We cannot, therefore, help recollecting Akinyemi’s alert as the Nigerian government announces the beginning of negotiations with Boko Haram. An Akinyemi can hold his head high and say “I discharged my duty” by the fact of that alert just as most members of that generation could. As recently as 1999, the late Dr Ibrahim Tahir told a PDP Orientation Session that Nigeria had been progressively driving itself into a pressure cooker from which there was no exit. The evidence now shows that no one heard him. What anyone might have been tempted to dismiss as intellectual alarms on Akinyemi or Tahir’s part have all come to pass, unfortunately. If, from this moment, we still do not do something bolder and more imaginative on restitution, the state is bound to encounter having to enter even more humiliating negotiations in the future. The weakest in the link have had to endure power in its most ruthless form in the past three decades. Naked power has been on the prowl across Nigeria either through corruption, physical or structural violence. All these have produced so many people echoing Akinyemi’s “God dey”.

Yet, no political leaders are out there at the head of fissure healing missions by communicating with people who might have silently borne the brunt of this history of physical and structural violence. And yet, we think there can be social harmony. Nothing can be worse than a polity in which the leaders who must be able to do good to all manner of people do not come down to everyone’s level. Rather they are haughty, obstinate and likely to pick quarrels, both among themselves and with those they are supposed to lead. Yet, people are not the same. Some are rich, others are poor; some are six-footers, others are midgets; there are men and women; old and young; everyone doesn’t fall into one age group. This observable obstinacy goes against the wisdom that stooping down to talk to a dwarf does not make the giant a dwarf.

As it is the quality of governance that brings security and peace, the phenomenon of absentee leaders, leaders who mobilise nobody around any values is one of the most critical dimensions of the Nigerian crisis. The subsequent disconnect between politics, the polity and the people is a major source of the tension in the country. There can hardly be an escape from this without political leaders stooping low to conquer via communication, dialogue and restitution. The question, however, is how would anyone expect any such capability from, say a Senator, who spent upward of N500m to purchase just nomination form? Or from a governorship aspirant who needed in excess of N10b to clinch the party ticket and win the governorship election? And these are just two examples. Where do we go from here?

The government of the day has set up some structures on the combustion in the North-East. That’s absolutely a most welcome step without reservations. That area is the most urgent in this respect, especially when resource availability is considered. But when that is done with, reconciliation and social healing are options the government might need to draw up a major new pact. On the long run, only a Mandela of Nigeria would do. A Mandela of Nigeria would be that individual whose moral authority would be such that when he says, “hey, gentlemen, calm down, calm down”, everybody would listen, irrespective of tongues or tribe or religious affiliation.

Given Nigeria’s complexity, it is doubtful if there would be ever such an individual in the near future. The turnout for President Buhari in the last election campaign offered much promise but it still remains to be seen how that can be consolidated with the viscosity of ethnic language in current public discourse in the country. Quite alarming, especially in the cyberspace! What is clear is that Nigeria is still not linked in a way that what is going on in one extreme stops everyone else on track at the other extreme. That communal distance has even been made worse by the supervisors of privatisation in Nigeria. They did not just sell our most valuable assets which constitute the commanding heights of the economy at a time when the prices were down, they did so without a thought for the binding role of those assets. Nations are imagined communities, we are told. Those infrastructural entities have symbolic imports in that geopolitical imagination: oil pipelines from PHC to Gusau, railway lines from Lagos to Kano, vast national telecommunications outlay, Power stations and the transmission lines, Nigeria Airways and so on. Those sales are absolutely reversible and the Heavens will not fall.

Against this background, elevating restitution/social justice in the president’s top priority list might be strategic. If those intellectualising state power at the moment find the time to read Akinyemi’s Farewell to Policy and were they to find anything useful there in respect of fine tuning such a new social pact, the point would have been made. It is more so if they link whatever they find useful there to the healing process Onaiyekan proposed some years back, which portion from an earlier op-ed I reproduce here, again: “For him, there are always a few basic elements necessary for this kind of healing. First and foremost is the truth. The truth means that everybody is ready to admit what he or she has done. It is not time to apportion blames or accuse one another. Nor is it time to drag in prestigious lawyers and advocates. Rather, it is time to accept that we have done wrong. Those who have stolen our money should admit that they have stolen. Those who have killed others, even in successful coups, should admit that they have killed one another. If we have not got the courage to do this, we will continue to dance around in circles. And in order that the telling of the truth may not just become racking up old wounds that will lead nowhere, it must be part of a process that leads to the next stage, namely repentance, forgiveness and reparation”.