DIALOGUE WITH NIGERIA BY AKIN OSUNTOKUN

First the good news, there is an often ignored critical dimension to debates on the political history of Nigeria and on which Nigeria can justifiably take pride. The default preference of (International) Western scholarship is the evasion of any evidence that runs counter to their narrative of the unrelieved incapacity of Africa in general and Nigeria in particular for exemplary political leadership.(The last on which local and foreign scholars now swear is ‘Nigeria and Prebendal politics by Richard Joseph)

Before I go to my inference, I will ask the question of how any honest observer of Nigerian politics will characterise the decade running from the 1950s to the early in terms of political leadership in Nigeria? . When I asked this question of the one and only Premier of the Northern region, Sir Ahmadu Bello from AI, this was the response I got:

“The creation of the civil service during the period of Ahmadu Bello is one of his major achievements. He regarded the Northern civil service as a meritocracy, which should be above petty political quarrels, and certainly above corruption. The civil service had a rigorous code of ethics, and came to serve as a counterbalance to both politicians and traditional leaders. The trans-ethnic nature of the civil service provided the backbone for Northern Regionalism and for northern development efforts, which were based on the principle of equal distribution of opportunities”

When I asked the same question of the Eastern region from AI as well, I was referred to the testimony of Dr Sam Amadi. It goes as follows: “The path to this future goes through the past. We need to go back to the 1960s when Eastern Nigeria was the fastest growing economy in the world, outperforming the likes of Singapore, Bangladesh, and Taiwan. There was something different about that burst of entrepreneurial energy by the government of Eastern Nigeria under Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe and M.I. Okpara and Nnamdi Azikiwe and a clique of well-educated technocrats”. I have no reason not to concur with this testimony

Representative of Northern opinion leadership, a group of ten opinion and intellectual leaders the ‘North’(Attahiru Jega, et all) issued a press release recently “expressing our alarm at the increasing threats to the Nigerian Nation, its democratic order and the rule of law’. The most germane observation was:

“Our assessment of the state of the Nation reveals that Nigeria stands at a dangerous crossroads where rising insecurity, an alarming level of electoral manipulation by government, and the weakening of democratic institutions are converging into a national crisis that threatens the country’s survival. The legislative branch has been placed under near total control of the executive branch. The judiciary appears to have lost both its independence and its integrity. There are no checks on the powers of the executive who now govern as they please without accountability or respect for the people’s concerns. Institutions have been compromised, weakened, and subordinated to the interests of the executive arm of government”.

Fair enough, but how do you remedy this anomaly without constitutional reforms that target the fountain of this deviant behaviour i.e. hypercentralizatio of powers at Abuja?. The fact that this omission is deliberate is discernible from their studied silence on the most prescriptive contemporary security measure in Nigeria today, namely the recommendation of state police whose introduction unavoidably entails constitutional reform. When the issue of decentralisation and devolution of powers is mooted, the stock response is leadership is the problem, not the constitution. But then how do you ensure the emergence of good leadership-when the factors that determine the outcome of elections in Nigeria are hardly noble.

The realistic alternatives to President Bola Ahmed Tinubu in the near future are Atiku Abubakar and to a lesser extent, Peter Obi. Right away and even before the election, the former spectacularly fails the test of moral leadership, a Northern hegemonic defiance of presidential power rotation between the North and the South, not to mention other conspicuous baggage. And If, by some quirk of fate, the latter emerges the President, would he not have to grapple with the challenge of status-quo compromised National Assembly and Judiciary? How does he, for instance, get his budget passed in the face of respondents, many of whom expended billions to get a seat in the Senate and House of Representatives? As I keep saying, this poses the problem Nigeria faces as a systemic crisis requiring a wholesale constitutional overhaul of the polity.

If, at all, the Yoruba are keeping quiet and all the criminalisation of Tinubu is valid then it is a sad commentary on the capacity of Nigeria to endure as a nation. You can force a horse to the river, you cannot force it to drink. It has to do with the fact that there is a difference between a Yoruba Presidential aspirant and a sitting President of Yoruba extraction. Without the certainty of the restructuring of power relations in the constitution and given the context of Nigeria’s realpolitik, it is a tough call to make.

The Igbo had been locked in separatist isolation until the emergence of Peter Obi and I have flagged this emergence as a desirable newfound moment of Nigerian political development. But here is a caution.The inevitable sugar high enthusiasm for Obi must not be allowed to fade into the perception of incipient regional chauvinism.There is a lesson to learn from history. The ‘first love’ instinct of the North is a bromance with the South West and the logic is predicated on the amalgamation of Nigeria and the concept of overlapping cleavages of tribe and religion. We do not need a repeat enactmentant of transferred aggression.

I once randomly came across a quiz that asked the question of what factor mostly binds communal relations, the answer was religion, more so in Islam where the concept of Umaa (community of Islamic faith) transcends any other consideration. It is far more convenient for the North to gang up with the South West against the South East. This is the enduring lesson from the civil war and the trap was set by the British colonialists. This follows from what was bequeathed to us by the colonial begotten Independence constitution, that the federal government would require a gang up of two against one.

The other is the population census contrivance which gives the North the choice of first refusal in political decisive situations. Dr Taslim Olawale Elias made the point on the floor of the Nigerian house of representatives in 1962-”I think I would remind you that the only region, perhaps in practice not in theory, it may be difficult for the house to secure a two thirds majority to deal with is the Northern region” (reference p 39 in Awolowo ‘travails of democracy’. In my capacity as the campaign manager of the Peter Obi presidential campaign, I once tried to woo a foremost theocrat from the North to Obi’s political platform. He retorted with the exclamation, Haram!

The trap I mentioned earlier finally sprung in 1962. The irony of history is that it snapped from the omission and commision of arguably the most intellectually productive commentator on the politics of Nigeria namely Obafemi Awolowo. The bait was his decision to exit his most utilitarian position as Premier of the Western region for an awkward ambition to become the Prime Minister of Nigeria. Because it takes two to tango, we have to ask the question, was Nigeria ready and structurally designed to become amenable to his desire to replicate his transformational leadership at the national level?

The answer of course is no. Despite Ahmadu Bello’s unparalleled leadership impact on the Northern region, the truth is that the region was potentially unresponsive to the utility of Awolowo’s vision. The irony again is that this observation can be extrapolated from his scholarship on the uniqueness of Nigeria. It would have taken nothing short of a revolution for the ‘North’to accept the offer of the modernisation model of the Western region. Recall that the first successful negotiation between Frederick Lugard and the Sokoto caliphate was precisely the premise that the North will be insulated against the replication of the Western modernisation model of the South.

Further evidence transpired at the inauguration of Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe as Governor General of Nigeria in 1960.

“At the ceremony, the Prime minister, Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa unleashed a derisive attack on me “He referred to me as ‘someone who called himself Leader of Opposition’, and proceeded to pour scorn on my role. I gave an impromptu speech, as he did, and do not now recall the exact words I used”.

“I said that I did not call myself the Leader of the Opposition. It was the electorate of Nigeria who decided the place I then occupied in the affairs of the country. Besides, in regard to the occasion that we were celebrating, it was ironic that Sir Abubakar occupied the office of Prime Minister. Because, it was on record that it was only recently that he was persuaded to support and embrace the demand by Nigerian and African nationalists, who were fully represented at the luncheon that Nigeria should become an independent sovereign State”.

On the third leg of the triad leadership that once made Nigeria proud, I reserved the best for the last, Obafemi Awolowo. I did because in addition to his practical transformational leadership of the Western region was his luminous exegesis on the case for Federalism in Nigeria. I hereby quote excerpts from his ‘thoughts on the Nigerian constitution’ as represented by my mentor, Lade Bonuola, in his RAM column in the Guardian.

‘As it has been continually proven, Nigerians have not moved away from Awolowo as the issue and they do not seem to be in the mood to move away from him as a reference point. They refer to his exemplary discipline, exertion, his application to work, and, as some would say, to his effulgent dignity and integrityI Hear the objections. “It’s impossible. The northern elites will never agree. The political class benefits too much.”

‘These are the same objections they raised against Awolowo in 1951 when he proposed free education. He did it anyway… They said Cocoa House would collapse. It still stands. They said Western Region would go bankrupt. It prospered. Awolowo said a unitary constitution would “have the effect of repressing healthy rivalry among different regions.” He then said: “Rivalry is the soul of development and progress.”.. “Any experiment with a unitary constitution in a bilingual or multilingual country must fail in the long-run.”.. “If a country is bilingual or multilingual, the constitution must be federal and the constituent states must be organised on a linguistic basis.” If a country is unilingual and uni-national, the constitution must be unitary.”