UNDER General Muhammadu Buhari’s watch, Nigeria is settling inexorably into a huge enclave of warlords, bandits, kidnappers, cattle-rustlers, armed militant groups, ethnic rabble-rousers, burgeoning separatist movements and sundry armed rogue elements challenging the legitimacy of the Nigerian state and threatening its survivability. Insecurity is so pervasive people are almost becoming numbed and desensitized to the news of another mass kidnap or callous mass murders. Bandits and criminals are so brazen in their operations they now enter people’s homes, schools, even places of worship and kidnap people, and on the highways, mindlessly killing and kidnapping people in their multiples. No one is safe anymore, criminal elements described as “enemy nationals” (apologies to Tatalo Alamu of The Nation newspaper) hold the whole country by the jugular, and it does not appear that anyone is in charge anymore! Even our once dreaded, incurably corrupt, inept but sadistic police apparatus, wilted so badly before street hoodlums who hijacked the peaceful #EndSARS protests.
In the midst of unrelenting agitations, General Buhari and his ethnic hegemonists are insisting Nigeria’s corporate unity is non-negotiable, implying they would rather hold Nigeria together by force than by the express will of the people. They casually dismiss honest patriotic calls for the amelioration of the country’s structural deformities and inequities. Which reminds us that our rulers have yet to learn any lesson from the immortal admonition of John F. Kennedy that those who make peaceful change impossible make violent revolution inevitable. Instead, they and their operatives are chasing shadows and flexing muscles against imaginary enemies. Is it possible that General Buhari is scheming to be the last president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria as we know it? It has crossed my mind more than a few times in the past two years as I watch our country reel from one crisis to another under an incompetent administration and a president with an aloof, cavalier, if not totally disdainful, attitude to the multiple nation-wrecking challenges. He has scorned every entreaty for badly needed structural reforms, even his own party’s reform agenda. Instead of proffering answers or assuaging the feeling of his countrymen and women who are worried sick about their country’s pitiable plight, his aides are abusing any patriotic Nigerian who expresses an opinion about the same country that we all love, a right to free speech that the constitution guarantees.
General Buhari has so brazenly elevated ethnic exceptionalism, religious supremacy and in-your-face bigotry and nepotism to the level of statecraft. He is not perturbed presiding over the most iniquitous governmental arrangement ever witnessed in Nigerian history, with all the three branches (executive, legislature and judiciary) of the pseudo-federal government firmly in the hands of his fellow regional hegemonists. And so is the nation’s entire security infrastructure —- Minister of Defence, Minister of Police Affairs, National Security Adviser, Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Chiefs of Army and Air Staff, Inspector-General of Police, Director-General of State Security Services, Director-General of National Intelligence Agency, Comptroller-General of Immigration, Comptroller-General of Customs, Comptroller-General of Prisons; as well as Chairman of the Federal Civil Service Commission, Chairman of the National Assembly Service Commission, and other strategic national parastatals like the NNPC, Ports Authority, to name a few. And all entreaties by well-meaning Nigerians for equity, fairness and adherence to the Federal Character principle enshrined in the 1999 Constitution receive no sympathetic hearing from the Daura-born General.
Ensconced within fortress Aso Rock, Buhari and his team delude themselves that the agitations for restructuring, which by the way have reached a crescendo, would dissipate if only they could intimidate and silence voices of reason. The General even claims gratuitously he does not understand what people mean by restructuring, even though the report of the APC Committee on True Federalism is gathering dust in his office. Nigeria is perched dangerously on a powder-keg, the possibility of its implosion is more real today than at any other time in its history. I am old enough to know that the country is almost inexorably inching towards avoidable suicide under Buhari’s watch. Now in my mid-sixties, older than the independent Nigerian state, and qualified to be treated as a Senior Citizen in much saner democracies, it is an authoritative assertion that I have lived through all the six decades of the nation’s travails, tribulations and agonies: from the 1964 general elections, to the massively rigged October 965 Western Region election and the “Operation Wetie” in its wake, to the savage bloodlettings of the coups of January and July 1966, the pogrom against the Igbos in Northern Nigeria in 1966, Biafra’s secession from Nigeria and the horrendous 30-month bloodbath called the civil war, to the election-rigging of 1983 and accompanying violence and police brutality, the ensuing military intervention and draconian Buhari-Idiagbon dictatorship, to Babangida’s dictatorship and his dubious transition to civil rule programme, the criminal annulment of the result of the June 12, 1993 presidential election, the un-governability that attended General Sani Abacha’s despotic rule,and the birth of the new civilian Fourth Republic in 1999 till date.
It is perhaps an inconvenient truth for the administration’s official spin masters that Nigeria has been fracturing very badly under the Buhari administration, that its structural fabric is under relentless assault. This fracturing is such that may become intractable and irredeemable unless urgent measures are put in place to address it! All the cheeky official claims that Nigeria is a settled matter, that its existence has come to be taken for granted, that it is indivisible, are not only insulting and offensive to our sensibilities as intelligent and discerning Nigerians, but constitute a hideous joke by those profiting from our national misfortunes. I have news for them: nothing is permanent, except that which the Almighty God created! And Nigeria is not a divine creation! It is the product of the will of a predatory foreign power to facilitate resource extraction and evacuation, with no pretense to creating a durable modern state.
So, the 1914 amalgamation was not by the blessing or consent of the diverse peoples involved but by the cunning of a duplicitous foreign power which forced the ‘marriage’ of unequal and unwilling nationalities. However, the continuance of the marriage no longer depends on the will of that foreign power but now on the willingness of the disparate nationalities to make it work. Unfortunately, the local elites have shown utter lack of vision, sagacity and competence to make it function properly, the major travails listed above being emblematic of their incompetence. I have asserted in several writings that multinational states that are held together by force or deceit than by popular consent are readily susceptible to state-wrecking possibilities, as the disintegration of multinational USSR and Yugoslavia have plainly demonstrated. And if the truth be told, the Nigerian civil war, the un-governability of the country in the wake of the annulment of the June 12, 1993 presidential election, are veritable indications of what can happen to conglomerate nation-states. The fact that the country survived the civil war intact, and weathered the consequences of the annulment, is no guarantee of its survivability. If developed and much better governed multinational states that did not parade Nigeria’s type of graphic national problems and dysfunctionalities had disintegrated so spectacularly before our very eyes, and if the once“Great” Britain is itself facing state-wrecking existential challenges from Scottish and Irish nationalisms, what hope is there for fragile Nigeria, whose current nepotistic rulers are busy fiddling whilst the country is in the throes of multiple threats to its existence?
As it is, the country is being pummeled simultaneously on several fronts —– the Boko Haram insurgency in the Northeast which has remained intractable for upward of a decade; uncontrollable banditry, cattle-rustling, kidnappings and murderous savagery in the Northwest; farmer-herder bloodlettings in the Middle Belt; relentless separatist agitations in the Southeast; militant violence in the South-South; general insecurity, kidnapping, armed robbery and cultist violence in the Southwest. Buhari’s five yearsin power have shown his penchant for the subversion of Nigeria’s federal structure, preference for excessive centralization of powers, authority and resources. His attitude of ignoring the people and merely getting his media aides to issue press statements on critical national issues portray him as bereft of understanding that a democratic government is accountable to the people. He is still rigid and inflexible, demonstrating embarrassing lack of emotional intelligence.
I fear that General Buhari is deliberately risking being the last president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria as we know it. His attitude to popular feelings, his body language, his reticence that is verging on absolute indifference, have not helped matters at all. Instead of being sensitive to popular grievances across the land, his seeming I-don’t-give-a-damn body language and enthronement of rabid ethnic exceptionalism are increasingly leading to disgruntlement and fuelingsub-nationalist sentiments and separatist agitations. And if the president continues his penchant for ignoring popular feelings and aspirations, ostensibly to concentrate on railroads, he just might leave office barely escaping the catastrophic collapse of this increasingly rickety conglomerate. If that happens, not even a thousand spin doctors and hagiographers will be able to rescue his legacy.
Well-meaning and patriotic Nigerians believe that if it is true the Generalloves Nigeria as much as his handlers make him out to be, and desires a good legacy, then he has his job cut out for him. And he still has a little more than two years to pull the country back from the edge of the precipice. A starting point would be to undertake a sober and dispassionate analysis of the myriad existential crises confronting Nigeria, and an honest acceptance of the reality that all is not well with the country, and that the nation needs fixing beyond mere rhetoric and grandstanding. There is already a plethora of useful recommendations, including the report of the APC Committee on True Federalism, from which he can draw inspiration. Outright restructuring, or at the minimum, drastic devolution of powers, responsibilities and resources to the federating units, is a suitable starting point to curb the burgeoning separatist agitations and save the nation from possible implosion. Done well, he just might leave behind what we can regard as a good legacy.
But then, one must not necessarily assume for him that this is the legacy that he desires. From the look of things, it is possible the real legacy he desires is a country where ethnic hegemony is not only the order of the day, but one where Fulani herders can brazenly commandeer other peoples’ ancestral lands, ethnically cleanse and colonize territories at will so that cattle may have unhindered access to grazing land and water. Should this be his desire, he would be the last president of Nigeria.
- Professor Fawole is of the Department of International Relations, Obafemi Awolowo University, Nigeria.
