And there was #TheAtikuPlan, launched equally with fanfare by President Buhari’s challenger in the other discredited party, PDP. Atiku and his handlers tried to cast a cosmopolitan aura on the entire atmospherics of their own launch, hoping to draw a stark contrast with President Buhari’s well-known qualities: myopia, backwardness, and irredeemable clannishness. Atiku and his handlers were hoping that people would forget that they are heirs to a horrendous sixteen-year PDP legacy; that the difference between PDP and APC is smaller than the difference between six and half a dozen, given the long history of osmostic exchanges of recidivist politicians between the two; that nobody would remember Atiku’s personal issues best summed up in one word America!
Buhari and Atiku are victims of a tragic form of myopia that I have previously described as elite disconnect. It is safe to assume that Buhari has not bothered to do any assessment of why he has failed so woefully in his first term. Atiku too shows no deep grasp of why Buhari failed. Even more ominously, Atiku displays no awareness of the fact that he would fail tragically as President (should he win the election) for much the same reason.
Both men were throwing policy statements, vision, and plans into a void. For all their fioritura, #NEXTLEVEL and #TheAtikuPlan are homeless vagabonds without a nation. Even the best policies in the world would never work in Nigeria because they’d be homeless. Appoint Jesus Christ, Mohammed, and the Buddha as Fellows of a ThinkTank and let them draw up a policy road map for Nigeria and watch their lofty visions crash against the harsh reality of the absence of a nation.
In 1882, the French thinker, Ernest Renan, delivered a famous lecture entitled “What is a Nation?”. A few themes from Renan’s lecture are relevant for Nigeria because they can explain why Buhari’s and Atiku’s policy plans are exercises in futility. A nation is a long, historical march by a people towards forging a common, collective destiny. The path to nationhood lies in what the people, within the specific dynamics of their history and experience, collectively agree to remember and to forget.
Thus, nationhood is rooted in perpetual negotiations. Ernest Renan calls this a daily plebiscite.
To be a nation is to constantly negotiate and renegotiate the terms of engagement. This gives the lie to an oft-repeated mantra of the Nigerian political elite to which Atiku and Buhari belong.
They will tell you that Nigeria is not-negotiable. This dubious philosophy runs counter to the philosophy of the Europeans who invented the nation-state in Africa. The Nigerian elite came up with this lie because Nigeria is a profitable business that they don’t want you to renegotiate.
For Ernest Renan, you must negotiate and renegotiate the terms of engagement because a nation is also, fundamentally, a conjugation of grievances and discontent. How a nation reckons with and addresses her historical grievances and discontent creates a symbolic home for vision, policies, and plans. If you look at #NEXTLEVEL and #TheAtikuPlan, you will see the usual evocations of security and insecurity. The planners are addressing symptoms because they both belong to a national political elite that has no comprehensive philosophy devolving from an understanding grievance and discontent.
Nigeria is a museum of unaddressed grievances and discontent. For instance, the Nigerian political elite do not understand the powerful symbolism of Biafra. To them, it is a security issue.
They criminalize the mere mention of Biafra. Similarly, from Ogoni to Benue, the Nigerian elite do not understand the nature of historical grievance and discontent. They then wonder why their policies don’t ever work.
Grievance and discontent are not a threat to the nation. They are raw emotions asking to be engaged, recognized, and humanized in a framework of acknowledgement and atonement.
Acknowledgement and atonement are the raw materials for national renewal. So long as you treat Biafra as a threat, as a security issue, you may build two hundred 2nd Niger Bridges, you will never create the emotional conditions necessary for a buy in by the aggrieved people of the southeast into your plans, vision, and policy road map.
Same applies to the south-south, the middlebelt, northern minority enclaves, and indeed, to every other place where the Nigerian elite has been treating grievance and discontent as security issues instead of acknowleging people’s deep historical pain and injury and taking concrete steps to atone as part of an overarching process of constantly negotiating our collective destiny and existence. No policy document or vision road map will receive the affective and emotional investment of people whose historical grievances and discontent are constantly vilified and repressed by military jackboots.
In Canada, where I live, there is something we call territorial acknowledgement. It has recently gained ground as part of Canada’s continous efforts to negotiate and renegotiate her terms of engagement as a nation. Before the start of any function or ceremony anywhere in Canada, including events on University campuses, the master of ceremony will announce to the audience that we acknowledge that this building or this ceremony or this University is located on “unceded land of the indigenous populations of Canada.”
Every ceremony in Canada starts with a version of this acknowlegment: we realize and admit that we stole your land. Now, the Native Indians (we call them First Nations) in Canada will never get the land back. However, never underestimate the power of the Canadian ritual of acknowledgement and atonement. There are equally other Canadian frameworks for acknowledging and engaging the discontent and grievances of the Quebecois nation. This is how policies and plans secure the buy in of the people.
In Nigeria, we criminalize discontent.
In Nigeria, we repress grievance.
Then we are shocked that the most brilliant policy documents have no home in the hearts of the Nigerian people.
and then