Nigeria and her growing trust deficit

DAMILARE EBENIZA

Damilare Ebeniza studied Political Science and International Relations in Nigeria, Benin Republic, and France, with a research focus on Nigerian history, economy, and foreign politics. He has experience as a conference interpreter and external relations management across Chad, Niger, Mali, and Guinea Conakry, for governmental, regional and international organisations in West Africa. He is an analyst for West African Democracy Radio in Dakar, Senegal and actively contributes to critical dialogues shaping the region’s socio-political landscape. Proficient in French, English, and four additional non-Nigerian African languages, he embodies a commitment to cross-cultural understanding and effective communication. He can be reached via comment@businessamlive.com 

Nigeria is one of the most used yet ill-defined words known to the people residing in this part of the world. Everyone assumes that everyone else knows what is meant by it and that asking the question ‘what is Nigeria?’ seems banal. But if we can shift our attention from the goals and promises of Nigeria to the processes by which those goals and promises are to be attained, we must begin with that question. 

What is Nigeria?

Words, it is said, reveal hidden meanings. But sometimes, words can also hide meanings with disastrous consequences. Nigeria is one of those words. Any definition that seeks to uncover the hidden meaning behind the word Nigeria has to start with Nigeria as an idea. An idea to which many, across centuries, have given their lives. They may not have called it by this name then, but that idea is as real to them as it is to us today. Nigeria is a form of human consciousness that is emotionally stronger and more meaningful for the people who call this place home. It is to some of these people the way they rationalise their wealth, to others, their poverty. It is a thought, an idea whose meaning we cannot ignore. Why? 

The answer to that question is my uneducated attempt to define Nigeria from the lens of someone who rather than watching the movie in the Cinema, devoted a good amount of his time to watching how fellow Cinema-goers are reacting to the movie in the hope that he will get a better sense of the movie itself. 

From this position, it is clear to me that beyond all the symbolism, the official rituals, the grand economic and political theories, even beyond democracy and the rule of law, Nigeria is nothing else but our attempt to regulate our interactions without using violence. A nation, with its regulations, customs, traditions, and even language, is nothing but an interaction regulating device. One thing that plays a key role in how the many parts of Nigeria interact is blame. This is not unique to us. 

Perhaps the reason we blame each other is because we expect more from ourselves. That is, we intuitively know that collectively, our interactions could produce better results. To blame some people, you must think they are capable of acting differently. At its core, Nigeria is our attempt to regulate our interactions to attain the needed level of trust among ourselves to a point that some of the now over-emphasised difficult memories of the past can be cast into oblivion. The reason we cannot ignore each other is that the history of our interactions, even in the recent past, is written in blood. And this is even before any white man had set foot on our soil. 

The violent nature of our past interactions is not peculiar to our race. Many of the modern nations we so desperately want to emulate were also the product of a violent process. Britain was colonised twice by Rome, and that colonisation was by any measure more violent than anything that happened to us. And there was a time in human history when Cicero was advising Greek merchants not to buy British slaves because they were lazy. The State and the Church merged in Europe because the church, or religion, was a useful tool to establish unified large structures of authority across cultural and ethnic boundaries. Many of those who call themselves British today are descendants of people who migrated across the channel from continental Europe. Very few Frenchmen and women are descendants of the Franks. Before the mass migration from Europe to America, many of those whose children would later create the United States of America would have gone to war with each other. 

How the reality we now behold came to be is that, in those places, human beings have found the social strength to sustain a level of peaceful interactions long enough to transform identity. In most cases, this began by violent conquest and the imposition of rules. We, here, have experienced that. Many of our larger ethnic groups are the result of violent conquests. What we have decided to do is to pursue this most important human adventure through time with peace as a key element. It is what we mean when we say we want to create a nation. 

Seen from this angle, therefore, Nigeria is a successful project. The Balkans or Eastern Europe is a laboratory of failed multiethnic national projects. Their names are Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. None of these nations made it to their 100th anniversary. It is easy to forget just how ambitious the Nigerian national project is. This ambition is well captured by the preamble of our 1999 constitution. 

‘We the people of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, 

Having firmly and solemnly resolved:

TO LIVE in unity and harmony as one indivisible and indissoluble sovereign nation under God, dedicated to the promotion of inter-African solidarity, world peace, international cooperation and understanding, 

AND TO PROVIDE for a Constitution for the purpose of promoting the good government and welfare of all persons in our country, on the principles of freedom, equality, and justice and for the purpose of consolidating the unity of our people. ‘

The rest of the constitution is how this aim is to be achieved.

Before I continue, let me offer what I believe to be a more nuanced view of our Constitution. Some have said in recent times that it was ‘midwifed by dictators,’ and some have suggested that it needs to be amended because the people did not have a say in the constitution. Perhaps they are right. But the Basic Law, which is the current constitution of one of the leading economies in the world, Germany, was not even written by the Germans. It was the product of the London Conference on Germany held in 1948. When the Allies asked German leaders to submit the Basic Law to a referendum, they refused. They argued that a true vote of the German people was not possible if the Country was still divided between East and West. German leaders, steeped in the history of Prussia, have not forgotten what it means to live as a divided people. And no democratic principle is worth such risk. When the Unification Treaty was signed on August 31, 1990, between the leaders of West and East Germany, the Basic Law remained the Constitution of the Country, still without referendum until today.

A serious study of the history of the creation of the United States of America reveals a different truth than is commonly known. The United States of America is not the result of a popular political movement. The USA began as a massive financial bailout of the States by the Federal Government. The campaign for the adoption of the constitution in 1788 was supported by the wealthy individuals who had loaned the states money during the war and whose chances of getting paid depended on the adoption of the Constitution. 

If in 1999 you submitted the Nigeria constitution to a referendum, and some States voted no, what would you do? Unless you take the childish history of Nigeria as the result of Lord Lugard’s amalgamation seriously, and therefore see the country as a forced marriage, you have to think about the consequence of such a referendum. The interactions of the people we call Nigerians today did not begin in 1914. 

In a 21st Century dominated by empire-sized political entities like China, India, the United States, and the European Union (if they can figure out their issues), a fractured Nigeria is not in anybody’s best interest. Yes, we have many problems. But we should not forget why Nigeria is important to the next generation. We may not be able to say what the lived experiences of those who would call this place home would be in the next 50 or 80 years. What we do know for sure is that being part of a large, coherent political structure is going to matter in this century. In Africa today, Nigeria is the most successful and most advanced of such structures. 

To understand how admirably our constantly derided constitution has performed, think about the problems the Constitution was designed to solve. In the 1990s, the political energy of the country was devoted to limiting the power of the presidency after the abuse of that office by the Military. Following prolonged military rule and the progressive reduction in popular participation in political life, our constitutional drafters aimed to prevent the re-emergence of a strong president. Our constitution was designed to limit what the president can do. It is the very essence of its procedural nature. 

June 12 is not the anniversary of democracy since democracy is not an event. June 12 is the celebration of efforts to enlarge popular participation in the political process. One of our problems today is that popular participation may have gone a little too far. As Professor William McNeil, in the concluding chapter of his 1963 monumental book of history, ‘The Rise of the West’, put it, “Save in a loose and metaphorical sense, the people never really controlled “their’’ government in the United States or anywhere. Even in countries where governmental monopoly of public communication does not exist, government more often than not can lull or wheedle the public into acquiescence or whip it into enthusiasm for official acts and plans’’. In Nigeria today, our government is losing the ability to do just that. 

Since the administration of President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan, Nigerians have been remarkably effective at limiting their government’s ability to act rather than getting the government to work. One wonderful way to measure how weak a government is is to look at how cheap it is to successfully lobby that government to make policy changes. 

The Western media propaganda and some on the continent want us to believe the defeat of the financial bill in Kenya by protesters is a win. Some even called it a historical win. If stopping a heavily indebted government from increasing taxes is a win, how do we call getting the government to initiate desperately needed reforms? 

The single most important criterion to evaluate the quality of political leaders on the continent today is not how high-sounding their proposals are. Any serious leader has to be ready to be unpopular if that is the only way to get things done. When political leaders display a lack of understanding of issues they want to fix or, even when armed with such understanding, the courage to do the right thing is lacking; political paralysis ensues. Referring to the disconnect between the European leaders and the people that led Europe into humanity’s most devastating self-inflicted disaster, Winston Churchill wrote “No one in great authority had the wit, ascendancy, or detachment from public folly to declare these fundamental, brutal facts to the electorates; nor would anyone have been believed if he had’’. When mistrust is at a level that the government is no longer believable, the challenges at hand overwhelm the promises of the future and, as he put it, “the malice of the wicked is reinforced by the weakness of the virtuous.”

So where do we go from here? 

To my mind, high-sounding policy recommendations like state police, regional government, and the ill-defined restructuring are nothing but attempts to code our growing level of mistrust into law. I agree with Governor Chukwuma Soludo of Anambra State that the solution to our problems may be found in our past. But the past is vast. 

The world around us is changing. And it is not changing for the better. The last time when developed nations were building up their armies as they are now, many of our countries were not “independent”. The current competition for weapons and knowledge is happening right before our eyes. And we seem not to be aware we are mere spectators. Our world is experiencing a historical leap forward in human knowledge that will create an even wider gap between those with more power and those with less. The result of this gap may be a reorganisation of the terms of interactions in favour of the most powerful. We cannot continue to live as though the only experiences in our past that matter to our political or national life are independence, colonisation, and slavery. These three experiences have served as a container, or better still, as a prison from which our mind has refused to escape. 

Yes, we do not have all we want, yes things are tough. But is there any form of hardships that we may be experiencing today that those before us have not faced with more dignity? A form of dignity that provides the necessary distance from the now and here so that the then and after can be considered with the needed attention. If we can strengthen our aims, there is no problem our nation is facing today that we cannot deal with collectively. We just have to expand our imagination and look more inward. If we can be humble enough to pay our past the needed respect, it will yield some interesting solutions to our current problems. But for this to happen, we need to be proud of our heritage.

We cannot continue to live as though what is going on around the world does not concern us. And to survive in the World of today, we have to draw resolve from institutions like the Emirs, the Igwes, and the Obas to re-establish organised authority at the local level. The prestige those institutions enjoyed in the past made them and the family the most efficient law enforcement mechanism our people have created.

I will write more about solutions in my next articles. Let me conclude with this response given by Cardinal de Richelieu when asked why he betrayed the Church for the French state; “Man,” he said, “is immortal, his salvation is hereafter, the state has no immortality, its salvation is now or never.”

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