Preamble
Why is Nigeria a tottering underdeveloped country-state even after sixty-two years of supposed independence and notwithstanding its vast production of highly educated manpower in all the facets of learning, knowhow and industry? In other words, why is Nigeria degenerating into a failed state that is characterised with mammoth insecurity, corruption and slide into a state of anomie? Indeed, why has Nigeria been run aground virtually and is now sliding back to the normal state of nature? I think that this has to do with the nature of our politics.
Impact of Severe Inter-Ethnic Face-Offs and the Underlying Constitutional Crisis
It is not only in Nigeria that politics has remained a battle between different ethnic groups each of which aspires to seize the instrument of state power and exclude every other group from influence, patronage and status. Throughout the African continent, it is precisely this problem that has made the state so fragile and unstable. In Nigeria, Somalia, Sudan, Niger, Mauritania, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, the Central African Republic, Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Mozambique, Angola, South Africa, Mali, Chad, Burkina-Faso and Ethiopia, the ethnic struggle for supremacy has ended in civil wars with the attendant massacres and refugee problem, and the disruption of development initiatives and projects.
To put it succinctly, ethnic pluralism is the ogre standing between Africa and development. Until this problem is solved through dialogue, openness, commensurate power sharing and equity, no other problem can be usefully addressed. Peace is a pre-condition for prosperity, and it is only in freedom that people fully mobilize their creative powers. In Nigeria, as in the other African countries, programmes of economic reconstruction will continue to fail until we get the politics of national reconstruction right. In other words, the most important reform Nigeria needs is political. We first need to affect a thorough restructuring of the captive Nigerian state that will in turn reconcile the different Nigerian peoples and hence liberate the suppressed genius and complementary energies of the people for social and economic advancement.
To cap it up, we can say that historically Nigeria’s post-independence constitutional, political and resultant developmental crisis kicked off very early in the day with the manipulations and revisionism that overthrew its better structured 1960 Independence Constitution and replaced it with the so-called 1963 Republican Constitution, and lately the rogue 1999 Constitution – with dire consequences for the country and its peoples. Those individuals who tell you that economic despoliation and declines in the country are responsible for the social and political disruptions, collapses and instability in Nigeria are telling you a big lie.
It is a wrong analysis of the Nigerian condition. The right perception is the other way around; that our bad politics disrupts and destroys our economic and social foundations and inhibits their advance because we are too busy plotting and fighting tribal wars to bother about concentrating our energy and focus on the enhancement of our productivity, socioeconomic wellbeing and growth. And the most consistent and disruptive aspect of these frictions and tensions in Nigeria is located in the incessant waves of jihad foisted from the Far-North, as is witnessed today under the effective Buhari‘caliphate’.
Indeed, Nigeria has since its birthing remained what might be called a modern state that coexists with the ancient Fulani Empire called the Sokoto Caliphate, which has continued to peddle disproportionate influence and power. The coexistence of the Nigerian State with a rival and competing caliphate is like having two captains in one ship! The situation breeds conflict and confusion especially since the two captainsusuallyhold conflicting worldviews or viewpoints in virtually every aspect of statecraft, ideology, developmental strategy or what-have-you. When one wants the ship of state to move in one direction, the other is willing it to move in the opposite direction.
It is confusion redefined! The rivalry between the institutions of the Nigerian modern state and the sultanate therefore makes it impossible for Nigeria to move in any given direction for any appreciable length of time. Thus the Nigerian ship of state is permanently adrift, without course or direction, like a flotsam at sea. Two reasons account for the continued survival of the Fulani Empire, namely; (1) the impact of British Indirect Rule system of administration in Colonial Northern Nigeria and British fraternisation with the Fulani emirs/ sultan; & (2) leadership dichotomies and disunities in the Middle-Belt and Southern Nigeria.
It is easy to see that for as long as the aforementioned status quo persists, Nigeria can never find its bearing. It cannot therefore have any meaningful growth, socially, economically and politically. In fact, the cost of this underhanded push-pull relationship between the two Nigerian centres of power – which seem today to have coalesced in Abuja – is most enormous and biting! Therefore, for Nigeria to advance and develop into a nation with a different outlook or to be reckoned with, we must do away with one of these two systems. It is either we dismantle the Federal Government and let Nigerian ethnicities go back to their separate primordial entities, or we have the caliphate fizzle out like the other West African empires before it and hence have Nigeria function as the secular modern (federal or con-federal) state that it is supposed to be.
There is no middle ground! I repeat, it is either the entire Nigeria ethnicities revertcompletely to their original primordial enclaves and existence or the caliphate is reduced to the status of the other erstwhile Nigerian empires, kingdoms, etc., namely; the empires of Benin, Oyo, Kanem-Bornu, Jukun and the coastal principalities or kingdoms, so that the attempt at building Nigeria into a modern state or democracy can proceed meaningfully, because for as long as the two aforementioned trends and power tussle persist, forget it, Nigeria will not get anywhere! Incidentally,President MuhammaduBuhari appears to have come up with an entirely different idea. And this seems geared towards the booting out of every pretension of Nigeria being a secular modern state and to transform it into a Fulani caliphate or empire – an enclave to be run through brute force and perpetual repression of Nigeria’s absolute majority groupings!
Background to Buhari’s Political Aspirations and the Ruination of National Cohesion
In his book, Path to Nigerian Freedom (1947), Chief ObafemiAwolowo informed us that at a conference of Northern emirs in 1942, a letter written to them by the West African Students Union (WASU) in London came up for discussion. The letter, Chief Awolowo tells us, touched on many problems affecting Nigeria as a whole; and the WASU appealed to the Northern emirs and their peoples for cooperation with leaders and peoples of Southern Nigeria in tackling them in order to ensure peaceful coexistence between the two sections of the country.
To be continued tomorrow
Nwankwo can be reached at [email protected] (+234 0811 819 5950 )
