Why Appeasing Terrorists is A Recipe for Disaster

The decision of the federal government to dialogue with Boko Haram has to be situated against a collage of tragedy – two thousand dead; men, women and children; Christians and Muslims; foreigners and locals; civilians and military and paramilitary personnel; innocent bystanders and agents of the state – all sacrificed on the pyre of nihilistic violence. There is something fundamentally immoral about negotiating with a band of murderers. It is the final violation of the memory of those whose lives they so brazenly cut short. What does it say to serving police officers, soldiers and intelligence agents that the lives of their fallen comrades have been bartered for the political legitimization of a terrorist group? It suggests dangerously that political outcomes can be determined by access to bombs and guns and is an open invitation to diverse assortments of criminals to seek political relevance by demonstrating a willingness to engage in mass murder.

Advocates of dialogue have argued that the federal government should negotiate with Boko Haram, understand its grouse and then offer what sops it can to end the carnage. There is one word for this –“appeasement” – and the spectacle of a government cajoling criminals to the table for “peace talks” raises questions about assumptions of a social contract, state capacity or national sovereignty. It suggests that for all the vainglorious pomp that attends governance in Nigeria, the public realm is a lawless frontier where citizens would be well advised to devise their own means of self defence. The word for describing this state of affairs is “anarchy.” Negotiating with terrorists is a bottomless abyss. Where does the state draw the line? How should it respond to the next band of terrorist gangsters that assault our way of life? Why, after negotiating with Boko Haram, should it suddenly refuse to do so with the next gang of murderers who demand a seat at the table? A state that so easily succumbs to the whims and caprices of every group that takes up arms against it is participating in the demise of its statehood and enthroning the rule of gangs in its stead.

To be fair, this crisis did not begin with Boko Haram. It is permissible to argue that the Nigerian state has a policy of negotiating with terrorists. We can look back at the Obasanjo administration’s handling of the Odua Peoples’ Congress (OPC) and the Odua Liberation Movement (OLM) which in the early 2000s attacked police stations and police officers in the southwest. We can also cite the Yar’Adua administration’s handling of militant gangs in the Niger Delta which included a sweeping amnesty program for militants and under President Goodluck Jonathan, significant influence for erstwhile militant chieftains, including the scandalous outsourcing of maritime security functions to a company owned by Government Ekpumopolo a.k.a. Tompolo, a key figure in the Niger Delta insurgency.

Several pundits have insisted that the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) is not a terrorist group like Boko Haram. They have through semantic contortions tried to place MEND on a higher moral plane where it enjoys a greater legitimacy than other insurgent groups. This effort is demonstrated by the readiness to label Boko Haram as “terrorists,” while describing their peers in the Niger Delta and elsewhere, somewhat ambiguously as “militants.” MEND, they say, fought for resource control while Boko Haram’s goals are either indeterminate or non-negotiable, for example, the “Islamization” of a section of the country. This summation is rather spurious. It derives from the selective discernment of pundits who only observe evils that emanate from cultures other than their own. They fail to see moral equivalence in the fact that violence as a means of extracting political and economic concessions did not begin with Boko Haram.

To begin with, terrorism is a description of means, not ends. Wanting Sharia or resource control does not make one a terrorist; taking up arms and violently threatening public safety to attain those goals is terrorism. Boko Haram, MEND, OLM, to the extent to which they deploy violence in fulfilling their objectives, are terrorist groups. MEND militants killed soldiers, police officers and attacked government bases and oil company installations. Its methods were remorselessly violent. Recall that the first terrorist attack on Abuja in the Jonathan era, the 2010 Independence Day bombing at Eagle Square, was carried out by MEND. On that occasion, President Jonathan committed the faux pas of publicly absolving MEND, contradicting available evidence before any investigation had been initiated. He fired Kayode Are as national security adviser and replaced him with General Andrew Owoye Azazi. In a July 2006 interview with Tell magazine, Azazi, then Chief of Army Staff had argued that the Niger Delta conflict is a political crisis that requires a political solution rather than a military one. It is easy to see why some polemicists would insist on applying the same standards of judgment to Boko Haram.

There is no better argument against appeasing terrorists than the evidence of recent history. The amnesty program has not ended violence in the Niger Delta. Arguably, it has incentivized gangsterism. By the end of 2012, the program would have gulped over N200 billion since its inception in 2009. Unemployed youths who want in on the bonanza have formed their own gangs to press their claims to the largesse. Piracy has surged since 2008 making Nigerian waters dangerously similar to those of Somalia. The fundamental issue in the Niger Delta is not federal largesse but good governance which politicians have been loath to deliver.

Even if the federal government did negotiate with Boko Haram, there is no reason to expect an end to violence in the North. The expanding footprint of gangsterism across the region which includes bank heists, cross-border banditry and violent religious extremists are not all the work of one organization as is popularly imagined. Boko Haram itself has splintered and its factions may not be easily accommodated by one accord. It is unlikely that gangs that have indulged so wantonly in sating their bloodlust can relinquish their murderous instincts and suddenly abandon the addictive ‘thrill of the kill.’ It is more likely that insurgency and crime will coalesce in a region already flush with guns and the technologies of violence. As in the Niger Delta, the failure of governance rather than the paucity of federal funds is the real problem.

To compound matters, the Nigerian state all too often acts like a terrorist entity. According to a 2011 report by the Centre for Victims of Extra-judicial Killings and Torture (CVEKT), Nigeria recorded a total of 7,198 extra-judicial killings by the police between 2007 and 2011. Police officers are notoriously trigger-happy and their conduct often invites comparison with men of the underworld. Recall that the extra-judicial slaughter of Mohammed Yusuf and scores of the group’s members by the police in 2009 was to form an important justificatory narrative in Boko Haram’s campaign. The state’s legitimacy is anchored to its methods and the relationship between its means and ends in its quest to establish justice.

Thus, it can also be argued that anti-state violence has emerged as a dialectical necessity to counter the official terrorism of the state. We usually define chronic violence as extremism, terrorism and militancy but risk missing the larger context that makes them inevitable and symptomatic. That context is a colonially-oriented state piloted by a kleptocratic political class whose outsized privileges are guaranteed by their control of the instruments of official violence.  The Nigerian state must change its ways and its politics must be rescued from the abyss of feral aggression. A greater regard for human rights and human life should inform its security operations.  

To resolve chronic violence, we must move away from the idea that murderers can justify their crimes by claiming that they committed them in the name of their ethnicity or religion. The right to life must remain sacred and be promoted as such by the state in word and deed. To this end, the federal government should consider the establishment of an anti-terrorism tribunal to adjudicate a wide range of matters under the rubric of terrorism including, the use of private militias by politicians during elections, hate speech and hate crimes. It is impossible to separate the plague of terrorism from the supervening culture of political violence. The thoughts and words that make it permissible to kill people in the name of creed or tribe, whether propounded by religious clerics, politicians or journalists, must themselves be stridently punished. The Jonathan administration must show greater resolve in apprehending the political sponsors of violence. And it must speedily develop the capacity to confront anti-state violence – something that it has been distressingly slow to do, even with the billions of naira voted for security.

It is, of course, conceivable that terrorists can have worthy ends and deploy terroristic means. The intelligent government must address the ends, the legitimate grievances that feed extremism; but it must punish the means of violence used to achieve them, lest we promote terrorism as a brand of politics. If not, it would be paving the surest path to a state of anomie. 

All images sourced online

Who are the Real Enemies of Nigeria?

Judging from the trend of opinion in the media and the tenor of conversations online, it seems that Nigerians have reached a rare consensus on the object of their collective wrath. He is the Northerner, particularly the Muslim “Hausa-Fulani” Northerner with the emphasis of the indictment varying from the generic category of “Muslim” to that of “Northerner” or “Hausa-Fulani” depending on who is doing the indicting and the circumstances. From the barrage of anti-Northern invective online, it is clear that the Northerner is considered the diabolical, greedy and power-hungry embodiment of all that is wrong with Nigeria.

Nigerians have consensually used these same adjectives before about another group – the Igbos. At one point in our history, the Igbos were the national scapegoats. As Chinua Achebe wrote in 1983, “Nigerians of all other ethnic groups will probably achieve consensus on no other matter than their common resentment of the Igbo.”

In a multiethnic and multi-religious society steeped in poverty, part of the competition for group advantage is the quest to identify a common enemy, to dress it in readily identifiable sectarian garments and crown it with thorns as the national scapegoat. In earlier times, the toga of villainy was draped around the Igbo, stereotyped in the national consciousness as grasping, greedy, arrogant and clannish.

From the mid 1980s onwards, it became fashionable to speak of “northern domination.” The designation of national scapegoat has to do with perceptions of power and group advantage in the public realm. During the pre-Independence period when Igbos were prominent actors in commerce, politics and the civil service, they were vilified for plotting “Igbo domination.” The sequence of northern-led military regimes from the 1970s to the late 1990s made a new narrative of northern domination inevitable.  

The demonization of “the north” in the media mirrors the vilification of the Igbo between the 1940s and 1960s. As with the Igbo, the depiction of the north as the arch-villain of the Nigerian tragedy is fallacious. Blaming all of Nigeria’s problems on one region or ethnic group and defining ethnicities as political categories with predictable socio-political habits is an untenable generalization and a prejudicial simplification of the Nigerian situation. This is unfortunately the dominant pattern of social and political analysis. It is one in which public life is interpreted in terms of mutually hostile fractal solidarities perpetually locked in a war for ascendancy.

The practice of identifying national scapegoats is a Machiavellian dark art. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Babangida regime identified “radicals” as the enemy. It was the desire to destroy radical academics that informed the military’s perception of the university as enemy territory and its subsequent subversion of higher education. Academics in the Ahmadu Bello University and the Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU) in particular faced systematic persecution and harassment. In later years, elements within the Babangida regime would identify the OAU as the hub of a “Yoruba opposition.” Similarly, the University of Nigeria in Nsukka was targeted during the civil war as the “intellectual base” of the Biafran secession.  

Following the June 12, 1993 election crisis, the emergence of Sani Abacha, and the incarceration of Moshood Abiola, the Yoruba were cast as the enemies of Nigeria and the chief opponents of the regime. The regime’s propagandists lost no time in dubbing the pro-democracy activists who wanted the June 12 election actualized as Yoruba tribalists even though Abiola’s mandate had been remarkably pan-Nigerian. The June 12 advocates reciprocated, insisting that the “north” was against the emergence of a Yoruba president, even though Abiola had won very handsomely in northern states. Abiola, himself a long time crony of military dictators, never attributed his travails to the machinations of a “north” intent on denying him power because he was a southerner but to what he called “a small clique in the military determined to cling to power at all costs.” But facts pale in the face of mythology.

Eskor Toyo once lamented that ethnic chauvinists in the south would rather refer to Sani Abacha as a northerner rather than as a fascist military dictator. After the near assassination of The Guardian publisher Alex Ibru in 1996, a group calling itself the Revolutionary Movement for Hausa Fulani Interest, (REMHFI), claimed responsibility. Of course, the attempted assassination was the work of the junta’s agents. It had nothing to with Hausa or Fulani interest and everything to do with the prolongation of a fascist dictatorship.  But power mongers have long learned how to manipulate popular bigotries to their own advantage.

By 1999, the scales of enemy definition were weighted firmly against “the North.” Guerilla journalists had riveted Nigerians with tales of the intrigues of the “Hausa-Fulani oligarchy” or the “Sokoto Caliphate” – all metaphorical representations of the “northern enemy.” In his book, This House Has Fallen, Karl Maier reports Bola Ige as disclosing that the real controllers of Nigeria consisted of “not more than two hundred Fulani families.”

With the emergence of Boko Haram, the North is being entrenched as an “enemy other” in the national imagination, aided by the ignorance and malice of a biased media, 90 percent of which is based in the southwest (the so-called Lagos-Ibadan axis); and bigotry of pandemic proportions in our public life. Jingoism as journalism is rendering public discourse between Nigerians mutually unintelligible. It should have been fairly easy to mobilize national opinion against Boko Haram, a terrorist group that murders Muslims and Christians alike, and to cast it as a common enemy – but the media’s insistence on the myth of the “northern enemy” and its prejudicial coverage, which has prevented even sufficient acknowledgement of the fact that as many (if not more) Muslims have been killed by the group, – have negated this. This reportorial slant corresponds with the narrative of a Muslim north ranged against a Christian south – a popular fiction, yet possessed of such apocalyptic sensationalism that it sells papers. Put simply, politicians and the press both profit from demonizing groups and promoting prejudice.  

However, ethnicity and religion possess limited explanatory capacity. According to Obi Nwakanma, northern domination is one of “the most sustained mythologies of post colonial Nigeria.” He argues that “the idea that the north through the military ran Nigeria and underdeveloped it is false… The closer truth is that a very complex alliance of business interests from the North and the South, with their international banking and security links ran Nigeria, and continues to run Nigeria. The ordinary northerner – Hausa or Fulani or Berom or even Tiv – has not benefited in any significant way from the so-called rule of Northerners. Individual northerners and southerners have benefited in immense ways, from their close associations and links with power, and we must pay heed to this fact.” Tam David-West contends that, “Northern Domination is a myth concocted and popularly peddled and perpetuated by lazy politically emasculated Southern politicians and most unfortunately also some Southern intellectuals; a grand alibi to cover up or divert from their  ineffectiveness, ineffectuality and even political harlotry.” “Northern domination” is used in the same way that some northern politicians use the bogey of “southern domination” to mobilize support through fear of the other.  

The great radical historian Bala Usman interpreted the Nigerian condition as a consequence of class machinations rather than contending ethnicities. He argued that a comprador elite of impeccably national character and transnational affiliations armed with hegemonic designs, rather than any ethnic constituency, are the true enemies of the Nigerian nation. Yet, their ascendancy lay in their ability to wear ethnic and religious masks, and manipulate ethnic and religious identities for personal gain.

In 1989, while addressing the Oxford-Cambridge Club, President Ibrahim Babangida said, “By accident of birth and more by education and access to opportunity, a few of us numbering only a few thousand, out of a population of more than 100 million, find ourselves in positions of leadership and influence in the professions and academics, the armed forces, the bureaucracy, industry, agriculture and commerce, in the media houses, in the courts and councils of our traditional and political associations. We equate our ends with the ends of the groups and communities to which we belong. We mobilize others to fight for our individual causes, individual beliefs, and interests as if those were their causes, beliefs and interests, etc.” Critics may justifiably see Babangida’s thesis as a self-indictment but it is accurate nonetheless.

The enduring lesson that political elites learned from the catastrophic failure of the First Republic is that no one ethnic group or region can “dominate” Nigeria. The key to political success since then has been to build multi-ethnic coalitions to share the national cake – an equal opportunity kleptocracy. This was the genius of the National Party of Nigeria (NPN) during the Second Republic and has been carried on by the Peoples’ Democratic Party. The tiresome “north-south” polemics only serve to obscure the pan-Nigerian character of the reigning elites, by provoking provincial passions and diversionary conflicts at the grassroots – in which the poor are expendable.       

Our chances of mitigating such aggressions depend on how mature we become intellectually and politically. The more mature we become, the less need we will have to externalize our failures upon other ethnicities and faiths, and the more discerning we shall be of who the real enemies are.  As the great political scientist Claude Ake once said, “There is no north that is anybody’s enemy and there is no south that is anybody’s redemption.”

In the 2011 PDP convention, Atiku Abubakar sought the party’s presidential nomination as the “official northern flag-bearer” and failed to muster a complete following even among northern delegates. His failure was no mystery. Political power obeys dynamics other than accident of birth. Geography is not always destiny. As Chidi Amuta explained, “In a free market Nigeria, the brotherhood of the naira is fast overtaking the bonds of tribe and religion.”

Despite Muhammadu Buhari’s popularity on the northern street, many northern elites, being beneficiaries of the current order did not support his presidential candidacy. Nor did they support the other two northern contenders, Ibrahim Shekarau and Nuhu Ribadu. The media with its tunnel vision fixation on a mythical northern solidarity failed to note that a monolithic north no longer exists (If indeed it ever truly did). The blame for our woes lies squarely with “the brotherhood of the naira” – a national fraternity of politicians far more united by their appetites than divided by ideology – and also with our own lack of discernment. Ethnic and confessional allegiances matter but they are subject to the supervening calculations of class interest and are nowhere as definitive as believed when it comes to the intrigues of “high” politics.

In fifty years, the actual enemies of Nigeria have not changed. As one soldier declared on a fateful day in January 1966, “Our enemies are the political profiteers, the swindlers, the men in high and low places that seek bribes and demand ten percent; those that seek to keep the country divided permanently so that they can remain in office as ministers or VIPs at least, the tribalists, the nepotists, those that make the country look big for nothing before international circles; those that have corrupted our society and put the Nigerian political calendar back by their words and deeds.” The righteous fury of this indictment was to be lost in the series of tragic events that collapsed the First Republic. But the truth of the diagnosis remains unimpeachable.   

Thus, while we slander and stereotype each other, our leaders continue in their unregulated feasting, secure in the knowledge that we are too distracted by petty bigotries to surveil their conduct. We must realize that this season of turbulence is also a teachable moment – one in which we should share perpectives, listen to and learn from each other while building a front to salvage our common future. We must not squander it. 

All images sourced Google Images. 

Reimagining Nigeria: Beyond A Sovereign National Conference

Of late, there have been strident calls for a sovereign national conference of Nigeria’s ethnic nationalities to discuss the state of the union. Its champions believe that such a dialogue has become necessary given the recent spate of terrorism in the country. This dialogue is often portrayed as the long-awaited panacea to Nigeria’s crises in the same vein as other magic bullet arguments that have been made before in our history about “democracy”, “return to civil rule” and other concepts that were supposed to magically transform Nigeria. The clamour for a sovereign national conference (SNC) is basically wrong-headed.  

A civic republic (which Nigeria both claims and aspires to be) is based on a social contract between the state and citizens. In Nigeria, we have crafted a drama of politics around a fictitious contract between the state and “tribes.” Individuals are therefore denied contractual agency as citizens. Indeed, they are infantilized as mere nodes of tribal networks that have no legitimate claim on the state as individuals but only as members of tribes. However, the constitution allocates no rights to tribes; the state’s defined responsibilities are directed towards citizens, not ethnic groups.

As Simon Kolawole has observed, SNC advocates offer no specifics as to whether the conference would be based on wards, councils, states, ethnic groups or dialects or whether it would be convened on the basis of equal representation or whether the summiteers would be elected or selected. But there are even more fundamental problems. 

In The Misrepresentation of Nigeria, the historians Bala Usman and Alkasum Abba contended that Nigeria’s ethnic nationalities have never been monolithic, fixed and separate entities. They are each unique, complex, multifaceted, interconnected and ever-changing at various levels and paces. Ethnic identity is only one factor in human political organization. Furthermore, it is practically impossible to demarcate the boundaries between most ethnic groups and their neighbours because these communities “actually have no boundaries as they intermesh into one another at the level of language, culture, identity and territory. Any attempt to carve out ethnic territories or to create ethnically-based federating units would lead to violent conflicts and sustained civil wars.” These issues not only demonstrate the complexity of our ethno-cultural geography but the inadequacy of the tribal idioms popularly used to interpret our political reality.

Usman and Abba also argued that the sovereign rights which the British seized when they imposed imperial rule, were only recovered with the independence struggle conducted not by ethnic or religious groups but by a broad-based nationalist movement consisting of several organizations and parties. The constitutional conferences at which the decolonization process was negotiated were summits between the British and Nigerian political parties, which, even when they were regional or local in scope, attended the summits as part of national alliances. On 1^st October 1960, the sovereign rights seized by the British were recovered by the government of the federation of Nigeria on behalf of the people of Nigeria and not on behalf of any ethnic or religious community. Independence came as part of an “anti-colonial liberation movement sweeping the world, marking the end of the age of empire and the birth of new nation states and on our shores, transforming erstwhile colonial subjects into Nigerian citizens.” Thus, sovereignty in Nigeria today does not lie in the domain of tribe or religion but in the citizenry. Political parties and not tribes are the legitimate and authentic vehicles of political action. 

The calls for SNC are flawed because they make tribes the fulcrum of political action in contravention of the republican doctrine that makes the individual’s right to freedom of association the basis of politics.  These calls trumpet the false assumption that tribes are political monoliths with uniform interests held by all members. In fact, as Mohammed Haruna once wrote, “A tribe can have uniform interests only if all of its people belong to the same religion, the same social class and speak only one dialect etc. This is well-nigh impossible.” An ethnicity is not an ideology; nor can political interests be divined from tribal marks.

Obi Nwakanma has rightly argued that “the fact that a man or a woman answers your father's name, wears the same tribal marks; speaks in the same familiar tongue, does not make his interests same as yours. Your interest is closest with the man or woman who sends his children to the same schools as your children; who goes for treatment in the same hospitals; who worries about the security of the same neighbourhood; who goes to the same grocery store; who drives on the same roads, and who you meet on the same frequency to talk about the vital security of the same social and natural environment.” Our mutual aspirations for the future rather than ethnic origins should determine our political affinities.

We should have dialogues but they should be ordained by citizens rather than tribes. We should convene town hall forums and village square meetings where we can invigilate issues that matter to us. The political momentum for structural and systemic changes should be generated through institutional channels such as via the National Assembly. We should join or establish pressure groups and political parties and use them to democratically actualize our ideals. Nation-building is arduous, often slow and particularly challenging for a post-colonial polity. There are no magic cures.

 

We cannot negotiate a new Nigeria with the same polarizing terms that the present dysfunctional order is built on. The SNC proposal is dead on arrival because it is based on the defective tribal logic of the current order. Nigeria’s current system, while flawed, is the best arrangement that can be arrived at with an ethnic constituency framework of representation. The constitution is heavily weighted in favour of the desire to achieve a strategic parity between ethnic groups. Using affirmative action, quotas and the desire to reflect federal character, we have created a representative bureaucracy in which merit has disappeared into the vortex of politically correct ethnic balancing. Not even the armed forces and the security services are exempt from the need to balance ethnic representation. Each state is required to have a minister in the federal executive council thus duplicating the representative function of the national assembly. The constitution guarantees a majoritarian presidency electable only by a two-thirds majority in two-thirds of the states of the federation ensuring that the Nigerian cannot, despite contrary rhetoric, be regarded as the property of any particular region or ethnic group. The spectre of ethnic domination has been shackled effectively. Under the current arrangement, virtually every “tribe” is guaranteed access to the national cake. A tribal parley cannot achieve better than the current order of things.

However, the present order has exhausted itself and is now paralyzed by its inherent contradictions. We have a thoroughly representative bureaucracy which is hyper-sensitively attuned to the nuances of ethnic and religious identity but it is plodding, incompetent, bloated and corrupt. Paralyzed by its obsession with representational politics, the civil service clearly cannot serve as an engine of national transformation. We have forged political parity between ethnic groups and regions yet poverty in Nigeria is a national phenomenon with the federal government’s own figures classifying 112 million Nigerians as poor. Elites from all over the country partake of the national cake but their rhetoric drowns out the more serious crisis of socio-economic inequality in which according to the World Bank, 80 percent of Nigeria’s oil wealth is enjoyed by a mere one percent of Nigerians.

Rotation and zoning of political offices and privileges has not solved the problems of corruption and failed governance. We have simply created an equal opportunity kleptocracy. Indeed, the plagues of our republic are of such a scale that they defy the conventional sectional terms of analysis. Terrorism, AIDS, social injustice, graft, crime and insecurity do not apply federal character or zone their consequences exclusively to particular ethnicities; they afflict us generally as Nigerian citizens. Our responses to these plagues must be framed in civic-democratic rather than in tribal terms. We cannot combat universal plagues with sectarian weapons.          

Implicit in the renewed calls for tribal summitry is a failure of imagination on the part of self-described progressives. It is the failure to imagine Nigeria as anything other than a mosaic of conflicting ethnicities and to craft an alternative ideology to the reigning philosophy of national-cake sharing among ethnic elites.  Other than the clamour for tribal summitry, there is scant difference between SNC advocates and their fellow tribal fundamentalists. The ruling faction simply sees governance as a means of pork distribution among elites who purportedly eat “on behalf of” their ethnic groups while the “SNC progressives” use the same tribal polemics as a moral bludgeon to gain political leverage.  Many SNC advocates are either unwilling or unable to attain legitimacy through the ballot and now want to do so as tribal representatives.

The persistent tribalization of political discourse is partly generational. Political conversation is still dominated by the generation of Nigerians that saw the civil war and who were actors in the First Republic. The tenor of polemics in the media is still informed by their view of Nigeria as a combustible arrangement of warring tribal enclaves. As such, even the solutions canvassed by the self-described “progressives” of this particular generation carry the fatal stamp of tribalistic myopia. This view of Nigeria has its intellectual origins in the ethno-federalist polemics of Obafemi Awolowo who advocated that the Nigerian federation be rearranged along ethnic lines to correspond with the aspirations of its ethnic nationalities. Nigeria has evolved beyond such balkanization.

Seventy percent of our population is under 35 years which means that the majority of Nigerians alive today did not experience the civil war yet their political thoughts are significantly influenced by civil war polemics of north vs. south and by inherited prejudices. We need a new narrative and a new understanding of our nation. Nigeria is crying out for a pan-Nigerian democratic movement to grapple with the perfidies of an equally pan-Nigerian confederacy of kleptocrats. Creating this movement is the defining political task of our generation.  

All Images sourced online.  

Why Nigeria Can't Break Up

No bad idea is regurgitated as constantly as the notion that the solution to chronic violence in Nigeria is for her to “break up.” The case for Nigeria’s disintegration surfaces routinely after tragic episodes of violence and has emerged following the recent increase in sectarian terrorism. Some perspective is necessary. Since the days before the Civil War, beating the drums of separatism has become a sort of pre-programmed response to national calamity. Rumours of our impending divorce attended the 1964 elections, the June 12 1993 crisis, the death of Moshood Abiola in 1998 and the Sharia controversy in 2001. In 1990, a gang of over-ambitious soldiers attempting to oust the Babangida regime even purported to evict five northern states from the federation. Thus, current debates about the durability of Nigeria are nothing new.

It is intellectually lazy and astonishingly parlous thinking to suggest that the solution to our national crisis is disintegration. It is true that much life has been expended on the Nigeria project to no apparent redemptive effect but what we owe the dead and the unborn as well as ourselves is clear-minded thinking on the fate of our union rather than just emotive polemics.

The usual suggestion is that Nigeria be divided between a “Muslim North” and “Christian South” or among its so-called big three – the Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo. Beyond these imprecise propositions, there is little specificity as to what shape post-Nigerian nations would look like except perhaps for the preposterous suggestion that every ethnic group should become a nation. These arguments are fallacious. Nigeria is not and has never been a country of monolithic religious halves. Christians and Muslims are scattered in substantial proportions and ethnic variety across the country. There are Fulani Christians and Igbo Muslims. Millions of Yoruba families contain adherents of both faiths. Nigeria is far more complex and diverse than the Hausa-Yoruba-Igbo tripod. Making each ethnic group a nation throws up problems. What would we make of Ijaw communities who hug the coastline stretching from the south to the south west? The sheer diversity and interlocking spread of hundreds of ethnic nationalities makes tidy disintegration a virtually impossible proposition.

A popular fallacy is that prior to the advent of the colonialists, Nigeria’s ethnic groups existed in self-contained cocoons of utopian bliss unburdened by the necessity of interaction with others. But many of the ethnic and regional identities which are now presumed “sacred” are in fact colonial creations. For instance, it was only after colonization, that the term “Yorubaland” began to be applied to the realms of all rulers who claim descent from Oduduwa, instead of only to the Oyo Kingdom. Before the British came, the Egba, Ijebu, Ekiti, Ijesha and Ilorin peoples fought costly interstate wars among themselves. The longest pre-colonial civil war was the sixteen year Kiriji war which was fought between Yoruba city states. Yoruba nationalism was forged by Obafemi Awolowo who rallied the descendants of Oduduwa as a political force in the new nation. Similarly, Igbos were organized into separate and autonomous republics. Many of them had scant contact with each other with some entirely oblivious of others before the advent of colonialism. Consequently, Igbos fought no wars as a collective. Igbo national consciousness was largely the handiwork of Nnamdi Azikiwe who at one point preached the manifest destiny of the Igbo in Africa. Hausa city-states co-existed through times of war and peace. Even when Uthman Dan Fodio’s jihad established the Sokoto Caliphate, the new emirates were never synonymous with “the North” which was a later British invention and was fortified as a political identity by Ahmadu Bello.

Significantly, pre-colonial societies were not based on ethnic units but rather on age groups, occupations, residence and settlements. Instead of monolithic tribal blocs competing for a share of the national cake, city-states, inclusive kingdoms and republics for the most part made up the area that was eventually christened Nigeria and experienced centuries-long commercial links and cultural cross-pollination.

Dissolving the Nigerian federation will not resolve the violence that bedevils places like Jos, the conflicts between the Ife and Modakeke in Osun, the Aguleri and Umuleri in Anambra or the Ezza and the Ezillo in Ebonyi, the Jukun and the Tiv or the Itsekiri and the Urhobo. Nor will it end conflicts between nomadic Fulani pastoralists and agrarian communities stretching from the north to the south. These are essentially either local or intra-ethnic conflicts.

Ethnic homogeneity cannot indemnify society against conflict. Somalia, the world’s poster child of failed statehood, has only one ethnic group, the Somali, only one language and is one hundred percent Islamic. South Sudan which only recently celebrated its divorce from Sudan is now embroiled in inter-ethnic conflict within its borders. Back home, we need only look at Bayelsa State and other ethnically homogeneous states to establish conclusively that ethnic homogeneity is not a predictor of peace, social justice or smart governance.

While prodigal political elites practise divisive politics, the Nigerian people themselves live in a socio-economic reality of interdependence and integration. The use of oil wealth from the Niger Delta in sustaining state bureaucracies all over the country may be the most obvious example of this. Less remarked is the dependence of southern urbanites on northern produce for food. The Fulanis are the main custodians of Nigeria’s livestock population, holding over ten million cattle, twenty million goats and millions of sheep. Their industry significantly accounts for protein consumption in the south. The north remains Nigeria’s food basket.

We are so captivated by the witchcraft of separatism that we fail to appreciate the fortuitous or providential alignments of ecological, geographical, cultural and economic factors that have fostered interdependence and integration. For example, if violence in the north was simply about anti-Igbo hatred then it would be saner for Igbos to stay home in the east. But the east is disadvantaged by its erosion-prone poor soil which cannot sustain the population density of the area and which accounts for the comparatively high level of migration of Igbos to other parts of Nigeria. Despite everything, Igbos (and other Nigerians) continue to migrate and mingle because human coexistence dictates it. No man is an Island. Aliko Dangote, Africa’s richest man is from Kano but has most of his investments in the south and employs more southerners than northerners. Millions of Nigerians have become socio-cultural hybrids through intermarriage, cultural adoption and transplantation.   

Nigeria’s problem is not her diversity but the failure of the state to affirm Nigerian citizenship as the ultimate identity superseding all other allegiances. It is our failure as citizens, intellectuals and politicians to articulate an all-embracing Nigerian ethos. Rather we waste valuable time and energy rebooting hackneyed definitions of Nigeria as an artificial creation or a mere geographical expression. Yet all nations, possibly except Australia, being creations of human political will, are artificial and begin as geographical novelties; they are not received from heaven. It falls on succeeding generations to transform them from mere geographies into socio-political moralities; to create transcendent solidarities where none existed before. This is what nation-building is about and this is what we have failed so spectacularly to do. Sectarian politics thrives largely because of the dazzling scale of ignorance that Nigerians demonstrate about their history, geography and each other.  

It is foolhardy to believe that the failure to treat ourselves as citizens rather than as ethnic and religious partisans will disappear if we dissolve Nigeria. If we cannot treat each other humanely now that we are compatriots, how on earth are we going to do better if we become foreigners? Last year, the Abia state government fired thousands of Igbo-speaking “non-indigenes” from its employment to make room for equally Igbo “indigenes.” Significantly, most conflicts in Nigeria are between so-called “indigenes” and “settlers,” a dichotomy that at times seems to defy ethnic or religious solidarity. These petty bigotries and manifestations of apartheid will not disappear with the Nigerian union. The challenge of civic security is inescapable for there is no possible post-Nigerian construct that would not contain either religious or ethnic minorities. It is worth noting that Biafra, the most serious separatist effort in our history was undermined both by the superior power of the federal forces and the reluctance of ethnic minorities who feared for their own prospects as citizens of Biafra. The problem remains creating a just, fair and equal citizenship that shelters all of us regardless of creed, ethnicity, class or gender.    Nothing suggests that new ethnic republics would in any way be more peaceful, stable or more prosperous than the current Nigerian reality. In short, it would require less effort to renew the Nigerian enterprise than to construct afresh new polities.

Having said all this, nations are not eternal but finite, expiring when they have outlived their usefulness to history and humanity. Nigeria is no different. Nigeria does not currently face immediate disintegration but a slow and steady erosion of federal authority by sundry paramilitaries, warlords and terrorist gangs, until the nation slips inexorably into failed statehood. Already we see signs of this in the brazen terrorism of pseudo-religious extremists who seek to establish alternate governments as well as the rise of oil-bunkering pirate gangs in our southern coastal waters.

It would be a pity if we were to let Nigeria fail. No one who has studied her history, encountered her acute humanity, sampled her cultural riches and researched the dreams of her founding fathers can fail to sense her ordination for higher purposes. For us to abort this purpose would be nothing short of cosmic treason. As Eme Awa once remarked, “If we were to dissolve the federation, a future generation of people will pass the verdict that the Nigerian elites committed suicide while of unsound mind.” Nigeria has not been tried and found wanting. We simply have not invested enough of our intellectual and moral energies into actualizing her promise. 

(All Images are sourced from Google Images.)

The Meaning of Occupy Nigeria

When Nigerians stormed the streets protesting the federal government’s removal of the subsidy on petrol, they detonated the myth that Nigerians are docile. In reality, the subsidy removal only served to ignite pent-up frustrations with a derelict government into a campaign against the reigning kleptocracy. Nigerians’ tolerance of governmental abuse has long been mistaken for cowardly passivity. In fact, the plain truth is that government is irrelevant to most Nigerians – whether to those who live in what Stanley Macebuh called “categorical poverty” whose material conditions have not changed in decades and will almost certainly not change for their children’s children; or to the embattled Nigerian middle class who have become micro-municipalities providing their own social services; and matters only slightly more to the rich who have fashioned their exit strategies to foreign lands in the event of a long overdue uprising.

In the absence of government, Nigerians have embraced the chore of survival while leaving the reigning kleptocrats to otherworldly judgment, their only caveat being that ‘if the government will not work for us, it shouldn’t impede us.’ The thieves may carry on thieving so long as their thievery does not appear on our front door demanding tribute. This is the understanding that has informed the much cited Nigerian “docility.” By eliminating the subsidy, and effectively imposing higher taxes on Nigerians, the government broke this accord, and provoked the citizens into protest.

In a larger sense, the Occupy Nigeria protests were about a generation which has long been characterized by apathy finally snapping into an awareness of its citizenship. Suddenly, Nigerians were asking serious questions and demanding answers. The awakening started in 2010 when protesters marched on Abuja demonstrating against the government’s hijack by a “cabal” in President Umar Yar’Adua’s absence through ill-health. They demanded compliance with the constitution and the transference of power to the then Vice President Goodluck Jonathan. The momentum was sustained for the 2011 polls which starred an unprecedented level of youth involvement and sparked off talk of a “youth vote.”

The spirit of activism that recently gripped young Nigerians, as well as the volcanic rumbling of dissent on the streets and in cyberspace all signify the coming of age of a generation. This generation, born between 1975 and 1990, has no memory of a Nigeria that once worked; no rosy recollection of an oil boom-fuelled era of prosperity. Its experience of Nigeria has been one of misery and disillusionment conditioned by economic recession and political repression. It is the first generation that has had to consider exile as a path to self-actualization. Raised during the era of military dictatorship, it understood Nigerian existence as a condition of servitude, of recourse to the heavens in the face of oppression and of gratitude to “benign” authoritarians for the small crumbs of their inheritance grudgingly delivered as privileges. That generation has finally decided to snap off the psychic bonds of subjection and fully assume their mantle as citizens.

For the first time in a very long time, Nigerians microscopically scrutinized a government policy to its entrails, traded obscure policy data on social media and debated the fine points of deregulation. We became emergency technocrats and cyber-parliamentarians, but it is really more accurate to say that we became “active citizens” invigilating political conduct and demanding accountability from our leaders.

To be sure, a week of protests, of cathartic expressions of rage online and on the streets, will not dislodge an entrenched culture of dysfunctional governance. But it can begin to lay the foundations of an authentic citizen-led democracy. Going forward, we can take stock of what we have learned and gained.

Occupy Nigeria showed us glimpses of what our generation can achieve. In Kano, Minna and elsewhere, Muslim and Christian protesters protected each other – a powerful gesture at a time that sectarian violence poses serious questions of our union – showing that it is entirely possible to rise above religious differences. Across the land, Nigerians of different ethnicities, classes and creeds assembled in the name of their nation. Such transcendent solidarity genuinely frightens Nigerian elites who have traditionally used “divide and rule” to sow discord and subvert the emergence of a pan-Nigerian movement. Their panic was evident in the Jonathan’s administration’s shameful frenzied efforts to ethnicize the protest movement, indicating that in almost a hundred years, from the colonial masters to military dictators to the current kleptocrats, the establishment has not changed its tactics and indeed, is incapable of developing new ones.   

The perceived failure of organized labour to be steadfast is symptomatic of the absence of an intelligent principled opposition. In the end, labour was being asked to drive a revolution for which it has neither the moral nor intellectual vision. The muffled protestations of the nominal opposition, indeed, their complicity in the kleptocracy in Abuja suggests strongly that the great divide in Nigeria today is between the powerful and the powerless. The powerful have the means to portray their lusts in sectarian colours as the interests of some religious or ethnic group. The powerless are anonymous and voiceless. Being the voice of the powerless and restoring to them both their voices and their power is the great political task of our time.   

It is easier to be united against something than to be united for something. We must balance our unified opposition to bad government with an equally unanimous proposition of an alternative ethic to govern the Nigeria that we want. This is a harder, though achievable, task but it is not executed in the streets. It is conducted in hidden sanctums where thinkers harness rage into ideology, tears into theology and radical energy into political strategy.

Perhaps, this generation which was born after the civil war will be less susceptible to the spirit of sectarian discord than its forebears. And if we can overcome the burden of inherited prejudice and bigotry, and transform our chains of subjection into bonds of solidarity, we can renew this nation.

Nigeria has experienced civic awakenings before. In the 1930s and 1940s, nationalists rode on such tides of discontent to mount the campaign for independence. Among the nationalist avatars are names that have passed into heroic legend – Azikiwe, Aminu Kano, Raji Abdallah, Sa’ad Zungur, and Mokwugo Okoye among others. During the 1980s and 1990s, pro-democracy groups used the growing disenchantment with the failed economic policies of the military to champion democracy. We remember Ken Saro-Wiwa, Bala Usman, Beko Ransome-Kuti, Gani Fawehinmi etc as icons of this struggle and honour their still living cohorts such as Soyinka, Shehu Sani and Femi Falana. Because nation-building is a generational endeavour, these movements achieved only partial fulfillment. Occupy Nigeria is a link in the chain of a democratic tradition seeking to extend the work of the patriarchs. The living icons of the struggle against militarism are lions in winter. Even as we drink of their wisdom, a new generation must call forth its own prophets and revolutionaries to interpret its possibilities. The consummation of this nascent movement will come not in the form of a few exalted paragons but of heroic multitudes, a critical mass of active citizens who bring to bear upon small and great tasks, a consciousness of their responsibility to God and posterity. The journey of national redemption is long and arduous but if we can overcome our chronic pessimism about ourselves, we can inherit a new dawn.

It would be a mistake to see Occupy Nigeria as a fluke. To do so is to miss the dynamics at work. Nigeria’s most globalized generation has been inspired by the televised revolutions of the Arab world and the “Occupy” protests in the west against capitalism’s inequities. Following the contraction of western economies, many of Nigeria’s exiles are coming back home from the diaspora with the righteous ire of heirs returning to reclaim their inheritance from usurpers. There is a realization that Nigeria is the only country that we have. Their return will not be without incident. Thirdly, there is new and gratifying desire to question authority, whether those of sleazy politicians, irresolute labour leaders or corruptible clergy. This is especially positive given our history of paternalistic authoritarianism.  Every revolution requires some iconoclasm; the destruction of the old idols and symbols of the status quo.  

Simply because the streets have fallen silent does not mean that the spirit of protest has been bound. For now, our placards are in our hearts. The genie of discontent is well and truly out of the lamp. Radical energies have been released and are crackling about us. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed; it can only be converted from one form to another. Similarly, the energy that animated those protests has simply shifted phase, and remains intangibly in the ether, proclaiming the inevitability of change.  

(All Pictures Sourced From Google Images).

The`Politics of National Security

Because of the unprecedented threat of random terroristic violence, like no other leader before him, President Goodluck Jonathan will be judged on the matter of security rather than on the previous perennially staple themes like the economy. However, the challenges are far more fundamental than apparently realized.

We cannot truly have national security without a progressive nationalist vanguard articulating the meaning and purpose of the Nigerian nation and what it means to be its citizen. If as the French philosopher Ernest Renan said, “A nation is a moral consciousness,” then to the extent to which that consciousness does not pervade the government, it will be incapable of designing an authentic national security doctrine. It is impossible to define national interest without there being a national consciousness active in those who would define such an interest. This is in essence the summary of our current crisis. Although a single party controls the presidency and the national assembly, it cannot forge the sort of elite consensus with which to generate a nationalist ideology because its raison d’être is rent sharing.

 In the military era, national security was deemed exclusively synonymous with the personal safety of the Head of State and the stability of his regime. Only security threats that directly threatened the Head of State were recognized by security czars. This accounts for why a security apparatus that was stunningly efficient at detecting both actual and imagined coup plots or arresting journalists for perceived slights against the Head of State, his family and his cronies, was incompetent at relatively mundane tasks like securing the nation’s borders.

The very nature of the post-colonial state complicates attempts to define state security. Because the state is less an organ of national interest than a vehicle captured periodically by competing elite factions, concepts like “state security” and “enemies of the state” are disturbingly fluid. Ijaw militants who less than a decade ago could be rightfully defined as terrorists and enemies of the state are now powerful non-state actors and friends of the current administration. The Nigerian state is not anchored to a singular national ethos but to a constantly shifting constellation of grudges and appetites in sectarian hues. This is why it has been difficult to articulate a consistent national security doctrine that defines the interests and enemies of the state.

Furthermore, a system of elite selection based on ethnic or ethno-regional representation cannot possibly produce a nationally-minded leadership and therefore cannot accurately interpret and address national security threats. Olusegun Obasanjo’s candidacy in 1999 was based on the notion of compensating the southwest following the death of Moshood Abiola, the winner of the annulled 1993 election. Umar Yar’Adua became president on the strength of the argument that power should return to the north and Jonathan was picked as his running mate on the basis of his Ijaw ancestry to placate the militants of the Niger Delta.

In all these instances, accident of birth was the sole or major propellant of presidential bids and significantly, the presidency was used to reward the implicit or explicit threat of violence and terrorism by some elites who saw it as the turn of their ethnic groups to rule. Precisely because the threat of sectional violence underwrites claims to national leadership, leaders thrown up by this process cannot interpret anti-state insurrections as anything other than ethnically or religiously motivated challenges to their own power.

This is why some senior figures of the security establishment have apparently settled for the lowest of the low hanging fruits by defining Boko Haram as a dastardly plot to destabilize the Jonathan administration orchestrated by powerful northern politicians.

The grounds for defining Boko Haram simply as an anti-Jonathan conspiracy or more broadly as an anti-southern presidency conspiracy are scant. Until now, the deadliest Islamist extremist insurgencies in Nigerian history have occurred while Northern Muslim presidents where in office – the Maitatsine revolt in Kano in 1980 under President Shehu Shagari and Boko Haram’s siege in Maiduguri in 2009 under President Umar Musa Yar’Adua.  The violence of both groups led to bloody confrontations with the army. Comparatively less serious uprisings were staged by the Shia Muslim Brothers in Zaria, Kaduna and Katsina during the mid 1980s while General Ibrahim Babangida was in power. It makes no sense, therefore, to interpret Islamist extremist revolts as secret weapons periodically unsheathed by northern elites to threaten southern Christian presidents. There is frail empirical basis for perceiving Boko Haram as northern anti-Jonathan agenda. Indeed, to define it as such is to reduce a national security threat to the envy of one man’s good fortune. To say that innocent Nigerians, Muslims as well as Christians slain in Maiduguri and elsewhere by the group have died simply because their murderers hate the president who is safely ensconced in Abuja suggests a level of vainglorious conceit at work in high places.

This summation ushers the current crisis into the distressingly familiar territory of North-South suspicion which is the intellectual comfort zone of the majority of our political elites. If as this narrative holds, President Goodluck Jonathan is being opposed because he is a southerner and a Christian, then countering Boko Haram shifts from the realm of developing strategic and institutional measures to that of recriminatory histrionics and jingoistic saber-rattling along ethno-regional lines.

What this means in effect is that the state cannot truly respond to conflicts as a neutral arbiter of contending political passions and custodian of national sovereign will; only as a hostage to sectional and class interests. Most times, the federal government responds by localizing, ethnicizing and politicizing security challenges, evading responsibility, while asking religious leaders and traditional rulers to “intervene”. Thus, Boko Haram is still considered a “northern Islamic” problem even when it poses a direct unequivocal threat to our putative national values of pluralism and tolerance.     

Our crisis is compounded by the fact that recruitment into the public sector including strategic services is based on a bastardized model of affirmative action that emphasizes ethnicity (and creed) rather than merit. The original aim of creating a representative bureaucracy has been pursued to unconscionable extremes.  This is the kernel of the dysfunction of our government and the legendary ineptitude of the civil service; too many offices are occupied by the wrong people who are indemnified in their incompetence by their ethnicity or religion. Consequently, we have an official bureaucracy that reflects the negative aspects of our diversity but possesses nothing of our intelligence, energy and industry. It is a system that reinforces the popular racist and bigoted idea that intelligence and stupidity, competence and knavery are unequally distributed among Nigeria’s ethnic groups.

The virtual collapse of governance is rooted in this malaise but the political elites who sit atop this sepulchral system have no incentive to make meritocracy the prime ethic of the Nigerian state. Yet, Nigerians persist in demanding excellence from a system that is not even configured to deliver performance. The politics of being a “good representative” of one’s ethnic group or faith cannot coexist with the imperative of serving the national interest.

As terrorism deepens, Nigerians have duly looked to the security services for answers and have been angered by their apparent inability to deliver results. Much of this anger is misplaced. There is no reason to expect a state which cannot deliver power supply to excel at law enforcement. Nor should we expect security services to perform above the general decrepitude of our infrastructure. On the occasions that they have miraculously done so, it stems from the work of a remnant of patriotic professionals who remain marginalized by an oppressive public service terrain.

The rise of anti-state violence and the government’s inability to curb insecurity across the country are symptoms of a profoundly pervasive governmental incapacity. Indeed, even if the political will to confront terrorism existed, there would still be the problem of state capacity which has been diminished by decades of graft and by the unhinged appetites of the ruling class.

Yet, the dark cloud of terrorism hanging over our nation has a silver lining. Our perennially fractious country periodically requires a common enemy, a foe so democratic in its affliction of our diverse members, that it qualifies itself as the object of our collective wrath. Boko Haram indiscriminately targets Muslims and Christians, Northerners and Southerners, men, women and children. It is the perfect enemy.

It is a species of evil that we cannot combat with sectarian rhetoric. President Jonathan should use this existential threat to our common humanity and citizenship to rally Nigerians behind his administration and to forge a new sense of national solidarity.

                                      

In confronting a group that uses suicide bombers, the state must address a burning question: what is the value of a Nigerian life? Boko Haram has amply demonstrated its low valuation of life. But does the state offer a radically different estimation of the worth of its citizens? Consider the level of alienation that could provoke young Nigerians to effectively renounce their citizenship and seek self-definition in a hate-filled life of violence. Consider the police officers and soldiers that have been killed by the group. Often these deaths in the line of duty pass unsung in the haze of statistical anonymity. But at least a Boko Haram operative can say what he is fighting for however nebulous. For what cause are young Nigerians in the police and the military being sent to fight and die in the north east or in the Niger Delta? What does it mean to be a citizen and a servant of the republic? An authentic national security doctrine must affirm the right of the Nigerian citizen to life and livelihood anywhere in the federation without hindrance or discrimination based on ethnicity, religion or gender. 

                                                                                                                                  

There is an opportunity here to redefine our articles of faith as a nation and to articulate a new social covenant that meaningfully binds state and citizen. This conflict is ultimately a clash of ideals and values. It is about which ideal offers the most tangible psychic and material incentives and rewards. Beyond armed confrontations, the more significant struggle must be won in the dimension of the heart and mind.