Ken-Saro-Wiwa

The Nigerian public space, suffused by these elements,is thus configured to be operated in violation of the principles of the protection of the interests of the commons. Although the very concept of the commons is problematic as this fractious space. Charlatans preeminently thrive in such a space. Led largely and historically by coopted charlatans or willing proxies of those with hegemonic impulses, Nigeria has become the epitome of the challenge of the Africa state space. The challenge, irrespective of the profiles of individuals at the helm of national affairs, is expressed in the unending inevitable conflicts and schisms, across all the facets of national life- from the depraved political order, including the legislature, a suspect judiciary strenuously mediating justice, law and order against a confrontational unemotional cash and carry bar committed to the consolidation of the constitutional order and a status quo with a high payload, through a mass debased and distorted national and individual spirituality, economic structures contrived to support a delegitimized political order, and a discounted national intellectual circuit well-heeled in a culture of political expedience in conceptual underpinnings to the critical evaluations of the nation space in time, among others. It is a systemic rot demanding radical holistic intervention to restore this nation state space on the basis of some clearly defined moral and normative essences.

Yet, the realities of this flailing experiment has continued to defy the persistent scant-truths and majorly lies that have and are still being bandied about by this coalition of opportunistic elite beneficiaries of an unending national trauma. Membership of this hierarchical structured coalition is founded on and constantly circulated among a select group of families, their dastardly scions and newly recruited individuals from the margins and ghettoes who are indoctrinated to rationalize or are minded to reluctantly accept the controversial fundamentalist hegemonic patrimonial principles on which the Nigerian national tragedy is anchored. Every inductee to this fundamentalist credo must reflect this unwritten convention in the execution of the national hegemonic governance paradigm to which they are pledged. It makes no difference whether the inductee is a bravura filled man haunted by a self-acknowledgement of his quasi-illiteracy in Olusegun Obasanjo, a simple puritan Umar Yar’Aduatied to a partisan central hegemonic impulse or the famously tragically clueless Goodluck Jonatan who was too happy to be a proxy of any force as long as he retained his bedroom in Aso Rock. The key to power was to concede control of national security to those who claimed total and partisan ownership of the state.

So Nigeria ended with murders and assassination of those who dared to test the will of the dominant forces. The Abiolas, MKO and Kudirat, Rewanes and co, or Ken Saro Wiwa and his Ogoni nine. Of course, before him came Adaka Boros. And they always got away. So Nigeria spawned the likes ofwily Obasanjo, Babaginda, a dark goggled Abacha, Major Al-Mustapha, Chief Security Officer, under the Abacha incubus and Colonel Sambo Dasuki’s under the Jonathan administration. They all in one way or the other represent the sharp reality of Nigeria. They all built formidable alliances across the country to subvert everything worthy left in Nigeria. They imbibed well and demonstrated the truism of the Babaginda years that everyone across the aisle had his price. Ask exiled Major Bashorun or better still, General Isama Alabi. Through such avenues, the hegemon thus appropriates the state space. The condition is that he must pay the price to all co-opted members of his alliance.

That these alliances have very volatile discount rates and time frame and thus often transient, explains the permanent state of flux of the Nigerian state space. The constitutional jamborees, almost always stuffed with icons of the status quo, so far have never been about the realignment of the balance of power or the re-equilibration of the structure of the state. This has been so because of the reluctance to challenge the very quintessence and underpinnings of Nigeria as presently formulated. Meanwhile, fruitless atomistic interventions are floated by the federal government on how to stop the Niger Deltans from demanding comprehensive restructuring of the political economy that guarantees perceptible dividends to it from oil from the Niger Delta. In this, the Niger Delta repudiates the dominant operative illogic of the Nigerian state and its political economy. Such issues, that border on the amoral foundations of the state, cannot be won by war, no matter the provocation from the militias in the creeks. The situation in the Niger Delta raises foundational challenge to the structure of the state and its political economy. Nigerians have overwhelmingly pronounced on the tenuous legitimacy of the extant constitutional dispensation.

There is thus no moral, ethical and ideational premise undergirding the Nigerian state and its society other than the informal self-seeking understandings to which the elite are bound. Deriving from this complexity, it is the main thrust that conflict in Nigeria and instability in its state system result from the continuous attempts to appropriate the state by major domestic constituent groups acting in collaboration with their respective allied extra-territorial stakeholders. These stakeholders are members of the larger corporate trans-national communities of which the constituent group in the post-colonial state and its national society are a part of. Such stakeholders are pre-existing trans-national nationalities and groups with historical affinities which may be largely tribes or religiously based communities. Common ethnic identification and religious affinities present a certain understanding of the cosmology, universe and a defined world view that may not only compete with others, but may also be the basis to challenge the emergence of new and common values as well as principles to legitimize the nascent state.

These competing ideational sub-structures of the numerous societies are often expressed in a fragmented civil society that is unable to develop an integrated national social capital base. In Nigeria, social capital abounds, but it is non-integrative, atomized and limited within networks of clearly defined corporate identities. The strength and resilience of the social capital that is derivable from informal structural linkages of the disparate transnational communities in the post-colonial African state and its intermestic environment have a deleterious bearing on the process of generating new and unifying identities and consciousness for competing compatriots of the state.

The disparate identities and groups compete to impose their respective partisan and narrow conflicting political agendas that can only be concretized through the total control of the social, economic and political space. The highly exclusive agenda of the contending forces can only be fulfilled through domination of the state and all its pivots of power. Power in that context is conceived in terms of the successful appropriation of the state for the imposition of a hegemonic agenda. At the cultural level, this includes the entrenchment of the symbols and images of the hegemonic group, its world view, the norms and values as well as conceptions of the universe of the dominant group as synonymous with that of the appropriated state.

Accordingly, a national dissembling machinery has been responsible for the current state of affairs as it has also been responsible for defining the fundamental assumptions, the almost axiomatic underpinnings of a false sense of the inevitability of Nigeria even in its deleterious social construction as a nation state space. Paradoxical, the inevitability of Nigeria is the only fundamental lie that one may on ideological premises whole heartedly subscribe to. It is simply that the British unwittingly did Africa a favour in creating Nigeria. But what Nigerians have done with this unintended gift to Africa is a historic crime against black humanity. The longevity of Nigeria as an enduring contrivance is not a given fact. The British did not intend to do Black humanity that favour.

But that has been the implication for Africa. Nigeria and Nigerians must wake up to their axiomatic salience as a necessary condition and presence for the holistic emancipation of black humanity. But more importantly, let it be firmly affirmed that Nigeria, no matter our partisan wishes, would not enjoy a permanence built on this mountainous accretion of fossilized amorality, its peculiar sense of contrived justice that merely upends social justice, and the illogic currently driving it. It is in that context that the imperative to revisit the premises and contortions of Nigeria becomes compelling. Nigeria urgently deserves a geo-political restructuring. But before then, it is imperative to define a consensual moral and historic quintessence for the anticipated new Republic.

Ademola Araoye is a former Nigerian diplomat and a retired official of the United Nations. Currently a Visiting Professor associated with the SARCHi chair on African Diplomacy and International Relations at the University of Johannesburg, Araoye is author of critically acclaimed books including Cote d’Ivoire: The Conundrum of a Still Wretched of the Earth and Sources of Conflict in the Post-Colonial African State. He is a regular contributor to TheNEWS magazine