Ademola Araoye
The last fortnight has offered, even if in a bizarre manner, Nigeria with another rare opportunity to undertake a brutally frank assessment of itself. The required thorough soul searching is with a view to embracing actions to dissipate the paralyzing fears that inform the surreal character of state and society. The sudden intrusions of what on the surface appears to be two unrelated episodes unfolding at home and at the intersection of home and the diaspora into the national discourse are historic. The case of Kemi Badenoch, leader of the Conservative Party of the United Kingdom and proudly self-avowing of Yoruba antecedents, and Dele Farotimi, an unapologetic reformist, afford many levels of analytic dissections. The two unanticipated confrontations with state institutions that portend potentially tectonic consequences. They have impacted as rude crashing into the consciousness of society of the unpalatable existential realities the establishment has always frightened the establishment and consequently refused to acknowledge. The waves so generated by the unambiguous rejection of the long contested axiomatic principles of state and society have revealed the abysmal dearth of rigor in the national ethic. It has as well shattered the atmospheric comforts associated with the multi-dimensional lies that the Nigerian state has come to epitomize. In that world of convenient contrivances, the curses of sycophancy, dissembling and inefficiency are major currencies of transactional interactions at all levels of the dystopian state and society. The triple curses are at the heart of the embarrassing imbroglio of the unfolding two national scandals.
The penchant to project glaring myths and blatant falsehoods as sacrosanct facts and verifiable realities has been the unfortunate bedrock of Nigerian statehood. In the industrial scale of systemic corruption of everything under the sky, data and perspectives on everything and on every aspect of Nigerian life are forged to support immovable institutionalized heresies. The improbable narratives of a transmogrified humanity are required for the state to survive, however awkwardly that may be. The price that the dubious project elicits from its entrapped disaffected population is not a salient element in the blind calculus of Nigeria’s pervasive immorality. The protocols of state and society are configured to deviate from the universal norm and the natural order of civilized global humanity. The systemic repudiation of the natural order of universal truths that is reflected in the ubiquity of irredeemable corruption of the public and private space in the country is traceable to the warped foundational principle of the state. Nigeria is founded and operated on hare brained disingenuous falsehoods that was originally perpetrated by the very architects of the state. Accordingly, state institutions, establishments, and its miniscule human-agency beneficiaries are delicately perched on brazen distortions of facts, myth and falsehood. These falsehoods carry the weight of law in state and, society. Accordingly, they are immutable decrees propelling the dynamic of that defined space. In turn, the dynamic produces well socialized merchants who are vested in the system who become the champions and guardians of the estate across all its realms. In this setting, it is inconsequential even if the legitimacy of the Constitution as a fundamental contract is contested. The Constitution begins with a historic lie. Everything is a lie. Like a recurring nightmarish decimal, one lie leads to another lie and then another lie ad infinitum. Nigeria has thus been long afraid of its mirror image. Reality is denied as a frightening quotidian anathema. Truth of the Nigerian condition and situation is prohibited. Teaching of history is prohibited. Nigeria is entrapped in a bubble of an unsustainable surreal. Nigeria is thus a classic expression of the fundamental precept of the discipline of sociology. Paradoxically, that principle is also deployed as a rudimentary concept in conflict management to highlight the irreducibility or distortion, however slightly, of objective reality. It relates to the impact of definitions and distortions of objective reality. The Nigerian condition, anchored on a reductionism of reality, a contortionist bending of the factual, has desensitized the helpless citizenry who make do with forms and expressions of ordinarily despicable imaginations just to survive. It is a world where snakes swallow bundles of freshly minted currency in their millions. This is a condition precedent for the emergence of icons, heroes, champions and merchants of the status quo to thrive. This revered band of pomposity constitutes the true defenders of the vacuous Holy Grail aromatized. But, to be sure, objective reality is a stubborn truth. It catches up with the contrivances of human folly.
“When men define a situation as real, they are real in their consequences”. As the elite heavily vested in the status quo and the continuity of the Nigerian state as presently constituted and operated are beginning to appreciate, the first law of sociology is a doubly edged sword. The constancy of the objective truth is unwavering irrespective of the transient distortions and manipulations of the objective facts to support engines that are revved by dominant falsehoods in the protection of partisan interests. In the fullness of time and the terminal cycle of human interaction, whether through sheer fatigue of a tired falsehood or the emergence of constructive interventions of deviants determined to purvey the brutal truth in the face of a conditioned sanctified human circumstance, factual reality rears its ugly head. For good measure, the long declined truth strikes at uncomfortable moments in inconvenient places by most unlikely human agencies. The insalubrious truth is seemingly auto-primed to create as much discomfort and disruption on its own terms. Nigeria has not lacked such iconic deviants in their heroic confrontations with the permanent morass of Nigeria’s statehood and society. That is the tribe of the Tai Solarins, Gani Fawehinmis, Fela Anikulapo Kuti and lately Dele Farotimi. Emerging from the same experiential cosmos, even if operating from a vastly different social space, is Olukemi Olufunto Badenoch, nee Adegoke, the leader of the Conservative party of United Kingdom of self-declared Yoruba antecedents. As predictable, the establishment, constituted mainly of comprehensive human parasites with codified doubtful integrity who live off the state, is unforgiving in their class partisan patriotic rage. They have mobilized and deploying the full weight of the threatened parasitic collectivity constituting the guardian merchant of the status quo in this war. Yet, this full scale moral equivalent of a nuclear engagement is borne more out of fear, given the awareness of the highly placed unconscionable social reprobates of the immorality of their corporate and individual moorings in the defined space. The effusion of the suffocating stench of their nakedness that the society perceives in the process of unravelling their hitherto sanctified falsehood is liberating from the entrenched moral dystrophy.
The culture of dystopian imprudence of the Nigerian political space reached its inglorious nadir with the undignified intervention of Vice President Kashim Shetima in the unwarranted face off with Kemi Badenoch. The senselessness was triggered by the notorious inefficiency of a caricature of a counterfeited mechanism that has opportunistically seized on the comatose of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to pretend to conduct consular relations of Nigeria in an embarrassingly loquacious manner. As every rookie consul, or broadly a trained diplomat, appreciates, discernment and discretion are critical assets in the personality profile of any one engaged in a standard diplomatic mission. This equally applies to consuls, whether posted from the foreign state or a honorary assignment of a distinguished national of the state in which he/she operates on behalf of the foreign power. A number of questions in relation to the unprofessionalism and lack of discernment exhibited by our faux consular mechanism arise: What was to be gained by Nigeria or by the opportunistic human agent of that nonsensical structure with no recognized legal status in the world of serious diplomatic interactions among states calling the leader of the Conservative Party of a global power such as the United Kingdom? Where was the High Commissioner to the United Kingdom or in his absence the Charge d’Affaires, a.i. if such informal interaction was deemed necessary? What diplomat goes out blabbing on national television about a private experience with such a highly placed person in the official pecking order of the United Kingdom? What motivated the public naming and shaming of Kemi Badenoch on rebuffing the attempted ingratiation by the lowly placed opportunistic character? Did any professional intelligent profiling of Kemi Badenoch take place before the impetuous telephone call? And what is this gibberish about Nigerianess? Another bogus one in the manner of Sese Seko Mobutu’s “Authenticite”? Do some of us live on Mars? And which office in the Foreign Office advised the Vice President on that response? Isn’t dignified silence in high places golden anymore? Has Nigeria not observed the pattern of highly consequential state officials who started off with dismissive vituperative evaluation of the country, a la General Colin Powell to Barrack Obama only to change tack post office? Finally, whose purpose is served by all this?
It is imperative to interrogate the central plank of the ire of the Nigerian establishment around the perspectives of Kemi Badenoch as postulated by the would be Consul General of Nigeria to the universe. The ludicrous doctrine of “Nigerianess” is a non-starter in the firmament of a multi-national state, to begin with. Yet, it is the convenient common emotional trapping of all who benefit from the skewed management of the structural incongruities of post independent colonial state entities. Have the articulators of the ideology, for want of a better concept, attempted to first resolve the pervasive challenge of value dissonances that is integral to all multi-national states? A significant manufactured fact around which state building and nation building has faltered is the falsehood that Nigeria is constituted by one people. Such falsehoods have endangered the many a state too often. The incontrovertible fact is that Nigeria is a multi-national state that has inherited the challenge of entrenched dissonance in the values systems of its many nations. Taking a leaf from my past intervention on the subject, it is affirmed that Boko Haram and the recent Lakurawas express the absolute value dissonance between a sizeable community of north based fundamentalist Muslims and other constituent communities in the Nigerian socio-political space. Some have suggested that these terrorist groups are proxies of political actors in the mainstream reaching to the very pinnacle of Nigeria’s political life. The groups terrorizing the Nigerian space are linked by a common repudiation of the legitimacy of the Nigerian state and have, in instances, explicitly proclaimed the ultimate mission to topple the social order through revolutionary means. This is with a view to transforming the Nigerian state into an Islamic theocracy. This revolutionary quest has entrenched violence as a long term normative currency in the political transactions between stakeholders in the Nigerian polity. The outcome of this situation is the continuing strong undercurrents of ethno regional and violent religious disruptive intrusions in the turbulent national process. Such is the situation that General Theophilus Danjuma, easily one of the endangered species of highly respected statesmen across the country, at some point declared that “Nigeria is on fire” while warning about the potential “Somaliazation” of the country. The frightening scenario seems to have further deteriorated since his bold admission of the extreme fragility of the Nigerian state.
In the recent past the submission had been made that it may seem odd, after six decades of statehood and pretend nation being, to propose that Nigeria should undertake a realistic and holistic reappraisal of its fundamentals. With its clear state of paralyzing dystrophy as state and society, such soul searching is compelling at this critical juncture. If for no other reason, redressing the ruinous complications of the wobbly project of the experimental statehood has become imperative for the sake of a Nigerian humanity that again, barely a generation after a horrendous civil war, is precipitously looking down into a dizzying abyss. In the dire circumstance, contrived oversimplification of the complexity of the situation, central to incoherent official accounts for the good of the political elite, is abjured. We therefore proceed in the acknowledgement, even if contrary to official narratives, that the configuration of the status quo; in its structural, in physical and ideational terms, ethical and normative expressions, constitute a deviation from universalistic precepts undergirding stability in multi-national political communities, either as states or societies. A critical first step in redressing the ruinous situation is the courage to face the daunting realities of the Nigerian longitudinal experience, warts and all. There is thus neither room for political correctness, status quo dissembling, nor placating euphemisms that obfuscate the gravity of current circumstances. The quotidian comprehensive horrors of life across the breadth of the Nigerian space impels a brutal discursive and practical engagement by all. The current noises in the land, mostly irrational, may indeed be a starting point.
The answer to these questions are evidently simple. These terminal inanities are reflexive of official Nigeria’s sense of extreme fragility that has given rise to a terrible insecure national psyche. Given the current state of the national psyche, Nigeria is ultra-sensitive in the warped imagination of assumed slights in what should be inconsequential rebuffs. Official interactions and relationships continue to be transactional, oiled by sycophancy at all levels and driven by a common understanding that the objective truth is irrelevant in the affairs of the embattled state entity. The guardians and merchants of this odious order are gearing for battle. It is however, a futile exercise on their part. The fire next time would overwhelm their obscure corners of false hallelujahs. Like a long simmering volcano, the eruption of truth is neither predictable nor anticipated. No one saw the coming of the rude awakening of establishment Nigeria from its own discarded truths. The implications of the jeremiad of brutal facts of Nigeria spewed by Kemi Badenoch and Dele Farotimi should certainly handsomely move the needle. Indeed, at their time of choosing, the chickens will finally and inevitably come home to roost.
Professor Ademola Araoye wrote from Ibadan.