Amilcar Cabral

It is therefore clear that the pursuit of pan-Africanism expressed in a dedication of a national commitment to the holistic emancipation of black humanity provided one very potent idea to ground the raison d’etre for the Nigerian state. Nigeria is also by virtue of not just its population size and by the sheer diversity of its internal constituents of over 250 nationalities and splay of indigenous and imported hegemonic faiths is best placed to codify the essence of its large presence and stature in the firmament as the central continental motor to drive the development and the overall transformation of the place of black humanity in the global scheme of things. Snippets of this have featured in the Afrocentric foreign policy but the average Nigerian is yet to understand the critical place of Nigeria in the historic challenge of black humanity.

These represent a potential mine of ideas and ethical imperatives on developing a raison d’etre for the Nigerian state. If Nigeria would be the shining exemplar of the black nation state, it would then refuse to accommodate the kinds of monstrosities that have polluted and clogged its social and political firmament. The kinds that sit in the dock of infamy today all over the place. These ideas were integral to Obafemi Awolowo’s vision and the renaissant Africa thesis of Nnamdi Azikiwe.

If championing the challenge of pan Africanism is unappealing to Nigerians, Nigeria must then craft a more ingenious reason why it must continue to exist as one indivisible state. This is a basic minimum requirement in an era when minorities everywhere, driven by an assortment of primordial sensibilities, seek self-expression in geo-political terms. The good luck with Nigeria is that the global strategic imperatives demands a bulwark against the potential expansion and conquest of black Africa by radial Islam in its historic confrontation with the West. Yet, the very fact of being perceived as pro West and Christian exacerbates our problem. As the Boko Haram phenomenon has demonstrated and highlighted by Zbigniew Brezinski, Western secular democracy is a particularly troublesome concept for Islamists as for them it implies an essentially atheistic society and state. Islamic fundamentalism also feeds off anti-Western xenophobia.

Africa is not now allowed to choose, because by repudiating its own authentic spiritual essences and consigning its self to alien spiritual spaces in its massive defection from the self, he has lost the freewill to choose to be itself. There is always a price to pay for choices made. That is why El Shabab and Boko Haram cannot operate in India or Japan. They have sustained the integrity of their spiritual essences.

So, Nigeria is caught in a dilemma of how best to repudiate the script of the main gladiators of coopting Africa as willing proxies in the contemporary and millennial edition of their historic fight. Boko Haram and its affiliation with the Islamic State and El Shabab are good pointers to this danger for Nigeria. The continued repudiation of black humanity of its own spirituality in favor of hegemonic imports does not augur well for the future. As we have witnessed in my state of Osun of all places, those who have nothing to die for, would die for anything. It is doubly tragic coming from the cradle of Yoruba in Ife. But what to expect where the “Igba keji Orisha” abandons tradition and goes kneeling in the temples of alien gods. May Nigeria not go the way of Osun, because then it would ultimately be a disastrous confrontation on a catastrophic scale. Without any such raison d’etre, Nigeria is pilotless in terms of ideational pivots of its continued survival. A cynical perspective would then be that Nigeria would survive only because it serves the interests of the historical rapists of the continent, and not because of its intrinsic value in itself. It is going to be an unpleasant survival for all.

It is against this background that every so often, Nigeria has acquired, in an almost seasonal and a boring mechanical character, the ritual of going through the umpteenth national conversation regarding the structure of the state. The motif driver of the engagement of the same national elite is in relation to the sharing of the national resources. By implication, it is never to formulate common understanding on the ingredients of an organic glue to hold together the many clashing and disparate interests in this multi-national and multi religious state. In the absence of what some have described as a civic theology to undergird the concept of the nation-state, personality cults emerge in many African rag-flag states and the ethnic and religious become the dominant emotive parameters in all.

But in Nigeria has emerged a deep rooted national consensus among its dubious elite how to bleed the country to death. And they seem to have succeeded, so far. Less than a hundred families have brought Nigeria to its knees. The consequences are the rise and daily rise of grass roots based militancy and irredentism outside the control of a discredited elite. These bodies represent a final repudiation of the status quo, including the odious miasma of unethical axiomatic foundations of the Nigerian non-nation state and society and the entrenched illogic of the standard operating procedures governing the national process.

So the last national constitutional conference proposed the further devolution of the state into 54 micro states. The conference seemed oblivious of the obvious lessons that the current thirty-six state structure has proven unviable. Six months after the reality of a crashing economy and an aggressive militancy to stop the flow of oil at the heart of the Nigeria illogic, about time Nigeria found some good raison d’etre. This is an urgent task before the Nigeria state space is shredded and joins the litter of the many hopeless small fiefdoms in Africa.

These fiefdoms are led, as in the Gambia, Burundi, Congo Brazzaville, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon and others by petty minded or out rightly mindless illiterate dictators. In aftermath of the death of Nigeria would emerge many more unviable pretend state spaces on the continent. Therefore, warts and all, the permanence and longevity of Nigeria is still the best bet as the nucleus for the struggle for the holistic emancipation of Africa. Just perhaps, this simple idea fortified by rigorous expatiations has a potential to galvanize and give meaning to sacrifices required to sustain a Nigerian state to future generations.

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