Odia Ofeimun, in this eight part serial, takes a very hard look at the Nigerian nation, its problems, follies and foibles and concludes that unless and until Nigerians institute an abiding faith in their country, dumping short term ethnic interests for the larger, long-term goal of national engagement and development, the road to true nationhood would continue to be a mirage. In this first part, which creates a synoptic basis but focused on the failure of leadership, Odia periscopes the crises in the education sector. He chews on the Charles Taylor asylum saga and insists that a leader who decides to go blind to the sensitivity of his people may have engaged the path of perfidy. But the more pertinent issue raised by Ofeimun, as you would read in subsequent series, and which he says remains the major hurdle to be scaled in the pursuit for genuine nationhood, relates to the canker worm of ethnicity. He picks the six geo-political zones one after the other, points out the inherent parochialism of their leaders and sounds a note of warning.
Go to the Vanguard Original (of Part 1)
Oct 14, 2003
Let me confess that I almost changed my mind about accepting the invitation to deliver this lecture when I realised that Trenchard Hall, University of Ibadan, would be the venue. This Hall used to be the last ditch stand, the terror of many an undergraduate, in the examinations that led to a degree or a meal ticket. In my days in this University, I never had the fortune or ill-fortune of sitting here for any examination; but the reputation of this hall as the ultimate test of scholarship has stayed with me. The very name, Trenchard, was a demand for mental rectitude. Under normal circumstances, it ought to be considered the very best of venues for a lecture, a State of the Nation Lecture, no less, (as we celebrate). A venue like this one, in the premier institution at the apex of our national knowledge industry, should normally impose some decorum and rigour upon whosoever is granted the privilege to deliver such a lecture. However, I am sure that without haggling, we can all agree that our circumstances are not quite normal. Staff and students have only just returned from six months of forced-draft hibernation as a result of problems that no self-respecting country should have allowed for more than a few days. To think of it, so much time has been lost already, both for individual students and for the country, that what is uppermost on every mind is how to cover lost ground in double quick time. This is particularly the case because the next generation of students is in danger of suffering two years of idleness at home because of those who gained admission but cannot finish their courses.
In the present circumstance, a lecture which seeks to deal with the state of the nation must remind us of the motley of unsolved problems that landed us in the closure of the institutions of higher learning in the first case. Even the most innocent and tame lecture cannot help but pay some mind to the problems that underlie activities across Nigeria¹s 44 universities at the moment. All the same, let me assure you that while I do not underrate the necessity to face up to the problems that confront Nigerian Universities, I believe the right kind of audience is not available in any of Nigeria¹s Universities at this time. I think that the roots of most of our current national problems lie outside the Universities and that it is out there we must go to belt the goblins. Although it used to be fair and normal to say that Universities will think some way through to solutions, I¹m not so sure about that anymore.
Our universities are in quite a state: they need to be saved before they can contribute their mite to the saving of the nation. Or why should anyone expect higher institutions that have not had the means to perform as the node of the knowledge industry universities without normal libraries; with departments bereft of the necessary compliment of computers in a computer-driven global knowledge industry; universities with laboratories that would shame some of the secondary schools of two decades ago; universities where the once-seductive bookshops now recall ravaged stalls in some war-torn countries; universities where student unions have been outclassed by state-sponsored cults; why should we burden them with the task of playing messianic roles?
Frankly, I shudder to recall that as an indigent student on this campus, I would have supported anything that could reduce the time that one expended to get a degree. Three years seemed too long! These days, however, an undergraduate spends seven and more years to get through a normal four year course without getting the quality of education that was once available! We who used to boast and brag about the quality of Nigerian education, as much as rejecting degrees from India, Eastern Europe and even the United States, we now find our first class materials being asked to repeat their first degrees in some universities abroad. The situation is tragic because many of those universities are manned by high-flying Nigerian academics who have been driven into political and economic exile by myopic Nigerian governments. While many of them cannot return to the dilapidation that has overcome their old alma maters, we are obliged to watch sector after sector in our national economy being overrun by less qualified and less skilled foreign barn-stormers who are busy extending the borders of their country into ours with a brazenness and gusto that our nationals in exile cannot afford because of the weakness of their country. Ours, as it happens, is a country being tutored to her death by foreign debt collectors, technical assistants and consultants, whose gain in management experience is our loss. It tortures the mind to think how much of the future of ordinary Nigerians, and how much of the future of the country is being cavalierly destroyed and thrown away in the process. We have become like a bereaved people shifting the burden of righting wrongs upon the wrong shoulders.
In more than a manner of speaking, this is why in spite of my reservations, I have come to agree with the Committee for the Defense of Human Rights (CDHR) that if the future belongs to the young, no time is ever too late or too premature to prepare them to engage the problems that will be theirs until they hand the baton to another generation. I have consented to the invitation to deliver this lecture because I share CDHR¹s belief that we need to nurture real nation builders who have no hang-ups. We need to displace the apprentices who have so far mortgaged our future. By the same token, we need the world changers – the natural scientists, social scientists, engineers, technicians, medical doctors, agriculturists, educationists, historians, philosophers, linguists and artists, who are capable of being in effective interaction or competition with counterparts in other parts of the world rather than being mere passengers in their train, or scramblers or mendicants in their backyards. We need a generation that will not agree to follow the footsteps of those who price loot-sharing, and therefore the bickering that goes with it, above the sweat and creativity that make great nations. My hope is that what I shall say here will speak to new possibilities away from the current movement towards anomie and closure across Nigeria.
This occasion is particularly significant because it is the launching of the 2002 Annual Report on the Human Rights Situation in Nigeria. The Report, which I have just browsed, is a continuation of previous confirmations by earlier CDHR reports and the reports of human rights organizations like the Civil Liberties Organization, that Nigeria is in a tragic bind. The Report covers the incidence of death penalties; judicial and ritual killings; assassinations; arbitrary arrests; assaults on the freedom of the Press and freedom of association; political unrests; strikes by the Police; non-payment of salaries and pensions; injudicious impositions on the educational sector and abuse of academic freedom; assaults on women and children¹s rights; brazen corruption and the disregard and abuse of the rule of law; and ethnic and communal conflicts. After running down these problems that afflict what used to be called our own dear native land, it is difficult not to say we have heard, read and experienced all that before. What makes our situation tragic is that we cannot muster the confidence to say that it must not and cannot happen again. In the past – and it is beginning to look like such a distant past – when we heard of such things in other countries, usually in Latin America or some small African country that we could squash into one of our provinces without bellyache, we used to be able to say that it can’t happen here. Our country was not Fernando Po or Sao Tome. But not anymore. Therefore, the purpose of going on year after year, to recount the atrocities committed against us, and the devilries we commit against one another, is partly to remind ourselves that we were not always in as bad a shape as now. It may seem as if we are, in a sense, advertising our weaknesses as a people. May be so. I remember, in this connection, that at the Law Auditorium of the University of Lagos, after I had done a review of the Amnesty International Report for the year 1996, I was asked: what is the point of writing all these annual reports? In that year, the Amnesty Report covered the atrocities committed by agents of the Federal Government of Nigeria in Ogoniland among thousands of similar and comparable cases in other parts of the world. The question was asked because the International Human Rights Community tends to engage in saturation reportage of human rights abuses all over the world to an extent deemed capable of numbing the consciousness of normally sensitive people, dulling the senses, and rendering a good number of liberal minds incapable of rising above hopelessness. The attendant argument was: if you detail the abuses too rigorously, you may achieve the negative result of convincing many people that the world we live in is so hostage to such abuses, and injustices are so native to our human circumstance that only its surface can be scratched but no end to the abuses may be found. This reasoning squares with what many dictators and human rights abusers normally wish for. Theirs is to create a pervasive feeling of hopelessness, and a fertile ground for apathy, so that evil can thrive. You come across it everywhere, these days: Think of how often we are admonished not to stand for our rights as it will get us nowhere whether at the Police Station, in the Minister¹s office or the law courts!
The wisdom of the streets which such admonition dispenses is actually the diametrical opposite of the logic of the human rights reports which are based on the presumption that exposure of crimes and abuses is a service to the cause of deterrence. This logic was upheld by the 1996 Amnesty Report which noted the establishment of the precursor to what is now an extra-territorial International Criminal Court, to be headed by a South African judge, at which several perpetrators of human rights abuses from across the world were to be tried. The establishment of that court was supposed to give more than mere teeth to the mission of exposure. Its existence freed human rights activists from charges of voyeuristic reportage. It gave notice to those who dehumanize others from the vantage of political power that they will not always go unpunished. It seemed so revolutionary. Some commentators began to hope for the day when there would be such an extra-territorial court for trying the crimes of corruption that have reduced many a Third World country to her knees. To think of it, with such a court, millions of lives could be saved from languishing in the virtual death camps that many countries have become as a result of the corrupt propensities of leaders and their off-shore cohorts. Think, for instance, of the relief that a country like Nigeria could experience from the return or at least, access to the estimated 250 billion dollars stashed away by, or with the aid, of Nigerians in off shore havens while the country is being virtually bled to death by the International Monetary Fund over a measly debt of 28 billion dollars or 34 billion dollars, depending on whom you choose to believe.
It is such hope that is being dashed by the recent political asylum granted by President Olusegun Obasanjo to Charles Taylor, the Liberian leader, who had been summoned to appear before the International Criminal Court for atrocities committed in Sierra Leone. President Obasanjo¹s offer of asylum may be an African solution. But it runs against the grain of civilized international expectations. As a Nigerian journalist, who remembers the two colleagues, Tayo Awotusin and Krees Imodibie who were like younger brothers to me, and both of whom Charles Taylor murdered, I find it very difficult to appreciate the offer of an asylum as anything but a dilation of the moral principles attached to such trials. Although the asylum being granted is based on a theory of removing the bull from the China shop, it over-exhibits the common tack of looking away when crimes are being committed and thereafter raking up every provision in the human rights arsenal to defend the rights of the criminal without bothering about the rights of the victims. If the history of our national involvement with the Liberian Troubles is anything to go by, it is as if we are setting a stage for the wilder beasts to cast their votes. It looks too suspiciously like peer group protection of an African leader who got caught while doing what most African leaders do so well – massacring their people or watching their people being massacred. Whatever may yet happen in Charles Taylor¹s case, it should not make us lose sight of the promise that an international court represents: to give teeth to human rights reports. Inadequate as such reports may be, they portend great hopes that the exposure of crimes and abuses will not always amount to begging the question. I think, whatever happens, we do owe an obligation, you and I, to prevail on the Nigerian Government to desist from watering down international protocols at the expense of the beleaguered peoples of the world.
Quickly, let me concede that once the matter is reduced to one of prevailing on the government to act, there can be no escape from the reality which stares us in the face: that the exposures and demonstrations effected by human rights organizations fall squarely in the bracket of mere media power. How effective they are tends to depend on the extent to which the media has penetrated the rest of society to energize the people. Without the media, human rights organizations, like all non-governmental organizations, pro-democracy and human rights bodies, are in limbo. They are limited by their nature as media-centred organizations. Part of our tragedy is that many people expect them to perform as action groups comparable to trade unions, political parties or even military outfits, able to change the world in a direct sense by impeaching an executive, toppling a government, pulling off a strike or, as in these days, putting a Governor in protective custody. The truth of the matter is that human rights organizations are neither purposed nor structured to perform such feats. This is why exposure of crimes and abuses and their pressure on organs of state to perform their prescribed roles may not necessarily yield rapid or expected results. This is why the graphic exposures of official malfeasance may create sound and fury but lead nowhere. Often, it happens, these days, that saturation reportage of crimes and abuses achieves the opposite of the expected. The perpetrator of misdeeds, who may even have been caught red-handed, strides out of the crime scene literally bragging to the village square, with a platoon of talking drummers at his beck, to conquer the marketplace. Often, the criminal who is accused of abusing his people returns home to a special feast graced by those who once shrank from him in disgust but are now either too poor or too frightened to shun the canopies mounted for his triumphal arrival. In such a society, no special insight is required to see that the media and civil society organizations, may have power but it is no more than the power to move other powers. If those other powers refuse to be moved, the media and civil society organizations are necessarily, accountably, lame. I use the word accountably because unless they transform themselves in ways that we are yet to see, they simply have no way of changing a situation where for instance, the Police is merely the handmaiden of any rascal in power; the Judiciary is misled by non-judicial rationales; and parliaments are bought by godfathers who boast that their stolen money has a sanctity that must over-ride the need for a popular mandate. If those of us who wish to say No to such shenanigans in the pubic space are not mobilized to go beyond media prowess, we must admit that we have hit the end of the road. And when a society hits the end of the road, the situation calls for road makers, not repairers. Not for apprentices who have driven away their betters. Not for thugs. Not for village idiots masquerading as philosopher kings. The situation calls for road builders, not sweepers. The pity is that all potential road makers in Nigeria have been overtaken by a queer ethic which requires that we all scramble, step upon one another, and trade in curses, because we live in a society where, as the saying goes, no one will give you your due, and if you wait, your turn will never come. Those who believe that their turn will never come do not only scramble and march upon others and their rights, they disfigure all rules and regulations, they seek access to undeserved benefices, and block the entrance against those who are more deserving than they. The situation is worse than Thomas Hobbes¹ state of nature where life is nasty brutish and short; and where you have to eat someone or you are eaten. To be fair, the state of nature seems superior to the sheer barbarism of the current state of our society. Whereas those in the state of nature know what they are in for, nobody knows what rules are supposed to apply in our own civil jungle because those who make the rules do not obey them. Which is why ours is a tragic bind from which we must seek an escape route.
>From the outset, I want to argue that one of the reasons we have not managed to find an escape route out of the tragic bind of our history is that we do not take Nigeria seriously. The title of this lecture, Taking Nigeria Seriously, is therefore an attempt to contribute to a ritual of reversal. I have chosen it in line with the essays that I wrote for some other publications during the locust years of the dark goggled dictator and in the spirit of what I called Partisan Objectivity. My purpose is not to dwell on what you have not heard or read or experienced before. I merely want to offer a re-interpretation of the history, away from the general distrust that has frozen out the study of history from Nigeria¹s educational system. If we must take Nigeria seriously, I believe we need to reconnect with facts and interpretations forbidden by official interpreters. My intention is to show how the problems that we face, regarding the failure of state institutions, the lost battle against poverty, the national question, corruption, the travails of democracy and the rule of law, are all part of the many ways in which different groups and nationalities refuse to take Nigeria seriously.
Awolowo¹s vision, Yoruba/Afenifere politics and ethnicity
Wednesday, October 15, 2003
My principal focus is on ethnicity about which, on a ritual basis, we ignore uncomfortable facts in our history as if that would eliminate the problems. Ethnicity connects with pervasive corruption and the absence of the rule of law in our society. We are in the current murky waters in our national life because we mismanage it, either by attempting to deny its existence in order to turn all of us into ethnic neuters, or seeking to put other ethnic groups under the suzerainty of one or a few as a way of reducing national diversity. The point is that it is not ethnicity but our mismanagement of it that has reduced Nigeria to a country in which it used to be said only that nothing works but where it is now being generally agreed that anything can happen. Against such odds, I think we need to revel in the diversities that constitute the strength of Nigeria. Extending Obafemi Awolowo¹s precepts, I think we need to insist that we can only displace tribalism and regionalism from the centre of our national ethos, through a capacity to apply a common morality to all Nigerians. A common morality exists where the idea of doing unto others as you would want them to do unto you, has been coupled with the other golden rule that Jew and Gentile were made by the same creator and must be judged in accordance with the same code. This is really the sense in which a people are called either civilized or uncivilized. Also, it implies a form of moral dignity, a quality of mind and perceptions that prevent serious people from changing their minds on ethical questions to suit every wind that blows. In the history of Nigeria, the non application of a common morality has made nonsense of constitutions, common law, and the idea of justice. It is a disease that afflicts not only one part or some parts of the federation: it has become the hallmark of our national identity. Virtually, all the identifiable regions – Arewa, South West, South East, Middle Belt and South South, have been overcome by a peculiar mode of selfishness and parochialism that have made it difficult for them to take Nigeria seriously. The behaviour of each of the regional groups has produced a peculiar morality tale. Although the protagonists of each of the groups may claim to belong to some world class religion which demands that all nationalities are equal in the sight of a common creator, they live by a code of Difference: A benign code for themselves and a pernicious one for others. They compartmentalise the moral space in such a way that they take what happens within the ambit of other ethnic groups or nationalities as being outside their own business. In most cases, they take pleasure in seeing other groups embroiled in problems. If they can find a place to stand, they create enormous problems for others as some people are doing in the Niger-Delta at the moment from the vantage of federal myopia. What I really want to say under the theme of Taking Nigeria Seriously, is that what they sow is what they reap. To anticipate my conclusions, I want to argue that although I would normally have considered it improper to take a whole region or nationality and to ascribe a mindset to its protagonists without qualifications, events based on the unionised nature of much of regional and ethnic politics in Nigeria have made it possible in 2003 to state that: The Arewa warlords who set out to undermine education and development in other parts of the country have ended up destroying education and development in the North in a more rigorous manner than any enemy could have done. The champions of Ndigbo who have no morally efficient accommodation for either the minorities in the East or their Yoruba siblings and competitors across the Niger, have merely ended up, as a result, by cutting down their own possibilities; The Middle Belt which pays lip service to the struggle of Nigerian minorities in order to benefit from closeness to Arewa power, ends up jumping from one form of marginalisation to another; the South South champions of resource control who wish to draft a constitution for themselves instead of drafting a constitution for Nigeria with which they can be comfortable, simply shortchanged their cause. The Southwestern contribution to this all-Nigeria myopia and parochialism is particularly clamant at this point in our history, so let me begin from there.
THE SOUTH WEST CONUNDRUM
My concern is not just with what happened in the 2003 elections in which five out of six states in the Southwest, a zone regarded as Awolowo’s territory, were lost to the ruling People¹s Democratic Party, PDP. I am concerned about a general pattern of self-abnegation which began with a turn of the coat early in the Fourth Republic. I call it a turn of the coat because, the Yoruba of the Southwest, unionised as a political family under the umbrella of Afenifere, took a turn in Nigerian politics in recent years that is transparently against the deeper motivations of economic rationality and national interest based on the precepts of Obafemi Awolowo on whose inspiration the mainstream political movements in the Southwest had thrived for decades. The turn of the coat enabled President Olusegun Obasanjo to appear to have acquired a home-base for his political party which did not win in any of the six Southwestern states in the elections of 1999. To be specific, the Yoruba Southwest under the influence of Afenifere, had voted in 1999 against the candidacy of General Olusegun Obasanjo in favour of another of their own, Olu Falae. In the process, they displayed, in the view of most observers, an astute sense of principle which did a lot of credit to the claim by Afenifere leaders that they were disciples of Obafemi Awolowo. To many observers, they had good grounds for turning their backs on Obasanjo¹s candidacy. Quintessentially, Obasanjo was not known in all his past forays into national politics to have behaved with any enduring appreciation of, not to talk of commitment, to the programmes and issues that distinguished their particular cultural geography. Although a Yoruba himself, Obasanjo was not known to accept the inspiration of Obafemi Awolowo whose moral and intellectual activism had raised the Western Region above all contending regions in the federation. Rather, he belonged to that echelon of “objective” Yoruba people who bargained for national offices by showing to people of other nationalities that they were not on Awolowo¹s side. Awolowo¹s side, incidentally, was not difficult to identify. Awolowo entered Nigerian politics with a pragmatic cast that almost single-handedly ensured that all Nigerians became federalists. His ideas worked at two levels. First, to catch up with the Western world which had colonized Africans. On this level, the goals were to lift indigenous African populations to have respect for their own culture based on re-development of their languages, literature, historiography, general culture, and the raising of education in these languages to a level that can absorb all neologisms in Western social and natural sciences. The purpose was to educate Africans to be able to stand up to the West in the creation of a knowledge industry capable of dealing with the problems of modern times. Awolowo founded the Egbe Omo Oduduwa in 1945 in pursuit of such an agenda which he believed every African nationality needed to pursue. Although he was largely misunderstood by those who, incidentally, were also organising their own ethnic groups, he never wavered. He believed that many of African nationalities were at a primitive stage of development which needed to be raised to modernity. In a country made up of different ethnic groups and nationalities, some large and many small in size, and at differing stages of development, he proposed a form of federalism to redress the imbalance in the country, breaking up Nigeria into states along ethnic lines as was done to save Indian democracy, while equalising conditions between the nationalities through a free education, free health policy and other social welfare programmes. His commitment was to an efficient bureaucracy, and a planned management of the economy which does not alienate the private sector. The central ambition was to transform what he once saw, in his 1947 book, Path to Nigerian Freedom, as a mere geographical expression, into a nation or what may well be called a cultural expression. His overall mission, as presented in his other books, Thoughts on Nigerian Constitution; The People¹s Republic of Nigeria; The strategy and tactics of the People¹s Republic of Nigeria; and Problems of Africa, was the building of a federal, multi-party, multi-ethnic, socialist state. Although he was called a Pakistanist meaning a secessionist – when he began his advocacies, he had brought such a quality of mind to the solution of national problems, and his performance in the management of regional and national economies had become so unparalleled, that it was not only members of his Yoruba family union, but the whole country that accepted the key registers of his advocacies. Constitution after constitution have since become a mere response to Awolowo¹s definition of national possibilities.
The snag however is that those who profess adherence to federalism and have come around to accepting his social objectives as directive principles of state policy, never appear to understand and do not appreciate the realism of his proposed ethnic states and therefore the necessity to reduce their differences through common social welfare policies. Obasanjo happened to be in the company that did not see eye to eye with Awolowo on many of these issues. The distance between the two of them, as argued with unshaken plausibility by many followers of Awolowo, may be seen in the fact that when Obasanjo gave free tuition to Nigerians in the last days of his first coming as a military Head of State, it was not out of a commitment to social welfare but to forestall and scuttle the campaign plank of the Unity Party of Nigeria, UPN, in the 1979 election. When he embarked upon a low profile programme to cut cost of governance, it was in the nature of an eyewash; contrary to pragmatic pursuits associated with Awolowo¹s approach which saved Nigeria from either devaluing Nigeria¹s currency or borrowing money during the civil war.
In fact, after the civil war, when there was no more national emergency requiring such bail outs, that was when Obasanjo accepted the bait and seductions of debt-peonage with which the principals of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have since reduced Nigeria, among other Third World countries, to her knees. Obasanjo, it was believed, rightly or wrongly, was personally liable for ensuring that Awolowo did not become a Head of State in 1979 just as the British colonial officers in 1959 had rigged the elections to ensure that he never came close to being Prime Minister. Thereafter, he was known to boast that leadership of the nation, which Awolowo sought all his life but could not achieve, had come to him, almost gratis, not by his will, as he intoned in the title of his book: Not My Will. In 1999, when he was set to repeat the feat, those who believed in Awolowo¹s commitment to the running of an efficient economy, and on federalism and social welfare policies, had reason to believe that he was not the fit and proper person for the job. True, there was the rather confusing moment when Afenifere leaders argued about who the proper person was; it was said they chose Falae because he was more acceptable to other Nigerians than Bola Ige. But that confusion was also part of a larger one which saw General Ibrahim Babangida, the prime patron of Obasanjo¹s candidacy, also being a major supporter of Falae, a fact that simply made the Afenifere its own worst enemy. At any rate, what is important from the standpoint of this narrative is that the Southwest, standing as one, rejected Obasanjo in 1999. It was the first time in the history of Nigeria, if we discount the freak occurrence of an Interim Government in 1993, when a Head of State would emerge in Nigeria who was not supported by his kith and kin. The only feat comparable to it had taken place in the old Western Region when the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroun, a party led by Nnamdi Azikiwe, a non-Yoruba, in fact, a former President of the Igbo State Union, won the 1954 Federal Election. That was the first time a party in power would lose an election that it conducted in this or in any African country. The Action Group lost that election because it insisted on sending riot squads to the towns and villages of Western Region to force the people to pay a once-for-all levy for the proposed compulsory free primary education and free health care slated to take-off in 1955. In essence, the common ground between the 1954 election and the 1999 could be stated quite simply: The people of the South- west rejected their own very illustrious sons for a reason that had to do with policy orientation.
A particularly significant reason, in 1999, is that Obasanjo was known to be a candidate of the military bosses in power whom Southwesterners had struggled against for more than a decade. Because the military hierarchy was dominated unabashedly by an Arewa code, he was presented as a candidate of the North, a hegemonic region that Awolowo had spent his whole political career trying to break up towards a truer form of federalism in which one region would not be so large as to literally wield a veto over the whole federation. Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the 1999 election was that although Obasanjo was supposed to be the representative of the Southwest within the zoning formula that was employed, it was the North that chose him as a candidate. To think of it, nothing could have been more clear-sighted than for a people who knew their interests to reject one of their own who was a bearer of an ethic that belonged to an opposing group. It seemed the wisest thing for the Yoruba to have done for themselves. After all, they had spent the previous six years on the barricades struggling to reverse the annulment of the June 12 1993 presidential elections, the freest and fairest election that Nigeria had yet known, an election that was won by MKO Abiola, a scion of Yoruba-land whom a section of the military, as part of a shadowy cabal in Northern Nigeria, considered untouchable on ethnic grounds. It could be argued that Yoruba ethnic solidarity was merely a response to that Arewa code. But it was, in a way, the beginning of trouble.
The first sign of trouble for the Yoruba strategy, represented by the Afenifere and allied NADECO chieftains, became obvious in the struggle to de-annul the June 12 1993 election. The leaders began, subtly and then aggressively, to accept the logic of zoning as a rational basis for governing Nigeria. Zoning had been insinuated into the lexicon of Nigerian politics by the chieftains of the National Party of Nigeria in the Second Republic. That party sold it to a much-divided nation, and it was bought by many ethnic groups, that the only way to run Nigeria to the satisfaction of all nationalities is to ensure that every ethnic group would have a chance at some point to rule Nigeria. There was no agreement between the ethnic groups as to what form the zoning should take. No idea was established as to how the ethnic groups would take their turns. The notion of zoning was simply floated as a vague conscientiser and, in the manner of a country that has never known how to count or number her population, it was accepted as a grand hypothesis for running the affairs of Nigeria. It became a matter for conjecture whether the rotation would be between the North and South; between the original three or four regions, North, West, East and Midwest or between the 19 states that we had at that time. Soon, some highly unconstitutional notion was added when the idea of six zones for Nigeria was put on the road, and believers in zoning began to talk about a rotation of the Presidency between the six zones. It was as if the example of the collapse of the Yugoslav federation after a rotation of the highest office between six zones was not enough warning. At any rate, the very idea that every ethnic group should have a chance to rule other ethnic groups was touted as its strongest recommendation.
This thoroughly unwieldy sense of the zoning formula ought to have been seen for the thoroughly impracticable idea that it was. In a country where, depending on how you count, there are between 200 and 428 different ethnic groups, it was a tortuous idea. What has been most bewildering is that this little piece of anthropology has not cautioned those who continue to talk the language of zoning like amala, tuwo, akpu and usi. The leaders of the Southwest gave a twist to the zoning conundrum in what was called power shift which soon had a headgear style to go with it. It became so strongly entrenched in the dictionary of Southwest politics that it became a case of how to give Nigeria a Yoruba President. No more no less. The siblings of the Yoruba on the other side of the Niger were angling for an Igbo President. Nobody wanted anymore to have a Nigerian President. They all wanted an ethnic candidate whom the rest of us would accept not because he was as efficient and people-oriented as Awolowo had been but because he comes from a particular backyard. There appeared to be no room for the issues that were the determining motivations of Awolowo¹s politics. What was worse is that after kow-towing to the idea of zoning and power shift, the stratachy of leaders in the Southwest allowed itself to be wheedled into accepting that the candidate whom they did not choose for presidency had taken their own slot in the zoning conundrum. How does a candidate chosen by one zone become the representative of another zone simply by the flashing of an ethnic card? One would have thought that the disciples of Obafemi Awolowo would heed the advice of their leader who argued in an epistle titled The Just shall live by Faith, written in his darkest days in prison at Calabar, that political party action should not be confused with ethnic solidarity positions. But Afenifere was too far gone in the zoning and power shift rhetoric to heed the voice of its own historical inspiration. The consequences were bound to be quite bizarre.
The unimaginable began to happen when the Afenifere, and by implication the Alliance for Democracy, the party that it helped to form, went off on a limb to support their opponents after the election. Even while their own candidate, Olu Falae was still contesting Olusegun Obasanjo¹s victory in the courts, the Afenifere had taken the position to support the President-elect. The court case simply began to appear as a matter of merely going through the motions; it was an irritant that had to be taken off the way. The agreement to work with the President was not based on any agreement on a programme or policy or vision but simply the fact that the President was a Yoruba person. It was a form of opportunism but one that soon began to have a defensible rationale when the Northern echelon insisted that they were the ones who made Obasanjo a President and began to berate him for not doing their bidding enough.
The most intriguing part of this opportunism was that the Afenifere was prepared to do business with the President but not with the President¹s party. Afenifere and the AD actually expected the President to write a letter requesting them to make a nomination for ministerial appointments while they were unprepared to do business in the only way prescribed by the constitution – as a party-to-party affair. Both the Afenifere and AD had so mortgaged their well-earned political savvy to the need for ethnic solidarity with the President that they disavowed procedures that their political school was notorious for. Although the Yoruba, as a people, had become the most centrally identified with the national agitation for the restructuring of the Nigerian federation, they allowed the contumacies of ethnic solidarity to bottle them into a corner away from the very goals they were declaredly adhering to. If truth be told, they could have entered a national government headed by Olusegun Obasanjo without abandoning their stand on any of the issues for which they were already well-known. This was Bola Ige¹s stand. But even he, by allowing himself to be part of an ethnic, rather than an ideological rationale for a relationship with the President, had removed the stop that could have guided them in responding to the President¹s policies or lack of policies. The result was that Afenifere, and by implication, the AD, began to quarrel over who should go for us rather than why go into Obasanjo¹s cabinet! It was the wrong debate. It was also so thoroughly distracting when viewed against the real issues: not that opposition groups do not go into the den of a ruling party, but that they must design a strategy that does not allow a contingency to become an ultimate goal.
The pity is that, on all sides, the Afenifere turned transient tactics and quarrels of ego, and even mere tantrums into matters of principle, to occlude and displace strategic group goals. One such tactic turned into a principle was the highly unrealistic insistence that the proposed National Conference must be Sovereign. Even the admission, by its stalwarts on National Television, that the word sovereign may be removed from the idea of the Sovereign National Conference was voiced in a manner that allowed so many members of the group to act as if they had a warrant to treat a mere tactic as a matter of principle. Much more relevant to the issue of the moment is that the position taken by the Afenifere as a representative of the Yoruba people did not accommodate the needs of other nationalities in the federation. The insistence on the Sovereignty of the National Conference in a plural, federal situation, failed to grapple with the issue of other repressed majorities or out-gunned minority groups over whose dead bodies some people could attempt a restructuring of the federation. There was clearly no basis for assuming, for instance, that the majority groups would accept that the minorities would have equal votes with them. If the old political geographies were accepted, the prospect of a Northern veto was too large to contemplate. If existing states were considered, there were more states in the North than in the South and more in Yorubaland than in Igboland; if local governments were used, Kano State alone had more local governments than three South South states combined. The arbitrary creation, by successive military administrations, of states and local governments, without respect for ethnicity, or nationalities, but beholding to the power of the agitators in the national spoils system, had made nonsense of the old Awolowo struggle of creating states to remove the Northern veto.
Even if ethnic groups were latched upon, there were more ethnic groups small minority groups, up to about 134 in the Middle Belt alone, according to some reading than in all other parts of the federation put together. The alternative resort to the ultimate of consensual decision-making amounted to embracing immobilism. How could a consensus be arrived at in such a situation without succumbing to indecision? The one possibility was to fall into the pattern of the first All-Nigerian Conference in 1950, which placed the population of North and South at 50-50 without a proper census. It was a decision that was bound to wrong-foot all forms of sharing between North and South ever after. Such a negotiated census, without a count, actually meant that no future census would involve a count as each region strove not to fall behind the original allocation. No census thereafter could ever be good enough for planning purposes. It was this history, if nothing else, that made Afenifere¹s insistence on a sovereign conference, a matter of mere bargaining which ought to have been left strictly on that bargain counter. It seemed to make sense when it could be used to drive the soldiers out of power. But in the reality of actual decision-making, it became quite a hindrance to the search for real solutions. The pursuers of re-structuring needed to care about the shape in which other nationalities in the federation could survive.
Those who refused to care were obviously not following the precepts of Awolowo who spent a lifetime dreaming up and crafting the fairest system possible for Nigeria in which he believed all ethnic groups and nationalities would be comfortable. Even if he was accused of drawing up a system for Nigeria with which the Yoruba could be more comfortable than others, he never at any time regressed to the level of those who wished to draw up a Constitution for the Yoruba with which Nigeria should have no choice. The latter position happens to be based on a rigour of indifference, bordering on insensitivity to other people¹s needs or demands. It was such a rigour of indifference that enabled some Afenifere members and allied commentators to argue that Bola Ige, as Afenifere/AD member in Obasanjo¹s cabinet abandoned secularity of the state, federalism and resource control. To charge Bola Ige with abandoning secularity is something that fits into the bickering in Afenifere but really has no reality outside it. It was a charge that took off from Bola Ige¹s acceptance of the inexorable existence of Sharia in the 1999 Constitution. The surprise is that literate Nigerians who have read the Constitution could assume that Sharia was not entrenched in the Constitution.
They ought at least to have acknowledged the existence of Sharia in the Constitution before contemplating how to ameliorate its de-secularizing effects. Not doing this amounted to attempting to expunge the successes that other groups had achieved in their own struggles within the Nigerian federation. Nor is it fair to charge the former Attorney General of having abandoned federalism simply because he took the resource control case to court as Federal Attorney General. The outcomes of the resource control case do not bear out the claim. Nor are the contentious parts of those outcomes, especially the crudely resolved on-shore/off-shore dichotomy, not discernible as an advance on the journey to a resolution. To make so much of such insupportable claims outside the logjam which the case was meant to break, and which it broke, is to weigh a supposed principle above the need for practice. I would argue that it is precisely because Afenifere set out to mind only the Yoruba turf, drafting a constitution for the Yoruba instead of drafting a Constitution for Nigeria with which the Yoruba can feel comfortable, that its stalwarts and allied commentators have found themselves committing such booboos in the public space. Which is really another way of saying that when organizers of ethnic groups tell us that they are more concerned with their nationalities and that the rest of us should not interfere in their internal affairs, they are hoodwinking themselves and trying to pull wool over our eyes. No such liberties should be granted in a true federation until it can be proved that the mismanagement of one turf will not destroy other people¹s capacity for survival and normal life.
October 17, 2003
Otherwise, it should be admitted that Afenifere and the AD landed themselves in the mess of the 4/19 elections because they would not risk serious identification with other nationalities who had similar objectives. As I have argued in my comment on the elections, “the leadership of the AD blunted itself and its capacity to meet challenges by romping in the graces of Awolowo¹s legacy without allowing goal-orientation of the kind that defends already acquired territory; they turned a tactic based on the mastery of a cultural constituency into a strategy of unswerving political maneuvre.” It was bound to fail. It got them trapped in a mould of support for the government of President Olusegun Obasanjo who, after a pre-election agreement with a group of Arewa handlers in 1999, scoffed at the idea of either a National Conference, a restructuring of the Federation, or the granting of those principles of revenue allocation that would have brought succour to the South West, the beleaguered Niger Delta and all the groups that felt their distinctiveness, rightly or wrongly, deserved national accommodation. If truth be told, Obasanjo may have appeared to be refusing to follow the dictates of those who claimed that they dashed him the Presidency but it was also quite clear that he was determined to conquer the turf that he had been denied by the politics of the Awolowo political family. The methods that he used to gain the seeming ascendance of the moment are not part of what I am concerned with at this point: what is significant is that through the boost of dynastic politics that roped all the old political families into his government directly or through the backdoor, he secured, if only for a while, the silence of the Yoruba stratachies and the good humour of the chattering classes in the media. He has been able to get away with the most incompetent and self-indulgent policies. In the face of Federal indifference to policies that once made the Southwest appear different, more progressive and self-assured, the Afenifere and sibling organizations, gave President Obasanjo a cushion of support that was totally unjustifiable from the standpoint of the interests of the Yoruba and other Nigerians. By the time Bola Ige decided to go to court on the resource control issue, and that is to say by the time he began to consider resignation from the cabinet and government in order to re-organize the AD for a major response to the circumstance, it was clear that a major confrontation was in the offing. As revealed in the recent altercations between President Olusegun Obasanjo and Professor Wole Soyinka, partly moderated by Professor Sola Adeyeye, Bola Ige¹s strategy, once he realized that the Yoruba slot was not going to achieve the goals on which he and other Afenifere stalwarts had laid so much store, was to step up his wish to reorganize the AD. The purpose was not just to support the return of Obasanjo to Aso Rock but to ensure that a basis would be created for genuine restructuring. In 2007, the Presidency would come from the East or at least the inevitable National Conference would come into being, chaired by an Easterner, specifically, Emeka Anyaoku, the former Commonwealth Secretary General who in his view was the closest Nigerian to being a civilized leader. Since Bola Ige had already bought the idea, that, after Obasanjo, the Yoruba would have used up their slot in the zoning charade, and since he was already worried that Obasanjo was flunking the goal of tackling the National Question, the need to re-strategize around Anyaoku was like trying to end the Nigerian Civil War in a way that Awolowo had suggested to Ojukwu in 1967. That is, as a Roundtable at which the handshake across the Niger would be a core event.
Bola Ige¹s attempt to play this often-abused card, was based on a long-standing idealism that readers of his Uncle Bola column may have been familiar with. However, even before he could act upon it, it was knocked sideways by his inability to separate the political party, AD, from Afenifere, the family union. The rest is history. What is not yet history, in fact, the rude part of present tense, is that the continued support which he and other Yoruba leaders and intellectuals gave to Obasanjo¹s incompetent administration has made a hash of the idea of democracy for all Nigerians. The Yoruba who always managed, on the inspiration of Awolowo, to take sides with progressive forces have been wrong-footed and are to be found fighting for policy ends that have no rationale outside the current lack of governance, or call it, Obasanjo¹s government-by-tantrums, at Abuja. The question to ask is: what domestic policy positions has the Obasanjo government pursued that will make the Yoruba truly comfortable even if other Nigerians do not benefit? I answer: None. Or, let¹s simply say that the only rationale that the Afenifere could have had for supporting Obasanjo is that the President was putting in place a programme for Nigeria that Yoruba people would be comfortable with even if a Yoruba were not in power. But no such thing has been happening. In fact, the expectation of many who were prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt in his first term arose from the belief that, if he was a good Yoruba person, he would seek to create a system with which the Yoruba and other ethnic groups would be comfortable even if a Yoruba were not a President. As far as can be seen, it is not happening. It was already quite predictable from Day One that it could not happen in his second term because the struggle for 2007 was bound to overtake or overrun any programme that he could not finish, or for which a proper foundation had not been laid, in his first term. So the Yoruba, just like other Nigerians, are today saddled with a Federal Government that has put a multiplier effect on the traditional incompetence, corruption and visionlessness that has been native to central governments in this country for decades. What is most pitiable, not for other Nigerians but for the average Yoruba is that by acting against the logic of the political code that once made the Southwest the envy of the rest of Nigeria, they have burnt out the basis of the pride that gave a tolerable sound of good humour to it whenever Bola Ige would say we are the best. How can the best produce the level of dementia in government that we have witnessed in the past four years? Who is to be thanked for the Yoruba submission to unguarded ethnic solidarity with a President who neither has solidarity with the Yoruba or with any identifiable group outside the contractors at Abuja? Whatever the answer may be, the rest of us can always now remind them that where Awolowo comes from, it is possible to have an Obasanjo. This need not hurt the average Yoruba person on the streets, but it ought to instill the kind of communal humility that should make it possible for them to work with other Nigerians not in the manner of those who want to join a warped political mainstream for the purpose of loot-sharing, but to be able to insist, as Awolowo always did, that we must first agree on policies that would benefit all Nigerians before we get lost in the business of choosing whom we shall send or who will go for us.
The demand for such humility is critical at this stage because the politics of ethnic solidarity which has overcome virtually all the political groupings in the South West has damaged one of the most enduring successes of the generation of Yoruba leaders who returned from their studies over-seas in the mid-forties into the year of Independence in 1960. Those intrepid ones wanted to get on as individuals but they were conscious that whatever they did should be additives to a communal project. Thinking of the Nigerian project in which there was an inevitable competition of various nationalities, they worked out a scheme that would widen opportunities rather than constrict them. They had to think first of widening opportunities in the West. As businessmen, most of them knew their leverage was enhanced by creating a healthy populace, educated enough, and gainfully employed enough, to participate in the modern economy. Any sensible person who wants to create a market society ought to know that a generation of people who can buy must be nurtured before a market can truly exist. If you want a healthy population, you train doctors and treat them like doctors. If you want an educated populace capable of participating in the modern economy you train teachers and give them their special place within the scheme of things. You make it possible for more and more jobs to be created by establishing productive organizations; not engaging in the mere printing of paper money or shifting same from one vault to the other as has become the vogue. The old Afenifere leaders of the fifties were obviously not an altruistic echelon but they knew, for instance, that if public schools failed, a society in which only they and their children would be survivors would not be able to compete with the rest of the country and the rest of the world. They knew they had to build a basis for common prosperity. The prosperity of individuals had to be viewed within a broad band that related individual progress to a communal sense of development. Thus it was not just enough to create individual businesses; they built structures which would enable all businessmen to operate at optimum. Unfortunately, the ethic of the new Afenifere, a cultural organization competing with the political party that it has created, is distinct from the participatory ethic of the old Afenifere which was wholly and completely a political party called the Action Group. Need it be said: the AG was radically distinct from the cultural organization called Egbe Omo Oduduwa which was its comparable cultural predecessor.
The new Afenifere, and sibling organizations, by adopting a code which imagines the Yoruba as a body closeted away by culture from other ethnic groups has en-couraged an ethic of withdrawal from the Nigerian project which is mis-educating whole generations of Yoruba people. Many now imagine that, even with the Presidency in the bag, it is enough to just do the Yoruba thing. A case of God for me the devil for us all. This was not Awolowo¹s project. Awolowo¹s Project was a determinedly Nigerian project which was superior to that of his closest competitors in the public space because it was based on a universalist criteria of social welfare. In spite of the many geo-ethnically inspired assaults on his person, he never allowed himself to be distracted by merely wanting to do the Yoruba thing.
Arguably, the new strategy was imposed on the new Afenifere by circumstance. It began as part of a realistic assessment of the parochial hijack of Nigeria¹s process of governance in favour of an Arewa code. For purely geo-ethnic reasons, the operators of that code had blungeoned the ambition of the best man Nigeria had for the Presidency and later annulled the election of the winner in the freest and fairest election Nigerians had known. Both were Yoruba. The result has been a strategic Yoruba withdrawal from public policy-making in favour of a highly privatised sense of national possibilities. By this I mean that there has been a clear disinterest in public works and a regression to individualistic out-manoeuvring of the system as a categorical way of solving problems. It has made those in government and those opposing them to appear like different faces of the same coin. To think of it: this attitude has become a shared culture across Nigeria. Its pervasiveness has allowed industries to collapse in Ijebu countrysides as in Kano and Nnewi and Port Harcourt with no more than a rueful shake of the head along lines dictated by market ideologies whose proponents do not practise what they preach. Those who always wanted the Yoruba to relate to other Nigerians on the basis of mutual respect and in accordance with defined principles of common citizenship are beginning to look quite the same as those who always wanted to join the mainstream of Nigerian politics from the standpoint of an anomic struggle for loot-sharing. It explains why the non-winners of the last election are looking good in public view when they talk about their victories. It suggests the need for those who want to make a difference to go back to the drawing board.
Over and above everything, the point is to realize that ethnic solidarities that are not governed by clear ideological programmes will always create confusion that induces people to fight against their own interests in the belief that they are defending a primordial turf and heritage. This prevents the design of realistic responses to modern traffickers in political manipulation who, for instance, will cause a whole ethnic group to raise armies and purchase mercenaries to wage war in a modern city centre on the basis of a fight over right of way between two mad individuals. All you need these days is for a smart political entrepreneur to throw a stone from one side of the street into another, and for some thoughtless fellow from the other side to remember an eighteenth century insult that has not been properly assuaged, and you can have a full-scale war as if there was no central government worthy of the name to keep the peace. Not to stretch the culpability of the central government too far, let me quickly add that the same scenario works out between different nationalities and ethnic groups as between different tribes and clans within nationalities. There is a general Nigerian incapacity which has set Yoruba against Yoruba; Igbo against Igbo and Ijaw against Ijaw because of a general lack of a sense of common morality across and within geo-ethnic differences. It cuts deepest at the national level only because we have tended to have central governments that do not know how to distinguish between Federal crimes of murder, kidnapping, and robbery of public funds – and ethnic squabbles. In such a society, it is not difficult to see why political entrepreneurs will take advantage of the absence of order by creating further disorder: masterminding friction between clan and clan, tribe and tribe, ethnic group and ethnic group, as a way of escaping accountability for wrongdoing and mismanagement. Confronted by such entrepreneurs, it is not enough to be Yoruba, Igbo, Edo, Ijaw, Hausa or Fulani. We must open our eyes to the naivety of supporting any position on purely ethnic thrust. As recent events should teach all of us, we have arrived at a juncture in our history when political entrepreneurs, or godfathers, as they are called, have emerged who do not campaign for votes but merely organize computer squads and commando units to steal votes, and seize the air waves in order to ensure that stolen victories are normalized by authoritative agencies. They cannot be stopped by merely organizing ethnic armies and tribal commando groups. There is no Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo, Ijaw, Fulani, or Edo way of dealing with the problem. There is a Nigerian way that goes beyond what any particular ethnic group can handle. Don¹t get me wrong: ethnic armies have their uses in a country where central governments are too easily hijacked by parochial agendas; but our situation calls for creativity of a different kind. We move closer to such creativity by grappling with the circumstances of other unionized groups such as the one based on the Arewa code.
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