Mamora renders account to constituency
Tuesday, June 29, 2004.
Ravaging as managing: Okonjo-Iweala,
IMF/Bank and reform in Nigeria (2)
Of course, the fact that Obasanjo stands no chance of making
history in a transformative sense is a matter for national and regional
regrets. Regionally, we (in West Africa) have lost a golden opportunity to
dilute the southern African monopoly of the continent's club of men of
undeniable historical stature since Nkrumah left the scene. For besides Mandela,
the two other African men of history in the next few years would be no more
than Thabo Mbeki and Robert Mugabe, all of them southern Africans. Although
Mbeki is standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Obasanjo marketing the illusion
called NEPAD, the objective variables, such as intellectual grounding,
ideological sophistication, a coherent and experienced political organisation,
and the international nature of South African society which will bring this
about are there irrespective of what we may feel.
Nationally, it has posed a survival and security challenge
for Nigeria at this moment. For as the UN and other international bodies have
noted, the violent ethnic conflicts, genocides, massive refugee and
humanitarian crises, transnational arms movements and criminality, etc that
today constitute a lot of the threats to peace and security are rooted in the
kind of poverty, food insecurity, mass misery and ordeal which the IMF and the
World Bank are promoting through President Obasanjo's leadership and regime. The
pure structural violence therefrom produces the zero-sum psychodynamic and
political orientation that makes negotiated accommodation impossible in Nigeria
today. This is because people are tense and aggressive. People are also dying
from both direct and collateral consequences of the reform. It is in this sense
that the denial last week in Abuja by US Under Secretary for Economic, Business
and Agriculture, Mr. Alan Larson, that conflicts in Africa were being sponsored
by developed countries was not necessary.
But the other question is how come a nationalistic and
combustible ever lucky Obasanjo lost the verve for any type of battles for
concessions from the IMF/World Bank and their G-8 lords? After all, he had said
in 2001 that the development models designed by the Bretton Woods institutions
for Africa have not achieved the desired results but were in fact causing so
much pains and upheavals that their local advocates have to be branded as
foreign lackeys. A confrontation with the IMF can be a costly heroism but not
the sort that any Nigerian President for that matter cannot contemplate and
prosecute. Could the President have truly bought the joke that Nigerians do not
come out to die for their leaders and that such heroism is not worth it? Or
could he have come to believe that ''they'' can bomb him if he were to prove
stubborn over the issue of allowing or not allowing market economy?
Meanwhile the market strategy is surely not working and we
are fast on the lane to social anarchy. And this is so basically because the
“main role of the state has been taken over by IMF country missions,
project overseers, economists in the budget units of finance ministries,
experts placed in reserve banks, privatization agencies, etc dictating
strategic direction for economic development- how much should fuel sell, how
many people should go to university, how many people be allowed to afford
access to health care, how many people should be employed or not and so on. The
very tight agenda supervision of this reform is such that these crucial
decisions over our future are not subjects of even the most cosmetic of
parliamentary or national debate whereas almost every 'mundane’ issue is
a subject of referendum in the home country of our new colonisers.
But the intriguing dimension is why IMF/World Bank would be
superintending the Somalianisation of Nigeria on behalf of their patrons? For
Nigeria of today is a vast populace of energetic and determined people who are,
however, of no use to imperialism in a capitalist sense. This is because they
are over-burdened by the constraints of post-colonial and especially financial
strangulation by a handful of advanced countries through indebtedness and debt
service servitude, etc. from which their liberation cannot be in the kind of cruel
jokes and reckless economic gospel the IMF/World Bank are preaching. Wouldn't a
comprehensive state intervention for economic reconstruction as has been done
to all destitute economies throughout human history create a more dynamic
market eventually? A continuation of present pressures for liberalisation on
Nigeria by the IMF/World Bank looks more like last minute clean-up of the
country before it dissolves into anomie.
There is no doubt about it that we are living in very
dangerous times unique to Nigeria. A state of emergency in Plateau State
consequent upon the violent and horrifying inter-group violence in Plateau and
Kano states is one manifestation of this. The danger in the Plateau and Kano
violence has been succinctly summarised by the writer who analysed that the
only difference between those and Rwanda is that while Rwanda took 99 days,
these two took ONLY four days each. Otherwise, the structure of intention
behind each of the violence as well as the level of bestiality, and the ordeal
and anguish left in the trail of each are very similar. The fact that the
eruptions were not detected nor skillfully managed is too significant a
commentary on the security health of the nation in the context of a number of
things taking place simultaneously.
One of these is the rupture in ruling class consensus in
Nigeria as far as the Obasanjo presidency goes. Their verdict of a President
afflicting the society with crudity and incompetence is hanging out for all to
see from the blunt testimonies of the big players in Nigeria's political
Wimbledon, such as Chief Sunday Awoniyi, Odumegwu Ojukwu. Muhammadu Buhari,
T.Y.Danjuma, Abubakar Umar, Okogie, the NLC, Osundare, among others, drawing
attention to our fast ride to another authoritarian breakdown on account of that.
This overwhelming agreement among members of his own class
that we are in the grip of a President they believe to be lacking in the
required epistemic authority, moral forte and political skills (especially of
consensus-building and subtlety in the management of human affairs) has the
potential of steeling a naturally combative Obasanjo into isolation and further
vehemence. The implications of this for national security must be obvious to
any observer of trends in the emergence of dictatorships particularly in the
light of existing social frustrations with consequences of Obasanjo' stalinism-
the ideology of imposing 'severe hardships and huge human sacrifices on a
generation in the interests of building some future utopia'. Cut off from
members of his own class and very unpopular with the masses, Obasanjo can be
truly prone to crisis in spite of his famed nationalism. Although, the Nigerian
ruling class has a history of innovative management of power and federalism in
comparative African context, the present rupture is still frightening because
in a period of badly managed reform as in Nigeria now, things can too quickly
get out of hands even for a smart governing elite.
A second consideration is an international order that has no
qualms in breaking up a behemoth like the old USSR and may, in the thinking of
some analysts, be contemplating on how to bring other remaining behemoths such
as China, India, Nigeria etc to their knees so that there would be no
territorial and demographic challengers to the emergent hegemonists in the
order. While Asian nationalism and level of industrialisation would make India
and China hard nuts to crack via the manipulation of ethnic differences used to
scatter east European Stalinist societies, Nigeria is vulnerable on both
counts. The reality of the excessively ethnic character of Nigerian politics
and the considerable impoverishment occasioned by the Structural Adjustment
Programme are two strategic threats to national security from the point of view
of foreign interests determined to rubbish Nigeria if they were to convince
themselves that such is better for imperialist (oil) interests now. General
Buhari may thus be right when he said that Nigeria could become a Somalia (See THE SUN,
February 7, 2004) Add Buhari's fears to Balarabe Musa's hypothesis that,
although Obasanjo has been exposed as incompetent, he would not give up power
regardless of the consequences on himself and the country. Subsequently, the
focus of opposition attacks has been on the Obasanjo persona in the explanation
of the current confusion at the grave risk of repeating the error of 1993 when
the struggle against authoritarianism was focused on the IRB persona as the
leading contradiction, thereby paving the way for the emergence of another
dictator',
There is no doubt that some strategists of opposition and
other writers appreciate this problematic. A recent interview by Alhaji
Abdulkadir Balarabe Musa (See INSIDER WEEKLY, February 16, 2004) and
another recent article by the usually informed Rufai Ibrahim (See THE SUN,
February 13, 2004,p.7) are instructive in this regard. They are an improvement
on the OBJ-is- the- problem paradigm precisely because they are locating the
problem in its social origin thereby transcending the subjectivity of many
others.
There are, of course, quite a number of things to quarrel
with in Comrade Rufai's essay. For example, the dictatorship indicators he
thought the power elite ignored in 1999 when choosing Obasanjo is, to my mind,
beside the point. At the time that candidate Obasanjo started manifesting
these, there was no way the Obasanjo Presidency could be stopped anymore save
through a pre-emptive coup or an external invasion. He was the ruling class
candidate, howeveryou
conceptualise ruling class in our context. He satisfied the major shareholders
of the Nigerian enterprise—from western Nigerian sentiments about power
then to the western World (NATO/EU), from the military oligarchy (which had
become estranged from the practice of influencing power from behind the scenes
to that of directly exercising it themselves) to the northern Nigerian elite
and even the liberal radicals beholden to Obasanjo' fleeting anti-imperialism
in foreign policy in the late 1980s.
But beyond this, it must be known to an immensely connected
person like Comrade Rufai that the announcement of Atiku Abubakar as
Vice-Presidential candidate was delayed for several hours because some party
mandarins were still debating with Obasanjo in favour of Abubakar Rimi. Which
is to say that the way candidate Obasanjo handled selection of VP or his offer
of Presidency of the yet-to-be born Senate at that time to Dr. Alex Ekwueme are
still not the conclusive kind of evidence needed to assert that the signs were
there even then against making president of the former prisoner .The point
which has been so well made by Comrade Balarabe Musa in the interview under
reference is the automatic and static assumption about Obasanjo regarding
patriotism that the ruling class had. It was this assumption connected with the
pressure for a politically correct choice in the post June 12 scenario that
combined to produce Obasanjo. The pain today especially among the more advanced
elements of the ruling class is not that they ignored those signs cited by
Rufai but that they never examined the larger context in which individuals
could be functionally patriotic or patriotically dysfunctional especially the
foreign interest dimension of political power in Nigeria.
Certainly, the haste in the transition and the keenness of
the superintending international democratic do-gooders to produce results
clearly, from the benefit of hindsight, left many questions unasked about
social targets of democratisation. There was simply too much of Chicago bulls
in the transition menu that, by the time Obasanjo arrived on the scene, he had
been sufficiently re- educated to be able to assert within the first week of
return to powers in 1999 that "government shall not seek to do that which
experience has proved it is incompetent to handle". He was voting for
privatization, the same thing he had criticised and sought to be educated on at
the PDP seminar held shortly before his inauguration. Was it possible for an
African adult of Obasanjo's critical life experiences and exposure to be
'educated' and transformed within so short a time? It was a terrible certainty which
I couldn't overcome for a long time until a labour leader told me that I was
overstretching idealism by thinking too highly of a President who never had the
benefits of central committee membership of any serious political tendency in
the country as to appreciate the dangers of self-repudiation he was embarking
on by his dramatic somersault from statism to the confusion called market
economy in a pre-industrial economy like Nigeria. Confronted with the reality
of an Obasanjo implementing the market strategy, I had to write in my editorial
comments in PLYING THE FOREIGN PITCH-the Media Portrait of the immediate past
Foreign Affairs Minister I was editing in my capacity as the Media Assistant
that ...if the market strategy works fine eventually, the President and his
regime would have transcended the limitations of the 'lumpen bourgeoisie' and
the question of Olusegun Obasanjo as a historical personality would have been
settled in spite of current objections and reservations about ideology of
foreign policy now. If otherwise, the consequences would accord with Claude
Ake's prophecy that for Africa, it is either socialism or social anarchy as we
are witnessing in Liberia, Sierra-Leone, Sudan, Somalia, etc.
It is very difficult to suspect President Obasanjo's
nationalism but the bits just do not tie up at all about his ultimate plan for
Nigeria. In spite of personal admiration for Obasanjo's informality, leaders
who want to throw society into chaos should be warned. Because another
authoritarian breakdown is clearly starring us in the face and there is urgent
need to prevent this. Let nobody tell us that anarchy cannot happen here
because anarchy has become too regular since the mid 1980s, courtesy of all
sorts of conflict evangelists, including the people in power. And there would
be many more Plateau/Kano type conflicts, each with its own reprisal
complications given the existing, pronounced intra-class and governmental
incoherence. Nigeria is NOT one of the countries that should be allowed to
collapse because the human suffering it would entail would be beyond
contemplation in its horror and mass misery.
Concluded
• Onoja, a conflict management researcher, writes in
from Abuja.
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