course of Nigerian history – the discovery of oil in 1956 and the military intervention of 1966. Nigeria shifted from the competitive communalism that had seen regions drive growth, to a unitary military government that centralized control of oil resources. As successive military regimes tightened their grip on oil resources, the central government became a leviathan dispensing alms to beggar states. The post-civil war oil boom sparked a rural-urban drift with hoards of youths streaming into chaotic cities in search of their share of the national cake. Federal control of petrodollars transferred the locus of power from the regions and states to an alien and alienating governing entity at the centre. Whereas politics previously had been localized and municipal, with regions running basically on tax-based social economies, the new politics necessitated a scramble for the centre where a new form of wealth was shared out amongst lucky partakers.

Thus was born another Nigerian dream – the pursuit of wealth without sweat squeezed out of remote oil-rich creeks at human and ecological costs that most Nigerians were blissfully unaware of. But it was a dream for the few and a nightmare for the many. Communal values and Calvinist ethics were displaced by new Machiavellian moralities that perceived boundless possibilities for the self. Pentecostal prosperity preachers have essentially appropriated and apotheosized this dream. Where the first Nigerian dream at least attempted to supply a sense of citizenship, the second dream has informed a radical self-interest that reduces civic being to conspicuous consumption.

The old Nigerian underclass of domestic servants, house-helps, guards and drivers who were shaped by the classical Nigerian dream were exemplars of contentment and longsuffering. While they toiled in the gilded corridors of the affluent, they held resolutely to the belief that their educated children would ascend the greasy totem pole of upward mobility and eventually reach down and ransom them from the stygian depths of want. But the structural adjustment programme of the 1980s brutally annihilated the old middle class that was shaped by the Calvinist ethos of dexterity and sacrifice. Today’s aspirants to upward mobility are less fatalistic about their prospects. Encouraged by the prophets of prosperity and nouveau rich kleptocrats, they have acquired a taste for instant gratification, a raging sense of entitlement and personal fiscal possibility, unhindered by the prudish constraints of “archaic” moralities. Thus, the rich plunder the state while a desperate underclass in turn robs the rich. 

            The second Nigerian dream has found expression not only in the grand larcenies of rogue politicians but also in the delinquencies that haunt the Dickensian cities over-populated by the scramble for a piece of the national cake. These delinquencies are apt symbols of our political degeneracy. Armed robbery, which grew alongside the metropolitan chaos of the oil boom era, symbolized the militarized capitalism purveyed by messianic soldiers who essayed to redeem the country at gunpoint but ended up simply looting it.

The 1980s introduced hired assassins to our society – mystery gunmen that slew their victims without stealing a dime before melting into the shadows. Death itself had become a marketable commodity deliverable on demand with extreme prejudice. A new growth industry of murder contractors emerged to embody what Niyi Osundare described as a “culture of mayhem.” The era also spawned ritual killers that preyed on innocents for use as sacrifices in rituals for wealth. The emergence of the fraudster by the 1990s was an apt metaphor for the long con that was messianic militarism. It is no accident that these three archetypal villains – the hired assassin, the ritual killer and the fraudster – emerged during the Babangida years, when a martial kleptocracy in the garb of a neo-liberal reform regime eviscerated the public infrastructure of the classical Nigerian dream. They were manifestations of society’s descent into Mammon worship in an age of recessionary hysteria and repressive politics.

Today’s burgeoning ransom kidnap industry is perfectly symbolic of a society held hostage by vampire elites that extort multi-billion petrodollar ransoms from state coffers. For the commoditization of human life is the logical consequence of the apotheosis of wealth. Finally, the emergence of sectarian terrorists detonating bombs indiscriminately in the midst of unsuspecting crowds signals the nihilistic consummation of the second Nigerian dream. The zero-sum politics of greed and Machiavellian self-interest has culminated in the self-destruct sequence of anarchic violence. In addition to being sold for profit, human lives are now extinguished for nothing with clinical efficiency and in the perversely democratic anonymity of mass death. Many of our cities and towns, turned into de-industrialized wastelands by decades of socio-economic holocaust, are now theatres of warring sectarian militias locked in the cycle of mutual assured destruction. How do we pull back from the abyss of anomic horrors?

Our challenge is to recover and re-interpret the classical Nigerian dream as a progressive social vision that leaves no Nigerian behind in the quest for moral and material betterment. A new generation of progressives must now articulate a politics of meaning that restores moral purpose to governance. They must undertake the rebuilding of our civic infrastructure – public healthcare, universal education and those systems that foster a common citizenship. We must reconstruct our social capital that was depleted during the years in which privatized selfishness became ascendant. We should recapture the cooperative spirit that enabled communities to establish schools, dispensaries and scholarships for their brightest children. New generation ethicists must extricate Nigerian spirituality from the grip of materialism, the stranglehold of charlatans and its incest with anti-intellectualism and redefine it as a social spirituality that rekindles our best moral instincts – empathy, enterprise, community values, social justice, a sense of the dignity of the other and a notion of the common good. Recovering the classical Nigerian dream is the calling of our times.

Politicizing the Anointing

In a multi-religious society like Nigeria where matters of faith are often contentious, we should at least agree on one cardinal principle: Politics should not be used for religious ends while religion should not be used for political goals. This maxim is prone to flagrant violation, more so in an election year. President Goodluck Jonathan’s campaign has been most guilty of this infraction. In one of his campaign ads sponsored by the United Nigeria Group, a voice intones at the beginning, “Let God’s will be done,” and goes on to exhort listeners to vote for the Jonathan/Sambo ticket because it is “God’s will” for the country. In another ad featuring some home video stars, the Jonathan/Sambo ticket is described as “God’s choice.” The Jonathan campaign has generally cast the president as some sort of divine elect or anointed king. This trend of religious politicking is worrisome.

In a society as religious as ours, faith will always be an ingredient of politics which at the best of times is an unstable alchemy of the empirical and the irrational. However, there is a difference between the incandescent political morality of Aminu Kano, whose religious scholarship sharpened his advocacy of democratic humanism and the opportunistic charlatanry of former Zamfara Governor, Ahmed Sani, the erstwhile proponent of Sharia, now an anonymous presence in the senate and last seen battling charges of child-trafficking and pedophilia. There is a clear difference between the thoughtful Spartan Christian faith of Obafemi Awolowo and the hypocritical self-righteous sanctimony of former President Olusegun Obasanjo whose presidency became a pulpit of bull.

Some will argue that the tenor of Jonathan’s faith-based campaign is simply political brand marketing, a scheme of communication that acceptably deploys religious idioms. Certainly, there is a clear effort to construct a usable myth around Jonathan as a man of providence and to dramatize his political trajectory as the stuff of the Nigerian dream. But Jonathan is in danger of becoming a candidate whose claims to leadership rest solely on the fortuitous manner of his ascendance to the presidency. His rise from anonymity to the highest office in the land within a decade, marked by serendipity rather than apparent competence, is being sold as a portent of divine favour and good tidings for the nation at large. There is a place for fairytales in politics, but to hinge our beleaguered country’s hopes on the good fortune of a candidate is, to say the least, imprudent. To advertize that fortune as a supernatural imprimatur upon his candidacy which we must accept for our own good is deception.

Nigerians have previously trusted in usable political myths to their grief. Even General Abacha was hailed by some as a messianic soldier ordained by God to cleanse the rot of the Babangida years although he had himself been an essential part of that rot. Obasanjo’s spectacular sojourn from prison to presidency evoked all kinds of pseudo-mystical interpretations and earned him the toga of the anointed – a concept which he took far too seriously. The late Umaru Musa Yar’Adua emerged as a dark horse in 2007 to clinch the presidency; an office for which his more famous elder brother had strived and ultimately died in vain. Again, some people saw providence at work in Yar’Adua’s emergence and sold him as a divine choice. Indeed, after his victory in the fraud-riddled 2007 polls, Yar’Adua urged his opponents to accept his election as the will of God. These are the results of the bastardization of politics in a religious society.

Religious politicking signals the crisis of legitimacy and stature ailing Nigerian politics. As the state has degenerated over the past two decades, its captors and operatives have increasingly sought to import legitimacy from the religious domain to deodorize their political pursuits. At the opening of the Lagos Central Mosque in 1988, General Ibrahim Babangida declared that the economic recession – which was exacerbated to no small extent by his structural adjustment programme – was “the will of Allah.” Such dissembling has become more pronounced since the inception of the Fourth Republic. Obasanjo constantly declared that his presidency was God-ordained. Ahmed Sani’s declaration of Sharia law in Zamfara effectively made him an Ayatollah – a defender of the faithful – without manifestly improving his performance or enhancing the lives of the people. In 2002, his deputy, Mahmud Shinkafi (now governor of Zamfara) issued a fatwa calling for the murder of Isioma Daniel, a Thisday fashion writer for an innocuous reference to the Prophet Mohammed in an article that some Muslims deemed offensive.

The danger is that ideologically bankrupt and amoral politicians will increasingly seek to legitimize their misrule by draping their failed politics in theological garments, thus casting themselves as prophets. The culture of impunity that already denominates public life can only be deepened by delusions of spiritual infallibility. Politicians typically seek transcendent authenticity by pressing flesh with clerics and getting photo ops with the country’s most respected “men of God.” But many are now defining their politics in religious terms, thereby altering the dynamics of democratic engagement and paving a highway to theocratic fascism. In this setting, failed politicians can always blame the electorate for being of little faith. Politics is conducted as holy war and governance becomes a personality cult. Dissent is criminalized as Luciferian insurgence against divine order. Social criticism becomes blasphemy and lawful oppositional activism becomes apostasy. Can terminal excommunications and inquisitions be far off? We should also fear that these ersatz theocrats will provoke an extremist backlash from zealots who believe themselves ordained to cleanse the society of elite hypocrisy. It is no accident, after all, that Boko Haram and allied groups have flourished in the Sharia states where politicians have cynically played the religious card.  

It is in this context that we must critique the Jonathan campaign and the general political field. The president’s recent appearance at the Redemption Camp where he was prayed over by Pastor Enoch Adeboye raises questions about the propriety of mixing politics with faith. Adeboye is one of Nigeria’s most respected clerics but is increasingly vulnerable to criticism as a leading luminary of a religious establishment whose choice of secular friends has been unscrupulous and whose deficit in social conscience and activism has become a moral millstone around its neck. Indeed, these religious elites are seen as collaborators with corrupt corporate oligarchs and rogue politicians in an infrastructure of kleptocracy.

The 2011 election must not become a referendum on candidates’ piety. The ads’ implicit and explicit appeals to superstition, emotionalism and irrationality are fraudulent at a time when we need to dispassionately invigilate the political options on parade. Their sectarian overtones are unwise in a country where religion is often a polarizing theme. Above all, it devalues what should be a serious contest of ideas for the right to direct Nigeria’s course in the 21^st century. Bala Usman, the late radical historian, argued that religion in the public square is largely an instrument of social control deployed by political elites to mask the true nature of their self-serving adventures in power. He held that the manipulation of religion to mobilize political support is largely responsible for sectarian discord in Nigeria. The tenor of electioneering so far is consistent with his thesis.

As citizens, we have to exercise discernment in a dark age of false prophets. We must judge aspirants by their fruit. What is their track record on dealing with poverty, hunger, homelessness, disease and the vast range of dehumanizing plagues afflicting Nigerians? We must jettison vacuous religious rhetoric and ask concrete questions about social justice, equity and economic growth. Politicians should not contend for hearts and minds in churches and mosques but on the stomp and in debate forums where they can outline their reasons for seeking office. People of faith must insist on these ground rules so as to protect religion from profanity by political hacks. Keen students of Nigerian religiousity understand that the god invoked in these ads is a deceptive construct forged in the crucible of elite corruption and mass suffering, superstition and gullibility. Politicians must also eschew pseudo-religious buffoonery in order to renew a vocation now overrun by conmen. We should judge candidates by their competence and character not by their eligibility for Al Jannah lest we surrender our fate to charlatans.  

The Future of Progressives

The most urgent question in Nigerian politics at the moment is not the outcome of the 2011 elections. It is the possibility of forging a viable progressive alternative to the extant political order. Several analysts interpret Nigerian politics as a Manichean drama between the “evil” ruling Peoples’ Democratic Party and an angelic opposition. This portrait is simplistic to the point of silliness. What ails Nigerian politics is bigger than a single political party; it is a militarized and parasitic political culture of which the PDP is only the most obvious example. It is a system, poisoned by the long years of military dictatorship, which cuts across party lines. The PDP is its most visible manifestation because it is the dominant party. Therefore, it would be a mistake to reduce political change to simply changing parties in power. Ejecting the ruling party will count for nothing if we do not change the reigning ideas.

A second view of Nigerian politics shared by many of its practitioners and analysts is that ideology is inconsequential; that tags such as ‘conservative’ and ‘progressive’ are passé. Again, this is a legacy of military rule which virtually eliminated ideas from politics and redefined it as a contest of cash and brigandage. It is true that Nigerian politicians mostly do not reckon with ideology. Indeed, to the extent to which political parties are ideological communities, we do not have authentic parties at the moment; only protean constellations of interests ever changing in accord with personal fortunes. The PDP is thus the biggest and the most successful congregation of strange bedfellows in the field. But ideology does matter. Over the past two decades, governance has been shaped by what can only be described as a free market kleptocracy entrenched by a raft of neo-liberal reforms that emphasizes untrammeled liberalization, huge cuts in social spending, privatization and the devaluation of the naira.

These measures are consistent with the structural adjustment programmes that were promoted by western governments and Bretton Woods Institutions during the 1980s and were discredited by the 1990s. General Ibrahim Babangida fundamentally altered the fabric of state-society relations by imposing SAP in 1986. Within the context of military dictatorships and our quasi-militarized illiberal democracy, and in the absence of regulatory inhibitions, these measures amount to simply vandalizing the state, cannibalizing federal assets and sharing them among cronies. The contradictions inherent in effecting a radical shift in socio-economic priorities under a totalitarian regime was glossed over by architects of SAP. In effect, even though, it affected a consistency with capitalism, what emerged can only be called a kleptocracy or more charitably, crony capitalism or predatory capitalism.

To be sure, Nigeria’s economic woes predated Babangida, but his socio-economic engineering deepened the consumerist maladies of the society, accentuated social injustice and corruption, and destroyed civic trust in government. The perverse neo-liberalism that generated these dysfunctions remains the dominant philosophy of government. The state has lost its meaning as a provider of public goods – social infrastructure, roads, bridges, education and healthcare etc. Government’s responsibilities have shrunk dramatically, while it has tightened its grip on national resources and redefined itself as a profit machine for its operators. For the vast majority of our compatriots, governance is denoted by its absence except for the nuisance value of sirened motorcades and allied formats of reprobate pageantry. It is this culture of predation for which a progressive alternative must be found.

In the quest for a progressive alternative today, it is sensible to look back and to reclaim the vision of the progressive patriarchs of yore. Nnamdi Azikiwe, Obafemi Awolowo and Aminu Kano were the leading luminaries of the progressive tradition in the fifties and sixties. It may be argued that their inability to win power, due to British colonial intrigues, internecine squabbling and ethnic mistrust, was the most significant political mishap in the early stages of the Nigerian project. For without a doubt, the course of Nigerian history would have turned out very differently if they had directed it. Zik, Awo, Aminu and their cohorts were not doctrinaire socialists despite their left-leaning rhetoric. British colonialists saw them through the blinkers of the cold war and deemed them to be a “red danger” but they were nothing of the sort. Rather they were “third way progressives” who envisioned a synthesis of an enterprise economy and a welfare state.

Their ardent advocacy of universal public education reflected their belief in the moral purpose of the state as an enabler of human potential and national prosperity. They were welfarists who were as interested in wealth creation as they were in social justice. The philosopher, Chinweizu has characterized their ideology as “communalism” rooted less in Marx than in the communal ethos of African society which emphasizes inclusion and collectivity. It is a vision of the responsible society that leaves no one behind in the quest for moral and material progress. The state is thus necessary to underwrite the mutual wellbeing of the citizenry while reining in the inequities and inequalities that result from unbridled capitalism. Certainly, surrendering society to the caprices of market forces would have been anathema to the patriarchs.

Nigerian progressives today are suffering from a number of plagues. The ascendancy of right wing military regimes throughout our history severely limited progressive fortunes. It also meant that right wing politicians were the favoured parties in military-sponsored transition programmes. Babangida’s particular persecution of so-called “radicals” nearly destroyed the progressives and left them too exhausted to mount a feasible challenge for power in 1999. Thirdly, the fall of the Berlin wall and the collapse of communism in 1989, unleashed a sense of ideological bankruptcy which buffeted the Nigerian left. The left has long supplied the moral energy of progressivism and with their weakening the progressive community also atrophied.

But the progressives are also reeling from self-inflicted woes, chiefly, their congenital inability to build a truly national movement. Progressive forces have been undermined by factional infighting, bigotry and sectarian prejudices. Progressivism is not synonymous with any ethnic nationality even though some politicians and commentators of the south west persist in making this unfortunate assertion. Their potential for a national victory has been nullified often enough by the irredentist reduction of progressivism to an ethnic enclave. In his seminal book, Africa in Ebullition, Adegoke Adelabu argued that the Action Group was limited by its “self-imposed provincialism and its petticoat of shabby parochialism.” The same criticism is valid today against those who deem themselves heirs of the A.G., and its later incarnation, the U.P.N. For years, an odious narrative has made the rounds casting the south (and the southwest in particular) as the bastion of progressivism and the north as the seat of feudal conservatism. This bogus narrative assisted by bigoted and ignorant commentators has long prevented progressives on both sides of the Niger from linking hands and rising to the defence of their constituency – poor, disillusioned Nigerians who are in the majority.

Secondly, progressives seem incapable of subsuming ego and personal ambition in the quest for greater collective victories. Internecine dogfights splintered the Peoples Redemption Party and reduced a potential national progressive movement to a skeletal organization located entirely in Kano. Too often, progressives prefer to operate as lone-rangers so convinced in the justice of their own cause that they wind up in a cul de sac of their self-righteousness, high on puritanical fervor but electorally impotent. This is a shame because when they make their case rightly, the progressives have the most compelling vision for Nigeria; one which should enjoy greater mass appeal but which for these reasons does not.

Of late, progressive ideals have disappeared from the public square. We live in an age of intellectual famine and ideas are rarely given space to manifest. Militarized politics ensures that public debate is frequently “won” by the hecklers and those who make the loudest noise. Reasoned, sober voices are drowned out. The triumph of cash and carry politics has sapped progressives of their confidence. There is presently no recognizable progressive party. Creating a national movement calls for progressives to rediscover their political identity and re-establish their pavilion in the marketplace of ideas. If they can regain their faith in themselves and in their values, overcome expired prejudices and provincialisms and find new young and energetic leaders, Nigeria could very well experience a national renaissance. 

Naija is not Enemy Territory

I read the report online at first with bemusement and then with a growing sense of grief. It was of the Minister of Information and Communication, Professor Dora Akunyili condemning the usage of “Naija” in place of Nigeria as “very uncharitable and unpatriotic.” Speaking to participants of a reality show, she said, “It is very offensive to call Nigeria 'Naija'. We are making plans to write companies to stop using the word Naija. I have heard that name Naija in adverts. I want them to go back and remove that word. If anybody says this is Naija, ask the person, 'Where is Naija?' We have to stop this word because it is catching up with the young. If we don't put a stop to its usage now, it will continue to project us wrongly,” she said. (Thisday, November 15, 2010)

At first, I was tempted to dismiss it as another instance of official logorrhea but was driven to put pen to paper because such gaffes delivered with undue zest from high government officials often somehow wind up informing policy. And also because such cant should not go unchallenged or be allowed to frame public perception of the issues. The minister’s response demonstrates almost everything that ails our government. The planned censorship of the term ‘Naija’ is an example of a typical misappropriation of energy in the service of petty ill-conceived goals. The obvious misplacement of priorities at a time when so much is going wrong exhibits the devotion to frivolity that defines high office in Nigeria. The incident also verifies the lingering presence of a ghastly bequest of military rule – the refusal to engage intellectually with popular phenomena and instead to reflexively “ban” whatever is not understood. Instead of seeking first to understand, we move immediately to undermine and to antagonize. It is the knee-jerk reaction to whatever does not emanate from the narrow and squalid precincts of a dysfunctional state bureaucracy.

The question that should engage us as thinking beings is this: What is “Naija”? The term is increasingly pervasive and has found near ubiquitous expression on the platforms of popular culture, media, advertizing and in the corporate world. Among the younger generation, it is a slang of popular usage. Yet, young Nigerians do not turn up at airports describing themselves as nationals of Naija nor do they brandish passports issued by the Federal Republic of Naija. The term is simply a colloquial diminutive of “Nigeria” with roots in the idiomatic treasury of urban Lagos. This is why its most common expression is in the vibrant popular culture of which Lagos is the trend-setting capital.

But Naija has come to mean more than a casual slang. In a profound sense, in the generational consciousness of its proponents, there are figuratively two countries – Nigeria and Naija. Nigeria is what it is: a complex, unfair and unequal post-colonial travail for a meaningful human existence occurring in a pungent paradox of poverty in the midst of plenty. Naija represents what the emergent generation of Nigerians born between 1975 and 1995 are making of their beleaguered nation. It expresses the vitality and the resiliency of youth in a realm where dreams die first. It is the parallel universe that young Nigerians are constructing with their sweat, creative toil and irrepressible dreams channeled principally through popular culture – songs, art, films – but also through the entrepreneurial dynamism that enables them to make an honest living against incredible odds. Naija is the labour of love of an orphaned generation. 

To grasp its poignancy, we must understand the socio-economic circumstances in which this generation lives. In 2008, the Ministry of Youth Development disclosed that 80 percent of Nigerian youths, that is 64 million Nigerians, were jobless. Success rates in post-secondary school examinations have cratered at around 20 percent. According to the federal government, 71 percent of Nigerian graduates are unemployable – a living testament to the collapse of our education sector overseen by successive regimes since the 1980s. 86 percent of Nigerian graduates remain jobless for up to two years after graduating. These are a few of the demons that young Nigerians confront daily amid the absence of basic social amenities such as electricity and potable water.     

Above all, the government has shown little inclination to address these issues; to promote an agenda that gives Nigerian youths a sense of belonging, civic purpose and hope for the future. Instead, from time to time, we are treated to government officials trotting out a youth culture they barely understand to publicly flay it with the scourge of pious hypocrisy. For if anything projects us wrongly, it is surely the conduct of those in authority, whether it is the juvenile brawling in the national assembly or the grand larcenies of those entrusted with leadership. Indeed, it is the chasmal divide between state and society, between politics and public priorities that Naija represents as a conceptual community. Naija is the patriotic poetry of a generation that has been left for dead by its fathers and mothers, and yet has chosen to make this country, warts and all, its own and to convert its frustration and angst into a fuel for creative endeavour. It is, in fact, a term of endearment.

Advert companies did not invent ‘Naija’; they simply discovered a wave in the popular culture among the dominant demographic subset of the social economy and are now exploiting it with aplomb.  If intelligence instead of mind-closure was the directive principle of governance, the official response would have been to seek ways of harnessing this viral idiom and seek interface with its purveyors. Rather, what we saw was a quasi-militarist response that perceives the creative space that young Nigerians have forged for themselves as enemy territory. In ‘Naija,’ a generation has found not only a common syntax for defining its reality, but also potentially, the raw materials of a unifying political ethos, a core around which they can rally and contend for their collective destiny. It holds the basis of a patriotism far more authentic than the sterile sloganeering proffered by uninspiring politicians. 

Instructively, President Goodluck Jonathan’s campaign has co-opted young artistes who are exponents of ‘Naija’ signaling an effort to tap into this phenomenon, to reach the youth vote and cast the president as a voice of youth. Since youths also demographically dominate the electorate, this is either savvy or opportunism or both. This demographic, it should be noted, also lacks genuine representation in the high councils of government that could conceivably advise on the nuances of youth culture. For these attacks on youth culture also stem from a generation gap that alienates politicians from their children and from youths in general who constitute the majority of our population.  

Nations all over the world have socio-cultural and informal appellations by which they refer to themselves (Britannia, Yankees, Kiwis, Nippon, Aussies, and Zion etc.)  There are also ontological and philosophical ramifications to a people choosing a formal or informal name for themselves instead of retaining their colonial cognomens. Names are vectors of values and identity and ‘Naija’ is an affirmation of values and an identity construct distinct from the post-colonial conundrum inherent in “Nigeria” – the name with which Flora Shaw baptized us.  Ironically, during the 1950s, Tai Solarin, the great educationist and social critic campaigned spiritedly against retaining the name ‘Nigeria’ because of its etymological kinship with the term “nigger.” He argued that preserving this name amounted to acquiescing to our national baptism with a racist epithet. Possibly, he feared that it would signal the “niggerization” of the world’s largest black nation and entrap us in a physical and metaphysical ghetto. Considering our present circumstances, Solarin might have been on to something.    

There is no telling how seriously the Ministry of Information will pursue its self-assigned censorial task but it is worth noting that words can’t be killed. They can only be buried or momentarily driven underground from where they will inevitably resurrect with greater rhetorical and intellectual potency. In view of this, we are better off allowing the positive values of Naija, chief among them the ability to coax hope and excellence from the jaws of despair and defeat, to permeate our public life. There is much to be gained from analyzing Naija and letting its essence revitalize our broken society. Nigeria is reeling from many ailments. Naija is not one of them. 

Understanding Boko Haram: A Theology of Chaos

A kingdom can endure with unbelief, but it cannot endure with injustice.

                                                                            Uthman Dan Fodio 

Three weeks ago, Boko Haram, the ultraviolent Islamic militant group rose like a phoenix from hell from the ashes of its defeat last year by the Nigerian military. In Maiduguri, Borno State, they carried out motorcycle-borne ride-by shootings targeted at police officers and other law enforcement agents. In Bauchi, they stormed a federal prison and set free hundreds of their members as well as other inmates and threatened reprisals against those they accused of persecuting their members. Obviously, the military did not defeat Boko Haram last year when a five-day long clash ended with the extrajudicial execution in police custody of Mohammed Yusuf, the group’s leader. Although scores of the militants were killed or rounded up, several also escaped, simply melting into surrounding environs. According to the State Security Service, Boko Haram has 540,000 members. A group with that numerical strength cannot be wiped out by the strategy of decapitation traditionally used by states to cripple dissident groups. Decapitation as a strategy is simply targeting dissident leaders for elimination as a means of exterminating their rebellion from the very top. The resurgence of Boko Haram makes clear that the military operation against it was only moderately successful.

The emergence of Boko Haram signifies the maturation of long festering extremist impulses that run deep in the social reality of Northern Nigeria. But the group itself is an effect and not a cause; it is a symptom of decades of failed government and elite delinquency finally ripening into social chaos. Think of Boko Haram and other extremist groups of its kind as bacterial cultures. We must understand the Petri dish in which they have been cultivated. In order to appreciate the peculiar resilience of such groups, we must grasp the socio-political and economic conditions of the north. Northern Nigeria is a seething mass of illiteracy, misery, poverty and beggary. While Nigeria generally scores very poorly on every index of human development, Northern Nigeria sinks below the abysmal national average to the extent that a child born in the northwest or in the northeast is likely to have a lower quality of life than a compatriot born in the southwest or southeast. 

The news headlines in recent months portray only a part of the north’s mosaic of human suffering. Since the beginning of the year, lead poisoning has steadily decimated children in villages in Zamfara State, where they have been forced by poverty to engage in illegal mining. Cholera, a water-borne plague eradicated by the early 20^th century has reached epidemic proportions in the north where it has killed hundreds. The recent outbreak has been called the worst in twenty years and according to the Federal Ministry of Health now poses a threat to the rest of the country. Cholera is rife in the north because of the lack of potable water and flooding. In addition, the southward surge of the Sahara is claiming many natural water bodies forcing rural folk to resort increasingly to contaminated water sources.      

In 2006, Borno State Governor Ali Modu Sheriff told broadcasters that he was not bothered by criticisms of his administration in the print media because 95 percent of the people in the state cannot read and write. In any case, he added, less than 2 percent of Borno residents have access to newspapers. The governor’s press people later clarified that what he had meant to say was that radio and television were the dominant media in the state. To discerning ears impervious to spin-doctoring, it sounded as if Governor Sheriff had been glorying in the illiteracy level of his people and boasting of its utility as a political weapon. Mahmud Shinkafi, the current governor of Zamfara achieved infamy in 2002 when as Deputy Governor he pronounced a fatwa urging Muslims to kill Isioma Daniel, a Thisday reporter, for alleged blasphemy. Despite the acute humanitarian crisis of the north, its leading politicians have been preoccupied in recent months with how to clinch presidential power in 2011 and how to negotiate favourable niches in a post-2011 political reality.  Clearly the priorities of the so-called northern political elites are not in consonance with the realities of their people.

These facts are necessary to provide an insight into the prevailing political psychology in the north. Boko Haram is the consequence incarnate of misrule by delinquent political elites. It is a creature of state failure demonstrating the decline of our institutions in all its unvarnished ugliness. Despite the fact that the sect sent a widely publicized letter warning of its militant intentions, its attacks still surprised law enforcement agencies. The diminished intelligence capabilities of the government, the ease with which the militants struck at the federal prison and the group’s boldness in attacking federal agents since 2005 all indicate the waning strength of the Nigerian state. Elsewhere in the federation a range of embryonic insurgencies exist in the form of militant groups in the Niger Delta and kidnap gangs in the south east, and they intimate us of the fact that the Nigerian state no longer has the means to impose its will on this country; it no longer has a monopoly over the coercive instruments that underwrite the state’s rule and indemnify it against sedition or dissidence. Boko Haram is the terrifying face of this reality in northern Nigeria. It is the harbinger of incipient chaos.      

Boko Haram is an extremist group but it transcends the traditional extremist victimization of Christians in pursuit of grander anarchic ambitions. Its war is with the Nigerian state and western education which it perceives as a vector of the corrupting influence of modernity. Its ultimate objective is some version of an Islamic state, preferably of 7^th century vintage. In this, it closely resembles Maitatsine, the violent extremist cult that inaugurated the bloody era of religious terrorism in the north in the early 1980s. But Boko Haram is itself only a part of the picture. The social conditions that permit its existence are rife across the country. Millions of unschooled and unskilled able-bodied young men reside in our cities and towns and provide a ready pool of malcontents for extremist recruitment. Even among the educated unemployed, the crisis of unemployment in Nigeria where 40 million youths are jobless makes them vulnerable to sectarian preachments. Into this breach, groups like Boko Haram enter offering a theological framework of social analysis: rampant poverty and existential meaninglessness emanate from the Nigerian state and its unislamic provenance; from the presence of western education and the intrusion of modernity into an Islamic society. Boko Haram imparts to its members a sense of purpose and mission as warriors for the cause of God ordained to cleanse the society of moral impurities and establish an alternate order.

In a failed or failing state, religion is particularly prone to perversion. The role of the state is to protect humanity from assault by the elemental forces of nature through the institution of law and order. Where the state is derelict, religion is often the likeliest agency people turn to for interpreting the vagaries of their existence. This is what has happened in Nigeria. The explosion of sectarian violence in northern Nigeria coincided with four developments in the eighties – the collapse of the Second Republic which signaled the failure of politics and a popular loss of faith in politicians; Babangida’s imposition of the Structural Adjustment Program (SAP) which eliminated state subsidies, and through untrammeled trade liberalization wiped out local enterprises (especially the major textile industries and tanneries of the north) thereby eliminating jobs; the Babangida regime’s unhelpful religious politicking as evinced by its surreptitious dealings with the Organization of Islamic Countries (OIC) which gave the impression that it was a pro-Muslim regime and inflamed sectarian suspicions; and the collapse of the agrarian communities of Nigeria’s northern neighbours, Niger and Chad due to massive plagues of drought and desertification, spewing huge numbers of refugees into northern Nigerian cities where they fell into the void of extremism. Niger and Chad are essentially failed states and represent bleak prophecies of what could eventually befall northern Nigeria.

Even now, as desertification and drought devastate vast swathes of the north, a convergence of ecological, economic and social adversities is occurring. When rural areas lose ancestral farmland to the onslaught of the Sahara desert, huge numbers of disinherited young men flood northern towns and cities in search of jobs. In some places they become commercial motorcycle riders known as Achaba who now number about three million in the Kano metropolis; otherwise they swell the ranks of the urban underclass and most wind up on the margins of society from where they become easy recruits for politicians looking to build private armies or for roaming bands of outlawed extremists or bandits. Note that in the southeast where gully erosion has devastated rural communities, young men dispossessed of any means of livelihood make for the urban areas where many sadly enlist in the underworld. It is permissible to argue a direct link between the ecological degradation of rural areas and the uptick in urban crime and terrorism that has gripped south eastern metropolises.

These instances tell us that the umbrella of the Nigerian state is in tatters and while a derelict political class continues its self-indulgence, dispossessed Nigerians are embarking on the path of self-help by any means at their disposal. Religion is one of those means. It is tempting to argue that this pattern of perverse religiousity is something unique to the north and attributable to its Islamic heritage. This is untrue. Consider the neo-Pentecostal cults in Akwa Ibom that engage in torture of suspected child witches. In these communities, pastors or exorcists are engaged by poverty-stricken parents to seek out the witches in their household. Children are tortured, found guilty of witchcraft and banished from home from which point onwards they fall prey either to early death or sexual slavery and maltreatment as victims of child-trafficking. In a failed or failing state, religion assumes the role of locating scapegoats to explain social conditions of misery. In the north, Boko Haram blames the presence of western education and the Nigerian state itself; other extremists blame it on the presence of Christians or infidels, just as in some other parts it is blamed on the presence of non-indigenes, infidels or strangers. In parts of Akwa Ibom, defenceless children are the scapegoats for material conditions of poverty.

The view that Islam is solely to blame for religious violence in the north is simplistic for another reason. The south has a very substantial Muslim population (particularly in the southwest and parts of Edo state) and records very little of the sort of sectarian bloodletting that periodically grips the north. The region’s acceptance of western education and, especially, Obafemi Awolowo’s single-minded insistence on free education freed many communities from the yoke of illiteracy, boosted the technical capacity of the western region and created a vibrant middle class. Economic security meant that religious affiliation could not be the primary social identity in the region. Lagos State, for instance, has only ever had one democratically elected Christian governor – Sir Michael Otedola, who served in the short-lived Third Republic. Yet, this has never been an issue in Lagos politics. Compare this with Kaduna State where Governor Patrick Yakowa is the first Christian to occupy that position, despite the considerable Christian demographic presence in the state. His ascension to that office this year was attended with uneasy novelty, tension and fears of sectarian violence from some Muslims who saw his rise as a loss of power.  

The difference is that religion is at the centre of northern life. Matters of faith are synonymous with political allegiances. The north, historically hobbled by its cultural resistance to western education, experienced the absence of technical capacity and a lack of readiness for the demands of a modern economy, for which it had to compensate by accommodating southerners and expatriates. According to B.J. Dudley in his seminal work, Instability and Political Order, deep-seated resentment of the educated, technically-savvy southerners who formed the urban merchant middle class of the north was the source of ethnic violence in the region between the 1940s and 1960s. He argued that these explosions of inter-tribal animosity were also (indeed, primarily) class conflicts pitting wealthy southerners against the northern urban underclass. This thesis remains valid. Storefronts in commercial districts are specifically targeted during bouts of rioting by the armies of vagrants and juvenile delinquents that roam northern cities and towns. This kind of “ethno-religious” violence stems from cultural hysteria – the angst of communities who are unprepared for a modern social economy, who have been raised to be deeply antagonistic of modernity and who consider themselves assailed by outsiders as a result.  Young males are socialized to see themselves as victims and then to react as aggressors. Their rage is inevitably directed at presumed alien influences in their communities, often people of other faiths and ethnicities. Supremacist ideologies rooted in inferiority complexes gain increasing audience.

Without the skills necessary to access opportunities in the current socio-economic equation, the people are left with nothing but their religion as their sole resource and are thus vulnerable to all the monstrous mutations of faith that are liable to manifest in a climate of ignorance, corruption and economic inequality. Such alienation feeds the burgeoning subculture of violence embodied by street gangs like the Yan Daba in Kano and Sara Suka in Bauchi. The political imperatives are clear. The north in educational and socio-economic terms is a disaster area comparable to the ecologically devastated Niger Delta. Both zones are theatres of human and environmental carnage wrought by rapacious elites. Northern politicians have singularly failed to invest in education and to fast track infrastructural development in the region. Indeed, over the years, northern elites have cultivated the impression that illiteracy and ignorance are part of northern identity; that part of what it means to be a northerner is to be illiterate, in order to facilitate their own positions as political protectors of their victimized people. Even the Koranic education system is dysfunctional and is mainly mass-producing millions of almajiris – the street children that are fixtures in virtually every northern town and city.

This is a travesty of the region’s history and heritage. Northern Nigeria has a long-lived tradition of learning and literacy. Uthman Dan Fodio’s jihad was not only aimed at purifying Islam but also at replacing the rule of materialistic potentates with that of scholars. A comparable analog is Plato’s idealized government by philosopher-kings. But Northern-dominated anti-intellectual military regimes from the mid-eighties onward reduced the region to a crypt of learning. Anti-intellectualism is now promoted as being synonymous with Islam – a strange proposition since the religion gave the world gifts of insight in the sciences, astronomy, medicine and mathematics especially algebra. We still use Arabic numerals as the mathematical medium for explaining the physical universe.  In the north, there persists a residual antagonism of the so-called Yan Boko – western-educated northerners “who have forgotten their roots.” This obdurate resistance to education and glorification of illiteracy remains along with elite kleptomania, the region’s greatest obstacle to progress and the leading vector of sectarian violence and poverty.

At the beginning of the 20^th century, the British colonialists and the Fulani aristocracy conspired to block the spread of western education in the north. The British wanted to avoid what had transpired in southern Nigeria where the ready acceptance of education had created a generation of anti-colonial nationalist agitators. They also wanted to avoid the emergence of educated Islamists of the sort that were then challenging their rule in Egypt. The British understood that western education would upset the conservative feudal social order over which their allies, the emirs ruled and would ultimately endanger colonialism itself. The Fulani aristocracy objected to western education because they feared that its Christian missionary purveyors would gain inroads into their domains.

Herein lies the source of the historic schism between northern and southern Nigeria. It was not political in the beginning but educational, technical and thus socio-economic. The northern elites of the independence era led by Ahmadu Bello necessarily saw their roles as slowly opening their society to modernity while preserving it from domination by the southerners who were better prepared for the rigours of a modern economy. Today, it is fair to say that the general antipathy to western education in the north has been sustained by political elites who understand that psychological subservience is best perpetuated in a climate of ignorance and fear. By using the bogey of southern domination and manipulating religious and cultural symbols, northern politicians have been able to maintain their access to power. Decades ago, the leftist academic Bala Usman extensively critiqued what he accurately identified as the elite manipulation of religion for economic and political advantage.

Boko Haram and other extremist groups of its ilk have also emerged in the context of a yawning political vacuum in the north. Forty years ago, the poor of the north at least had champions like the great Mallam Aminu Kano and his Northern Elements Progressive Union (NEPU) and later the Peoples Redemption Party (PRP). Mallam Kano, a scion of the ruling class was an ardent advocate of the talakawa and made it his life’s cause to terminate the conservative power structures that he deemed responsible for their poverty. He championed education, women’s rights and the social emancipation of a people bent double under the yoke of feudal oppression. He used Islam as a liberating ideology against the preachments of those who used Islam as an ideology of subjection of the masses and women. In his excellent study, Ethnic Politics in Nigeria, Okwudiba Nnoli details how the British colonialists colluded with their local confederates in the 1950s to deny NEPU its electoral victory using thuggery, chicanery and intimidation.

In the years since the early eighties when Mallam Kano died, the fortunes of northern progressives have waned. There has been no other northern (or for that matter, Nigerian) politician of comparable iconic status and moral authority. The machinations of conservative opponents and military dictators ensured that the northern progressive movement was reduced to its entrails. No politician and certainly none of his prominent disciples have risen to claim Aminu Kano’s mantle. In the absence of a progressive opposition to the conservative ruling elite, a dangerous vacuum has grown in northern politics. The talakawa may have lost their political champions but this is not to say that they are completely voiceless. It is this vacuum created by the neutralization of progressive forces that extremist cults are now seeking to fill. It is their advocacy of the cause of the poor and their opposition to social injustice that lends these groups their appeal. Boko Haram and allied groups represent a potent if erroneous critique of the delinquent state and its dysfunctional leadership culture.

            Boko Haram’s actions cast some light on our institutional failings. Their assault on the federal prison in Bauchi may even be seen as an escalated protest against a travesty of justice. 70 percent of Nigeria’s prison population is awaiting trial. The justice system is over-burdened, beset by corruption, manpower shortages and other plagues. Keeping Nigerians in detention without trial indefinitely does not serve the cause of justice. From their point of view, Boko Haram simply liberated their brethren from illegal captivity by state agencies. If suspected terrorists cannot be charged to court and successfully convicted, then it is the fault of the state.

            

In a sense, the Boko Haram saga is also about chickens coming home to roost. For years, northern politicians paid lip-service to anti-Christian violence wrought by homicidal zealots. It was as though some secret diabolical transaction stipulated that Christian lives be used to placate the violent extremists to stop them from turning their attentions to their leaders. Emergent groups like Boko Haram, Kalo Kato among others are sectarian zealots like their forebears but have now arrogated to themselves the right to determine who or what is “Islamic.” To that extent, the double-edged sword of extremism is now aimed precipitously at the jugular of the northern ruling classes. It remains to be seen if northern politicians understand the catastrophic potentials of the Frankenstein monster that they have created; whether they can act to stamp out the homicidal pathologies festering along the margins of their society.

            

A few things can be done to arrest the slide into anarchy. The federal government should establish special tribunals mandated to deal expeditiously with cases of sectarian violence and terrorism. The capabilities of security agencies in terms of intelligence gathering and early warning systems should be enhanced. The operational conditions and capacities of the police mobile units, the army and other paramilitary agencies should be enhanced with respect to addressing urban terrorism and guerilla warfare. From all indications, our security forces are not yet attuned to the operational nuances of suburban counter-insurgency and conventional military approaches result in great collateral loss of life and property. Our northern borders with Chad, Niger and Cameroon are notoriously porous and have to be secured against the influx of weapons and would-be extremists and fanatics from these countries.

            

However, the greatest task lies in the domain of politics and public policy. The fact is that vast areas of the north are conducive to crime and insurgency. So too are the scores of decaying urban centres across Nigeria left desolate after the collapse of social services and public utilities in the late eighties and early nineties.  There needs to be serious commitment at the highest levels of government to address the entropic conditions incubating groups like Boko Haram. It might require some kind of federal intervention especially in the areas of education and healthcare and greater pressure on northern elites to develop the region. Without this, Nigeria could find itself battling with an insurgency in the north in addition to its manifold challenges. And unlike Niger Delta militants who are at least open to negotiating with the state, the absolutist extremist groups in the north want nothing except the very destruction of the state itself.  

            

Superior bullets, bombs and spies alone will not defeat extremism. Terrorism as a form of protest beckons to a generation of youths who see that they are destined to live and die in poverty and deprivation. Their present is bleak and their future is uncertain. Thus, they take refuge in a manufactured past, a mythical 7^th century Islamic Utopia into which they seek to forcibly induct the rest of the society. For these alienated legions, life is a more frightening prospect than death so presumed martyrdom has an allure because it offers a post-mortem status that exceeds anything that Nigeria can currently offer them.  Such cults threaten national security because they virulently oppose the pluralism, tolerance and civic mutuality generated by the very existence of the Nigerian nation. Their ideologies are by nature exclusionary accommodating only one perspective. Our national ideal, even if observed mostly in the breach for much of our history, is inclusion. Furthermore civic solidarity is undermined when a growing number of Nigerians aspire to relocate to the 7^th century while the rest strive to master the 21^st century. It is worse when these mutually exclusive aspirations occur along geographical lines.

Ultimately, we must redefine the notion of Nigerian citizenship in such a way that it provides a framework of civic purpose and welfare for every citizen. Being a Nigerian must offer a measure of existential meaning for Nigerians otherwise disaffected millions will seek definition in narrow, exclusive and polarizing sectarian identity constructs. The only cure for extremism is an umbrella of psychological, social and economic security spread over the nation by a socially responsible state, one that sees its role as guaranteeing the common good. Constructing such a state is the most urgent task of leadership today.