By Obi Nwakanma
Dear reader, I welcome you to the new year.
The Orbit has been silent in the last few weeks of the past year because Nigeria overwhelms me. It is exhausting to respond to the rapidly shifting environment of events in this country. As anybody capable of reflection and truth recognizes, Nigeria seems almost to have ceased to exist, as we know it. A country exists when its institutions are intact. When they communicate a national spirit. When there is convergence.
When the congruence within the borders of the nation leads towards effective sovereign affirmation. When the relationship between the citizen and the nation is deepened and marked by consent. But Nigeria presents a very complicated debility. For years, those who seized power in Nigeria used Nigeria’s ethnic and religious diversity to divide Nigeria, and drive a wedge of hate, rather than of strategic collaboration between Nigerians. They made Nigerians believe that “Nigeria was a mere geographic expression.”
That Nigerian nationalism was a farce. That the nationalists who fought for Nigerian independence, and who led the nationalist movement, on which colonialism was defeated were the enemies of the progress of Nigeria, because they were “dreamers” who could not recognize the practical truths of our tragic and permanent difference. They were pan-Nigerian, where there is no Nigeria. They taught Nigerians that their country was imposed on them. That Nigeria did not emerge from a common will. That Nigeria was so divided and different, so much indeed, that whatever is done to build a common nation, will end up in utter futility because Nigerians have nothing in common.
Nigeria, to those who promoted the idea of the fixity of our cultural and geographic boundaries, a false teaching in any case, is foreclosed. There is growing dissent therefore about the meaning of nation. Just weeks ago, in her response to Mr. Shettima, Vice President in the APC regime that currently superintends the fragments of this nation, the Yoruba-born British leader of opposition, Kemi Badenoch, made it plain that she is not a Nigerian. She has greater affinity to her ethnic Yoruba identity.
She has pretty little in common with other Nigerian people, especially those Northwards of the Niger, where Boko Haram she says, has festered. Missus Badenoch is of course completely wrong, especially for one married to the Scot, Hamish. She seems to have closed her eyes, and the reality of her own situation in the United Kingdom, in the unfolding ethnic question raised by Nigel Farage and the Reform Party about the meaning of Englishness. There are those who have described her as the female version of Uncle Tom. But she reminds me a bit more of Frances, the character in Sally Rooney’s Conversation With Friends, who describes her body as “garbage,” or Marianne, in Rooney’s other novel, Normal People, who normalizes psychic death.
But even so, Kemi Badenoch expresses a growing sentiment that reflects an increasing attitude across Nigeria, where citizenship has regressed, and ethnocentrism and the virus of tribalism has been instituted as a national program. There are many, many more Kemi Badenoch’s out there, because Nigeria has failed them. They are suffering from a psychic wound. And it is festering.If Ms. Badenoch is the product of a failed past, the current situation in Nigeria is bound to produce worse. Nigeria is now governed by the most tribalist of any tribalist, most narrow-minded, and most incompetent set of leadership in its history. You would think Buhari took that title. Mr.Muhammadu Buhari was indeed the kind of ethnic and religious bigot never seen before at the acme of Nigeria’s national leadership.
Whatever else one says about past leaders of Nigeria, what was unarguable was that they were forced to shed their tribal mantles at the door of the presidential office. The idea of a multi-ethnic Nigeria always contained them, until Buhari, of course, who defied every constitutional guardrail without consequence, because of a compromised Judiciary, and a very complicit National Assembly. He launched his re-entry into power by reigniting the Nigerian civil war with the Igbo in the South East. Buhari launched an attack on a peaceful and prosperous South-East of Nigeria, with the intention of turning it into a social and economic desert, because they posed a problem for him.
They did not support his political vision, which was anchored on a broad program of “Islamization and Fulanization.” Buhari saw the Igbo especially as a bulwark against his very radical political conquest of Nigeria. His vision of a new moral essence of Nigeria was to be by Islam, and the codes of its practices especially embodied by his Fulani people – the Bororo. But Bola Ahmed Tinubu is making Buhari look good. That is a great achievement in itself, that evil can make evil tolerable! Mr. Tinubu is not governing as the president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.
He is not even governing as the “Yoruba president of Nigeria,” because there are many thoughtful Yoruba who are opposed to his project; and a vast category of the Yoruba are not benefitting from his presidency. He is governing from the program of the revanchist faction of the Yoruba in Nigeria. I am very careful and deliberate in making this categorical distinction. There is a different Yoruba: the cosmopolitan, worldly, and liberal Yoruba, who is very pan-Nigerian. Then, of course, there is the nativist Yoruba, who is fearful of difference, and of cultural insemination. For some odd reason, this Yoruba type also has a very mortal fear of “strangers”, especially the Igbo.
It is a situation which may be deeply rooted in historical psychology; in events so deeply ingrained in past national memory, and needs further investigation. The political history of the modern Yoruba has always made two clear tendencies visible among the Yoruba of modern Nigeria: one is the fiercely provincial and nativist Yoruba, whose Yoruba nationalism has always been in conflict with a pan-Nigerian idealism. This half were supporters of the ethnic nationalist ideology originally circulated in Nigeria by Mr. Obafemi Awolowo and the bulk of the now defunct Action Group Party. Primarily, for this category of the Yoruba, and this is about 52% of the Yoruba, give or take, the idea of the multinational state is a burden on their fixed sense of identity.
They are politically, isolationist. Their ideology goes something like this: Yoruba for the Yoruba, otherwise, we end it all. They invent grand animosities. Propagate massive conspiracies. They cut a tree loudly in the forests, and come out to the road to say, “who be that?” This was the faction of the Yoruba that introduced the culture of massive corruption in Nigeria’s public service. They even had a name for it: “Egunje.” It is a story now told onlyin whispers. But as one of Nigeria’s most eminent historians, the now late Professor Jacob Ade-Ajayi publicly noted, the foundations of the massive corruption of Nigeria was laid from 1967, with theexodus of the highly professional Igbo civil servants, who returned to the East to fight a war of secession.
In their absence, and sensing the opportunity to permanently upstage the Igbo, and assume the bureaucratic power the Igbo had occupied at the end of colonialism in Nigeria, key Yoruba figures quickly recruited poorly qualified folks, put them through quick short service trainings at home and abroad, and placed them in positions once occupied by Igbo career civil servants. As Professor Ade-Ajayi noted, things went downhill from there. Prior to this, Nigeria was noted to have inherited the most efficient modern civil service in modern Africa. The Igbo civil servants, when they were at the helm, largely kept corruption at bay.
I would certainly not be accurate, if I were to make a blanket statement about the corruption and incompetence of all Yoruba public officers. It would be patently untrue, because there have been many professional, incorruptible, and competent Yoruba civil servants. But truth is that large scale corruption entered the Nigerian public space from 1967, when the system was corrupted. While the Easterners were busy fighting for their lives, and trying to hold together a nation which had declared secession from Nigeria, the Yoruba, who had the next reserve of technical skills after the Igbo, took over the governance of Nigeria, and scoured the barrel.
While the Igbo were inventing and building indigenous defence systems, and turning every inch of space in the East into workshops, the Yoruba were busy awarding defence and oil contracts, and partying like crazy in Lagos which had become the sleaze capital of the world by 1970. A real kleptocracy had emerged. It was “Ariya unlimited.” Corruption swelled a newly rich Nigeria, drowning in petrodollars. New “board members” emerged from fictitious corporations. Bola Tinubu is a product of this travesty. The party went on until it spined out of control by the 1980s. By the time it came to full accounting, the Yoruba, in full control of the instruments of mass dissemination, created the myth of a powerful North, in order to deflect the real involvement of the triumphalist Yoruba, in the destruction of Nigeria.
Yes, the “powerful North,” on which many unreflective Nigerians have learnt to hang every error of Nigeria, is an invention of the Yoruba mind. It is the process of the “mumufication” of Nigerians. It is the art of deflection. The “North” of Nigeria, which actually ceased to exist politically in 1967, never had the capacity at any rate, to govern Nigeria, without the Yoruba, who very brilliantly let them hold the head of the calf, while they stayed between its legs, milking it dry. Bidding the turn of time. They set the stage for eventual state capture.
These are practitioners of the trickery of Esu, or Legba, whose methods form the national ethos of Yoruba political and cultural action, since Moremi’s successful ploy against the Egwugwu. Bola Tinubu is the product of this ploy. His faction of the Yoruba is now in charge. But to what end? We see the end game already in the longline of beggars lining the streets begging for food, for to create a monarchy, you must turn free people into slaves and bondsmen. Nothing better makes slave of man, than the emptiness of his stomach, crying for food.But it is imperative for a new generation of Nigerians to fight. We must return to that powerful, Zikist vision of a single, multiethnic nation, in which everyone is born free and equal, and deserves, irrespective of our many differences, to be treated fairly and with justice.
Obi Nwakanma is a columnist with Vanguard
