Unlike what obtains in organic nations where the state acts mostly in concert with the will and aspirations of political societies or at the very worst in dialectical modification of each other, the Nigerian state has been mostly at odds with the genuine aspirations of the emerging Nigerian society as it struggles with the imperatives of modernity and modernization. The result is a war of all against all which leaves the nation bruised, battered and permanently bleeding. The origin of this endemic crisis of nationhood can be located in the colonial constitution of the modern Nigerian nation and the type of indigenous political elite authorized by the colonial masters to facilitate the project of permanent domination of the global periphery. Colonialism destroyed the extant political structures and the viable states of the constituting nationalities and replaced them with an alien structure so hostile and implacable as to be at violent variance with the genuine aspirations of the indigenous people.
No matter the prefix to delimit its historical actuality, it is obvious that there is not much difference between colonialism in Nigeria and what has come after it. In reality, “post” is often a marker of barely disguised continuity rather than sharply delineated discontinuity. As an English wit has quipped, there is no point in settling the order of precedence between a flea and a louse. They are both bloodsucking vermin. In many African nations where enlightened indigenous elites seized the reins of power after independence, they saw the overriding need for the visionary reconstruction and recreation of the colonial state in order to humanize it and make it more amenable to the genuine needs and aspirations of the people. It is this epic narrative of recreation that has found a few African nations on song for economic development and national integration. This is the difference between Nkrumah’s Ghana, Nyerere’s Tanzania, Senghor’s Senegal, what could have been Augustino Neto’s Angola and a laggard Nigeria. Upon independence in Nigeria, what took place was the Africanization of colonial tyranny and a mere change in the personnel of despotism and extractive predation.
The managers of the interior simply switched colour in the colonial plantation. Yet it will amount to self-slander to insist that the colonial incursion into Nigeria did not throw up some visionary leaders. Beginning from the end of the nineteenth century, a string of intellectual pamphleteers and writers from the Lagos coastal aristocracy subjected colonial rule and its sham pretensions to searing critiques and penetrating putdown. It was a very risky thing to do and it was to draw the ire of the Lugard brothers who responded with vitriol and vehemence. The long list of illustrious anti-colonialists and conscientious objectors stretches from the great lawyer, Sapara-Williams, Otunba Payne, Henshaw, Sir Kitoye Ajasa, through Herbert Macaulay, the wizard of Kirsten Hall, and on to Nnamdi Azikiwe, H.O Davies and their contemporaries. Azikiwe’s stirring anti-colonial rhetoric and polemics of Black emancipation set the tone for the final push against colonization. In retrospect, it can be seen that Obafemi Awolowo’s radically humane project of the rapid emancipation of his people from the jaws of colonial depredations represents a visionary and pragmatic critique of colonization at its most destabilizing.
Unfortunately in the run up to independence as the Lagos coastal elite appear to have lost steam as a result of historic fatigue while Zik became bogged down and embroiled in bitter local politics, the feudal colonial state reasserted its authority and suzerainty with vigour and ferocity. Under the less than watchful eye of bitterly feuding regional politicians, this predatory and patrimonial state transformed into the predatory and patrimonial post-colonial Nigerian state with the war cry of always centralize! It is as if a nation is nothing more than a vast military garrison. It is the repercussions and fallout of this overcentralization and harshly unitarist system which have led us to where we are today. It is an ideal breeding ground for despotism and the garrison politics, not to talk of military irruption which often lead to a forcible homogenization of the nation with predictably disastrous results. No matter the military might or the feudal wiles, it is impossible to homogenize a heterogeneous nation of contending nationalities in mutually incompatible stages of economic, political and spiritual modes of production. It is a measure of this endemic crisis of nationhood that a western observer recently described Nigerian leaders, particularly in their post-military incarnation, as “personalist and patrimonial”. It is a short, pithy and pitiless summation which captures the roiling contradictions of the Nigerian post-colonial state and its hapless political society.
In a telling contribution to the debate, President Mohammadu Buhari was reported to have observed that in Nigeria, strong men destroy institutions. Institutionalized rule because of its impersonal and rational nature, its clause of substitute actors and abstract procedures is the logical enemy of patrimonial rule and its father-figures. Yet in saner climes, these human institutions are the creations of strong men and women with a selflessly visionary imagining of a better, fairer and more orderly society. Building institutions is not a tea party. It is the product of repeated gestures and habits burnt into the human consciousness where they become routinised and accepted norms of human behavior which in turn are emblematic of society over time. When General George Washington declined to become an American presidential monarch, he set the tone and template for political rectitude and the institutionalization of democratic rule in the new nation. Washington had the full weight of history behind him.
Whatever their personal contradictions, America was founded by visionary intellectuals with radical notions of human emancipation and the inalienable right of each person to choose how he would be ruled and by who. Despite the horrors of slavery and the decimation of the native Indian population, Washington would have felt that his ancestors did not escape from the horrors of absolutist rule in the old world only to inaugurate same in the new world. It is this absence of a transcendental idealism and the sheer lack of capacity to envision a free and prosperous new society from the ashes of traditional authoritarian society and colonial predation that has been the bane of the bulk of Nigeria’s post-independence leaders. But you cannot give what you don’t have.
If we must complain about the sluggishness of a stream in midcourse, we must first take a look at the origin. In the absence of a critical pan-Nigerian mass which can galvanize and serve as the nucleus of a radical political emancipation of the nation and pioneer its rapid economic emancipation, and given the obvious incapacity of the political elite to act in pan-national concert, various segments of the emerging Nigerian society have risen in stirring critique of the patrimonial and neo-feudal state. Since independence and as a result of radical disaffection with the state of the colonial union, all the major nationalities have threatened at one time or the other to leave the nation.
Most of the time, this disenchantment with the nation remains at the level of muted murmuring and private cursing. But occasionally, they assume the status of armed critiques which leave the nation roiling in a bloodfest, the most devastating and destructive being the civil war. This is not discounting the Tivi uprising, the Niger Delta insurrection and the ongoing Boko Haram war which has laid waste most of the North East of the nation. The federally engineered scuttling of the Awolowo project also occasioned much bloodshed. Although the Yoruba nationality has never risen in armed confrontation with the Nigerian state, its political rebellion and intellectual critique of the architecture of the nation have twice led to bloody confrontation with the federal might and quality casualty for the ethnic formation.
Yet despite perpetual adversity, Nigeria is slowly changing. The slumberous giant may be rousing. There is an obvious change in the demographic complexion of the nation and a shift of ideological orientation which bode ill for personalist and patrimonial rule. The problem with compulsive thieves is that they never know when they have stolen too much for the owner not to notice. But when devils get to the crossroads, they must also tremble, for it is usually a short ride to perdition. Twice in the last twenty two years, the Nigerian multitude have risen as one to demand momentous change in the structure and system of leadership in the nation. On June 12, 1993, the pan-Nigerian mass voted for MKO Abiola and the termination of despotic military rule.
Although they did not succeed in installing Abiola, the chain of events triggered by the annulment led to the eventual retirement of the military to the barracks. Failing to correctly decode the signal, the military ended up disgracing and humiliating itself. On April 28th 2015, Nigerians rose as one again to vote for change as personified by Mohammadu Buhari and for the termination of inept kleptocratic rule famously exemplified by the last administration. This time, they seem to have succeeded in both objectives, or so it seems. Last week, the regnant rump of the patrimonial cabal struck in the hallowed chambers of the senate in a daylight putsch at implacable variance with the mood of the nation.
For them, the nation can go to blazes as long as they have their way even over the corpse of party and noble principles. Is another “democratic” annulment of the national will on the way? As it happened with the SDP in 1993 and the federally engineered implosion of the Action Group in 1962, the irony of all this is that the victorious party which is at the vanguard of radical transformation is also the weakest link in the radical evaporation of hope and change. With the APC reeling from one crisis or the other ever since, is history about to repeat itself? If the APC implodes, the only possibility in the horizon is radical anarchy. Change should not shortchange a nation.
The widespread condemnation of the senate putsch and of the over-pampered privileges of the National Assembly is a pointer to a looming social combustion. Without a dominant party with clear moral and political integrity through which the turbulent social discontents can be channeled and routed, there is bound to be a direct collision between the streets and the state. It is another word for chaos and anarchy.
The leadership of the APC must put on their thinking cap. Change is possible only if there is a party that drives change. Let those who are fanning the embers of discord and disunity both within and outside the party understand that that they are also in the shortest run organizing their own political funeral. For now and with President Buhari at the helm, this coalition of contraries represents Nigeria’s best hope for orderly change and the principal powerbrokers must find strength, resolve and visionary energy in the countervailing polarities. Otherwise, the party itself will become part of an unfurling narrative.