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ANNOUNCE THIS ARTICLE TO YOUR FRIENDS

Forwarded by: SEGUN FAJEMISIN

NOSTALGIA AS NATIONAL ILLNESS:
BRITAIN AND NIGERIA IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

(Lecture delivered 30th October at the public presentation of Hi-Life, a society newspaper published in the UK and the first in its series of annual dinner-lectures)

NOSTALGIA AND THE NATION

r. Chairman, illustrious members of the high table, distinguished guests, notable Nigerians or --dare I say--- Anglo-Nigerians, once again I find myself breaking a self-imposed oath of silence as far as Nigerian affairs are concerned. I have discovered that in times of acute national distress and disorder such as we are, it is often better to keep one's counsel. But the topic on this occasion is compelling enough, and clinical to boot, because it affords one an excellent opportunity to take a retrospective and prospective look at the fate of Nigeria without being drenched in the foul and murky tide of the present.

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My first reaction on being presented with this topic was to marvel at its presumptuous irony. What makes us so sure that either Nigeria or Britain will survive in their present form and formation till the end of the twenty first century? Before our very eyes, the nation-state paradigm is undergoing radical and revolutionary transformations. There are interesting possibilities both in terms of post-empire global cartography and what the late and illustrious Edward Said has called the "underlying world map".

But I was also struck by the hope and optimism invested in what is called the Nigerian project by Nigerians all over the globe, despite the current travails of nationhood. Despite the parlous state of the nation, it is heart-warming that Nigerians have refused to give up on what they consider to be the manifest destiny of their nation as a haven for the black soul. These are immense psychological resources for a journey of redemption and renewal, and I salute this abiding faith and optimism of ordinary Nigerians which is borne out of an almost mystical belief in the destiny of their beloved country. Let us give three hearty cheers to a prosperous and peaceful Nigeria.

But by far the most striking thing about this topic is the halo of profound nostalgia that surrounds it: nostalgia for colonialism and the glorious age of empire, nostalgia for what might have been, and nostalgia for what ought to be. In a moment of bitter irony, the late Sam Mbakwe, Second Republic governor of Imo state, a man of tearful compassion, publicly wished that the British colonialists would come back to recolonize Nigeria. He was not only indicting himself but the entire post-independence political elite of Nigeria. But this dark view of Nigeria is not restricted to politicians alone. Many scholars and prominent authorities have argued that large parts of Africa overwhelmed by adversity and the collapse of state institutions ought to experience benign recolonization.

We are not there yet, but the prospects are dire indeed as agents of the new empire probe the nation's soft underbelly for the early signs of the impending implosion of a rotting innard. The argument is unchallengeable: large swathes of Africa that have descended into ungovernability are a breeding ground for terrorism, warlordism and drug Mafiosi. Hence, they are a threat to the civilized world. As each succeeding government outbids its predecessor in corruption and misgovernance, as every ginger step forward turns out to be a catastrophic tumble into the quagmire of the past, one can understand why nostalgia in Nigeria has assumed the clinical dimension of collective psychiatric disorder. Nostalgia is the iron cane with which we beat the errant present. Please take a sample. There is a revival of the cult of General Sani Abacha. There is a longing among many for the golden age of General Ibrahim Babangida. There is a yearning for the prim and proper politicians of the Second Republic who restricted themselves to stealing within the margins of horror and restrained themselves from the feeding frenzy of the current piranhas. The ten-percenters of the First Republic have long ascended to the pantheon of venerable sainthood.

Anybody reading between the lines of the recent tributes to General Yakubu Gowon on the occasion of his seventieth birthday would come to the conclusion that they were more of a telling indictment of the present rather than an unstinting homage to the clubbable general. Gowon's consensus-seeking charms, his humane disposition, his compassion, his honesty and essential integrity are compared to the brutish insensitivity, the graceless duplicity, hypocrisy and rank dishonesty of his succeeding military subordinates. This is coming almost three decades after public calls for his trial and execution. But by simply refusing to die, Gowon has lived to witness his own historic apotheosis; a sweet vindication over his detractors, and a confirmation of the Chinese proverb that if you stay by the river long enough, the bodies of your enemies may wash by. The national mood is foul and filled with nostalgic foreboding.

In such circumstances in which nostalgia feeds on aborted promise, in which the unedifying past crowds out the unseemly present, projecting the future and prospecting the present is an enormous task. Such, then, are the difficulties in plotting the relationship between Britain and Nigeria in the twenty first century. But given the less than sterling state of governance and economic development in contemporary Nigeria, we must still identify the positive roles Britain can play in the political and economic development of its colonial creation in this century and the dire consequences for both nations in the event of failure to heed the warning signals. To do this, we must isolate the present from the global flow of history, conduct a brief excursion into the past and then confront past and present with future possibilities and our prayerful hopes.

On Players and Spectators

We live in very interesting times for the nation-state paradigm. Commenting on the manifest decline in terms of prestige and productivity of British higher institutions of learning compared to their American rivals, a reader noted in the Financial Times of October 23/24, that the decline would be reversed around the year 2372 when there would be a common educational system across the 50-plus membership of a mega European union. Such a behemoth conglomeration will have a common currency, a premier language which is most likely to be English and a unified economy. Just as America represented a new type of nation-state which concentrated within its borders enormous human and natural resources which made overseas possession and the old-type imperialism an historic irrelevance, the new-type union of states will turn the old-type nation-state into the superannuated burden of the Fourth World.

This is not some idle dreaming or private fantasy. We can already see the hazy horizons of this new global restructuring of territorial space in the contemporary European Union and the bullish strength of the Euro. Britain's gaze is firmly fixed on Europe to the exclusion of its former colonial possessions. Africa and Nigeria are being frog-marched into the post-nation frontiers without having achieved the consolidation of the post-Westphalian nation-state. Just as it happened with the internationalization of slavery and the development of a planetary economy, Africa is once again a passive object of historical re-engineering. Once again, we are supine spectators in a world-historic drama.

Let us draw an analogy from the game of football. Can the spectator ever become a player? Even those on the reserve bench are normally cautioned against undue optimism. In the nineteenth century, Marx, Hegel, Weber and a slew of European thinkers and philosophers justified this historic aberration by bemoaning the dark superstitions, the rural idiocies and satanic rituals which had frozen history in Africa and the orient into one long nightmare. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, their intellectual heirs, the neo-conservative policy wonks, are bemoaning the failure of the colonial nation-state in Africa, the epidemics of dereliction such as AIDs and the Ebola virus and the pestilential afflictions that are the political elites of Africa.

With such natural and human disasters, it will be a miracle of New Testament proportions if a benighted continent were to get its act together. Yet if Africa were not to become a catacomb of human ruins, a way will have to be found to make it work. This is where Nigeria comes into play as the largest conglomeration of black people. One in every four Africans, and one in every five black people, is a Nigerian. If the idea of such a vast conglomeration of black people did not exist in the colonial imaginary, it might have had to be invented as an integral part of the anti-colonial telos. As such, Nigeria is a tribute to the power of inadvertent genius and the immanent logic of modernity. But, like modern Haiti, it may also become a metaphor for radical failure and the inability of the black psyche to find accommodation within the western logic of human development. What makes it so sad is that on the few occasions that Nigeria has managed to get its act together by reverting to its default settings rather than the prodding of its historically remiss political class, it is pure poetry in motion. Does the fault lie in our stars, or is there a global conspiracy to keep the most dynamic Black community permanently on its knees? In the words of our most famous novelist, perhaps it is time to go back to where the rains started beating us.

WAKING FROM A COLONIAL NIGHTMARE

Nigeria as we now know it came into existence exactly ninety years ago in a daring act of imperialist nation formation. Three separate entities were incorporated and amalgamated to become the modern nation of Nigeria. The author and conjuror of this colonial legerdemain was Lord Fredrick John Dealtry Lugard, a footloose but resourceful imperialist adventurer who had already seen action in Burma and East Africa. According to his famous doctrine of dual mandate, African states were to be administered to the mutual benefit of Africa and the world economy, the world economy being nothing but the economy of its leading nation: imperial Britain. Thus, the modern Nigerian state came before the nation, unlike the parent country where the state evolved in dynamic contradiction with civil and political society. And thus was sown the seed of an alien, terrorist state permanently in fundamental conflict with the wishes and aspirations of its captive people.

But while colonization was an act of fundamental economic aggression against the local populace, no one can deny in retrospect that the colonialists ran a better economy than the succeeding Nigerian political elite. A peep into European history is mandatory. What we now know as Britain had itself evolved through the dark ages from a conglomeration warring tribes, a monarchy in a state of radical flux, a nation with a constitutional monarchy, an empire-state and finally a nation-state when the sun eventually set on empire. Into this complex evolution was thrown several revolutionary interludes and momentous upheavals, the Magna Carta, the War of Roses , the Cromwellian uprising and civil wars. In the tumult and turbulence, the rule of law was gradually established with historic retribution as a supreme deterrent. Two British maxims will suffice. First, it is said that men are killed not because horses are stolen but so that horses may not be stolen. Second, a wag once noted that from time to time admirals are quartered to serve as an encouragement to others. Two historic axioms can be deduced from this. First, all nations are artificial entities glued together by blood, sweat and tears. Second, a nation is a permanent project in progress.

Unlike Britain, Nigeria, since its creation, has undergone no revolutionary metamorphosis. Yet its internal borders have been permanently contested, particularly after independence. From the Isaac Adaka Boro uprising, the second coup of July 1966 whose initially war-cry was "araba" or separation, the civil war, the Orkar mutiny, the June 12 fiasco, the Ogoni insurrection, sharia separatism to the contemporary stirrings in the Niger Delta. Many already dub President Obasanjo as the Gorbachev of Nigeria, the man under whose watch the contradictions accelerated thus facilitating the disintegration of the nation. Instability has become the stable fare of the Nigerian nation. Why is the nation so crisis-ridden? Why does it lurch, like a drunken elephant, from one crisis to the other?

In formulating their vision of the new nation of Nigeria, the British colonial authorities had to rely on the paradigm they gave to the world. Let the nation cohere, coalesce and congeal around a master-nationality that will serve as the rational incarnation and essence of the nation. This was what the English did to the Scots, the Welsh and the Irish in a series of bloody encounters. And everybody lived happily thereafter, so to say until the late twentieth century. Preferring injustice to disorder, the British colonial authorities felt that nation-building is not a tea party for squeamish liberals.

The choice of a master-nationality for Nigeria was not without a profound rationality and logic. The northern region at that point in time was the most stable and ordered society in the whole of the nation. In a series of jihads led at first by the revered Islamic scholar, Othman Dan Fodio and later by his descendants, the entire region had been brought under a rigid, centralized authority by the Fulani conquerors. By comparison, the societies of their natural competitors, the Yoruba to the west and Igbo to the east, were in a state of anarchic flux and political ferment. The embryonic, coastal pan-Nigerian elite formation sprouting in Lagos at that point with its Brazilian Brahmins and westernized scions of former slaves was considered too volatile and inflammable. Lugard's strictures against the Yoruba coastal aristocracy are memorable for their gruff disdain and reflex hostility. Having chosen its task-masters for modern Nigeria, Britain loaded the dice in their favour through a deliberately skewed pattern of recruitment into the army, the deliberate falsifications of census figures and the outright rigging of federal elections.

Unfortunately, this choice was to engender profound structural, political, economic disequilibrium for modern Nigeria. Power and authority were vested in those least prepared for, or amenable to, the demand and rigors of the modern-nation state. Legitimacy was bequeathed to a world-view still rooted in a medieval vision of empire in which , to quote Dan Fodio, the founding father, "the government of a country is the government of its king without question". The violent collision of logic is underwritten by a violent collision of worldviews. A modern nation is not supposed to be ruled by a king but by a leader chosen freely by the people. Decades later, Dan Fodio's great grandson, the Sardauna, would describe Nigeria as his great grandfather's empire. Any nation so defined cannot have citizens but subjects, a momentous contradiction in terms. Any country so structured cannot have a rational modern economy but patrimonial feudalism.

But let us not play any genetic card. Rather than viewing this as tantamount to a constitutional incapacity or natural deficiency on the part of a people, it is the objective reality of historical conditioning. If it were the Igbo or the Yoruba that have also had centuries of direct interaction and cultural communion with the Muslim and Arabized world, their response would not have been different . Indeed, it is arguable that had the north been left alone it might have solved the problems of nationhood more easily, given the sliver of genuinely radical and reform-minded military officers and politicians it occasionally throws up at the national level. But having said that, it must be acknowledged that the feudal mind-set is a proven disincentive to modern nation-building. With the mind mired in superstitions and the spirit denuded by conformity-demanding rituals, it encourages an unthinking servility to authority rather than the republican vigilance crucial to the push and pull of a modern nation. On the part of the rulers, they see themselves as incarnating the state and the will of the fiefdom. In the process, nation-building is stalled or completely abandoned as the rule of law is replaced by the rule of impunity.

With astute deployment of patronage and state largesse, like-minded autocrats are recruited from all over the nation to this malign world-view, often creating a lineage of absolutism in which the baton of fascism is handed down from fathers to their children. On the other hand, apostates are promptly excommunicated while former rebels who have seen the light are swiftly incorporated. A predatory army founded on the logic of colonial occupation is a natural and befitting ally of this worldview. In such circumstances, the entire nation must resemble a vast bazaar of buccaneers and piratical scoundrels with statecraft reduced to the politics of the belly and politicians reduced to shameless thugs scraping for the spoils of office, and making sure that the fruits of their larcenous exploits are deposited in the metropolitan capitals.

But since this thieving emporium does not exhaust the immense possibilities of the Nigerian nation, it is constantly challenged by other worldviews and alternative visions. And since these alternative worldviews and visions often mutate into armed critiques of the state, the nation is embroiled in permanent violent conflicts. Closed off to rival claimants who want to partake of the meal, the Nigeria state often appears like an ancient Roman coliseum permanently filled with armed gladiators. But despite the differing complexion of each set of power-merchants that have managed to muscle their way in, there is an organic nexus which binds all of them together. This is the logic of the bandit state. And each time we thought we had seen off the ultimate emperor, there is always a more vicious mutant lurking in the shadow.

Any wonder, then, that any attempt to challenge this moribund order often provokes a unique violence and often ends with the imposition of a harsher regime of predation and unitarism on the nation, no matter the official garb. As the endgame approaches, the stakes are raised, as the confrontation widens in scope and the state loses its legitimacy, power of surveillance and monopoly of the instruments of coercion, each military regime is more brutal and vicious than its predecessor and each civilian regime is less democratic and accountable than the last. It is this progressive attrition of the state and steady attenuation of living conditions which induce nostalgia which in reality is often reconciliation with the horrors of the post-colonial state under duress. Nostalgia then becomes a national illness, a strategy of containment, a symbolic resolution of concrete and intolerable contradictions at the level of imaginative longing. What then can be done to rescue the Nigerian populace from a mortally wounded state in order to start afresh?

NIGERIA EXPECTS���

The current atmosphere in Nigeria is pregnant with foreboding. There is a clear and serious danger to the country. Let us not make any mistake about this. The collapse of Nigeria will have thunderous reverberations in Africa and rest of the world. The human armada will stretch from West Africa to Europe, engendering misery and suffering on a scale which has never been witnessed by humanity and which will make the biblical exodus a child's play. What then should be the role of Britain in averting the looming tragedy and nudging Nigeria away from the edge of the precipice? Enlightened self-interest and the principle of historic responsibility suggest that Britain should not walk away as its colonial offspring descend into chaos and anarchy. If it is our post-colonial mess, it is also your colonial muck. But the nature of remedy also depends on the nature of the ailment, and it is this we must briefly return.

From the preceding analysis, it is clear that something is seriously and fundamentally wrong with Nigeria. It is a nation trapped in the abyss of transition with the old order clearly weakened but unwilling to let go and the new order too weak to break through. It should now be clear from the current post-military experiment that no matter the ethnic coloration of its core members, the professional costume of its enforcers or the religious affiliations of its leading lights, the difference between the various factions of the Nigerian ruling class is the difference between six and half a dozen. No straight furniture can be procured from crooked timber.

Let us not equivocate any further. The Nigerian political class is beyond soap and water, and beyond tokenist and tepid reform .What Nigeria needs is an earth-shaking political revolution which will sweep away the current political class or, baring that, a series of fundamental structural and political re-engineering which will create a new nation and prise the Nigerian multitude from the vice grip of the old order. As the British experience has shown, revolutionary interludes are an organic and integral part of nation-building. Britain can facilitate the emergence of this new Nigerian nation or the emergence of a truly nationalist Nigerian political elite by taking a more proactive stance against the evil misgovernance, the lack of transparency and accountability and the tyrannical misrule that have become endemic in Nigeria. British financial institutions must also resist the temptation to become conduit pipes for funds pilfered from the Nigerian people.

Despite the horrors of colonization, a great majority of Nigerians remain compulsive Anglophiles. London boasts of the largest Nigerian community outside Nigeria. The joke these days is that the Nigerian middle class has relocated abroad. It is estimated that there are close to a million Nigerians living in the London megalopolis. While this reflects the old colonial ties, it is also an affirmation of faith in the principles of fair-mindedness, justice and compassion which have sustained this society in its long journey to civility and humane governance. What Nigerians expect is that Britain should reciprocate this natural affection. While the pull towards Europe can be explained by the logic of kinship and self-preservation, Britain must also find the will and the energy to facilitate the emergence of a truly patriotic and nationalist political elite in Nigeria so that by the year 2372 a prosperous and stable Union of African States with Nigeria as the hub would also have emerged alongside the giant European Union. Without this, what you will have, and much earlier, too, is a European Union of African Refugees. Nigeria expects that Britain will do its duty to its colonial creation in its hour of need. Thank you all.

Adebayo Williams is the immediate past Amy Freeman Lee Distinguished Chair of Humanities and Fine Art, University of Incarnate Word, San Antonio, USA, Honorary Research Fellow, University of Birmingham, England and Professor at Large, Universitaire Robert de Sorbon, France.