Godfathers, Infallibles and Indispensables, Nigeria Problematique,
(Part 2),
Ademola Araoye
The fact is that the well codified operational mantra of the preeminent class insisting on the continuity of the status quo as is, in spite of all its observable warts, is underscored by personal transactional interests. These elements are the same operators and the very beneficiaries of the firmly entrenched prebendal culture of the Nigerian rentier state. But, to be certain, the dogged resistance of this class to radical changes is neither the way forward to future stability nor does it portend any hope to salvage the sinking ship. Their prescriptions are exactly what have brought Nigeria to its knees. The reluctance to let go of personal interests are also the main reasons the old establishment, their indulgent scions and newly recruited urchins inducted into the boardroom of criminal elite syndicates are determined to frustrate any rigorous and rational new thinking in new directions on Nigeria’s future. To be sure, pre-bendalism refers to political systems in which state officials and their allies in state institutions through legal but mostly illegal avenues appropriate resources of the commonwealth, and distribute them to benefit almost exclusively family, supporters, co-religionists and selected members within their very narrow contractual power circuits. As a rentier state, a state derives all or a substantial portion of its national revenues from the rent and commission paid by foreign individuals, concerns or governments. In most of such states, prebendalism is integral to the operative political agreement. Such a political agreement is an informal deal outside the framework of the Constitution or the laws governing governance of the state among political parties, party factions, key individuals, candidates for public office, or holders of public office. In practice in developing post-colonial states such as Nigeria, it is an agreed formula among political forces, especially in relation to how to share booty derived from the national coffers among leaders.
The agreed upon formula are often enforced through the deployment of the state institutions of coercion or through extra constitutional means, including violence, deployment of traditional mystics, and other non-chivalrous modalities of rule enforcement. Cult like relations develop among the hierarchically arranged beneficiaries of the underhand deals. At the apex of the crime like enterprise is the Godfather, who in smaller polities or in the One Man State or One Party state may be the President. The Godfather directs implementation of such agreement, including the distribution of perks and privileges accorded members of the cult like group. The pervasive problem in the system of political cultism and Godfatherism in Nigeria is that like everything in the Nigerian firmament, there is indeed no honor among thieves. Thuggery, lawlessness and chicanery are shamelessly integrated and manifest in public life and are formally adopted as the most preferred and potent currency of interaction across the whole gamut of life in society. These attributes, defining political life of the state, are associated with the conduct of peculiar control mechanisms in the organized underworld. The state and society are integrated into the massive empire of a formalized and institutionalized underworld. That empire, consistent with the extant protocols of the underground, are sub divided into fiefdoms. In vast territories like Nigeria, the formal state equates the fiefdom of the Godfather. These states, delineated fiefdoms, are under the control of the dominant Godfather. The longevity of control of a fiefdom by a Godfather is unpredictable. Subsisting political agreements are thus often temporary as they unravel with every shift in the balance of influence among the critical actors, including rise of ambitious former acolytes of the Godfather, in the defined universe. Instability is heightened by the emergence of every new set of ambitious young Turks, mostly through questionable elections; from the manipulated party primaries to the stolen national elections that are all facilitated by the Godfather. National political process is thus no more than the coordination of efforts by the draconian reign of a hierarchy of local Godfathers across the national state space. Godfathering and cultism are thus entrenched elemental realitities of the certain fragility of the political process. In heated political spaces, the transmutation of Godfatherism to the reign of warlords begins with only small and often imperceptible incremental steps. The Niger Delta and River State comes to mind. In all this, for both godfather and his acolyte, expectation of control of subventions from the Federal Government is foremost. Oil!
Nigeria is both an oil-dependent and rentier state. Holistic mismanagement, implying a culture of political brigandage that is linked to contrived policy of economic failures, has meant that oil has stifled the development of other modes of foreign exchange earnings, including the abandonment of the agricultural and industrial sectors. The oil sector constitutes about 90 percent of foreign exchange revenue and it is the economy’s mainstay. Domination of the oil industry by the political class, including the military, in the context of a clearly defined ethno-regional and ethno-religious hegemonic aspirations, has been the major prize for control of the center of the center and the center of the periphery. The structure of the management and control of the oil industry directly reflects the distribution of state power. The fossilized stratification and demarcations of access to state rent, preeminently through access to oil wells by private individuals, along ethno-regional and ethno-religious lines have been a central contention in the problematique of the Nigeria phenomenon. Essentially, who not only brings what to the commonwealth but also who appropriates what are the main imperatives motorizing the unending recurrence of the search for structural equilibrium, social equity and political justice? Accordingly, in the dire straits, moving deeper into the new millennium, it is inconceivable to imagine the propagation of the continuity of the culture of state rentier transactions among a few elite syndicates that have led to the total repudiation of the very concept of a Nigeria. The tragic reality is that the infallibles, untouchables and indispensables, the Godfathers, are implacably fixated on the agenda of their self and class perpetuation through revamping a legacy of extremely skewed access to the national till that many silent Nigerians have now adjudged to be irredeemable. Godfatherism is deeply rooted and pervasive in national life as absolute control of levers of policy making at all levels and across all spheres revolve around Godfathers. The processes leading to the emergence of Umar Yaradua as President of the Republic and ultimately the unfortunate outcome for political stability is instructive of the nebulous role and agenda of hay-wire ultra-nationalist patriotism spouting infallible Godfathers of the crumbling state and wobbly pretend nation. In a related digression with a high degree of salience to this discourse, for the discerning student of Nigeria’s foreign policy in the last decade or two, the immovable, indispensables and infallibles of Nigeria are directly responsible for the turmoil in the West Africa sub region today. These old infallible and indispensable wise ones, in instances for personal political agendas and, also in sad expressions of unbounded ego and hubris, misled the Nigerian state at a critical juncture during the Ivorian conflict. Their earth shaking naivety, being charitable here, in navigating the most strategic challenge of post-civil war Nigeria, helped to consolidate the flailing influence of France in West Africa. Exuding little humility and scant circumspection, the historic opening presented Nigeria to advance the most important foreign and security policy objectives since it emerged as a state in the global interstate system was carelessly dissipated by the immovable and infallibles to the chagrin of all progressive forces in Africa. They even goaded the extant regime to declare war. What was Abuja smoking? The consequential price of this historic blunder has been steep for the whole of West Africa and indeed Africa. The lesson from the massive and unprecedented policy failure on the Ivorian conflict is that there is the constant need to ring fence the future of youth from the toxic delusions and fixations of sanctimonious demagoguery of know all ancient patriotic interventionists. Indisputable that they are culpable in the grossly untenable state of national affairs, it is an assured fact that in the least, they and family are insulated from the excruciations of current realities across the land. They are also prime passengers with priority seats in the caravans of the exodus that would be set in motion in the event of a comprehensive humanitarian implosion that Nigeria appears to be decidedly bent on actualizing.
Meanwhile, a broader contextualization of the current situation helps to locate the sources of the comprehensive pathologies, including the emergence of the brigades and brigandage of infallibles, indispensables, and Godfathers afflicting state and society in the post-colonial state environment. The calculus of the status quo oriented infallibles and indispensable elite in charge unfolds in the larger context of the paralyzing circumstances of the mechanical state. The theoretical pretensions of legitimacy of the odious order, neutrality by the Godfather-run state institutions or the formal state itself are belied by the lived historicity of the state in the post-colonial African environment. Nigeria, like every other post-colonial African state, is an artificial creation. But it is also an unfortunate amalgam given its antecedents, timing, circumstances, the impurity of the motives of its birth as well as location of its emergence at the delicate flexing of the evolutionary cycle of global sensibilities. Cobbled together in an era of the creeping emergence of a radically more refined sensibilities at the onset of the embryonic international society in post WW II, the Westphalian transplant is unable to assume or give birth to a loyal citizenry. Accordingly, it has struggled but continues to lack organic roots in society. The state is thus an imposed aberration that has sought from its very creation to find a raison d’etre to legitimize its problematic existence. The post-colonial state, unable to evolve or grow, floats in the absence of any universally acknowledged consensual ideational foundations that hold society together or that define the essences of the peoples forged into the political contraption. It must be acknowledged that the flailing social and political orders borne out of impositions lack legitimacy, since there are no validating principles on which the state is anchored. In fact, there is systemic value dissonance, given the dearth of salient convergence in basic values and worldviews around which any legitimizing principles could evolve. The state must compete with powerful indigenous social and political orders that are organic and are the distillation of the evolution of the various peoples. In a difficult paradox, the creation of the African state in many instances was the trigger of the rise of what before then was barely latent sub-nationalistic consciousness. This was a reaction to perceived and real threats of possible subjugation by an internal hegemon in the new order. The emergence, especially through guile, of the state immediately elicited a security dilemma. Security dilemma, in the context of intra-state process, is a situation in which actions taken by a competing constituent unit for power to increase its own security or system control cause reactions from other constituent units. This in turn leads to undermining confidence in the capability of the system to protect all rather than an increase in the state’s security. Resolving the classic security dilemma becomes the first crisis to be managed by the new state. The evidence of the failure to do this abounds. Sadly, the security dilemma remains unresolved through most of Africa. In that context, statehood is rendered a dangerous myth.
On the basis of sovereignty, states vary in the degree of their statehood. It is for these reasons that many of the post-colonial political entities have been described as characterized by lack of adequate stateness. It has been observed that many sovereigns in sub-Saharan Africa have not been interested in emulating more developed states. The contentions are either that post-colonial states in Africa have not been successfully transplanted from their Western origins or that they are in the process of permanently being constructed. But for how long can the fortitude of even the most hard headed idealists last? For how long must development be postponed for the state to properly gel into a constructive mechanism to uplift restive society trapped in the stagnant contrivance? What happens to a future deferred of progressive constituents of the perpetually crisis ridden state? Who determines the extent of human sacrifice and suffering morally acceptable to keep a visibly bankrupt post-colonial state afloat? What are the implications of the perpetual mobilization for the internal war of colonial suppression for development? Some analysts therefore think of the state as being in decline and suffering from dual crises of the state and the economy. The post-colonial African state, it is further observed, belies the validity of the assumptions about the existence and viability of the state, which analysts generally take for granted. The very notion of the ‘lame Leviathan’ state in sub-Saharan Africa has been problematized as characterized by state arbitrariness, instability, corruption and high inefficiency. All these deconsolidate the process of statehood and strain the project of nationhood.
This is why ethno-regional suspicions and ethno-religious conflicts have become a recurring immovable decimal and integral to national life in Nigeria. Let it be briefly recalled that in 2002 to 2003, there was conflict in the Middle Belt (lower Benue valley) involving Tiv in Benue, Taraba and Nasarawa and the Jukun of Taraba states and other tribes in Nasarawa state. During the same period, there were conflicts between Moslems and non Moslems over the implementation of Sharia law in Jigawa, Kano and Kaduna States. Conservative estimates put fatalities from politically motivated violence related to the introduction of Sharia in northern states of Nigeria as far higher than that resulting from perennial conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.29 Fatalities from communal or religious violence across the country in three years is put at least 10,000. In July 2009, the Boko Haram, a fanatical Islamic group began a Jihad with the intent to Islamize the whole of Nigeria, in particular the “evil West and South” of the country. In clashes between members of the group and the military and Police, 800 were killed as government forces fought to contain the spread of the mayhem initiated by the group in five of Nigeria’s northern states. The forces remain potent as they have defied intense engagement with the military. While this is so, there are accusing fingers at elite complicity in the continued vibrancy of Boko Haram. In more recent times have been a onslaught of Fulani in the Middle Belt. The unending Fulani deadly provocations in the South West and the South East, some propound, are deliberate attempts with a view to acquiring a homeland in Nigeria.
Current challenges are therefore mere extensions of unresolved problems from the past. Nigeria has known no respite since the end of the civil war. Conflict on ethno-regional lines in Nigeria merely complicate the emergence of the threat of fundamentalist Salafist group, the Boko Haram, that some suggest is waging a war to islamize Nigeria. The war of this terrorist organization long seriously raised questions around the longevity of the Nigeria state. Before the advent of Boko Haram, a long-standing, low-intensity conflict that pit a number of militias in the Niger Delta and the Nigerian military forces over the control of oil resources mined in that region. The Niger Delta area accounts for 90% of the country’s oil and gas export earnings, but since independence it has remained severely underdeveloped and politically marginalized. At that point, the greatest immediate challenge to Nigeria’s stability emanated from the Niger Delta, where political grievance, criminal opportunism and militia violence, all fuelled by major oil theft operations and a massive influx of increasingly sophisticated weaponry, created an ever more dangerous dispensation. The year 2005 witnessed an alarming escalation of the conflict with illegal arms flows into the Delta, with militia groups increasing their personnel and armament strength. The future of the Nigerian state, like many other post-colonial states in Africa, remained at stake. Ason Bur observed the steady rise and increase in the number and operations of ethnic militias in Nigeria since 1999. He observed that ethnic militias came from South west, South South, South East and some Northern parts of Nigeria’s six geo-political zones. In the South West he highlighted the emergence of the Odu’a Peoples Congress (OPC) led by Dr Frederick Fasheun and Otunba Gani Adams who were agitating for self-governance of the Yoruba speaking areas.
Ason Bur further surveyed the security outlay of the country. He affirmed that that in the South East, there was also a militant organization, the Movement for the Actualization of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB), headed by Chief Ralph Uwazuruike. This organization, as the name implies, seeks to actualize the sovereign state of Biafra. Bur writes that MASSOB is very influential among the Igbos in the South East geo political zone….It is alleged that they have a Radio Biafra in America and have Biafran currency circulating in Abia and Imo states…In the Niger Delta area of the South South geopolitical zone inhabited largely by oil producing states, militia groups have emerged since 1999 demanding 100% resources control or political independence for the Niger Delta region. These are mainly Niger Delta People Volunteer Force (NDPVF) headed by Alhaji Asari Dokunbo.
To be continued
*Read the first part of the essay here
*Professor Ademola Araoye is a retired official of the United Nations and former Director of Abuja Leadership Center, a TETFUND Center of Excellence in Public Governance and Leadership at the University of Abuja. He is author of Sources of Conflict in the Post- Colonial African State (AWP, 2012).