Ademola Araoye

He spoke of a Congress twisted and pulled in every direction by hundreds of well financed and powerful special interests. Partisanship was the order of the day and it trumped the concern for the common good. Down the road of a mistaken idea of freedom for Americans to grasp for themselves some advantages over others is implicit the constant conflict between narrow parochial interests that would end in chaos and immobility. Carter observed that this American national crisis was manifest in the growing doubt about the meaning of individual lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for the American nation. It was noted that the spreading of American crisis of confidence was an outward manifestation of an underlying crisis of values. The consequential erosion of national confidence threatened to destroy the social and political fabric of America. But the gravity of the crisis and the ethical deficiencies and value deficits were not allowed to submerge the idea of an American project. Americans rose to the challenge in various re-invigorating projects.

Among these was the project proposed by Walter Russell Mead. The project is defined by Walter Russell Mead as a grand strategic vision of what it is that the United States seeks to build in the world. He advanced that in the case of the United States, the national project then was to protect America’s domestic own security while building a peaceful, world order of democratic states linked by common values and sharing common prosperity. Importantly he located this development in the deep roots in the American past. Mead reasoned that the aims and methods of American policy may be mistaken and misunderstood. Yet, it is the avowed American objective to promote the happiness and advance the cause of humanity as a whole. For him his advocacy of the American project was not to persuade his compatriots to do something different and better in the world, but to show better ways of achieving goals that he thought could be as moral and as practical as could be expected.

These seminal interventions are consistent with Antonio Gramsci’s epistemology that is founded on Hegelian principles. Summed up by Richard A Brosio, it is that knowing is never a passive reflection of the given, but instead is an act which can change the given. This is the logical outcome of belief in tenacious will of man. Gramsci affirmed that individuals can, and do, act alone and collectively in order to make their own history. Gramsci is clear about the locus of man and his existence as an actor. As a social being and actor, man can understand the data which comprise the physical and social worlds, and can act in a politically effective manner to create an order which makes good and just life possible. Man can reorder and restructure his world to advance equity, justice and fairness. Brosio illuminates that Gramsci is firm in his belief in the power of the will; the ability dialectically to analyze physical and social reality; and man’s ability to act collectively in order to realize his legitimate plans. Yet, in making history, men and women do so not under conditions of their choosing. The structural context is then critical. This understanding is crucial for all sides in renegotiating the political settlement of the disequilibrated Nigerian polity.

The structural context of the coming counter jousting of local and partisan interests puts the old core North on a back foot. As with all social processes human, it was only a question of time for hegemonic forces to get to the current impasse. Hopefully, this structural evolution would not imply a catastrophic cul de sac for the nation. As with all situations of power transition, managing the consequences of the evolution of major internal forces for power distribution in the federation requires on all sides deft and prudent management of the cards they have been dealt by our national history. Yet the case of Nigeria would not equate the classic power transition model. In real terms, restructuring from a hegemonic Order in a multi-national state space can only imply not classic power transition but rather power diffusion to achieve a new balance of multiple power centers. This power diffusion would ultimately strengthen the new federal experience of actually pooling resources together to achieve corporate strength.

It reverses the prevailing logic of roller coasting the federation through hegemonic predation of the weak co-opted. Parties to the construction of Nigeria’s new project should abjure the logic and trappings of hyper-hegemonic chest-thumbing. The concept of nationalism is not static. The construction and constituent elements of nationalism evolve with the exigencies of each era. In this, just like freedom, nationalism generates new imperatives as old constraining existential realities are consigned to the garbage heap of history. Nigeria needs to eviscerate problematic concepts and notions that have been associated with the massive and historic failure, waste of human energy, hemorrhage of the national will that combined have brought it down on its knees.

In the current national debacle, it is imperative to allude to a great American intellectual power house of the 1930s through to the 1960s. Reinhold Niebuhr, pastor, teacher, theologian, humanist, and a man of profound intellectual depth called for philosophical realism (not the power calculus strand) in managing situations such as Nigeria’s current phase of evolution. Holding very few illusions about the nature of man, the possibilities of politics or the pliability of history, Niebuhr enjoined all to see the world for as it is, and not as we would wish or even fantasize. He asserted that the challenge to being realistic is hubris, which may imply an outsized confidence and commitment to a partisan stance based on a false reading of reality.

• 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