|
Healing our divided society
Healing our divided society
OKECHUKWU EMEH Jnr
TO
offset such nightmare of self-implosion and disintegration in Nigeria, all hands
should now be on deck for the urgent task of healing our divided society. In
this connection, the present political regime in the country, under President
Olusegun Obasanjo, should step up effort in the unfinished tasks of
nation-building and national integration. This is because these tasks are so
intimately interwoven as to constitute the singular and most ambitious goal of
any political community. To respond firmly to the challenges of nation building
and national integration, the administration must uphold the fundamental
principles and ethos underlying liberal democracy, good governance, true
federalism, justice, equity, fairness and general good. In fact, all these
values and others have the necessary in-built for addressing communal, regional,
political and class concerns and grievances and the attendant acrimonious
conflicts in Nigeria, as well as calming the agitation in some quarters in the
country for secession or sovereign national conference, which is nothing but a
poisoned chalice.
The ability of our national leadership to
wrestle with the principal problems emanating from the negation of the workings
of our political economy would also help to heal our fractured society. This is
essential because communal, state, regional, political and class conflicts are
deeply rooted in the underlying individual human needs and values that together
constitute people’s social identities, particularly in the context of group
affiliations, loyalists and solidarity. Such conflicts are also aroused by the
desire for dignity, recognition and safety, as well as self-expression and
survival itself. Therefore, what these yearnings and aspirations demand for is
turning the tide on adverse effects of economic hardship, inadequate
distribution of resources, uneven development, hunger, poverty, unemployment,
deprivation, corruption, mismanagement and sense of rising frustration - which
have all conspired to heat the furnace of tensions, conflicts, crime, and
violence in our body polity.
Given the ruinous effects of divisions and
posturing among members of our political class on the prospects of attaining
democratic community and corporate existence in the country, they are enjoined
to bury their hatchets and heal their rifts. They should jettison their definite
penchant for personal and sectional interests, which have cost them credibility
and prestige. Like their counterparts in advanced democracies like the United
States and Britain, our political class should play the noble role of a guardian
class whose members, regardless of their party affiliations and ideological
leanings, are renowned for their firm commitment to defending democracy,
political stability, social cohesion and public interest at all cost. Members of
our political class should also imbibe the virtues of tolerance, sportsmanship,
statesmanship, forbearance, reconciliation and positive - sum-game in politics.
They should see politics not as a means of feathering their own nests (prebendal
politics), but as an opportunity for reaching out to the populace and satisfying
their hopes and aspirations.
For communal groups in the country, the
choice today is not between divisive conflicts and peaceful co-existence but
peaceful co-existence or non-existence. This is imperative given that one of the
grievous harms caused by persistent and protracted strife in a plural national
society is the loss of will and capacity to forgive and reconcile, as could be
gleaned from the cataclysmic conflicts in the Middle East (between Israelis and
Palestinians) and Africa’s Great Lakes region (in Rwanda, Burundi and
Congo-Kinshasa). To avert this fatalistic scenario in Nigeria, which could wreck
cohesion within our state institutions, our communal groups should eschew mutual
distrust and suspicion and the attendant prejudice and name-calling that sow the
seeds of discord, hatred and conflicts among them. In fact, for a wholesome
society in the country today, our communal groups need to be awoken to a new
spirit of mutual love, tolerance, forbearance, reconciliation and spiritual
sharing as God’s own children. They should shun and abhor primordial attachments
of ethnic chauvinism and religious bigotry and subordinate these atavistic urges
to the necessity of building a strong and stable nation-state in Nigeria. This
is important because it has become apparent that communal allegiances could
compete with national state for loyalty, challenge it for power and legitimacy
and, ultimately, weaken its authority.
There is no question that various conflict
situations that are nudging to tear the country asunder could be managed and
resolved within the context of democracy, which, apart from its elevating
virtues of popular participation and good governance, connotes the freedom to
discharge in order to agree. What is more, as Reinhold Niebuhr would assert,
"Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man’s inclination to
injustice makes democracy necessary."
Civil society groups and non-governmental
organisations in Nigeria cold play a crucial part in helping to heal our
fractured society. Worthy of note, in this regard, are bodies that are tilted at
peace building and conflict resolution . These bodies are expected to be more
innovative by transforming communal, regional, political and class conflicts in
the country into what Jay Rothman, in Resolving identity - Based Conflicts in
Nations, Organizations and Communities (1997), calls "an opportunity for
growth, co-operation and development waiting to be fulfilled."
For the mass media in Nigeria, they could
be instrumental in removing the cancer of social divisions in the country
through their informative, educative and awareness functions. On this account,
they are obligated to emphasize on the ties that bind in the federation, rather
than factors that divide. The mass media are also expected not to thrive on
conflicts by promoting sectarianism, but should help in conflict resolution
through even-handed reporting and calls for restraint, moderation, forbearance
and reconciliation in the land.
Considering that Nigeria of today has, in
a way, become a big graveyard of victims of ethnic, religious, regional,
political and class conflicts, the imperious necessity of plastering over all
our social cracks and divisions cannot be underscored. It is hoped, therefore,
that all and sundry in the country would be moved to unite with strong will and
dogged determination to make frequent tension, conflicts and instability the
regrettable legacies of our past. For sure, we have arrived at a decisive moment
of rebuilding from the ruins of our tragic divisions. All Nigerian compatriots
should coalesce and be poised for this daunting task of pulling our polity out
of harm’s way of divisions, to enable it move on in peace, progress and
development. Thus, what we need now in our fatherland is a triumph of the human
spirit over all forms of hatred, rancour, antagonism and destructive conflict
and the injustice, oppression, deprivation, inequity, exploitation, morose envy
and man’s inhumanity to man that prompt them.
•Concluded
•Emeh, author of a forthcoming book, IN SEARCH OF A VIABLE
NIGERIA, writes from Wuse, Abuja.
|
