Daily Independent Online.
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Monday,July 19, 2004.
Nigeria: The unfinished business
By Ndubuisi Kalu
Ndigbo have a proverb, which says that only those who have
not chewed water fail to realize that water has bones. Just keep chewing your
saliva for now, so that at the conclusion of this lecture, you can determine
the veracity of the proverb. Unless you have previously chewed water!
“The National Association of Seadogs (NAS) started in
1952." So said the organizing committee of this lecture. Significantly,
that was 52 years ago! Wole Soyinka, Professor Emeritus, Nobel Laureate, a
distinguished son of the Yoruba nation and, thus, a citizen of Nigeria, was
then 18 years old. I was a mere nine year old. The founder and spiritual leader
of the Pyrates Confraternity (please note that Pyrates is spelt with a
“Y", not an “I”) is Professor Wole Soyinka. In a nutshell,
the association’s goal is “a just and egalitarian
society.” Wole Soyinka has
been committed to the objective of a just and egalitarian society for the past
52 years. Ladies and gentlemen, even if I am to halt this lecture at this
point, may I ask that you please give our dear Nobel Laureate a rounded,
standing ovation.
Why the organizing committee of this lecture chose me as the
lecturer is unknown to me, notwithstanding the encomiums poured on me in their
letter of invitation. Therefore, if I disappoint in my presentation, the blame
is theirs, not mine. I should wholeheartedly join you in blaming them. If,
however, I meet your expectations, it will only lend credence to the saying
that the young and the younger shall grow. I thank the organizing committee for
inviting me.
This is Wole Soyinka, speaking at the Colin Powell Centre of
the City University of New York on March 23-24, 2000:
“We recognize only the unity of peoples across any and
every merely administrative divide, the indissoluble unity of a nation's
humanity with opportunity, resources, responsibility and fulfillment, with
education and housing, a unity in freedom of association and freedom of
religious worship, with freedom to believe or not to believe, unity with
employment and health, with access to justice under the law, with care and
pension in old age and even the right to a continued productive existence at
the twilight of existence. Any other recourse to the drumbeat of unity is
shopworn rhetoric.” Soyinka's lecture was titled: Preventing the
Breakdown of Democracy in Nigeria: Strategies for a Living Constitution.
I have long come to the disposition that there is not much
point discussing Nigeria's problems. Almost everything, every aspect...indeed,
not almost but all aspects of the country is in error. These have been vastly
discussed again and again. Is it the economy? Is it national politics? Is it
the infrastructure? Is it the plague of corruption? Are we talking of the
inequities of marginalization? Or those of religious fanaticism? Is our
searchlight beamed on the exploitation inherent in the national superstructure?
Any, which way we examine Nigeria, there are fault lines staring us in the
face, dangerous fault lines that must be breached for the country to have a
chance to move forward in genuine peace, true unity and generally beneficial
progress.
The objective of the correcting of the fault lines in the
structure of Nigeria is the reason I am before you today, to present my
thoughts and suggestions.
The Vehicle called Nigeria.
I am Igbo. Recently someone asked me if there was any part
of the Igbo country where horses and horse riding were parts of the nature and
the culture. The answer is No. But, there are swathes of this country where the
horse and its rider are as natural as the rising and setting of the sun. The
reason I make this point is that Nigeria is a country of different peoples. In
not moving the Nigerian vehicle along routes that could ensure the amity of its
different peoples, we have made avoidable mistakes that are at the roots of the
country's lingering problems. We must bear in mind that, unless the noble
objectives of a journey, any journey, are achieved, all the labour deployed
into such a journey are, at any stage, simply hanging in the balance, if not
altogether lost.
The National Democratic Coalition (NADECO) and other
pro-democracy forces went a long way on the journey towards making our various
peoples have pride in the Nigerian association and enterprise. Milestones were
attained that included the present return to civilian rule and, even more
importantly, the institution in the psyche of a majority of Nigerians the
awareness of the inviolate and inescapable necessity for justice and equity.
Only someone foolish will fail to realize that, no matter
the time spent on traveling on a wrong road and the distance covered on this
wrong rood, the only remedy is to turn away from the wrong rood. Otherwise the
intended destination will never be attained. Nigeria has for far too long - since
the 1960s, the period immediately after Independence - been proceeding
heedlessly on the wrong road, the road antithetical to nation building. Even in
1914, what Nigeria achieved" was only amalgamation, not unification or
unitarism. At Independence it became a federation, not a unitary dispensation.
We (all our peoples), therefore, had at the Center a Federation with:
• Regional Constitutions (from which, in actual fact,
was derived:
• A Federal Constitution. A Parliamentary System of
Government.
• A Center (Federal Government) that was dependent
upon (not dictating to) the then composing units of three Regions and later
four.
• A Distributable Pool for Revenue, with emphasis on
derivation.
• Civil Governance.
With the incursion of the military into politics in 1966,
Nigeria got sucked into the vortex of unitarism, a malevolent prescription that
has, over the years, heightened in intensity. Since then we have had in various
shapes, unitary constitutions in which:
• The Center (Federal Government) dictates to the
composing units (States).
• Revenue Accumulation at the Center, with little or
no regard to Derivation.
• Governance by Military Cliques (with or including
command tools" and even surrogate and puppets).
In effect, the only thing that has changed with the coming
of present dispensation, the Fourth Republic, is the replacement of military
uniforms with civilian clothes. It is necessary to recall that the then Regions
aggregated the different peoples within their areas. It is also imperative, in
expatiation, to state that return to civil rule is not a full turn away from
traveling the wrong road. After all, the hood does not make the monk. I hold
that for Nigeria to remain sustained as a country, and for it to become
prosperous, it has to revert to the status of a true Federation an entity
composed of federating units. This was and remains what NADECO and
pro-democracy groups always stood for. The only modification today is that,
instead of the federating units being composed of regions or states, they now
have to be made up of the different peoples and different nationalities that
make up the entity known as and called Nigeria, with each composing unit
consenting to where it is situated in the scheme of composition. That is the
way to turn back from the wrong road and begin the valuable journey of moving
forward on the right road.
It is obvious that all of Nigeria's problems stem from our
non-return to the right road. These problems have led to the erosion of
patriotism, and includes corruption (whose greatest impetus are Unitarism and
Resource Accumulation at the center), the energy dissipation of
Executive-Legislative contention, economic rigmarole, policy instability,
real-terms retrogression, societal hopelessness, violence in varying degrees,
crime multiplication, insecurity, general lawlessness, infrastructural
degradation, etc. The hard, inescapable fact is that, unless Nigeria returns to
the right road, the road on which it traveled at Independence, with
modifications to exchange Regions for peoples in generally agreed zones,
national problems will compound and complicate with the unfortunate eventuality
of the countries demise.
NADECO's
efforts and sacrifice, as an organization of patriotic Nigerians, would have
been wasted when (not if things come to a disastrous head as a result of the
country not returning to the right road. Let it not be so; it must not be so.
NADECO, pro-democracy groups, and patriotic individuals have an unfinished
business for a better, equitable and just Nigeria. We must advance this
national business to its finish. Not a few of our own comrades in this noble
endeavor have fallen to fatigue, to temptation, to deception, to inertia, to
bewilderment, to economic and existential pressures of bread and butter, even
to misadventure and death. More than compensating, nonetheless, is that many
more of our countrymen and women from all walks of life, from all corners of
the country, and from all persuasions now see reason in our endeavor, and now
recognize that: THINGS JUST CANNOT CONTINUE LIKE THIS.
Sooner or later, The Gambia would take the chair of ECOWAS.
The country's population of 1.4 million is less than Ajegunle's in Lagos State.
Nigeria does not lord it over The Gambia because it has a much larger
population. Nor do the natural and human resources of The Gambia belong to the ECOWAS Secretariat.
Nigeria has the same single vote whether at the UN, in ECOWAS as does The
Gambia, Gabon (population: 1.233 million), Equatorial Guinea (498 Thousand),
Austria (8.17 million), Belgium (10.275 million), Australia (19.5 million), New
Zealand (3.9 Million), Canada (31.9 million), USA (280.5 million), Kuwait (2.1
million), Iraq (24 million), Israel (6 million), UK (59.7 million), Cape Verde
(409,000).
Historically and empirically, no country that is
multinational (made up of different peoples), multilingual (peoples of
different languages) and multicultural survives, let alone progresses, as it
should, unless the Center is federal - both in the functions assigned to the
Centre and in the Center's performance of those functions.
The difference between the German, the English and the
French tribes (Franz, Francis, Francois) is by far less than that between the
Igbo and, say, the Yoruba. If being big is just what it takes, then apologies
should be rendered to the Ottomans, to Napoleon, to Hitler, and even to
Britannia (by Nigeria for playing a part in getting independence from the
British Empire). And yet we now have European Union (EU). That is unity under
agreed terms, with the 'federating' units retaining their local autonomy. That
is what also applies with the memberships of the Commonwealth and ECOWAS.
The wellspring of corruption in this country is precisely
the corruption that stems from what should and must be 'federal' Centre but is
de facto 'unitary' Center. View it as you like; carry out as much analyses as
you please. You will come to the conclusion that this is the source of
Nigeria's multiplying corruption; the source of all, repeat, all our troubles.
So long as it remains a unitarized Center, so long shall we continue facing
forward and moving backwards. Some would say that the problem is leadership;
but it is a verifiable and veritable fact that not even a government of angels
can run Nigeria properly when its structure is faulty in terms of a unitarized
Centre.
Let us take a simple example. Take a neighborhood of houses
that share walls, neighborhood roads, and even a market. Every landlord and
tenant in this neighborhood has all the rights of looking after his household,
his property, his security, and his self-defense. Now, the landlords/tenants
meet (or are forced colonialism - to meet) and form a Neighborhood Committee.
In doing so, they individually decide to assign (cede) some of their rights to
the Neighborhood Committee (NC). In the area of security, they agree that the
Neighborhood Committee should build barriers (against incessant armed robbery);
they organize for central clearance of refuse; they attempt to master the
nuisance of historical power and water outages, they raise security guards,
patrol dogs, etc, and all for the common good of the neighborhood.
Unfortunately, and by systemic attrition or arrogation, by
acts of omission or commission, all contrived by greed and selfishness, the
Neighborhood Committee becomes the Overlord. It now decides that all rents and
dues (over and above what the landlords and tenants had previously agreed for
the performance of the only functions that they had given (ceded, mutually
authorized) must be paid to the Neighborhood Community. The Neighborhood
Community arrogates to itself, virtually all the rights of the landlords and
tenants. Only the Neighborhood Committee can now repair burst pipes in a house,
or blown-off roofs. Closing of doors and windows in a house can now take place
only with the written permission of the Neighborhood Committee, and for which a
license must be obtained and a huge fee paid. The Neighborhood Committee
becomes accountable to nobody. In fact, it becomes an act of treason,
insubordination, and a disturbance of the peace, a criminal conduct for any
landlord or tenant to ask for accounts, or question the power accumulation by
the Neighborhood Committee. The Chairman of the Neighborhood Committee becomes
a demigod. Offices are opened; so also cells and neighborhood prisons. Sons and
daughters of some landlords and tenants get appointed Neighborhood Committee
Advisers - with a view to chopping a bit, and hence stifling any protests from
their parents. In particular instance, and for a mind-boggling long period, the
security guards ('maigadi') of the Neighborhood Committee take over the supreme
control of the Neighborhood Committee and the Neighborhood!
Consequently, it becomes the desire of everybody to end up
as the almighty Neighborhood Committee's Chairman, and to belong to the
Neighborhood Committee; some for altruistic reasons so as to set things right,
others from a desire to be the ones wielding the big stick and despoiling the
commonweal. In the meantime, and heading so for all time, the neighborhood,
including the areas occupied by members of the Neighborhood Committee,
deteriorates and gets dilapidated - not only in infrastructure but more
ominously in the degradation of human values and human development. The
landlords and tenants are worried and harried. Of course, something is bound to
give way - someday, somehow. The Republic of the disillusioned expands by the
day”. [Soyinka on: A Quest
for Dignity, Apr 28,2004].
On the (Sovereign) National Conference (NC), many have
tended to make a mountain not just out of molehill, but also out of a no -
hill"! The NC is vital and necessary, not to invent or reinvent the wheel,
but to return to the only way (federalism) that could allow Nigeria to continue
to exist as a country; the only way it can have real peace and make genuine
progress; the only way that the peoples will get back a sense of belonging
which leads to patriotism; the only way to revive the soul and spirit of
Nigeria. Hear Professor Wole Soyinka:
“It is the destiny of the whole, not of a part that is up for
negotiation… Above all however, let no one deny this inalienable right of
a people, a right of any people, at any moment, under any circumstances, to
embark upon the quest of coming into their own self-defining, self-consultive history”.
[March 23-24,2000].
