By Adagbo Onoja
The Nobel Prize might not make anyone
the Asiwaju of African literature but that doesn’t mean we should mistake what the
Nobel Prize stands for: the value of self-correction which Alfred Nobel was
institutionalising.
I am not sure it is proper to dismiss that value on the
grounds of cultural nationalism and deny that, by winning the Nobel Prize and
being the first Black African to do so, Wole Soyinka has not joined the Michael
Jacksons, the Nelson Mandelas and the Barrack Obamas in breaking down History’s
thick barricades against Africans.
It is on this ground that no criteria
of meaning-making should fail to take note of the event at Abeokuta last
weekend where Nigeria was the subject of disquisition at the 80th
birthday of the Nobel Laureate with the theme “This House Must Not Fall:
Renegotiating Nigeria’s Social Contract After 100 Years of Nationhood”.
Even those
of us unenthusiastic about the liberal virus in the theme of Social Contract at
a time when both the liberal and the radical world have moved on to the
emancipatory virus, there are still many things brought together by the
occasion that cannot be ignored.
The
most obvious is the fact that Nigeria is still a non starter in this business
of ‘Africa Rising’. Yet, Nigeria is ‘the largest concentration of blacks under any one
government in human history’. Two, Nigeria is Soyinka’s country of origin and,
by implication, the country by whose profile Soyinka’s use of the Nobel stature
for emancipatory politics ought to be measured.
Tragically, Nigeria is
in ruins. Someone might argue that it means Soyinka didn’t put his Nobel
stature at the service of building Nigeria creatively enough. I won’t dismiss
such a position although I am not sure immediately now how far I would go with
it. According to Mallam Aminu Kano, Nigeria can tire anybody.
It
could, therefore, also be that Soyinka can be discharged and acquitted of the
charges of Eurocentricism in his writings and sectionalism in his politics because
the same Soyinka, along with the late Chinua Achebe was a member of the
People’s Redemption Party, (PRP) in the Second Republic. Professor Eskor Toyo,
a man competent by experience and sacrifice to comment on this matter declared
then that the PRP was the party for nationalists.
In other words, Nigeria might
just be less a case of what a Nobel laureate did or failed to do and more of a
classic of where All the King’s horses and all the King’s men are having serious
problems putting Humpty Dumpty together after tumbling severally in a great
fall.
To
take just one example of such tumbling, we have had the worst massacre,
bestiality, cruelty and all those things that advertise us as an unserious
collective for 33 uninterrupted years, i.e. since 1981. We call these
ethno-religious conflicts although, in virtually all cases, they are elite
struggle for control of oil money. Naturally, this reality must have taken a
toll on the psyche of the entity called Nigeria. After all, it has been such a
prolonged war and, in war, stuff happen.
Nigerians have seen stuff these years
– things horrible and things terrible - death, destruction, misery and
dehumanisation. In other words, the crisis and the attendant manifestations in
violent conflicts has not only been prolonged but also very, very painful,
producing a collective psychology antithetical to the flourishing of Nigeria
itself.
Apart from all sorts of predictions of Nigeria’s
implosion in 2015, there are very little signs that we are about to get it
right, even if we were we to succeed in begging,
cajoling, boxing, defeating and kicking out Jonathan. This is without prejudice
to the fact that there is a uniquely Jonathan dimension of the Nigerian crisis.
What I am saying, however, is that there is such a huge deposit of
agony, bitterness and absolute loss of faith observable in the citizenry that
it amounts to taking deceit too far to still assume that Nigeria can get it
right through the next elections, even if it meets the international standards
that Attahiru Jega, the umpire is promising. That’s one.
Two, even if elections in 2015 would
produce any solutions at all, does it mean Nigeria can afford the current level
of killings going on throughout the country till 2015? As things are now, there
is nothing to suggest the killings would stop before 2015. The Sultan of
Sokoto, Saad Abubakar 111 said recently that power seeking is behind the
current insecurity. Saad Abubakar 111 is not only the Sultan, his pedigree is
in the security sector and he must know what he is talking about. If this is
the case, does it not behove of us to think of alternative ways of approaching
2015 rather than a victory – defeat dualism? Who will win and who will be
defeated?
Three,
the idea of re-negotiating the Social Contract that was privileged at Soyinka’s
birthday was sufficiently tempting but not only is the discourse of the Social
Contract out dated, the dialectics of citizenship in much of Africa has negated
it. Fascism has been used on the citizenry by authoritarian regimes that the
citizens who should demand and sustain the Social Contract are also its
greatest enemy, much of it against their ‘objective’ interests.
Even
if Social Contract were still worth exhausting ourselves ideologically on, the
elite mobilization facilities of huge internet mailing lists, newspaper and
television screen populism that we use cannot sustain it. We lack the rooted
political machine that can rouse the masses across popular democratic
aspirations and keep them there in such a way that a Jonathan in Nigeria would never
contemplate what the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) have
courageously called ‘envelope budgeting’.
They present the budget, the National
Assembly passes it, the president signs it with fanfare and that is the end of
story. The real budget is what the IMF’s Policy Support Instrument, (PSI) says.
Yet, the Social Contract and the PSI are totally contradictory and, apart from
ASUU, the PSI is not an issue in Nigerian protest politics, not even within the
hypersensitive NGO community which is fond of dancing itself lame before the
real dance comes when we talk of democracy.
Stuck in such a sickening and demeaning
democracy but lacking a coalition of broad democratic flank cutting across the
ethnic, religious and regional fault lines articulating, demanding and
asserting itself against an elite that is fragmented but still national in its organisation
of state power, we are effectively back at the ground zero of the Nigerian
project.
We are today a nation in which no body is in control although we are
told by the government that they are on top of the situation. The evidence
clearly shows that it is the situation that is on top of them rather and they
could lose control in a way that millions could perish in few hours in a
scenario that cannot be captured better than the way Isa Yuguda, Bauchi State
governor did at the Lagos Island Club in February 2012.
He said “A free-for-all
internecine conflict in Nigeria will take on the character of several different
battles-an inter-regional, intra-regional religious war between Muslims and
Christians; an ethnic war fuelled by pent-up tribal grievances within a single
state or across the boundaries of neighbouring states; an indigene-settler, farmer-nomad
war of attrition and an all-out war between the haves and the have-nots across
the length and breadth of the country.
It will be a war without a warfront,
because the whole country will be the theatre of battle and every inhabitant a
reluctant warrior. And it will be a general war with an unprecedented number of
casualties that, in addition, will cause large-scale suffering in which several
millions of internally-displaced persons will be rendered homeless and many
more refugees will be forced across Nigeria’s borders into neighbouring
countries.”
This is the basis for sympathising with
a Soyinka. For it will require a miracle for him to witness the realisation of
the corrective possibility embedded in the Nobel Prize in Literature and which
Nigeria should have been the most beautiful showcase for Africa to follow. The
criminality of optimism in this context must be self-evident to all.
But that is one side of the
story. Literature in which Soyinka won the Nobel Prize is about life and life
is about the temptations of impossibilism. The criminality of optimism might be
self-evident because the basis for optimism is not there. But even at the Soyinka
80th birthday anniversary, there was a flicker worth noticing. And
that is General Yakubu Gowon’s presence at the occasion.
That
is not because he has reconciled with Wole Soyinka whom he put behind bars
during the Nigerian civil war. Their reconciliation is no longer news.
Professor Ali Mazrui has told the story over and over. What was a flicker there
is the workability, the productiveness of reconciliation and the signal flashed
to Nigeria from that little corner.
Nigeria’s
historic incompetence in nation building explains why Gowon’s presence but not
what he said there should interest us all. Gowon jailed Soyinka as a state
duty, under conditions of emergency as well as a military regime. He could
argue that there is no basis for reconciliation between him and Soyinka. But he
didn’t say or do so.
When Ali Mazrui invited both of them to a conference, thereby
providing an opportunity to smoother things over, Gowon recognized that such is
the way of the world and he went. Soyinka too, in spite of perpetual
intellectual warfare with Mazrui went to New York. The outcome is that a Gowon
was at Abeokuta live addressing Nigeria on how to respond to the on-going war from
the 80th birthday of the guy he put out of circulation in the course
of prosecuting a previous war. Isn’t there something beautiful in all these?
If
there is anything beautiful in all these, shouldn’t we seek to reproduce it in
any ways on a national scale as a critique of a ‘fight to finish’ syndrome? Will it not be so healing, more
productive and cheaper than any of the dead ends being touted by
self-enlightened characters as ways forward, particularly going into the 2015
elections under the present conditions which is most unlikely to change
drastically soon.
Nigeria does not need the victory or the defeat of any party,
person or region in the 2015 election. What it needs is the victory of the country
and which victory can be gained only through reconciliation now rather than
continuing to bleed ourselves to death with great prospects of slipping into
permanent agony.
Nigeria would be exploring a rich
heritage in taking this step. It is almost trite to but we must still start
with mentioning Dr Alex Ekwueme’s emergence as a Vice-President less than a
decade after the Biafran War. Some scholars have described as hollow Gowon’s
‘No victor, no vanquished’ but that pronouncement and Ekwueme’s position are
very powerful confirmation of Ali Mazrui’s thesis that forgiveness and
reconciliation is African.
Earlier this year, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo whom, as
everyone knows, wronged Chibuike Rotimi Amaechi in 2007 went to reconcile with
the man who is now a governor. IBB and those who plotted a coup against him did
so earlier in 2009. Atiku Abubakar whose warfare with Obasanjo had such a
destabilising impact on the country is back with the same Obasanjo. It is probably in the nature of things
that even in the midst of the bloodshed and bitterness that dominate Nigerian
politics, such acts of reconciliation took place and we might be making a
mistake not to attach meanings to them and draw lessons accordingly. After all,
what is that great value that we stand to teach the world by insisting on
electoral warfare in 2015 when we can beautifully pact power in a way in which
would bring relief and benefits to everyone?
While the deadly warriors seeking to be
president, governors, senators, ministers and what have you are doing their
thing, is it not possible to contemplate the Nigerian crisis from the entry
point of a Soyinka symbolism entailing a reconciliation initiative as a critique
of 2015 in which neither victory nor defeat of any of the parties to the
Nigerian crisis would be good enough for anyone or for Nigeria, if the signs on
the ground are anything to go by.
The sign is simply this: if there has been
bloodletting for four years and even much earlier than that, not only as it
relates to Boko Haram, and nobody could stop it, what is the guarantee that it
would stop after 2015? And supposing some different kinds of resistance
develops as the situation unravels, wouldn’t Nigeria have lost it?
Wisdom, said, Chinua Achebe, is like a
goatskin bag. Everyone carries his. My wisdom sees a great ‘process Utopia’ in
a coming together of the Wole Soyinkas, the Saad Abubakars, ArchBishop
Onaiyekans, the Sanusi Lamido Sanusis, the Emeka Anyaokwus, Hajiya Najatu
Mohammeds, the Mathew Hassan Kukas, the Ledum Mittees, (could somebody help me
add more names please), taking note from the onset that we are not looking for
angels but just a certain category of human beings whose trajectory or position
in life imposes the duty of enlightened conscience on them and who are, therefore,
in a position to, collectively, carry out an injury time intervention for
Nigeria by waging a moral, cultural and psychological warfare against evil and
defeat it. And revitalise Nigeria.
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