Whither Nigeria?

Each time it was discovered that the ship of state was foundering, without compass, and no one seemed to have a handle on how to navigate with a proper goal-orientation, the question, Whither Nigeria?,  has been asked as a way of giving expression to where we are as a country, where we are going or where we should be going.  Mostly, the issues have emerged from trying to think beyond the scramble  by the various nationalities in the country. In a multi-ethnic society, reality tends  to be resolved around levels of perception in the practice of governance.  I am interested in how we’ve been fixed by history, and how we’ve always managed to have so many  unresolved issues, so embarrassingly many, even now, when the most intense  marker of dissension in the Nigerian firmament  is the Boko Haram Insurgency in the North-East which has sought many times, unsuccessfully, to declare a Caliphate over parts of the country. Take the  other  issue around MASSOB (Movement for the Actualization of the Sovereign State of Biafra) and the Indigenous Peoples of Biafra (IPOB). They have raised the Biafran secessionist flag  contentiously and ambitiously  over what used to be the Eastern Region. Successive Federal Governments have  pursued them with punitive measures as if the civil war of 1967-70 did not quite come to an end.  Now, look, the clouds are gathering,  as fractions of the Yoruba, at home and in the Diaspora, are  angling for a secessionist binge of their own, unless, as it is stressed, ethnic nationalities are allowed to become self-governing within the Nigerian  Federation.  Let me say that I concede their purpose, but not their angle. At any rate, I think that there is a cautionary note to be registered against  the various secessionist pressures  which have been heightened, I believe,  by the  recent upsurge  of the Nigerian Fulani from amongst whom there has emanated an invitation to all other Fulani across sub-Saharan Africa to come take over Nigeria as a permanent homeland. Let me be upfront with it that I concede their angle of having a commitment to a homeland, but not to the purpose of withdrawing from a common sense of nationality with other Nigerians. I say this as a backdrop against which I must accommodate  what I shall call the Fulani Upsurge.

The upsurge has come down to a question of whether  the scramble for Nigeria should be in piecemeal fashion  through  armed propaganda  or  in one fell swoop to displace  those who currently regard themselves as Nigerians. It would seem that the upsurge, as a strategy,  has had a test run in the National Assembly in the attempt by organic legislators of the Fulani  to deploy Nigeria’s Basic Law, the Nigerian Constitution, as a means of designing  or divining a law-governed approach to have the Fulani domiciled in each of Nigeria’s 776  local government areas. The purpose, as it is being stressed, is to achieve the formalization of cattle grazing reserves, rural grazing areas, cattle republics, or cattle routes of which the latter, unfortunately have been so grandly  reminiscent of  pre-colonial slave-hunting routes that it has caused quite some disgust and umbrage.  Add to it, the avid pursuit of legal encirclements of local governments in the test-run of  bills at the National Assembly. Due to the rampage of armed propagandists supported by the Cattle Breeders Association of Nigeria, the Miyetti Allah Kaital Hore,  all of the protagonists of the cattle breeders, though not  necessarily of the same ethnic stock,  have shown enough capacity to contest the state’s monopoly of the means of violence in such a way  that their common occupational drives  are generally assumed as marks of their common identity.

I want to state in this connection that the Nigerian situation  has had  quite a boiling pot quality, if not drama, since the recent informal application of the President of the Republic of Benin who wants his country  to join Nigeria as the 37th state of the Federation.  This application, from another multi-ethnic country, has come as a  follow-up to years of special relationships,  nurtured personally by Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari with Francophone countries –  in particular, the  Niger Republic. Whether  or not one of the countries is serving as incubator, follow up, or rehearsal of the special relationship with Nigeria,  the matter of importance is that, from the standpoint of whither Nigeria, of how the country will fare in the near or distant future, there is a driven pattern of cohabitation  that it demands within  the possibility of Nigeria splitting up or seeking to fuse with neighbouring Francophone African states. Clearly, it is a step away from the case of Morocco which, incongruously, in my view, wished to join the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) to create a larger French community of which Nigeria would have to be a member. Suddenly, we are confronted by the  loaded question  of how Nigeria, on its own or in agglomeration, may be governed beyond current skirmishes in the debates over the restructuring of the Nigerian Federation.  Whatever  may happen, the core issue  remains how the split or coming together  of territories or the hitching together of cultural geographies within and around Nigeria, can fit into  an agreement between fellow Nigerians not merely on the need to stay together as one country but on how any form of  coming together  can be framed and actualized. This, to be sure, is one of the things it could mean to ask ‘Whither Nigeria’ in the current dispensation.

I grant  that, in seeking to ask and answer the question  there are elements of the not so normal,  if not a breakdown of normalcy, a  civil war situation, a war without fronts, a strut of wanton disorder and a general plunge into spoliation and possible self-defeat in the scenarios that we can picture as part of the Nigerian maelstrom.  What needs to be written into it is how the structure of power in Nigeria offers a sense of ultimate decision-making where  it used to be said that nothing works; but it is increasingly being argued that anything can happen, especially if it is bad. To put it this way is to draw attention to how far the country has travelled, or regressed, since General Muhammadu Buhari took over from President Goodluck Jonathan in 2015. As it was argued, change was imperative; and so change needed to happen. Campaign managers were brought from Barrack Obama’s America to help rephrase the challenge.  If, by some mischance, there was electoral victory for the wrong candidate, it was speculated  that hired armed propagandists from the Sahel’s unfinished civil wars could be cashiered into the country to unleash mayhem of undefined proportions as a settlement of  accounts. Later, the public space was reliably informed that the armed propagandists who were hired for post-election accounting collected their fees, but refused to return to where they came from after President Jonathan conceded victory and so did not provide an excuse for anyone’s blood to be shed. A new moral bypass was therefore allowed for the armed propagandists to dissolve into sundry schemes of ethnic solidarities that have since enabled them to stick around in the country. Not to forget: this happens to be the country where change was slated to happen but no one has been available  as  canvasser, claimant or parent of any genuine change. Actually, it would seem that the question Whither Nigeria, at  this lecture on the platform of the Obafemi Awolowo Foundation, is some way of  visualizing a country ahead of us that is eminently saveable in spite of the change that has not taken place.

Need I say it; for a society to be saveable, there must be a class of people who are ready to do the job. In this regard, the Nigerian circumstance has been marked, if not muddied by a certain leader-centred capacity for manoeuvre which cuts across political party lines and which  has formed a peculiar political culture of its own.. One way to put it is that no matter how seemingly divergent they may appear, Nigerian political gladiators are informed by the same political purview in the sense that they have the same dispositions in goal orientation and party organization. A flat ideological landscape exists across them  which is easiest explained by the fact that they are mutually interchangeable, outside, and even within ethnic differences. Since no political grouping is likely to depend on subscription for its mobilization of political bias, the same form of capitalist financing is at the root of their nativity and self-assertion. They engage  in similar funding practices with past political entrepreneurs and business moguls  who supply  what political scientists of the Maurice Duverger school of thought describe as sinews of war. Once near or in power, they have the same schemes of resource mobilization. They depend on security votes that have been appropriately sanitized through sheer giraffing in favour of future loot-sharing that by-passes formalities. In more recent years, the governors have  resorted to tax consultants as a means of beefing up their war chest for electoral purposes to make sure that political money continues to flow. The pattern was borrowed from military adventurers in power but it has quickly proliferated from the more daring venturers of the Fourth Republic until a critical mass of the political class  yielded to it. This has reduced the old bogey of ten percenters or of higher percentiles in about 23 states in the Federation. At the last count, all the incumbents steeped in tax consultancy for the purpose of  political finance had to make it a test for the Governors’ Forum.

To be continued.

• Being excerpts of the virtual 2021 Obafemi Awolowo Lecture delivered by the Polemicist, Odia Ofeimum, as part of activities marking the 112th posthumous birthday of the sage, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, on Saturday, March 6.

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