By Osuolale Alalade

The deep and multi-faceted apprehensions over the coming presidential elections, the consequences of the peaceful or violent environment in which it may be held, the outcome and its implications for the character of the Nigerian state, have naturally dominated the equally energetic and enervating national discourse in the last few months. It is yet to reach its crescendo not knowing what imponderable directions the process would take as reality unfolds and the elections are won and lost on the many sides of the engaged gladiators.

More important is therefore the denouement, which for now can only be ultimately temporary, of the many conundrums being thrown up daily by the elections and its longer term consequences. It is a challenging context for any state, especially one whose historic challenges have revolved around its conscious refusal to attempt to define its basic, essential purpose; its reason to call for its continued existence and on the basis of which to validate its demand for the loyalty of tis citizens. The biggest deficit in national life is the explicit or implicit lack of a reason for the continued longevity of the Nigerian space as a corporate political entity. This must be cured.

•Boko Haram insurgents

The Boko Haram phenomenon, in its violent repudiation of what Nigeria stands or may not stand for, therefore has deeper implications for Nigeria. The gravity of the larger implication of the current war would for now seem to have eluded public attention and engagement. In the conveniences of this national culture of immediacy, the management of what effectively is the war in the North East against a virulently fanatical strand of political Islam has been driven largely by the calculus of winning the elections.

Some, may be uncharitably, even hazard that this situation was contrived to fester in the last six years, despite the attendant tragedy it has imposed on the land. If life and death are confined by state and society to only how they inform the fleeting immediate, the question arises as to the reason for the being of the Nigerian state. For some, this is the crux of the matter that must be resolved in time, if Nigeria is not to continue to drift through the labyrinth of evolved global strategic confrontations of which the Boko Haram is a local expression.

The definition of the nation’s raison d’etre is important especially against the backdrop of a global wide geo-physical landscape going through the crucible of violent strategic transformations or irrefutable revolutionary demands for a reconfigured global space by forces that have declared themselves as the millennial engine of history running fast in many parts of the Muslim world. This challenge is not unique to Nigeria, as we are caught in the maelstrom of a global turbulence that is not about to end tomorrow. It is common to most African states cobbled together by the colonial experience whose centers are still falling apart in the Central African Republic, Mali, Algeria, Somalia, Kenya, Niger, etc.

The struggle in these places, as in Nigeria, is the continuing attempt to co-opt them as part of the core of a resurgent global force challenging the structure of global system as we know it. Because we are weak, the response has been going back into sublime servitude of the elite forces dominating the structure of the global system as willing handmaidens bewildered by the turn out of events.

•Nigerian soldiers

The opposing millennial revolutionary forces proclaim their struggle as the endless clash between the Divine truth and the satanic falsehood that would survive in all ages; consistent with the dictum that history that would never end. They pooh-pooh the Fukuyama idea of the end of history. The struggle for the entrenchment of their Divine Truth is propagated as getting enormous fuel from the blood of the Islamists in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Somalia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Mali, Nigeria, Algeria and many other parts of the world.

They see their brand of Islam as showing a strong global resurgence in their struggle for the dismantling and replacement of the secular state with their Divine caliphate. The suave, well learned and articulate ideologues of this global revolutionary irredentist force proclaim that in the past, the colonial occupation of the Muslim countries led to huge genocidal massacre, massive economic exploitation and extreme political deprivation. They argue that the greatest damage to the Muslim Ummah was done by dispossessing Islam from the ownership of a state. They contend that full Islam can never survive or grow with such dispossession. For them this posed the greatest harm not only to the Muslims, but also to the whole mankind.

As a consequence of such dispossession, they advance that Islam –the only revealed religion of the Almighty Allah SubhanawaTa’ala couldn’t deliver His greatest gift to the mankind for the benefit both here and in the hereafter. They have taken it on themselves to help Allah deliver his gift because they understand that an ideology always needs a powerful state as its supporting backbone. Otherwise it can’t stand anywhere in the society.

Does this not sound sexy enough to any weak mind that has nothing to die for? Does it not provide an ideo-metaphysical raison d’etre, couched in language that has proven seductive throughout the history of Mankind. The long time counter weight to this perversion of faith is the distillation and articulation of a more powerful secular and more seductive ideo-philosophical vision that validates the nature of our current being of which the Nigerian state remains in perpetuity as its potent instrument. It is in the context of the undeniably powerful pseudo –rational articulation of this religious perversion that this school refuses to treat Boko Haram as an aberrant episode of a particularistic epoch.

Boko Haram is the biggest challenge to the very concept of Nigeria in our entire history. And it would remain so in a very long time to come irrespective of our on-coming victory on the battle field. It could well be an aberration of our times if Nigeria ultimately gets it right in the long term. Rather, Boko Haram, in the context of Nigeria, is the expression of a historic reality that was bound to be given expression to one way or the other, in one manner of the other, in a form of the other in a national society caught up in conflating the exigencies of the immediate moment as the profound challenge of the history and eternity. Unfortunately, the context of the current local contestations in all realms is based on the tenuous assumption of a common Nigerian future that is taken for granted.

These concerns have naturally deflected the national focus from more profound and emerged fundamental questions about the longevity of the Nigerian state raised by the many potentially devastating dimensions of the Boko Haram phenomenon. This has been long in coming from the eruptions of a domestically confined Maitsatsine insurgency to the rise of Boko Haram and its declared affiliation with the ISIL. We took no notice as radical Islam, conveniently midwifed into national consciousness by prominent actors in our national politics, incrementally overwhelmed the Nigerian state as we played the politics of the immediate and appeasement. It began with the demand for Sharia that grew to become a full blown insurgency to carve an Islamic republic out of the Nigerian space, as a first step toward conquering what goes for the entirety of Nigeria.Here, we’ll mainly focus on the domestic imperatives of Nigeria’s difficult location in this uneasy global ferment. From this perspective, the future of the Nigerian state is in question. Its future lies in successfully addressing the fundamental question of its being.

•Abubakar Shekau, Boko haram leader

The opportunistic declaration of Boko Haram leader, Abubakre Shekau, of formal linkage with the Islamic State in the Levant (ISIL), the recent reports that Ibrahim Uwais, son of a former Chief Justice of Nigeria, Justice Muhammed Uwais, has allegedly joined the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria as well as the unfortunate Christmas 2009 precedent of Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalab, the underwear bomber, are significant indicators of the depth of the penetration that the global Islamic revolutionary ferment in Nigeria.

These are well educated, rational minds who accepted the poisonous propaganda of the extreme pole of their faith. I refuse to accept the prevailing logic that the actions of men and minds of this caliber are inexplicable. This was the plan all along as Osama Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda had warned much earlier that it had Nigeria in its sights. This was no surprise as the entire socio cultural and political space known as Nigeria has been under attack, both visible and invisible physically and metaphorically, to be appropriated by frenzied proselytizers of both Christian and Muslim fundamentalist camps.

Those who have had the courage of codifying their narratives of service in the State House have revealed the potency of religious belonging for career advancement and acceptance. This has been under both Christian and Muslim heads of state. Under them, Nigeria had long become a psychological Republic of Hallukabria (anantithetical synthesis of a rambunctious Halleluyah and Allah Akbare that have ran amok). In this republic of Hallukubria co-existing with the formal state, the Nigerian state had been rendered second class to the activities of quack redeemers, winners and mendicants, evangelicals, mullahs, Alfas and crass opportunists, impostors in red and grey cassocks wearing heavy long golden chains.

In short, the Tartuffes dominate the Hallukubra state. The formal Nigerian state is in the pocket of these impostors as they have appropriated the stage rallying to the immediacy of quasi -private concerns of which faction of the ruling elite would appropriate Abuja post March 28, if hopefully the elections do after all take place. But the danger is that the Hallukubria syndrome would take Nigeria nowhere.

Nigeria needs to find its secular raison d’etre to blunt the viciousness of religious indoctrination across the board. In designing a vision for Nigeria’s evolving future, the main argumentation would revolve around the place of religion. This is not to suggest that ethno-regionalism would be irrelevant. The reality is that the problem of systemic value dissonances are more amenable to bridging in ethno-regionally divided societies than in societies where the constituent units cloak their values in religious garbs. And Boko Haram is a good example of this.

Some experts have postulated that Nigeria had from its inception brought together a multiplicity of often contradictory value systems. They note that embedded in the national society was a clear value dissonance between the operative values systems of the various regions and constituent communities of the federation. This had resulted from the different evolutionary paths of the various regions to their common federation. These experts note that the post colonial state is an arena for the continuous struggle for ascendancy of often irreconcilable, opposing interests. These interests include value systems, attitudinal orientations, and diverse worldviews associated with the respective constituent communities occupying the socio-political space.

What has happened in Hallukabria is the persistent undermining of the integrity of preexisting value systems that are polarizing constituent units that could earlier boast of common heritages as the organic glue binding each community member to the other. So at two levels, at the national level, the state operates without any rationale; no logic to its demand for unalloyed loyalty to the state. At the second layer, the communities struggle to revamp claims of their respective validity as the primary custodian of the essences of the individual in society. Religious fanatics in our midst, both Christian and Muslim, challenge this. The Christians of all hues enjoy massive material and support from the West and their Muslim counterparts look forward to Saudi Arabia, Emirates, Sudan, Iran for support.

The continued polarization of society was clearly at work as groups from the South volunteered to fight on the side of the United States coalition in Iraq and against Al Qeada, while in the north Osama Bin Laden was idolized and as northern youths expressed their readiness to join his cause. No responsible state allows this state of affairs to fester. Serious states design policies to mitigate potential threats to its internal cohesion. Yet, as we saw in my state of Osun, visionary leadership building structures that promote integration and long term social cohesion such as facilitating the education of both Christian and Muslim children in the same schools is often confronted by narrow mindedness of myopic holdouts.

President Goodluck Jonathan

The silver lining in the Boko Haram phenomenon is that it provides opportunity for Nigerian society to knock down the elevated role of religion and religious bigotry expressed in the pervasiveness of the Republic of Hallekubaria in its affairs. This entails a paradox. Nigeria should hands off religion. Don’t fund pilgrimages. Dissolve all pilgrims boards. Reverse the policy of mission funded educational institutions at all levels. They breed parochial minds. The challenges of America are different from the realities of Nigeria. Extend policies such as the concept of Unity Schools that transport children at young ages to other stations in Nigeria to get an education.

The state should impose tax on religious institutions, including churches. Nigeria must articulate a powerful reason for its continued being. If we did this, there would be no reason for old men in national conferences to promote the idea of fifty four states. Yes, if we have no holding glue we may as well continue to fragment ourselves. If Shekau had been cleverer he could have secured participation in the last so called Constitutional Conference and secured the inscription of Islam as the national faith for the states in the North East. Perhaps he could have created his caliphate with less blood and drama.