Jonathan's Rocky Road Ahead

Recognizing the reputational debilities of his party, the People’s Democratic Party, President Goodluck Jonathan built his campaign around his personal brand, which despite his underwhelming incumbency, remained sufficiently popular to earn him a win. He presented his bid as “a breath of fresh air” not an enterprise in continuity, knowing that the PDP had offered little worthy of continuation. He engaged broadly on social media and with constituencies ranging from commercial motorcyclists to Nollywood. It was smart politics. By repudiating the PDP’s zoning arrangement, Jonathan had angered influential northern power-brokers and needed to counteract their angst by broadening his popular support. Arguably, he accurately keyed into public opinion since an NOI/Gallup poll in early 2010 found that 63 percent of Nigerians opposed zoning.  

While campaigning, the president often sounded more like a populist insurgent than the ruling party candidate. Having won by virtue of strategic populism, he must now manage stratospheric public expectations and the tension between his two public personas – man of the people and ruling party standard bearer. These tensions will define his presidency. Nigerians voted for Jonathan and not the PDP. Yet, the coming days will reveal just how much ownership of his presidency ordinary Nigerians can justifiably claim.

The Jonathan administration will move to abolish subsidies on domestic fuel prices which will cause not only a hike in the price of petrol but also diesel and kerosene, the lifeblood of household economics for millions of Nigerians. It will likely raise fuel prices to between N115 to N120 per liter, effectively an increased tax with knock on effects on food and transportation prices. Last September, the finance minister, Segun Aganga disclosed that the subsidies would be removed by the end of 2011 but after investment in a mass transit program to ease its impact on the poor. Since then, officials have been more forthright in arguing for subsidy abolition than in announcing when this mass transit program is to commence.

At the same time, Jonathan has to curb the riotous government spending particularly, the reckless and unsustainable financial rewards that the PDP dominated National Assembly has appropriated for itself. This will surely bring him into confrontation with his party. If he abolishes subsidies without imposing fiscal discipline, he will swiftly become the object of public odium. If he takes on the reigning kleptocracy, he could trigger a civil war within the PDP pitting reformers against conservatives. But Jonathan could rally civil society groups and popular support to his aid in an epic confrontation with the culture of impunity. Either way, confrontation is certain if the orgy of theft in Abuja continues and the economy does not improve.

Subsidy removal will not achieve the administration’s stated goal of reducing the current 13.2 percent inflation rate to single digit figures. Nor would it aid reduction of the present 21.2 percent unemployment rate. Indeed, it will erase the gains of the new national minimum wage of N18, 000 which many states cannot pay. To do so, some states may have to lay off workers and risk the wrath of organized labour. Industrial unrest could paralyze several states as a result. The increasingly powerful Governors Forum will insist on a revision of the Revenue Allocation Formula to increase the funds available to states and ignite a potential confrontation with the federal government which presently gobbles up 52.68 percent of centrally collected revenue.  

Jonathan must also contend with a treacherous national security threat environment. Nigeria’s ruling class is a rent-seeking elite reliant on government for survival but its northern fraction is the most hopelessly dependent on government, the most vulnerable without it and, therefore, the most obsessed with state power. Unlike its southern cohorts, it has no technical or entrepreneurial capacity to fall back on. The coterie of northern politicians that sees power as an entitlement and now feels marginalized by Jonathan’s victory may stir up the feral passions of the northern street. They may deploy the armies of the slums to wreak havoc as a means of negotiating their continued access to the national cake. While they share no affinity with the Talakawa, identity politics often creates a false sense of solidarity between the dispossessed and the privileged. This explains why mobs may riot in support of the very elites responsible for their impoverishment. This has happened often enough in the past and is a likely scenario in the coming days.  

Kaduna which has its first elected Christian governor could witness a rise in sectarian tensions. For nearly two years, in Borno State, the ultraviolent anarchist Islamist cult, Boko Haram has been assassinating police officers, district heads and opposing clerics. It will attempt to expand its theatre of terror beyond the northeast and target even Abuja with high profile bombings and assassinations in order to firmly establish itself in the national consciousness. Other extremist groups could arise elsewhere in the north due to the ongoing and widespread radicalization of young northern males. In Jos, Plateau State, which is now largely segregated across ethnic and religious line, a tense calm is punctuated frequently by covert reciprocal killings. The likelihood of more open violence remains.

In the next four years, an outbreak of violence in the north may compel President Jonathan to declare a state of emergency in the affected state. At the very least, the army will be deployed as has been customary since 1999 to contain unrest. Yet Jonathan must adroitly manage the politics of militarizing trouble-prone Northern areas and also the practical consideration that prolonged militarization of an area tends to radicalize restive communities as was the case in the Niger Delta in the 1990s.

The administration must develop a comprehensive national security doctrine that metes out tough, swift and decisive responses to sectarian terrorists, their sponsors and the architects of serial unrest including clerics and politicians that traffic in hate speech and incitement. Such a doctrine must also tackle the structural poverty and injustice that feed extremism. Jonathan must pressure and work with northern state governments to deliver good governance.

On another front, the new administration must tackle the constant clashes between nomadic pastoralists and agrarian communities. This is actually Nigeria’s most consistent low-intensity conflict and is partly a result of our flawed energy policy. 45 percent of Nigerian households use firewood for cooking and this figure will rise as the abolition of subsidies prices kerosene beyond the reach of more people. The quest for a cheaper alternative in firewood leads to deforestation, contributing to severe erosion and loss of farmland in the southeast. According to the Federal Ministry of Environment, Nigeria’s forests are plundered of more than 30 million tons of firewood annually.

In the north, deforestation and desertification is forcing the southward migration of pastoralists in search of grazing ground and into contact and conflict with agrarian communities in the Middle Belt. It is really a straight forward resource conflict but because these agrarian communities are mostly Christian, these clashes are reported as Christian-Muslim clashes when, in fact, nomadic Fulani are not Muslim. Such reportage fits the stereotypical “Muslim vs. Christian” binary beloved of much of the local and international media. Unfortunately, it also creates artificial convergences between distinct formats of violence, intensifying conflicts and perpetuating a mutual sense of threat and paranoia among ethnic and religious groups.

Much of Nigeria’s protein requirement is supplied by the pastoralists now hemmed in by the surging Sahara and by unwelcoming farmers. Without land to sustain their livestock, the pastoralists will suffer but Nigeria’s loss will be more severe. It will undermine our food security and sharply increase protein deficiency which is a key factor in the high rates of malnutrition and child mortality. The federal government should resume plans to establish a grazing reserve which if successfully implemented would drastically reduce clashes between herdsmen and farmers.

On the whole, the Jonathan era is likely to be marked by turbulence. The Nigerian state is bereft of institutional capacity, severely weakened by pathological graft and no longer has a monopoly of force. New non-state actors have emerged, created by the long-term militarization of public life, mobilized by social injustice and empowered by the privatization of violence.

The president may feel inclined to secure his government by distributing government positions to placate special interests. This would be a mistake. The commoditization of public office is the hallmark of a failed brand of politics. Instead, Jonathan must assemble a coalition of competent and honest Nigerians to drive national restoration. This will be the first sign of any serious intention to distinguish his presidency.

Politicians typically campaign in generalities and govern in specifics. However, in the course of his campaign, Jonathan was exceedingly vague and offered no definitive positions on key national questions such as why an oil-rich country imports fuel when it could build refineries or the meaning of Nigerian citizenship in the light of conflicts between so-called “indigenes” and “settlers.” These and other urgent questions await cogent answers. 

The End is Not Nigh

Following Goodluck Jonathan’s presidential victory and the subsequent post-election violence in some parts of the country, local pundits and the international media have returned to familiar habits – trafficking apocalyptic predictions of Nigeria’s imminent collapse. Some analysts have declared the country “deeply divided” and have called for its breakup to preempt its certain meltdown in the near future. The pessimists are ascendant. To these evangelists of misery, we must say, ‘the end is not nigh.’

Nigeria has always been allegedly poised on the verge of ruin. For as long as we can remember, we have been falling short, falling behind and falling apart. The jeremiad is a national tradition. Coup speeches were jeremiads announcing the imminence of disaster and the necessity of salvation at gunpoint. The agonistic disposition of Nigerians to Nigeria is born of serial disappointments. It serves as an emotional shield against heartbreak in our engagement with an immensely frustrating country. But we have now translated our justifiable dissatisfaction with inept governments into an unjustifiable disdain for the land itself.

Let us consider the history of America which offers compelling parallels with our own circumstances. No other country exercises as much influence on the Nigerian imagination and political architecture. Both nations are former British colonies. Both fought civil wars and in both cases the union was saved. They share the eagle as a national symbol. Our system of government is a clone of the US federal presidential model.

Many of our statesmen, notably the Zikists, were influenced by their experience of the US. It was the site of Abubakar Tafawa-Balewa’s Damascene conversion from pessimism about Nigeria’s prospects to a commitment to be “a Nigerian and nothing else.” General Yakubu Gowon drew inspiration for his prosecution of the civil war from studying Abraham Lincoln.

America represents the summit of our republican aspirations. It is the country that Nigeria most wants to be like. The Kenyan scholar Ali Mazrui has described Nigeria as Africa’s “closest approximation to the United States”. That the US hosts Nigeria’s largest diasporic community is no accident. Incidentally, many of the slaves that ended up on American plantations were from present day Nigeria.

Nigerians see the US as a mirror of social perfection by which to measure their own advances. In reality, America had to evolve from the point in which political power was the monopoly of the landed elite in the 18^th century through the 19^th century when the suffrage was broadened to white men beyond the traditional gentry. Women and African-Americans were finally included in the civil mainstream only in the 20^th century.

The instability of 1960s America is strikingly reminiscent of Nigeria. Then, America was reeling from the legacies of slavery – institutionalized racism and segregation. Race riots were common. In the southern US, African-Americans were liable to be lynched and their churches and homes torched or bombed by racist terrorists. So pervasive was state-sponsored and supported racist violence that Malcolm X was not alone in foreseeing a racial civil war. While running for president, John F. Kennedy’s most cited disadvantages were his Catholicism and his Irish ancestry – an indication of the ethno-religious bigotries of the day. The climate of intolerance ultimately consumed President Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and Robert F. Kennedy among others in a spate of assassinations.

America has since moved on but there remain deep veins of bitterness stemming from historic white Anglo-Saxon violence against African-Americans and other minorities. Issues like the 1992 Los Angeles Riots, the decay of inner cities, the disproportionately black population of US penitentiaries and Hurricane Katrina in 2005 depict the sordid underbelly of race-related poverty and injustice. Elements of the opposition to President Barack Obama, particularly the “Birther” movement and those who peddle rumours that he is a closet Muslim reveal the lingering currents of racism in the American psyche.

Some watchers see America as deeply divided and foresee the cultural and ideological conflict between liberals and conservatives igniting another civil war. The red state- blue state divide is as pungent as any that we have in Nigeria. Even so, America continues its quest to achieve “a more perfect union.”

Those rightly frustrated by Nigeria’s sectarian polarities and inequities can observe US history for parallels in ethno-religious and political violence and social injustice. Sectarian violence in Northern Nigeria today recalls the racial violence of the American south in the fifties and sixties. Debates over ethnic quotas and federal character in Nigeria mirror the contention over affirmative action in the US.  

Just as America struggles with its plurality, Nigeria also grapples with its diversity. The difference is that America is older and consistently projects its most positive narrative as a republic founded on truth and justice while downplaying its equally valid narrative as an empire founded on slavery, racism, white supremacist destruction of aboriginal cultures and expansionary militarism. We, on the other hand, have mainstreamed a self-destructive pessimism that we virtually revel in.  

Pessimistic pundits typically invoke the most skeptical utterances of our founding fathers while ignoring their more affirmative declarations on Nigeria’s destiny.  Obafemi Awolowo did say, “Nigeria is a mere geographical expression” in 1949 but in 1958, he said, “Let us cross the Rubicon into independence and burn the boat. Nigeria is a noble purpose and a venture worth fighting for.”Ahmadu Bello did indeed once describe Nigeria as “the mistake of 1914” but later said in 1953, “Whatever the Nigerians may say, the British people have done them a great service by bringing all the different communities of Nigeria together.” In early 1960, he declared that with independence Nigeria would rise to become “first among equals in Africa.”

Like the nation itself, these leaders’ views on the viability of the Nigerian project evolved over time. However, we have frozen our patriarchs in their most skeptical phases and made them oracles of our own faithlessness. We have made cynicism our national religion, thus subverting our quest for a better society.

At his 1962 treason trial, Awolowo prophesied a “twilight of democracy” in Nigeria but also an eventual “glorious dawn” after the darkness. Azikiwe who lived in Jim Crow-era America when Negroes were subjected to systematic violence wrote that the “racial intolerance, bigotry and lawlessness” of the period was “a passing phase in the saga of American history.”

The patriarchs had an insight that we need to recover and apply in evaluating our national life. A nation is not static but holds within itself the seeds of its constant renewal. It is an odyssey in space, time and spirit from one state of being to a higher plane of existence. Each generation of citizens must write its own chapter of this odyssey, either progressing or regressing, but never standing still. And their children bear the burdens or blessings of what has been written. The question is whether our own children will inherit a scorched wasteland or a garden of civic concord and opportunity.

Through their proclamations, the patriarchs offered a political eschatology of infinite promise and unyielding hope. They understood that transforming a post-colonial state into a sovereign republic is an arduous struggle.

Admittedly, Nigeria faces grave plagues in venal politicians and the ubiquitous portents of state failure. In a bid to drive home the urgency of our crisis, we are often prone to shrill exaggeration and defeatist doom-mongering.

A society’s prophetic faculties include a capacity for self-criticism but we have degenerated into self-loathing and self-flagellation. To be truly prophetic, it is not enough to uproot and overthrow with our critiques; we must also build and plant. We must move from agonizing to organizing. If we stop at destroying and deconstructing without designing new social and political architectures, we are no more than anarchists and nihilists. We must not only proclaim the end of the undesirable, we must also declare a future and a hope. We do not need saccharine fantasies of a God-willed Utopia miraculously delivered from on high but a constructive optimism about our nation.       

It is impossible to nurture democratic potentialities in a climate of despair. If Nigeria is already doomed, why bother voting or engaging? Why bother with activism if all possibilities of change have been foreclosed? Democracy flowers where there is hope while antidemocratic forces thrive in an atmosphere of hopelessness. Indeed, by promoting a toxic pessimism about our future, we unwittingly sustain the longevity of retrograde power-mongers that have outlived their usefulness. We concede the public square to entities that prosper only because we believe that change is impossible.

Nations are not built by colonialists, military strongmen or oligarchic cabals, but by citizens. Yet we persist in outsourcing our civic responsibilities to the most unregenerate of our compatriots. Nigeria will not be saved by any political messiah but by citizens with redemptive values and habits and the organized political expressions of these positive energies. The challenge is for us to overcome the temptations of despondency and bigotry and articulate a progressive politics of hope and common purpose.  Our fate is in our own hands.  

What Next for the Youth Vote?

Perhaps the most significant subtext of the 2011 elections was a statistic: 70 percent of Nigeria’s population is under 35. In the course of the campaign, various candidates sought to lay claim to the “youth vote” via campaigning on social media platforms and direct engagements in youth-oriented forums. The polls were marked by a very significant upsurge in youth activism. Many young people shed their aloofness and got involved.


This youth majority has serious implications for our public life and politics.


The question is: Now that the polls are over, what next? We would be mistaken to believe that simply voting is the extent of our task. Our work is only just beginning. Nations are not transformed in election cycles but in generational cycles. Therefore, the emergence of the post-oil boom generation (those born roughly between 1975 and 1990) as a putative demographic majority, holds possibilities for national renewal.


Nnamdi Azikiwe proposed that the most critical dialectic in the evolution of nations is generational conflict. “Youth,” he wrote, “act as a sort of catharsis to society. It is the revolt of youth against the injustice of the old which enables old age to realize that it needs a new set of values, morally or otherwise.” He believed that the contest between youth and senescence is history’s decisive dynamic. The contest is over who owns the future and thus has the right to define it. In Azikiwe’s conception, youth transcends physical and physiological conditions; it is a state of mind, a new way of perceiving reality. It is a psychic disposition towards discontent with the status quo; a hunger for innovation and progress.


Over the past half-century, our sense of nation has been defined by a particular generation born between 1930 and 1945. That generation became politically ascendant in 1966 after the fall of the First Republic; it fought the civil war and through cycles of coups and counter-coups ever since, it has remained the most influential faction of the Nigerian elite. The recurrent figures in our politics either belong to this generation or share its ideas. Wole Soyinka famously dubbed them “the wasted generation” for failing to fulfill Nigeria’s destiny.


This generation has continued to wield an altogether malign influence. Their values were inherited by their children, the independence generation, so-called because some of them were among the mass of flag-waving children on October 1960 or born in its wake. They came of age just as the oil boom briefly offered the material means of fulfilling our national potential and then receded, leaving behind the carnage of consumerism and corruption. The independence generation witnessed the collapse of the Second Republic and the abortion of the stillborn Third Republic. They placed their faith for national redemption in messianic military men and were sorely disappointed. They reacted by largely withdrawing emotionally and psychologically from the Nigerian project. Their politics is marked by abandonment and alienation. Their rhetoric is one of resignation and recrimination.


Because the wasted generation witnessed the sectarian perfidies of the First Republic and fought a bloody civil war as a result, its definition of Nigeria is as a patchwork quilt of mutually antagonistic tribes, perpetually on the brink of warfare. Despite the wasted generation’s rhetorical obsession with Nigerian unity, their sectarian vision of Nigeria has done more to undermine national solidarity than anything else. As our own generation comes of age, the hour has come to redefine Nigeria and what it means to be Nigerian.


Unlike the wasted generation and some of the independence generation who were born in a British colonial territory and first carried British passports, we are authentic sons and daughters of the Nigerian geopolitical reality – one hundred percent “omo naija.” We bear the burdens of its dysfunction and the accumulated derelictions of past generations. Unlike them, we have no memory of a time when Nigeria worked.


Whereas our parents were the first generation out of rural areas into the townships and managed tensions between their allegiances to tribe and nation, the post-oil boom generation are for the most part born and bred in sprawling, urban metropolitan spaces. We came of age in an epoch of globalization and many of us, through exposure, education, travel and work, have a bifocal consciousness of both local and global realities. We are thus obliged to operate in a social universe far larger and more diverse than that of our parents. We intermarry more and live and work far away from our natal communities. We are typically children of two or more worlds; socio-cultural hybrids for whom identity should neither be a lethal weapon nor a fatal weakness but merely a symbol of self-definition.


We grew up in a Nigeria in which “Where do you come from?” is the most frequently asked social question. It is an interrogation of origins; often an attempt to classify the subject of inquiry into a tidy category or frame neat stereotypes through which we may relate. With this query, we typecast each other and make ciphers of our compatriots. ‘Origin is Destiny’ is the chief principle of progress. We are denied our right to define ourselves as we deem fit and sentenced to a lifetime in straitjackets of inherited identity. Opportunities for self-actualization are circumscribed by where we come from. Accident of birth over which we have no control is frequently the main factor that influences our chances of success.


This is arguably our greatest failing as a society. We obsess too much with origin and too little about destination. We focus too much on divining narrow ethnic pasts at the expense of imagining a grand national destiny. We waste so much time and energy classifying “indigenes” and “non-indigenes” when only citizens are needed. The question should no longer be “Where do you come from?” but instead, “Where are you going?” Our place of birth should matter less than place of berth – our destination. Nation-building is much more about a perceived common future than a shared ethnic past. The passport to that future should be our state of mind rather than our state of origin. We should pay less heed to ancestral oracles and sharpen our powers of prophetic imagination.


This is not to advocate amnesia. Memory matters, for there can be no development without peace; no peace without justice; and no justice with memory. The process of rebuilding our future must include an accounting for its ruin. Even so, the vast majority of our country did not see the Civil War, so we can no longer sustain the definition and practice of politics as a continuation of the war by other means. What we have seen is the failure of previous generations to bury their antipathies and promote a just peace.

Nation-building requires faith, forgiveness and reconciliation. We must be willing to admit and overcome our bigotries and inherited prejudices; to seek first to understand before being understood. Whatever our political convictions, let us hold them with decency and civility and always with a respect for the other. Human life must be our most sacred temple and human dignity our highest ethic. We must reject the legacy of bad politics that condemns us to carry on cycles of strife and vengeance. For the sake of our children and theirs, we must become avatars of peace. Only by so doing can we proclaim new beginnings.


We have been conditioned to relate with each other in terms of negative stereotypes and mythical ethnic categories and to discuss Nigeria with clichés. Yet the fullness of our freedom as a people will come about only when we foster semantic liberties in our conversations and freely define ourselves without suffocating stereotypes.


The challenges now confronting us and which will assail our children are onerous. We will witness Nigeria’s population hit the 300 million mark just under thirty years from now. We could also witness the depletion of Nigeria’s oil reserves and/or the discovery of a new source of cheap alternative energy, both of which developments will throttle our current oil-based economy. Clearly, the failed politics of the past fifty years is unsustainable. This is why we must now design alternative ways and means of civic engagement.


Our promised land is a realm of boundless opportunities for vertical and horizontal mobility; where citizens are judged by their character and competence, not their creed, clan or gender; and where the only limit on our potentialities is our own consciousness.


Skeptics will argue that this is an unattainable ideal and that we are better off aspiring to what is realistic. I disagree. Nations do not progress by reaching for what is realistic but by striving for the ideal. It was never realistic to stop slavery or segregation or colonialism or apartheid or the holocaust. Our civilization will not advance by grasping the low-hanging fruits of the realistic but by reaching for the stars. By the sheer force of desire and discipline, we can translate the apparently impossible into the inevitable.


A nation is a dream in constructive fulfillment. If Nigeria is a nightmare, it is because we have acquiesced to the reprobate dreams of the vilest among us and relinquished our right to envision better as citizens. The time has come for us to dream boldly and dare in like spirit. Let us embrace it.

Clear and Present Danger

In the 1990s, the ecologically-devastated creeks and militarized communities of the Niger Delta generated an insurgency that threatened to destroy the soft underbelly of the Nigerian state – its hydrocarbon economy. Goodluck Jonathan’s emergence as president will not solve the fundamental questions raised by this insurgency but it symbolically defangs Ijaw militancy and answers the clarion of southern minority marginalization. Just as the creeks produced a generation of militants, the multiplying ghettoes of northern Nigeria combined with the devastation of rural agrarian communities by drought and desertification have sired a culture of homicidal zealotry that manifests frequently in bouts of sectarian violence. This cult with its offspring terrorism is the most urgent national security threat confronting Nigeria today.

There are four distinct though closely related formats of violence in the north. Conventional ethno-religious violence pits the mainly Christian Berom against the mainly Muslim Hausa in Jos, the Tiv against the Jukun in Wukari and the Muslim Hausa-Fulani against the mainly Christian Sayawa in Bauchi. This type of conflict is frequently more ethnic than religious, revolves around land ownership and political primacy and frequently conflates religious and ethnic identities. There is the conflict between the largely non-Muslim nomadic Fulani pastoralists and various agrarian communities which is fundamentally a non-religious struggle for scarce land resources. With drought and desertification forcing increased southward migration of pastoralists, this is Nigeria’s most consistent low intensity conflict. There is sectarian violence that pits Muslims, usually members of extremist sects like Maitatsine, against Christians. Fourthly, there is the emergent strain of nascent terrorism in the form of groups like Boko Haram who seek to create their version of an Islamic society. With the exception of that between pastoralists and farmers, all these conflicts are closely linked to urban poverty.  

Let us be clear. The problem of the north is not Islam. Too often commentators struggling with ignorance and prejudice sacrifice analytical integrity on the altars of their prejudices and slander a whole religion and its adherents. The notion of an Islamic north and a Christian south hermetically sealed off from each other is a fallacy. There is a very significant Muslim population in the southwest (just as there is a significant Christian population in the north) and the zone records little religious violence. The difference is that Islam in the southwest historically interacted with western education, economic empowerment, the accessories of modernity and an industrial economy. In the north, Islam exists in a pre-industrial vortex rife with ignorance, poverty and illiteracy. This precarious existential condition produces an inferiority complex and notions of ethno-religious supremacy that incubate extremist violence. Religion in this situation can only become a hideous zealotry.

Once Islam is eliminated as a cause then we may examine the geography of sectarian violence which is consistent across the north. It occurs mostly in the densely populated ghettoes with high concentrations of unskilled young males and is entirely unheard of in the upscale neighbourhoods and estates of the middle class and the rich. It may spread occasionally from the ghettoes to the commercial districts where these alienated males destroy businesses and storefronts – the bastions of an economy from which they are excluded. Churches are unfortunately deemed fair game because they embody an alien presence more culturally and organically connected to the same economy that has no place for the talakawa.

The dynamic of Hobbesian violence in slums is similar all over the world. Consider the gang-bangers of American inner city ghettoes, the gangs of Brazilian favelas or the small time narco-trafficantes of Mexican barrios. During the 1960s, Martin Luther King argued that the serial rioting of blacks in the American inner city communities was not because they were black but because they were poor. They were victims of a structural violence that had trapped them in the slums in the first place. This is the case with northern slums and ghettoes. Violence always wears garments of cultural convenience. In northern Nigeria, violence wears the garments of Islam just as in the Niger Delta it assumed the form of Ijaw ethno-nationalism. Violence typically adopts the socio-cultural properties of its immediate environment.

Skeptics will ask why the presence of slums in the south has not produced similar ethno-religious violence. The socio-economic dynamics are different. Historically, the north has always had lower crime rates than the south. This has less to do with piety than opportunity. Urban centres like Lagos, Port Harcourt, Enugu, and Onitsha have economies that can sustain a thriving underworld. Crime is a sort of black economy but it requires a flourishing legal economy to exist. For example, armed robbery exists where there is actually something to steal; kidnapping is rife where there are high net-worth individuals who can pay hefty ransoms. Advance fee fraud or 419 requires people wealthy enough to be scammed. Drug dealers need people that can afford their products. Lagos has more schools, banks, hospitals, industries, cybercafés, doctors, lawyers, bankers, and IT technicians than the 19 northern states put together. This indicates the geographical concentration of a middle and upper class whose presence can sustain crimes of acquisition. Advanced societies address crime by instituting wealth redistribution and welfare programs. In our unequal society which has no social safety nets, crime is often like an informal wealth redistribution program.

However, the northern economy cannot sustain crime in the same degree as in the south. Kano, the erstwhile commercial centre of the north has been reduced to a de-industrialized ghost town. The destruction of northern industries which began with Babangida’s structural adjustment policies has stripped the region of its productive capacity. In northern towns, there is little of a middle class but plenty of idle rich, contractors, retired generals, political operatives and ex-bureaucrats who live on government patronage but do not create wealth. There is literally little or no economy to steal from in these parts. Since the hoards of the dispossessed have little to steal, they take to killing and destroying. Thus, while underclass angst in the south assumes the form of conventional crime, in the north, it is simply arson, murder and brigandage. But we do not call it crime; we call it ‘ethno-religious violence.’

The problem, therefore, is not Islam. It is systemic poverty – the structural impoverishment of a region that was late in accepting western education and has therefore remained behind the rest of the country in every conceivable way except possibly in the incidence of random violence and the burgeoning population density of its urban areas. What divides north and south is not fundamentally religion or ethnicity but the disproportionate distribution of skills and empowering tools fostered by British colonialists and their local allies but then carried on by a generation of northern elites who exploit the region’s poverty as a political weapon. These elites have used the rage of the talakawa to underwrite their claim to power while ensuring that generations of northerners remain entrapped in Dickensian conditions. Thus radicalized by neglect, these youths become ready recruits for all kinds of cults, wannabe terrorists and a host of malcontents with grand anomic aspirations.

Privation of the scale we see in Nigeria is dangerous enough. But it is compounded because it significantly coincides with ethnic and confessional lines creating a situation in which the condition of the talakawa can always be explained by demagogues as a conspiracy against Hausa Muslims or Arewa in general. When poverty seems to be the exclusive property of a particular ethno-religious community, sectarian violence rears its head. Paranoia is its own reason and logic, its own court, judge and executioner.

Our national security infrastructure needs urgent reform to deal with the escalating threat of domestic terrorism, especially the law enforcement, policing and intelligence administrations. But the typical response of militarizing a strife-torn area is not sufficient. The conceptual link between social security and national security has to be rediscovered. People who have been educated have the tools to actualize their potential and are less likely to throw their lives away. People who have good jobs are ennobled by the dignity of labour and have a sense of self-worth as contributors to the economy. They have much to live for and therefore no reason to risk their lives in suicidal acts of mass delinquency. People who earn decently are unlikely to hire themselves out to politicians to fight and die for causes they barely understand. Such people perceive themselves as citizens, part of a social economy, and are not inclined to destroy that economy.

The geography of sectarian violence indicates that densely populated areas which lack basic social amenities are especially prone to breeding anarchic nihilism. Indeed, Nigeria’s geography of violence corresponds with its geography of economic opportunity. Seen from this perspective, the provision of basic social infrastructure – potable water, electricity, sewage systems, healthcare and schools – to raise the quality of life in these areas, as well as the provision of jobs, is an urgent priority. An urban transformation project aimed at replacing these slums with environments actually fit for human habitation is necessary. In short, good governance commends itself as the ultimate national security strategy. Of course, merely providing social services will not completely stamp out extremist violence but it will reduce its incidence to the activities of an intransigent delinquent minority, whereas military deployment as a sole solution will only radicalize whole communities.   

The grand narrative of northern political domination has long obscured the larger truth of northern poverty. The plight of the presumed hegemon of Nigerian politics has not elicited as much sympathy as that of the Niger Delta did. Even so, the case for northern slums is not a matter of sympathy but about pursuing what is right, just and fair. 

Buhari's Last Testament

The Congress for Progressive Change is something of a populist movement with its presidential candidate, Muhammadu Buhari, as the symbolic vessel of northern underclass angst and radical discontent. Much of this fury is not directed at President Goodluck Jonathan personally but at a national confederacy involving northern elites that has left the north impoverished. The ferocious support for the CPC in the ghettos and slums of the north is therefore a protest movement against a generation of northern oligarchs which has gained influence and affluence while misery and privation have proliferated in the region. Jonathan’s emergence is only a convenient trigger for the rage of the talakawa.

Buhari’s limitations as a politician, ideologue and communicator prevented him from framing the inarticulate groans of the talakawa in a broader grammar of national liberation politics as Aminu Kano, Sa’ad Zungur, Bala Usman, Balarabe Musa and others did before him. These were the luminaries of a northern progressive tradition that has roots in socialism and in the egalitarian preachments of Uthman Dan Fodio. This tradition has been remorselessly assailed to the point of near extinction by the conservative oligarchs. In the absence of progressive voices calling for social justice in the north, groups like the anarchist Islamist sect Boko Haram have emerged.

Where opportunities for social progress are denied, agencies of regress evolve. If the talakawa are denied opportunities to prosper in the 21^st century, they are seduced by merchants of chaos preaching the merits of a 7^th century Islamic utopia. If the present and the future hold no hope for the seething millions of uneducated and unskilled young males in the slums of the north, then a mythical past becomes more appealing. This is the secret of the allure of fundamentalists who preach a return to an idyllic pre-modern paradise – a return to statelessness since the state is deemed to have failed.

Buhari’s and the CPC’s failings left the party desperately unable to transcend its limiting definition as the party of glass-eyed mobs in the northern suburbs. With proper organization, the CPC may have been able to harness the rage coursing through northern slums to build a constructive opposition to the status quo. Instead, the party will now be terminally defined by the scenes of its supporters burning, killing and maiming, fulfilling the resilient stereotype of ‘the angry northern Muslim mob’ that scares so many Nigerians. Without critical orientation, the party has been reduced to the most primal manifestation of political violence – that rooted in religious differences. This is a pity but perhaps it was to be expected of a party that was apparently solely set up to facilitate Buhari’s pursuit of the presidency.

To be fair, Buhari is no religious extremist but he is uncharismatic, serious, and hopelessly oblivious to how he is perceived by many Nigerians. His record of addressing sectarian violence has been atrocious for one who aspires to national leadership. He seemed happy to milk his popularity with the talakawa, not worrying that their evident ownership of his candidacy was casting him as a sectional champion. He did little to counter his brand as a “defender of the faithful” even though a candidacy charged with such religious meaning is incompatible with the egalitarian settings of democratic contest, and particularly dangerous given our history of divisive politics.

Religion makes absolutist claims about the will of God. Democratic politics is about the supremacy of the popular will. Both claims cannot mix without perilous consequences. As we have seen, when a messiah is defeated at the polls, his disciples interpret it as apostasy and launch a violent inquisition to root out the infidels. This is the meaning of the post-election meltdown in northern suburbs which saw CPC supporters attack homes of Christians who were simply assumed to be PDP supporters and also attack Muslims who voted for the PDP.

It is difficult to believe that the ecstatic mobs at CPC rallies failed to intimate Buhari of the possibility of violent protest by his supporters in the event of his defeat. It was an outcome that could have been avoided or at least minimized. Buhari and his party must accept some culpability. He and the CPC dissociated themselves from the mayhem but it was too little, too late. True, we cannot blame all the violence on the CPC but the tenor of Buhari’s campaign in the north was like a spark to dry tinder. He, of course, has the right to feel disappointed by his electoral fortunes. But his refusal to concede defeat and his decision to challenge the poll results has cemented a reputation for gracelessness unbecoming of a democrat.

Since the days of Ahmadu Bello, northern politics has been a continuing search for a moral champion – a political quest for the twelfth Imam. Even Aminu Kano often framed his progressive socialist preachments in the syntax of Islamic liberation theology. Yet over the decades as Northern Nigeria has reeled from sectarian wars, the place of religion in public life has become contentious. In appropriating the rapturous ecstasies of the northern underclass, Buhari succumbed to the temptation to be a spiritual talisman and undercut his claims to national leadership. This was partly strategic. Financially outmuscled by its rivals, the PDP and the Action Congress, the CPC sought to compensate by whipping its northern base into a populist frenzy. Maigaskiya, (person of truth) the honorific bestowed upon him by this constituency, reflected the esteem in which they held him. Their love was insufficient to fetch him the presidency.

The main lesson of Nigerian politics, which opposition parties have repeatedly failed to learn, is that no party clinches the presidency by appealing solely or mostly to its provincial base. In fact, it is possible for a candidate to win without his home zone as Obasanjo proved in 1999. The victorious candidate is the one who can go beyond his homestead and build broad national coalitions. This is historically what the establishment parties – the Northern People’s Congress, the National Party of Nigeria and now the Peoples Democratic Party – have been good at doing. It is why Shagari fairly defeated Awolowo in 1979 and why Abiola defeated Bashir Tofa in 1993. (In fact, in 1979, Shagari won more votes in Rivers and Benue than in his native Sokoto) It is why Buhari has been losing since 2003. In contrast, the failed merger of the CPC and the AC illustrates the handicap of the opposition. The fact that CPC voters in the south have held their peace, while those in the north went on rampage shows the geographical location of the party’s soul. Buhari’s popularity in sections of the north, while unquestionable, was an insufficient basis for a national victory, especially given his reputational, financial and organizational deficits. Nigeria is a far more complex proposition than the fallacious “Christian south-Muslim North” formulation customarily used to explain our politics.   

In a bid to pacify the ‘north,’ President Jonathan may try to forge a consensus with the discredited old guard oligarchs. Ironically, these elites despise the puritanical and uncompromising Buhari, and would sooner negotiate with Jonathan so long as business continues as usual. Should Jonathan pursue this course, he risks being identified more closely with the problematic personalities of the north and reaping even more of the ire of the underclass. Instead Jonathan is better off cultivating a new generation of northern progressives to implement the rescue of the region from poverty. Jonathan’s emergence has sealed the retirement of the geriatric northern elites who have spoken for the region for the past forty years. Their failed politics of entitlement has reduced the north to a zone of misery. There is an opportunity here to inaugurate a new conversation about the north centred on people-oriented development instead of elite privilege.

Regardless of its showing in the gubernatorial elections, the CPC does not seem to have a long term future. Without Buhari’s halo, the party is simply an unwieldy aggregation of political outsiders and malcontents from other parties, all hoping that their proximity to Buhari may yield an anointing by association. With the general’s halo, the party is simply a personality cult. Nigerians who voted for Buhari had high hopes, but on hindsight, the CPC was always a poor vehicle for national change. The search for truly transformative alternatives will have to continue. In any case, the talakawa crisis remains a grave plague that we must confront as a society. Any viable opposition movement must tame the north’s feral ghettoes and translate the fury therein into transformative democratic energy.

As a 69-year old former military dictator, Buhari was always an implausible candidate of change. Most Nigerians had either not been born or were in their early childhood when he ruled. It should be clear now that his three abortive presidential bids have as much if not more to do with a fundamental lack of national acceptability than with the much vaunted rigging of the ruling party. He belongs to a generation that has long exhausted its potential. He should just go quietly into the night.  

Change We Can't Believe In

In our complex, plural, often fractious society with various mutually-suspicious interest groups, you do not win the presidency by being (or appearing) visionary or radical. You do so by looking harmless, passive and unthreatening. You do not win the presidency by serving up a revolutionary manifesto or rigorously grappling with issues; you do so by affecting a genial cluelessness. You win by demonstrating an extraordinary capacity to regurgitate stale clichés and to utter the bleeding obvious with an air of intellectual profundity. This is the true genius of successful presidential aspirants and it is sadly reflective of where our politics has calcified at the moment.

Muhammadu Buhari looks too threatening to win the presidency. Behind the stern mien lurks a seething moral zealotry and a righteous indignation at what his country has become. During his term as Head of State that zealotry came to the fore when armed with repressive decrees, his regime declared a war on corruption, handed out hefty jail terms to corrupt politicians and attempted to frog march the country into the future. Buhari’s running mate is Tunde Bakare, a pastor, attorney and activist who earned his stripes as a preacher railing against the materialistic excesses of Nigeria’s Pentecostal elites and thundering against official corruption. Thus the Buhari-Bakare ticket is led by two puritans…and two authoritarians, for the Pentecostal movement is an authoritarian institution and its pastors tend to be totalitarian oracles.

Whether a ticket led by two men of authoritarian disposition can deepen democratic habits is a fair question. But Buhari is feared for other reasons. The fanatical support he enjoys from swooning and ecstatic mobs in the north scares many southerners who fear that the ex-general is a closet religious extremist. This allegation owes less to reality than to a smear campaign against the general mounted by President Obasanjo’s minions during the 2003 polls. Buhari has tried to counter this fear but clearly deems it beneath his stature to address such canards. The cruel irony is that in a bid to dispel his sectarian image, he has been forced to play “religious politics” by picking a pastor of questionable political clout as his running mate. Whether this will assuage fears remains to be seen.  More importantly, many elites fear that a President Buhari will resume his war on graft after a 26-year hiatus with renewed vigour. For all his grassroots support especially among the northern underclass and others who see him as a potential change agent, Buhari simply frightens too many people – people who could otherwise be valuable supporters.

Nuhu Ribadu suffers from basically the same limitations as Buhari. The former police officer made scores of powerful enemies during his term as anti-corruption czar when he hunted down several high profile fraudsters and thieving politicians. Ribadu is seen as embodying the promise of the independence generation (those born in the 1960s) and has attracted many young urban middle class professionals to his campaign. But Ribadu has lost the toga of incorruptibility to Buhari and is now running solely on youthful promise and potential. Even so, Ribadu can at least look to the future, but for Buhari, 69, this is clearly his last presidential venture.

This leaves us with Goodluck Jonathan, the incumbent and frontrunner in the race for Aso Rock. Jonathan fulfils all the requirements for winning the presidency cited above. He is not a radical and has no record of any strong views on any subject. His placid demeanor, in contrast to say Obasanjo’s abrasive persona has made it impossible to cast him as a hate figure in the north even after he torpedoed the PDP’s zoning arrangement. He is clearly a deal-maker and a conciliator rather than a confrontational type. His unlikely ascent from obscurity resonates in a religious country as the stuff of pop religious mythology. His campaign has nimbly exploited this by portraying his rise as the quintessential Nigerian folktale – a man from provincial backwaters rising to be president aided by divine favour. And, as incumbent, he has a war chest of public and private resources surpassing anything his rivals can boast of.

Above all, Jonathan’s appeal lies in his novelty. As the first ethnic Ijaw to sit in Aso Rock, his presidency is a symbolic recompense for the long-neglected oil-producing region. His other names ‘Ebele’ and ‘Azikiwe’ have enabled him to skillfully appropriate the affections of the southeast. His appointment of the first Igbo army chief in 40 years has deepened those affections. For many, Jonathan’s presidency signals the reintegration of the south and southeast zones into the national project. It breaks the perceived northern hegemony of national leadership and conveys a sense that people from other parts of the country can aspire to the highest office in the land. In this regard, Jonathan’s presidency speaks to the deep-seated need for equity and justice in the Nigerian subconscious.

Ethnicity should not matter in our politics in 2011. But Jonathan’s rivals have acted as if it does not matter at all. They have failed to seriously interrogate the roots of Jonathan’s appeal, to grasp the sense of inequity and exclusion that sustains his popularity, and to make the case that their own governments could deliver more tangible goods to those that feel excluded as against the merely symbolic properties of a Jonathan presidency. Instead Buhari and Ribadu, betraying a tin-ear to the sentiments in the southeast and the Niger Delta, picked running mates from the southwest, leaving those two zones with no option on the field except the incumbent. Perhaps, in their calculus, those two zones were deemed unwinnable and thus conceded. The polls will prove this strategy right or wrong.

Yet, Jonathan has significant chinks in his presidential armour. His reign in Bayelsa was so anonymous that not even his handlers have used it to make a case for his presidency. His vice-presidency was largely nondescript. Jonathan has never won an election on his own steam, and his one year in Aso Rock has not dispelled the image of a man promoted beyond his competence by fate. His intellectual minimalism agrees with a society that disdains ideas and scorns men of thought. His handlers have trumpeted his PhD as though it is a Nobel Prize – a scandal in a country that produced Azikiwe, Awo, Aminu Kano, Ahmadu Bello, among others – in an age in which politics was for men of thought and erudition. A more demanding electorate would have scrutinized Jonathan’s claims to the presidency more closely.

As it stands, Jonathan’s campaign rests primarily on his incumbency yet he is yoked to the disastrous brand of his party, the PDP, whose 12 years in power have been appalling. He has built a personal brand and distanced himself from the party in the public consciousness. He has not cast his campaign as one of continuity but as “a breath of fresh air.” Thus placated, many Nigerians excuse him as a good man who just happens to be in a bad party. This is bollocks but it works for some and Jonathan is genuinely popular.

There is one last thing to his advantage. Oppositional figures do not fare well in Nigerian politics. If not, Awolowo, Aminu Kano, Gani Fawehinmi and Pat Utomi might have done better in their presidential adventures. We may romanticize mavericks and outsiders and crown them with such epitaphs as “the best president Nigeria never had” but we rarely validate them with votes. There are many reasons for this. Culturally, we venerate authority and so find the iconoclasm of democratic competition unnerving. Nigerians may disparage the ruling camp but would rather join it than oppose it. Under military rule, political and economic survival meant seeking accommodation with the establishment rather than challenging it. Nigerians still respect the establishment and prefer giving it a new veneer to discarding it. In this sense, our society is conservative. Jonathan and the PDP will benefit from this dynamic this year. Unfortunately, Buhari and Ribadu will suffer for it.

But there are signs that this sort of conservatism is ebbing away provoked by widespread disillusionment and the emergence of a new generation of Nigerians. Young voters, unburdened by memory and prejudice, are more likely to challenge the status quo. This is why the Action Congress and the Congress for Progressive Change have mounted such strong campaigns this term, and it holds great promise for the future. The opposition parties will achieve more in future if they venture out of their provincial strongholds with more conviction to build national networks.

Jonathan has been clever as a servant of the status quo posturing as a change agent. This weekend, most Nigerians will probably agree with his claims at the risk of choosing symbolic change over substantive transformation. His likely victory tells us where we are as a society.