By Adewale
Maja-Pearce
 |
| President Goodluck Jonathan |
LAGOS — Mine is a country of 175
million people, who speak more than 500 languages and are renowned for their
inability to get along. Blame usually falls on colonial map makers, and it is
well-deserved. But the reasons for our national discord are complex — certainly
much too complicated for most of the international media to fathom — so news
accounts of the multiple antipathies among our 250 ethnic groups are usually
telescoped into what is known in the trade as boilerplate: the Muslim North
battles the mostly Christian South for control of Nigeria’s oil wealth.
As a journalist, I know the
difficulties of summarizing the world’s mad doings. Take the bewildering
violence of Boko Haram. I’m as confused as anyone by the Islamic terrorist
movement’s motivations, tactics and goals — perhaps because they themselves
seem just as confused. In the beginning they were against southern Christians
living in the north, and blew up churches to prove it. Now they’ve gone
beyond attacking establishment figures to slaughtering their own people — even
children — on the grounds that they are against Western education.
Though he won’t exactly admit it, our
president, Goodluck Jonathan, shares this confusion, but — given the dignity of
his office and the reality that elections are little over a year away — he
apparently feels he must make a show of shoring up national unity. Thus,
earlier this month, Mr. Jonathan inaugurated the Advisory Committee on National
Conference/Dialogue. The name is unwieldy, the goals uncertain, and the chances
of success dubious.
The fact is that our divisions are more
nebulous than we Nigerians are sometimes inclined to admit. There are, for
example, as many Muslims as Christians among the Yoruba people in the south.
Still, it would be unfair to suggest that Nigerians, like people everywhere,
don’t have stereotypes about our fellow countrymen.
I happen to be a member of the
“fun-loving” Yoruba (as the British characterized us back in the early days of
colonialism). We have a reputation for being hotly argumentative, charmingly
treacherous and highly pragmatic, as loose in our morals as we are in our
religion — at least according to the Igbo, the other dominant ethnic group in
the south. On the other hand, it is said by some Yoruba that the Igbo would be
willing to sacrifice their own parents in the pursuit of money, which they get
largely by trading, sometimes in drugs.
As for all the “minorities” in between,
there’s no telling what they get up to in their myriad languages, which few
understand, even if we all speak English.
So what, then, was the reasoning behind
the president’s call for dialogue — a call that took everybody by surprise? For
one thing, the timing was odd: Why, after 53 years of independence, after civil
wars, military coups, rivalries over oil, Boko Haram’s murderous insanities and
the brutal military response that may well tear the country apart, do we suddenly
need such a conference?
Actually the answer is simple. We
don’t, but the president does. Elections are expected in early 2015, and Mr.
Jonathan intends to run for a second, four-year term. But civil chaos and
spreading corruption scandals do present certain difficulties. Still, Mr.
Jonathan is a schooled politician, and it is clear that he has learned his
lessons on how to navigate through seemingly unsolvable problems: When you need
to divert popular attention and buy time, you can always call ... a conference!
The president has been careful not to
spell out any specifics. He has merely constituted an advisory committee to
deliberate on “the nomenclature, structure and modalities” of the eventual
Commission for a Dialogue or Conference. Nigerians are taking this bureaucratic
gobbledygook in stride: The conference is widely dismissed as just another
“talking shop.”
If national unity is so important, many
people are asking, what stopped Mr. Jonathan from calling for one at the
beginning of his tenure? Few of us are really fooled; we understand the
realities of power in a country where the scramble for office is a do-or-die
affair. Political power, after all, is the only game in town that ensures
unfettered access to the nation’s oil riches.
Yet it would be unfair to suggest that
Mr. Jonathan has overseen the most corrupt government in Nigeria — not least
because it would be difficult to be more corrupt than its predecessors.
According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, between independence
in 1960 and the return of democracy in 1999, Nigeria’s leaders and their
accomplices stole close to $400 billion.
Nevertheless, recent scandals offer
plenty of room for comparison. One concerns newspaper accounts alleging that
Nigeria’s minister for petroleum resources, Diezani Alison-Madueke, routinely
awards crude oil contracts to hastily registered companies fronted by people
not previously known to be involved in the industry.
Another involves accusations that the
aviation minister, Stella Oduah, squandered $1.6 million on two bulletproof
cars worth about a quarter of that amount. This comes just weeks after yet
another fatal plane crash, the seventh under her watch. Repeated calls for the
dismissal of these ministers have been ignored.
Nigeria is convening a conference on
national unity when we should be clamoring to end the corruption that lies so
close to the heart of our ethnic, sectarian and civil discord. The decision to
empanel a “talking shop” made of handpicked delegates who are uncertain about
the exact nature of their assignment — beyond the fact that it will continue to
provide them with their own slice of the national cake — fools no one.
Given the ever-present danger of
Nigeria’s implosion — brought about by militants in the oil-producing Niger
Delta, Islamic fundamentalists in the northeast, ethnic cleansing in the north
central region and kidnappers everywhere you turn — we fractious Nigerians are
unified by one salient truth: We all know that we cannot continue like this.
Adewale Maja-Pearce is a writer and
critic, and the author of “Remembering Ken Saro-Wiwa, and Other Essays.”
Source: New York Times
No comments:
Post a Comment