The Bonds of Freedom

It is the hubris of a generation to think itself set apart; to assume that its nation’s history begins and ends with it and that it can therefore single-handedly decide the country’s fate. As a society this has been and remains our greatest transgression. Pundits and critics fill the news pages and airwaves with summary dismissals of Nigeria’s prospects as a nation. Others flippantly propose the dissolution of the country without considering what is at stake. We are obsessed with merely momentary episodes of our history or with the peculiar inconveniences of our own time, when we should concentrate upon the entire fabric of our national existence. This inability to see the big picture is our greatest undoing. Wisdom tells us that each generation is part of the existential continuum of its nation and therefore part of a larger story. Our time is only a chapter of the national odyssey. Understanding that we are part of an epic narrative gives our lives purpose and meaning, and enables us to overcome the existential challenges confronting the society. We call this taking the long view.

To begin with, nations are not presented gift-wrapped by historical circumstances. They are built from the ashes of transience and adversity by people who deign to forge a collective destiny. The blueprints are in the dreams and visions of our founding fathers and mothers – the ancestors of our political genealogy. Without an understanding of where we are coming from, we will be unable to see where we are going. In our past, we will find assets and resources with which we can more accurately chart our course. The dreams and visions that ignited the Nigeria’s beginnings were neither local nor petty. They were illustrious. We find them in the poetry and prophecy of luminaries like Marcus Garvey and WEB DuBois who dreamed of an African civilization that would manifest the glories of the black race. Nnamdi Azikiwe spoke of the renascence of the African spirit – a New Africa of which Nigeria would be centrepiece and capital. By and large, these were dreams that possessed our founding fathers. The values of the renascence would be liberal democracy, community, justice and freedom. Other dreamers envisioned a republic in which Africa’s triple heritage of western civilization, eastern civilization and indigenous values would be harmonized in a symphony of social and spiritual wisdom. This was to be and remains Nigeria’s manifest destiny in the comity of nations.

As Frantz Fanon said, “Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfil it or betray it.” It took a generation of anti-colonial agitators and nationalists to end colonialism and win our independence as a nation. It took another generation of pro-democracy activists and campaigners to terminate military dictatorship and earn the country another opportunity for democratic rule. The historic mission of the present generation of Nigerians is to recover the old dreams and interpret them anew in our own time. This is the post-oil boom generation that was born into the twilight of the Nigerian promise, came of age during the dark years of military misrule and now bear the brunt of pervasive dysfunction. This is also a generation that has largely succumbed to cynicism, apathy and despair. For them, there are only two imperatives – the necessity of an emergency exodus in search of greener pastures abroad or fatalistic resignation to the dreariness of life in a failing state. But there is a third option.

We have moved beyond military dictatorship into a more ambiguous era, when berets and swagger sticks have given way to Babanriga and briefcases. In this age, the false god of military Messianism – the idea that soldierly strongmen can miraculously transform our society – is rightly dead. The golden calf of oil wealth as a magical cure all for all our ills stands similarly discredited. New ways, means and strategies of seeding change are required. In politics, this means building a vibrant civil society, engaging actively in civic life and public service. In culture, it means crafting ideas, art, songs, myths and stories that can stir the soul to greater heights of virtue and nobility. In business, it means shifting from the rent-collecting contractor mentality to a culture of wealth creation, vocational excellence and authentic entrepreneurship that will widen the circle of prosperity in the land. In faith, it means translating belief into social action; into acts of courage, conscience and compassion in the public square and in the marketplace. By getting involved in any of these domains, we become active participants in the processes now shaping the future.

Our national anthem speaks of a Nigeria as “One nation bound in freedom…” The imagery of the bonds of freedom is profound for it implies that freedom carries certain restraints. Freedom itself imposes a set of responsibilities on us and defines the ways and means by which we may pursue and apply it. Keeping an eye on the big picture is to recognize that a society’s progress in freedom is piecemeal. Each generation must expand the borders of freedom, deepen its meaning and pass it on as an inheritance to their children. For the nationalists that fought colonialism, freedom meant relief from British rule and the right to self-determination. For the pro-democracy activists that challenged military dictatorships, freedom meant an end to the reign of fear and the oppression of jackboots, and the right to choose one’s leaders. For us, freedom means entrenching democracy, justice and equity and defeating the forces of graft and kleptocracy. It is our generation that must take democracy beyond nominal voting rights to the liberalization of opportunities for health, wellbeing and happiness for all regardless of creed, ethnicity or gender.

Taking the long view of our nation and our place in the scheme of its destiny is to accept that accomplishing these objectives is necessarily a generational struggle demanding investments in sweat, blood, toil and tears – the symbolic elements of redemptive suffering. Sceptics might question if all or any of these lofty dreams can be achieved. The point is that the struggle for freedom is a chain and each generation is a link in that chain. Our ancestors in the struggle did not realize all of their dreams but they ran their race and passed the torch of liberty to their children. Every generation is meant to realize more fully the promise of what its forebears sought to accomplish. For us too, the important thing is to run our own race and to leave a legacy of hope for our children.

Predictions of our impending and inevitable national doom are not cast in stone. Nothing about our future as a society is settled yet because the key determinant of civilizational destiny is human agency and moral choice. Human beings through their actions or inactions, choose the fate of their societies. It is within our powers to choose life or death, order or chaos, redemption or perdition. It is crucial that we discern the choices facing our generation at present. Our children will surely have their own problems – this is the way of life – but what matters is that we work to give them a richer freedom and a more edifying reality than the one we know today. Posterity itself compels us to do this. To betray this calling is to transgress against the future and to commit cosmic treason. These are the bonds of our freedom.

Genocide Theology and Nigeria's Sectarian Holocausts

The times call for much introspection and soul-searching among people of faith. We live in times of holy warlords, false prophets and sundry oracles spewing all kinds of hate-filled theologies. These warped theologies represent a potent existential threat to Nigeria. Recently, the central Nigerian city of Jos was enveloped in sectarian violence that claimed the lives of several hundred people and displaced up to forty thousand more by one estimate. Similar bouts of violence have torn the city apart four times over the past twenty years. At those times, we have witnessed the familiar rituals of politicians calling for peace, the deployment of the military; the establishment of probe panels of inquiry to examine “the immediate and remote causes” of the conflicts and then the burial of those reports until the inevitable next round of violence.

Jos is by no means the most violent place in Nigeria nor is the sectarian hate that has poisoned its otherwise serene climate unique in the Nigerian experience. Sadly, the tin city is only the latest theatre of a pattern of conflict that is increasingly prevalent across the federation. Nigeria has never been an oasis of peace. Military dictatorships were in power for more than three decades during which time, the civic aspirations of the Nigerian people were viciously repressed. It endured a terrible fratricidal civil war in which over a million people were killed. It has remained united but suffers from fairly frequent eruptions of ethno-religious conflict. This isn’t novel. In a multicultural society, ethnic and religious tensions and conflicts are to be expected. Intelligent governance can manage, defuse and in time, neuter these tensions and their latent potential for flaring into wars. But Nigeria has notably not been blessed with intelligent governance.

What is troubling about the current spate of conflicts is how thoroughly infused with hate they are; the murderous ardour with which mobs are encouraged to demonize and exterminate their enemies including women and children; there is a sense, not yet full-blown but increasingly evident, that particular people are “evil” because of their ethnicity or their religion and that they ought to be stamped out or exorcised from a defined space. These views are promoted subtly and unsubtly by some politicians, elements of the media and most disturbingly by clerics. We should fear that the seeds of generational hatred and conflict and cycles of violence are being sown. We should be alarmed that we are setting the stage for a legacy of discord and inherited strife to haunt the next generation and their children’s children. We should worry when children aged ten years and even less are being raised to hate Christians or Muslims and to see people of differing creeds and ethnicities as enemies by default. And religious clerics who are the most powerful non-state actors in the public square are complicit in this crime against the posterity of Nigerian humanity.

Even as the immediate and remote causes of the Jos crisis are investigated, we as a society must question what kind of moral climate permits our cities and towns to collapse into orgies of wanton genocidal butchery. What explains the speedy transformation of these locales into sectarian slaughterhouses in which even places of worship are attacked? What spiritual and theological influences are at work when religious leaders subtly and overtly justify religious violence? For the avoidance of doubt, theology matters. It is theology that generates the values that define the ethical climate of the society. The prevailing ethical climate in turn generates particular patterns of moral choice, public conduct and social example and these further reinforce the moral climate. All our problems as a society can be attributed to the framework of anomic values that now undergirds our public life. This essay addresses the largely unremarked theological and socio-psychological dimensions of sectarian conflict in Nigeria.

Religion in our society mostly fulfils the human need for what psychologists call ‘other-blame’. When things go wrong for communities, the instinctive response is to look for scapegoats upon which to heap the blame for our misfortunes. For the ancient Hebrews, the scapegoat was the vessel symbolically imbued with the sins of the society and then released into the wilderness to be consumed by the demons of the desert thus achieving the ritual cleansing of the community. According to some theological perspectives, the use of the scapegoat was simply a placebo – a superficial therapy of the conscience that did not address moral responsibility and therefore offered no actual cleansing. Nevertheless, the logic of scape-goating is the dominant element of theology and popular spirituality on these shores.

Significantly, scape-goating tends to occur within the context of economic realities. As recession reduces the financial inflows, economic and cultural paranoia set in. We begin to look for those who we suspect are reducing or shortening our rations. When we find them, we dub them aliens, strangers, unbelievers, settlers or non-indigenes and heap upon them the blame for our collective misfortunes. Such psychopathologies emanate from a national soul besieged by both material and spiritual poverty. For instance, Adolf Hitler cast the Jews as scapegoats for Germany’s economic woes during a time of depression and hyperinflation. And most Germans reeling from their country’s defeat and humiliation in the First World War and its subsequent economic decline agreed with him and became complicit in the Nazi genocide of the Jews.

It was during the 1980s, when Nigerians suffered the flagellation of structural adjustment programmes and inflation that a new neo-Pentecostal theology emerged. It attributed the economic decline at personal and social levels to the activities of witches, wizards, demons and other malign spiritual forces. According to its exponents, epileptic seizures, plane crashes, hit and run accidents, cerebral malaria, fire outbreaks or collapsed buildings could just as well be demonic afflictions or witchcraft attacks. Trace elements of this immensely popular brand of faith are evident in the crisis of social aggression that has beset our communities. For years these preachers have excoriated the devil without precisely identifying his earthly agents. Rather than confronting the machines of social injustice grinding life out of the people, the preachers blamed a host of metaphysical entities. It is these “demons” that are now being given human form and flesh as “strangers”, “non-indigenes” and “infidels” to satisfy the need for other-blame. Theology informs how we perceive and approach reality. If are directed by our imams and pastors to look for enemies – scapegoats responsible for our failings – we will find them eventually in the shape of members of other sects, denominations, faiths or ethnicities.

As poverty becomes more endemic, more people become susceptible to the belief that they stand a better chance as a group in staking a claim to a bigger share of the national cake. There is a belief that others ought to be elsewhere – they should not share our space, or the land that belongs to our people and the civic arena in which we determine our destiny, especially in times of material scarcity and political uncertainty. And if we allow them to share of our physical space, it is under our terms or those prescribed by tradition. A demarcation emerges between self-proclaimed sons of the soil, the community landlords and the so-called strangers and aliens, the presumptive tenants in the emergent social equation. New ideas of religious, ethnic and socio-cultural supremacy emerge. Communities are polarized between master races and serfs.

Sectarian animus can also be attributed to psychological factors. Having enemies fulfills an important human need whether it is children on the playground forming rival packs or university students forming rival fraternities. Psychologists say that nothing promotes social, ethnic and national harmony as surely as a common object of loathing. As all students of power know, fostering an “us against them” dynamic is a central element of demagoguery. There can be no “us” without there being a corresponding “them” to oppose. In group psychology, the alien other embodies the worst aspects of the group itself. We simply project our greed, avarice, paranoia and cowardice on to the other group. Such stereotyping frequently becomes the wholesale demonization of entire peoples and generates the sort of rhetoric that inspires hate crimes, ethnic cleansing and genocide. This is the substance of what I refer to as genocide theology.

The need for enemy formation is so potent that sustaining it is emotionally gratifying. It is easier for the Berom in Jos to think of the Hausa and the Fulani as their arch-foes or for the Hausa and the Fulani denizens of the far north, in turn, to think of the Igbo as an invasive presence. The same sentiments denominate relations between the Tiv and the Jukun or the Urhobo and Itsekiri and many other ethnic groups in the federation. Genocide theology is a vehicle for an even deeper psychological malaise. It may well be that to compensate for their inability to rise up against a bankrupt ruling class, Nigerians are directing their rage at each other. Our chances of mitigating these aggressions depend on how mature we become spiritually and politically. The more mature we become, the less need we will have to externalize our failures upon an enemy, and the more discerning we shall be of who the real enemies are. This calls for a new kind of civil theology that empowers us to take responsibility for our collective destiny rather than search for metaphysical or physical enemies to blame.

Conflicts of the sort that periodically wrack Jos and other communities are difficult to pigeonhole and do not submit to easy categorization. They are not simply religious conflicts; they are sired by a complex intercourse of factors – ethnic, social, cultural, political and religious. We can argue with supporting evidence that the Jos crisis is only superficially religious. In a society characterized by dysfunctional governance, elite delinquency, a demographic boom and infrastructural collapse, millions of young people without education, employment or prospects for the future are susceptible to genocide theology. Under such circumstances, the baser impulses that drive mobs to loot, maim and kill are draped in the sacred garments of religion. Genocide theologians summon scriptural justification for the demonic lusts lurking in the society’s subconscious.

We have not heard the sort of theologizing and rhetoric that emphasizes concepts like forgiveness, reconciliation and inclusion. The notion Of Al Kitab – that we are people of the book, heirs of a common body of revelation despite our differing interpretations thereof – contrasts sharply with the flagrant ease with which the labels, “infidel” and “unbeliever” and their implicit subhuman classifications are generously plastered on perceived enemies. Very little is heard of the imperatives of constructing bridges of empathy, forbearance and compassion across ethnic and religious divides. The tragedy is that voices of moderation and reason that ought to shape a necessary interfaith conversation have largely fallen silent. In their absence, the interfaith conversation, if it can be so-called, has degenerated into demagoguery and occasionally careens into the realm of guns, swords, machetes and assorted weapons. Even within the different religions, it is reactionaries and zealots that are in the ascendancy. Millions of Nigeria’s Christian and Muslim believers are illiterate and ignorant even about their own faiths. Zeal has not been tempered with knowledge and is now running riot in a climate of unreason and superstition. So far, the extremists are winning and it is not a good sign.

The need to resolve the role of religion in our public life continues to loom large. Secularism remains the best option for a society that hosts a diversity of faiths but it does not mean as some religionists charge that the public arena will become a values-neutral wasteland. A secular social order means that the public square cannot be monopolized by any one faith; public life can be enriched by our moral values but cannot be colonized as the domain of any particular religion. Today, the public square is a theatre of conflict where various faith groups contend for domination. The political elite have long been adept at manipulating religious sentiments to build bases of political support. And too many politicians and clerics have been willing to consecrate political chicanery, electoral heists and allied injustices as “God’s will” blurring the boundaries between the religious and political dimensions in the process.

To save the state itself from complete devastation by sectarian warfare, we must redefine those boundaries. Some actions readily commend themselves: Government sponsorship of pilgrimages to Mecca and Jerusalem should be terminated. The use of public funds for affairs that fall under the province of personal devotion is wrong. The patronage and courtship of religious clerics by public servants should be discontinued. Such measures will help to renew the Nigerian state. The paradox is that our grotesque brand of civil religion has turned the public square into precisely the sort of values-neutral wasteland feared by religionists.

There is also the matter of the gaping vacuum in the public square that ought to be occupied by clerics that can speak truth to power and repudiate the spirit of sectarian strife that threatens all of us. We have not heard the ringing condemnations of violence perpetrated by Christians and Muslims from the pulpits and mosques. Some religious leaders, imams and pastors have denounced the violence but these are relatively few voices. All too often, clerics who should be standing on the non-partisan moral high ground advocating truth and justice are themselves sectional champions of the worst kind conflating their inherent bigotries and prejudices with “the will of God.” We are called to occupy this moral high ground where the loss of a life, any life whether Muslim or Christian or of any persuasion at all, can be interpreted rightly as a human tragedy instead of as a victory for a particular religion. It is upon this holy ground that the authenticity of our faith and humanity will become manifest.

The rising incidence of sectarian violence is best understood in the context of a failed or a failing state. Extremism, sectarianism, bigotry and genocide theology generally prevail in failed states. Think of Somalia, Afghanistan and Yemen among other countries that have become outposts of international terrorism. While Nigeria is not in the league of failed states, we can surmise that she is steadily heading in their direction. The healthy balance and creative tension that should exist between politics and religion has been disrupted. Ideally, religion enables us to pursue the “treasures of heaven” – a metaphor for the use of transcendental moral values to guide our personal and social conduct. The state exists to enable us access earthly treasures by providing the public goods that make for citizens’ welfare. Where the state fails to provide public goods and underwrite the welfare of the society, non-state actors like religious movements will step into the void often with disastrous consequences.

In a multi-religious society, people will tend to see themselves first and foremost as adherents of particular faiths and only secondarily as citizens or not at all. Religious movements will invade the state’s domain and purport to have the keys of access to earthly treasures. Inevitably, there will arise messengers intent on creating a paradise on earth whether an Islamic theocracy or a New Jerusalem. In such a realm, people are persuaded that by converting to a particular faith they are guaranteed social mobility and economic advancement. Consequently, terms like “Muslim” and “Christian” increasingly refer not to adherence to particular moral codes but to competing political categories with a predictable set of partisan beliefs and allegiances. In most parts of Northern Nigeria, this is already the case. This is the context that permits the growth of extremist movements like Boko Haram and Maitatsine – religious movements with avowedly political objectives – and sustains the spread of genocide theology. The civic domain ends up disfigured. This is what has befallen religion and politics in Nigeria.

The chief task for politicians of this generation is to rebuild the Nigerian state so that it can spread a broad umbrella of inclusive welfare that covers all her citizens and provides them with civic meaning, purpose and hope. Only a state guided by nationalistic welfarist principles and operating as an impartial arbiter in the public realm can neuter the centrifugal forces at work in the polity. A state that is hostage to sectarian zealots and partisan agendas will simply self-destruct.

Without a federal administration committed to promoting social and economic rights – access to education, health care, shelter, food and employment – the nightmare scenario long envisioned by observers of Nigeria will come to pass. It is the spectacle of more holy warlords and false prophets enthralling millions of dispossessed Nigerians who have nothing to lose. Pocket theocracies, genocidal turf wars and ethno-religious insurgencies will scarify a landscape patrolled by vigilantes and militias as the state recedes from the public consciousness. International terrorists will find a haven in yet another failed state. It is upon this road that genocide theology has set Nigeria – not to a paradise on earth but to a hell that will consume everyone regardless of what God they purport to believe in.

Enemy at the Gates: A Poetic Meditation on the Jos Crisis

Enemy at the Gates

The beast rises from the deep

Baring fangs of twisted metal

Festooned with flesh torn limb from limb

And the blood of generations born to bleed

In times of presumptive peace

For those seasoned in lifetimes of war

Again, there is talk of enemies

Of alien others and demon strangers

Baying for our blood at the barricades

We hear rumours of war

Conspiracy theories and unsubtle spin

Quickened from front pages and nightly news

Via cyberspace and mobile phones

Summon dread and hate

In prayer meetings of the beleaguered faithful now turned séances

Whisper it in the dark

Over fresh corpses and still smouldering carnage

The enemies are abroad and there are strangers among us

Learn the secret codes of unspoken intent

Etched in marks that are not of our own tribes

Subtle stripes on dark cheeks scream:

“Slash the enemy from ear to ear;

Gut him before he guts you.”

Shadows of demented wolves

Lengthen in the pale light of a darkened crescent

Hungry warriors of a wretched brood

Enchanted by the battle cry of the dead

Hasten to the summons of the sirens

To the bugle that calls for holy war

By the bonfire of crooked crosses inflamed with unholy ardour

Enemies will be named and shamed

Claimed or maimed by lynch mobs with God on their side

If not the infernal legions of abominable martyrs

The enemy is at the gates

On our threshold knocking on doors not without but within

Stir the brackish waters of the whirlpool that is the heart

The beast lurks here

In unexpected depths and uncharted regions

In the abyss of the Gadarene herd

The mirror cracks in the instant of self-revelation

When self-righteous masks slip to reveal

The hideous alien other;

The fearsome stranger that must be destroyed

The crack is the fault line rippling through

Land cursed by fraternal blood sport

Wastelands irradiated by mutual abhorrence

And malice as unyielding as the grave

But the rift is within

Disfigured souls rent asunder

By the beast borne deep in psychic marrows

Breaching the gates from the inside

There the enemy rests

To rear its head and strike unexpectedly in unwary hours

Till we aim our weapons inward

And exorcise the infernal legions

That war within these stately citadels of the self,

Where Ego, id and superego nestle

Resplendent in the temples of St. Narcissus;

These white-washed sepulchres

Antipolitics, Militancy and Terrorism

If anyone still doubts that Nigeria’s dysfunctional political order is in meltdown, the events of the past few months and in particular, of recent weeks, should have cleared all doubts. For the past decade, the federal government has been locked in a low intensity conflict with militants in the Niger Delta. The militants’ stated goal is greater control of the oil resources bountifully buried beneath their land. That struggle is now less of a clear-cut agitation for resource control, having been adulterated with criminality, organized crime, kidnapping and brigandage. Even so, the essential contention remains over the control Nigeria’s strategic resource. In recent months, the temperature of the conflict spiked following the slaying of 12 soldiers, including a lieutenant colonel and a major. The Joint Task Force launched a sweeping reprisal campaign that culminated in an amnesty announced by President Yar’Adua for all militants who would lay down their arms. For the avoidance of doubt, what is going on in the Niger Delta is a small scale insurgency. Militants have gone toe to toe with federal forces and remain unbowed, and have even been able to extract concessions from the state.
Two weeks ago, over 700 people were killed in clashes between the military and a radical Islamic extremist group known as Boko Haram (western education is a sin). By and large, such episodes are not new in Northern Nigeria where ethnic, political and religious differences combine in a highly unstable cocktail of sectarian animus. There is a long tradition of Islamic extremism in the north notably with the rise of the Maitatsine group in the early 1980s and subsequently similar sects. What is striking about the recent clashes is that they represent an escalation of extremism in the north to the point of full frontal engagement with the state.
The best way to understand the rise of militancy and extremism as represented by Niger Delta militants and sects like the Boko Haram is to situate them within the context of a failed state and as the natural consequence of a coincidence of alarming social indices. At no other time has the state been so comprehensively disconnected from the society at large. Three quarters of our population is under 35. The overwhelming majority of these youths have no jobs, no prospects and no hope. As many as 40 million Nigerians are unemployed. The vast majority of the unemployed belong to the under-35 age group. Furthermore, the federal government freely admits that up to 70 percent of the products of the educational system are unemployable. What these statistics represent is nothing less than the failure of the state and a flagrant inability to secure a sustainable future for the next generation.
This is further compounded by the triumph of antipolitics – the degeneration of politics from the art of governance to nothing more than predatory extraction and plunder. Under these circumstances, as poverty has deepened, an ever smaller cartel of politicians deploy cash and guns to secure electoral victories and then plant themselves squarely at the receiving end of the unearned billions of petrodollars disbursed by the federal government. Most Nigerian states subsist only as beggarly leeches sucking the golden goose of crude oil without any attempt at wealth creation. Nigeria’s politics is that of expropriation and loot-sharing. The consensus that binds the political class is the same as the concord among pirates and robbers as to how to share their plunder. It is fundamentally a kleptocracy. The president sits atop the predatory machine exercising proprietary powers over Nigeria’s mineral resources along with 36 state governors who serve as sub-executives of Plunder Inc.
The subtext of all this is the shrinking circumference of the federal government. The Nigerian state can no longer project its power at will as it used to do at the height of military rule. There are a number of reasons for this. One is the political reality. After Babangida, June 12 and Abacha, it was a politically awakened and sectionally aroused nation that entered into the fourth republic. The increase in micronationalism across the length and breadth of the country was a reaction to the rapacious misrule of the military. It is no surprise that from the Yoruba and the Igbo to the Ogoni and the Kataf peoples, micronationalism took root. Ethnic militias were formed to prevent their peoples’ political extinction at the hands of a neo-colonial state machine long captured by a class of political predators.
The second factor is sheer demographics. Nigeria has a youth bulge. About two-thirds of this country’s population is under 25. The population doubles every 30 years. Demographically speaking, this is not the same country that the military so easily seized control of in the 1980s. Significantly, general productivity, industrial capacity and agricultural production have nosedived as our population has surged. There are many more people to pacify and to police. This surge in our population also means that the contest for spoils and resources that customarily defines our politics has intensified. As oil revenues plunge due to militant attacks and global recession, there is increasingly not enough of the fabled national cake to go round. The Nigerian state apparently has no idea what to do with its burgeoning youth population. Politicians have been unable to galvanize them with economic empowerment through employment or a sense of belonging, identity and purpose. Under these circumstances, militant groups, criminal gangs, extremist sects and violent cults have multiplied as a form of social capital creation by these alienated youths.
Thirdly, the state can no longer project its desires at will because it no longer has a monopoly of violence. The years under Babangida and Abacha were nothing if not an education in the theology and physics of coercion. Most of the militants now negotiating with the federal government were but teens and youths during the 1990s, when the Nigerian state conducted a ruthless pacification of their land. They were conditioned by the extermination of Ken Saro-Wiwa and his band of dissenters. For them it was an education in the utility of violence. This consecration of violence, what Wole Soyinka has called “the divine right of the gun,” is the most insidious legacy of military rule. It taught the post-oil boom generation that treason was alright so long as its practitioners were successful. Coup plotters that failed were executed with dispatch. Those that succeeded became the government of the day. The principle was that he that has the most guns wins.
Eight years under Obasanjo did little to displace this principle from the national consciousness. Politicians have merely borrowed and perfected it by recruiting unemployed youths to serve in their private armies and as storm troopers in electoral campaigns. This militarization of Nigerian politics and public life was responsible for the emergence of confraternal brigandage in our universities but its most prominent progeny is now militancy. In place of the previous state monopoly of violence, there has been a deregulation of terror. Competing franchises on violence are all over the federation – militancy in the Niger Delta, Islamic extremism in the north, organized crime and kidnapping rings in the south-east among others, all of which constitute a fearsome mosaic of domestic terrorism.
The recession of state power is coterminous with the diminution of the moral authority of our politicians and the ethical degeneracy of our public institutions. It stands to reason that if the electoral process is a certified farce, then its products will be an expensive parasitic circus of ostentatious politicians. Ordinary Nigerians have lost faith in governance and have since resigned themselves to the grim chore of daily survival. Voter turnout since 1999 has steadily plummeted. News of the larcenies carried out by public officials and the unconscionable heists perpetrated by government agents now lack impact. It is not simply that “Nigerians have been shocked into a state of unshockability” as Dele Giwa once remarked. It is a grim resignation to the facts on ground – civilians are no better than soldiers when it comes to managing the public trust. The civilian/military dichotomy is no longer a Manichaean moral divide. The current PDP government which is even now engineering the emergence of a one-party state can only be likened to an army of occupation in plain clothes.
This development brings us to the fourth phenomenon of the post-military era. It is the increasing pre-eminence of religious clerics in the popular imagination. The switch to civil rule in 1999 was the climax of the popular discontent with military rule that had been brewing since the dawn of the 1990s. The idea of military Messianism had died a slow and painful death under the deception and intrigue of Babangida and the bare-knuckle savagery of Abacha. Nigerians consequently discarded the idea that salvation would come from the barracks and decided to give civilians another chance. In 2009, ten years into the fourth republic, Nigerians have lost faith in politics and politicians. They have deposited their faith in religious leaders and ethnic warlords. This explains the near mystical appeal that Nigeria’s faith gurus and sectarian freedom fighters command. It explains why not a few people see Asari Dokubo, Henry Okah and their confederates in MEND and allied groups as emancipators waging a just war against a bankrupt state. It accounts for the appeal of the late Mohammed Yusuf, leader of the Boko Haram sect and clerics of his ilk.
Just as militant leaders command great popular esteem in the south, so do religious clerics command great following in the north. According to the State Security Service, Boko Haram has half a million members. The fact that it took the military almost a week to subdue the movement in Maiduguri and that the sect’s followers were spread across several northern states is reflective of the sort of following that these clerics command. No Nigerian politician can command the sort of fanatical loyalty among the masses that figures like Dokubo, Ralph Uwazurike, Ganiyu Adams or Mohammed Yusuf and others elicit. In summary, the balance of power has shifted in this country from the federal government to what we might describe as non-state political actors.
This is the proper context in which to place the emergence of domestic terrorism and the recent deadly clashes in the north. This is the basis for the increasingly prevalent extremist theologies now festering in the cauldron of volatile social conditions and now capturing the hearts and minds of millions in the north. Some of these theologies are hived off those of the puritanical Wahhabi school propagated by some wealthy Saudi Arabian charities and missionary agencies and most recently manifest in Afghanistan under the defunct reign of the Taliban. This is why Boko Haram and allied sects have been described as “Talibans”. The appeal of sects like the Boko Haram is their explanation of the material conditions of the dispossessed: poverty, injustice, famine and hunger are rife because people have abandoned the path of true faith (in this instance, pure Islam of 6th century vintage). Nothing but a theocracy and the rule of Sharia will remedy this situation. The Nigerian state being a colonial invention and all other accessories of the modern nation-state (like western education) are diabolical structures against which a jihad must be levied. The military, the police and all other government institutions are arch-enemies of this theocratic order and must be thus destroyed.
Only the most ignorant Nigerian will write off this summation as the stuff of fringe lunacy. For while it is right to say that these extremist groups live on the margins of society, it is also correct to say that the vast majority of our people have, in fact, been forced onto the margins of society, alienated by the social injustice and impoverishment wrought by anti-politicians. Youths who have no hope and no prospects roam around these fringes from where they can be initiated into extremism. The appeal of groups like the Boko Haram should not be a mystery. They provide a theological explanation for the dispossession of millions of Nigerians who are born into this country in poverty and are apparently preordained to live and die in poverty. The theology casts injustice and class inequities in Manichaean terms as a struggle between light and darkness. Above all, it provides our existentially frustrated youths with a transcendent cause (jihad) for which to live, fight and die. In a reality characterized by lack of moral clarity and amorality, these theologies provide a firm moral order through which the faithful can interpret their circumstances. Their doctrines of sainted exclusivity and exclusion offer the very sort of self-esteem and self-respect that the Nigerian system so abjectly fails to give its youths. In addition, Nigerians remain hungry for leadership, and following the serial failures of military messiahs and civilian buccaneers, they are quite willing to settle for the oracular certitude of charismatic militants and pseudo-prophets.
It needs to be said that these symptoms are in no way restricted to Islam. They are mirrored in the ascendancy of some Pentecostal, neo-Pentecostal and wholly Nigerian brands of Christianity in recent decades. We must see the moral equivalence that connects the excesses of groups like the Boko Haram and the atrocities perpetrated in some communities in Akwa Ibom and Cross River, some of whose denizens abused, tortured and even murdered their children because some Pentecostal clerics had dubbed them witches. In both cases what is evident is that a cadre of priests are providing scapegoats for the material circumstances of the faithful. For Boko Haram, it is western education and the Nigerian state that sustains it; for the Pentecostal gurus in Akwa Ibom, it is defenceless children. The saga of Reverend Chukwuemeka King who was sentenced to death for murder in 2007 and others of his kind intimates us of the equivalent capacity for extremism that exists in Nigerian Christianity. In short, over the years the failure of the state and the general moral degeneracy of society have created the perfect circumstances for the emergence of false prophets and the germination of extremist theologies. Reason is in decline. Unreason, superstition and unhinged zealotry have taken centre-stage.
These trends are not in anyway restricted to fringe religious groups. Nigerian politicians have been adept at manipulating religion to serve their own ends. It should be remembered that it was Nigerian politicians not clerics that declared Sharia law in some northern states in late 1999 and 2000. For the politicians, Sharia was a convenient piece of populist gimmickry. For the long suffering masses, Sharia held out the promise of redistributive justice and a more ethical society. This is why the people took to it. As it turned out, these high-minded objectives were far from those of the politicians. But their betrayal of the people stirred the deadly broth of discontent that has produced extremists like Boko Haram. As governor of Katsina, Umar Yar’Adua also instituted the Sharia. The first execution under Sharia law in Nigeria was in Katsina under his watch. After his victory in the farcical 2007 polls, President Yar’Adua urged his opponents and Nigerians to accept his election as the will of God.
Reason demands that we trace a parallel line of congruence between Yar’Adua’s definition of his dubious victory as the will of God and Mohammed Yusuf’s definition of his crusade against western education as the will of God. In Yar’Adua’s case, it was the consecration of an electoral heist executed with generous deployments of state-sponsored terror; in the case of Yusuf and the Boko Haram, it was the sanctification of privatized terror deployed against the state and its agencies. It is not a leap in logic to propose that Yar’Adua and Yusuf, as far as their pronouncements are concerned, are neighbours on a spectrum of religious belief – one that purports the appropriation of divine sanction for partisan agendas. This speaks to the need for us to resolve the role of religion in public life in this country.
That the emergence of domestic terrorism poses an existential threat to Nigeria is beyond doubt. The question is how to defuse the incendiary circumstances in which extremist and militant movements have been incubated. The solution to the crisis lies squarely in the province of moral leadership. The challenge is one of repurposing our politics, reorienting the political class and reforming the character of the Nigerian state which at this moment is essentially a machine of internal colonialism. Bombing campaigns and amnesties will not resolve the Niger Delta conflict. Over the years, Nigerian military chiefs have publicly admitted on several occasions that a military solution to the conflict is not viable. The conflict is a prime example of asymmetrical warfare with a comparatively small band of irregular combatants operating in a familiar and inscrutable terrain, a labyrinthine network of creeks and amongst a largely sympathetic local population. An all out military solution is fraught with the risk of high casualties for the armed forces, unconscionably high collateral damage in human and material terms; much of Nigeria’s oil infrastructure would be imperilled and above all, such indiscriminate deployment of military force against Nigerian citizens would only further radicalize the surviving population.
In the north, law enforcement agencies can be deployed against these extremist groups but only as one component of a holistic strategy. The fact that these groups tend to disperse and reappear again with increased ferocity indicate that there is a large pool of disaffected people from which to swell their ranks. Let there be no mistake. Nigerian forces may have routed the Boko Haram in Maiduguri but this is no time for jubilation. All that has been achieved is the decapitation of a particular sect. Yet, the extra-judicial execution of Mohammed Yusuf by the police somewhat proves the point of the sect which is that the agents of the state are messengers of a degenerate power. The slaying of their leader will serve to further radicalize the members of the sect. The police through its thoughtless brutality may have simply created a martyr in whose name more disenchanted youths can rally. Indeed, while a certain sect has been neutralized, there remains a widespread movement in the north of people who share the sect’s disenchantment with western education, modernity and the Nigerian state. Therefore, containing extremism cannot be a matter of who can deploy the most force. The challenge facing the political elite is to enthrone good governance and social justice.
Militancy and terrorism are Frankenstein monsters that were conceived by the militarization of politics and nurtured in the Petri-dish of antipolitics. In order to eradicate militancy, the political culture that has created it must be addressed. President Yar’Adua must come forward and commit publicly and unequivocally to ending political violence, not as a sermon or a piece of presidential posturing but as a matter of urgent national priority. He must commit himself to putting an end to zero-sum politics. In practical terms, this means insisting that the ruling Peoples Democratic Party does not have to win every state in the federation and discarding the party’s manifest design to establish hegemonic one-party rule; he must ensure that the relevant agencies particularly INEC and the police are unshackled and empowered to function as truly autonomous arbiters in the electoral process; and that the police and allied security agencies will safeguard the integrity of the process.
The chain of causality is obvious. When politicians recruit unemployed youths as thugs and arm them with cash and guns, they create the next generation of militants and terrorists. When these politicians take power, their knavish misrule creates the material conditions that gestate terrorists and extremists. Antipolitics is the reason that the federal government has thus far failed in the Niger Delta. Hopelessly rigged elections produce public officials that are answerable not to the electorate but to cliques and cartels in the ruling party. When the Yar’Adua administration created the absolutely needless Ministry of the Niger Delta, it created, in effect, yet another channel of plunder and patronage for party chieftains. The dubious provenance of the Niger Delta Ministry and of the “selected” officials in the zone means that government will never deliver for the long-suffering denizens of the region. This is because they were never on the agenda in the first place. This democracy deficit is the key factor in the instability in the region. Only as the Nigerian state cleanses itself of its predatory proclivities will it assume the moral authority needed to distil the social ferment in the country into criminal terrorist elements and genuine democratic activism and agitation.
In the Niger Delta as in every other part of this country, Nigerians need to know that their votes count and that their leaders will be held accountable. Issues like devolution of powers from the centre, adjustments in the derivation formula and revenue allocation are ultimately political outcomes best pursued through the channels of political engagement and public debate. But as long as our electoral process is subverted to the point that its outcomes are undemocratic, no such debate will occur. The democratic channels that provide a valve for discontent and legitimate agitation will be closed. Under such circumstances, Nigeria’s growing army of discontents will ardently adopt the eloquence of violence to press their claims. The gap between state and society will widen and terrorists, warlords and extremists will fill the void, serving as a buffer between a bankrupt political elite and a disillusioned citizenry. In time, these agents of disruption, enabled by their weapons of war and ennobled by the disenchantment of the masses will carve out turfs where their rules rather than the laws of Nigeria apply. Their little kingdoms will continue to increase, while the circumference of a state manned by an intellectually exhausted political class continues to shrink into irrelevance. The country will drift further into the outer darkness of statelessness and failed statehood. This is the possibility that the Yar’Adua administration must now work to avert.