Ancient bridges set ablaze

BY CHRIS ANYOKWU 

Chris Anyokwu, PhD, a dramatist, poet, fiction writer, speaker, rights activist and public intellectual, is a Professor of English at the University of Lagos, Nigeria and has joined Business a.m.’s growing list of informed editorial commentators to write on Politics & Society. He can be reached via comment@businessamlive.com

Denizens of islands know the signal importance of a bridge, surrounded as they are by wastes of water which in some cases could stretch into infinity.  And islands, however well-stacked with provisions and sundry supplies, are never known to be self-sufficient, and, therefore, fully cut off from the rest of the world. Even so, from the mists of memory, humans, challenged by lack of technology, had fashioned crude devices made of wood and other handy rudimentary elements, to connect one group of people to another. And as time went by, people were able to build and construct bridges, the types that are common sights in the present-day world. However, here is not the place to delve into the various stages of the development of bridges or the nitty-gritty of engineering and technological nous that go into the construction of different types of bridges found in villages, towns and cities, and even in countries and, as in Turkey, continents (i.e. Asia and Europe).

There is no telling of the human cost incurred because of the absence of bridges where they were sorely needed; the man-hours lost by people trying to circumnavigate treacherous terrains and topographies of dubious solidity. Beyond, however, the geo-physical imperative of bridges, there are other kinds of bridges known to civilisation, namely mind-forged linkages and psycho-spiritual ramrods which interlink minds, consciousnesses, worldviews, values and even epistemic grids. You may point to such categories as friendship, marriage, religion, recreation and leisure, clubs, neighbourhood association, sororities and fraternities, professional bodies, school membership and tenancy in homes as some of the traditional sites of bonding and bridging of subjectivities and minds.  In Ifa, Yoruba prognostic system, it is stated thus: “Friendship is sacred, do not betray it/ Friendship is sacred do not betray it”.  Friendship or neighbourliness or fellow-feeling is the suturing and sustaining agent in the categories listed above, even in marriage. People belong to various groups and organisations due to friendship or a sense of esprit de corp. This sense of collegiality is what undergirds sororities, clubs, professional organisations, industrial relations, among others. It was quite dispiriting and disheartening to witness, for instance, the fracturing of Nollywood by political partisanship that was itself based on ethnic affiliation.  Actors and actresses, normally considered national icons, deliberately frittered away their hard-earned global superstardom and reputational gravitas for a mess of porridge, as it were. They became ludic salesmen and women of flimsy tinsel. Such self-defenestration is coterminous with the famous once-in-a-lifetime de-robing of ancient masquerades in Achebe’s timeless tour-de-force, Things Fall Apart. Musicians were not left out in this universal dans macabre as well as others who pretend to be some form of media spectacularity. Their celebrity status became commercialised; a cash-and-carry article displayed for the political money-bags.  Places of worship were not left out. So-called men and women of God shredded the Holy Scriptures as they bought and sold carnal products vended by Mammon.  The pulpit, to be sure, was converted to a soapbox upon which incendiary hustings took place. And Jesus wept!

Most neighbourhoods, where people had been living peaceably for aeons, went up in flames when the men of power visited. Long-standing residents and tenants in the same houses, living under the same roofs, suddenly dusted up and whetted their long-forgotten swords and spears. They were reminded by the visiting power that they were sworn enemies because they spoke different tongues or worshipped different deities. Suddenly, hostility and resentment and mutual distrust replaced solidarity and camaraderie.  As it was in the past, so it is today. In Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel, Half of A Yellow Sun, we are deeply appalled as “ancient” neighbours, Igbo settlers and their Hausa-Fulani hosts quickly forget love and oneness cultivated through the years and butcher one another like a colony of crazed jackals possessed by the god of war. With the horrendous events of the recent past, the pogrom of ’66 and the Nigeria-Biafra hostilities seemed incredibly recent in our collective imagination. As the war snapped ancient cords of neighbourliness, so have the 2023 elections snapped ancient cords of oneness and peaceful co-existence in Nigeria. Just visit some compounds and you will discover to your chagrin that tenants who used to live amicably, share the same balcony, the same kitchen, the same toilet, use the same utilities, can no longer see eye to eye. Daggers now lurk drips from their furtive glances and venom drips from in their darting tongues. And you wonder: whither the soothing and salubrious songs of yesterday? Why is today so toxic, so apocalyptically bilious? Whence is all this anger raging in workplaces, clubs, recreational centres, school premises, offices, hospitals, marketplaces, motor parks and highways? Physical fires are hot; but unseen fires are hotter. The land at present lies in shrouds of inner combustion rearing to show its lurid tongues.

If the family is the basic unit of society, the compound or yard, as some prefer to call it, is the basic unit of the nation. In the yard, prior to this grievous time, children born of parents from different parts of the country used to celebrate their birthdays together. It didn’t matter whether or not they spoke different languages and, thus, have divergent cultures; they bonded over matters of common pursuit. In the yard, tenants fell in love and got married. They celebrated Christmas or Easter together as they did Muslim holidays as well. Old albums, repositories of the yard’s communalism, were, in effect, photographic memorabilia; they were group-biographies of sorts and iconic heirlooms memorialising milestones and, sometimes, Stations of the Cross – births, nuptials, funerals, etc.

These were bridges that sutured hearts and minds beyond the artificial divisiveness of “tribe and tongue”. In the western world, racism and xenophobia are common social pathologies. Not in Africa. Not here in Nigeria. From the svelte physiognomy of the northerner; the buxom shapeliness of the middle-belter to the ample proportions of the easterner; the arresting athleticism of the south-south soul and the curvaceous superabundance of the south-westerner, Nigeria has always been a heaving cornucopia of beauty and grace. Regarding its maleness, Nigeria boasts some of the sturdiest, most rugged and well-built boys and men on the continent and in the world. Nigeria is home to the liveliest, friendliest and happiest people on the planet. Easily identifiable anywhere by their “notice – me” braggadocio, their unapologetically loud hauteur and machismo as well as a natural predilection to “buga” (preen), Nigerians are a class by themselves. On the plane, at stadiums, in the market place, just name it, Nigerians are proudly Nigerian! They may have no dime to their name; ride rickety vehicles; clad in threadbare calico or speak bad grammar, yet they are eminently ebullient, irrepressible, effervescent and full of pluck and vim.  S/he is the pride of the Black race as Nelson Mandela once famously remarked. Our next-door neighbours, Cameroonians and Ghanaians in particular envy us to death. South Africans are eternally devising ways and means of becoming Nigerian! They envy Nigerian men (for obvious reasons) and speak of our women in hyperbolic terms. In the culture industry, notably music, film and literature, Nigeria streaks ahead.   Nollywood, the world’s third biggest moviedom, after Hollywood and India’s Bollywood, is Africa’s lodestar, unquestionably. In international relations, Nigeria is a respected member of many global bodies.  Nigeria is a frontline nation when it comes to continental trouble-shooting and peace-building. A potential permanent member of the UN Security Council, Nigeria is poised to be the world’s fifth most populous nation in a few years’ time. Given its demographic advantages, the country has written all over its body, a Sleeping Giant and World Leader-In-Waiting!

We are the natural leader of the Black race. Little wonder, you tend to get this sneaky feeling that the western powers know this, and, hence, play Russian roulette with our fate. Our strength lies in our diversity. Yet, tragically, recent events have shown that this same diversity is, paradoxically, our Achilles heel! History is replete with tragic instances of how our diversity had been deployed by the ruling classes to subvert our collective wellbeing; to divide us; to set the nation on a collision course and sometimes almost tip it over the brink. But the storied legendary Nigeria’s luck has always intervened in the nick of time. Whether it is the quotidian conduct of a census, employment exercise, admission to Unity Schools or tertiary institutions of learning, recruitment exercise in our armed forces, and sport, merit is almost always the first casualty, the living sacrifice on the surfeited altar of geopolitical calculus and hare-brained expediency. The execrable mantra has always been the Doctrine of Federal Character, a euphemistic bunkum for the official institutionalisation of mediocrity! The cumulative effects are writ large in our body politic! Unsurprisingly, therefore, the Lugardian Gamble of 1914 has come unstuck; has unravelled or is unravelling right before our eyes.  Like water and oil, the constituent units seemed to have demonstrated that they cannot mix; that the nation-state paradigm has utterly exhausted its unifying possibilities.

Not unlike previous election cycles, the 2023 elections, particularly the Gubernatorial and State Houses of Assembly ones, showed that Nigeria is not an organic entity, one that can ride out any form of stress-testing. We have long cohabited in a gilded castle of lies, and now we are buffeted by storms of truth.  The structure tilts; overbalancing … Can it survive the on-going ethnic baiting and bashing?  Will elite brigandage not finally put the ailing post-colony out of its terminal misery?  The truth of the matter is that our political class has, for its own selfish ends, put a knife to the “things” that held us together and things have fallen apart.  Lucky Dube laments in his song “Crazy World”: “Leaders starting wars every time they want/ Some for their rights/ Some for fun and their own glory letting/ People die for the wrong that they do…” Politicians and their enforcers invent or stoke fires of religious and ethnic differences in the hearts and minds of the gullible masses, lying to them that the person who does not speak their mother tongue is the enemy, to be disenfranchised, brutalised or even killed!  Flashpoints such as Kano, Lagos and Rivers State will forever be etched in our collective memory in this regard. The whole world witnessed on social media, TV and so forth the crime scenes that passed for elections in some parts of Nigeria.  World press have given the sordid farce a thumbs-down. The Economist described it as “a chaotically organised vote and messy count”; The Financial Times on its part regarded the elections as “deeply flawed”; The Guardian of UK and The New York Times returned a verdict too damning for words.  Al Jazeera reported on “how violence rob[bed] Nigerians of their votes.”  Leading democracies such as Austria, Poland, Canada, and the US, all gave Nigeria a thumbs-down, with Canada in particular saying that “Depression, anxiety, uncertainty becloud[ed] Nigeria’s political space”.

It will be interesting to see how the much-talked-about “Handshake across the Niger” between the Yoruba and the Ndi-Igbo can be actualized in the aftermath of the 2023 elections.  Fecklessly mischaracterized as “Igbo”, non-Yoruba (and non-Igbo) people are already fulminating and threatening Armageddon. They are chafing and smarting from being so insouciantly denied their specific ethnic identities and being lumped together as the Igbo and, hence, mistreated during the elections. Everyone, it would seem, is currently re-examining and recalibrating their place in the Nigeria Project. As things stand, Nigeria is fast becoming a notorious instantiation of the postmodern primacy of the fragment, since the elections were largely a form of ethnic census. Social media is awash with disenchanted and disaffected nationals tearing their Nigerian passports to shreds. Also old friendships are now dead as dodo, just as churches are shutting down owing to political partisanship.  Xenophobia is now the new normal across the land as ancient “bridges” have been incinerated by blazing torches of ethnicism and religion.  Sadly, marriages are also collapsing. A woman, for instance, was weighing up the propriety of poisoning her husband because theirs is a cross-cultural conjugation.  It can’t get more bizarre and dystopian than that!

Barack Obama has famously declared that: “The politics that’s based solely on tribe and ethnicity is a politics that’s doomed to tear a country apart.  It is a failure, a failure of imagination. We can all appreciate our own identities, our bloodlines, our beliefs, our backgrounds… that tapestry is what makes us who we are but the history of Africa which is both the cradle of human civilization and a crucible of conflict shows us that when we define ourselves narrowly in opposition to somebody … just because they are of a different tribe or race, or religion and we ignore who is a good person or a bad person …. Are they working hard or not, are they honest or not, are they peaceful or violent … when we start making distinctions solely based on status and not what people do, then we’re taking the wrong path and we inevitably suffer in the end.”

Going forward, whilst the whole world watches and waits with bated breath the post-election litigations in our courts and the eventual rulings regarding the elections, it is instructive for us to survey the land and offer provisional prognosis on what lies ahead.  Will Nigerians ever live down the tragic events of our recent past? Will new enemies overcome their mutual hate and hostility to achieve rapprochement?  Will all the burnt bridges be rebuilt?  Or, from the mouldering and smouldering ashes of our former self, shall we have children of the Phoenix? The future travails, nearing parturition. But the question is: what shall it birth?

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