Mobutu Sese Seko

Nigeria is thus a state groaning under the weight of a lack of civic theology. It has no transcendental values distilled into a moral and spiritual foundation essential for any modern society. Historically, civic religion was intended simply as a form of social cement or an organic glue, as an instrument to unify the state and society by providing it with civic sacred authority. The end result of this void in Nigeria is the cyclical nature of confused national debates and contentions around the shifting fundamentals, including the basic structure of the state. A vacuum on the fundamentals of a non-existent national consciousness or an attempted consciousness based on a rot of nothingness has percolated down to the grassroots through equally deceptive elite self-serving rationalizations. What is, after all that cacophonous clatter on its dissolubility or non-dissolubility for example, the essence of a Nigeria?

The historic contentions around the expression of the Nigerian state is about revenue allocation and who is placed to appropriate, legally and through other means, not the largest share but the totality of this revenue at the institutional, community and personal levels. Hegemonic and partisan pretenses become instrumental to favorable placement to assure a large morsel of revenue. The acclaimed institutional protectors of the integrity of the Nigerian state, the Executive, the Judiciary, including the Bar, and the military, as with elsewhere on the continent, have always all proven to be false redeemers. The allure of stealing and corruption is central to the internal dynamic of the state. Against this background, it is legitimate to pose the question of what Nigeria, as with the modal African state, is about beyond sharing and stealing money? And why so?

The internal political configuration and entrenched socio-political dispensations in Africa, just as in Nigeria, were designed to advance a certain extraneous cause and causes far removed from the interests of the peoples of the continent. In the final analysis, the evolution and devolution of the Nigerian state has been driven by illogic that are rational ad interim logics only within specific contexts and challenges in time that place and limit these important developments within particularistic historical loci. In a longitudinal frame of time they prove ultimately short sighted. A fundamental flaw is seen at work here. The critical challenge is ideational. The common denominating void in the challenge of Nigeria and practically all the non-nation states in sub Saharan Africa is the historic incapacity to formulate and a prevailing lack on a broad consensus on transcendental ideo-philosophical foundations that define the new political space to which all its constituent socio-political communities ascribe.

There is a litany of attempts in this regard. And they may sound paradoxical. Mobutu’s Authenticite is an interesting example. As an iconic representation of the very worst of Africa’s governance paradigm in his capacity as an unrepentant murderous stooge and proxy of neo-imperialist West in Africa, a percursor of life Presidency that preceded copycats like Pierre Nkunrunziza in Burundi or Paul Biya in neighboring Cameroon or even Sassou Nguesso in the Republic of Congo, or I might even add locally Olusegun Obasanjo’s attempt at term elongation, Mobutu Sese Seko had the good sense to attempt to institute a rallying fundamental creed of Authenticite to ground his dubious enterprise of keeping Zaire under his belt. Leopold Sedar Senghor’s strand of Negritude was tragic. His position was consistent with that of his compatriot Blaise Diagne who in 1919 subsumed the salience of the unity of Africans under assimilation into French culture and national life.

In 1921, at the Second Pan-African Congress that met in several sessions in London, Paris and Brussels, the only dissenting voices on African Unity were those of Blaise Diagne and Gratien Candace, both French politicians of African and Guadeloupian descent, who represented Senegal and Guadeloupe in the French Chamber of Deputies.

Cheikh Anta Diop

They both soon abandoned the idea of Pan-Africanism because they advocated equal rights inside the French citizenship and thought the London Manifesto declaration too dangerously extreme. In effect, they effectively denied the unity of Africa as a fundamental condition for black emancipation. Reports of 1919 conference note that it took the combined efforts of Blaise Diagne and W.E.B. Du Bois to navigate around the obstacles by the French government and organize the Pan-African Congress in Paris in February 1919. Diagne’s role was crucial to the convening of the Congress.

A Senegalese, Diagne was the highest-ranking African in French politics, having assisted France in recruiting African soldiers. As a Senegalese deputy to the French Parliament, French Prime Minister Clemenceau approved the Congress as a political favour to them; nonetheless he disapproved widespread publicity for it. Then came Cheikh Anta Diop, a foremost African philosopher, physicist, sociologist and chemist- a rounded intellectual-issued from Senegal, who later formulated the seminal work on the economic and cultural basis of a federated continental African state, adumbrated that national problems in Africa were still being met with bureaucratic mentality.

He was prescient in noting that the lack of cultural policies worthy of the name and none of the new states then had adopted a systematic policy of restoration. Finally, in 1987 he observed that there had been no political work accomplished in Africa that might radically have transformed consciences or prepared them for the austere tasks required by true independence. Refusing platitudes and political gratifications, he was thrown into jail by Sedar Senghor. Mwalimu Nyerere’s Ujaama, Ivorian Ivorite (as an intellectual rallying point and not the corrupted political deployment of the concept) to hold all constituent nations in the state together, have been attempts at formulating civic theological precepts at the national level. Yet, Nigeria has been uniquely placed to develop a national civic theology around a truly emancipatory Afrocentric template. A failure to do this, just like Ghana, has had tragic consequences.

Despite Ghana’s historic failure at consolidating its acquired foremost credentials as a country mobilized by core tenets of pan Africanism, the progressive tenor of most of Ghana’s administration puts it in a different class from Nigeria. Ghana had clear advantage with Nkrumah’s pan African vision and leadership. Nkrumah was central to the convening of the Fifth Pan-African Congress that was held in Manchester, United Kingdom, 15–21 October 1945. The congress was jointly organized by George Padmore, the influential Trinidadian pan-Africanist, and Kwame Nkrumah. The Congress was attended by 90 delegates, 26 from Africa.

Participants included scholars, intellectuals and political activists who played influential roles in various African independence movements such as the Kenyan independence leader Jomo Kenyatta, American activist and academic W. E. B. Du Bois, Malawi’s Hastings Banda, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, prominent Jamaican barrister Dudley Thompson and Obafemi Awolowo and Jaja Wachuku from Nigeria. It also led partially to the creation of the Pan-African Federation, founded in 1946 by Nkrumah and Kenyatta. The 1945 Congress followed the foundation of the Pan-African Federation in Manchester in 1944.