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Nigeria:
The "Greatest Nation"?
The "Hope of Africa"? The
"Hope of
the Black Race"?
A Thursday Postcard by Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem
Nigerians like seeing themselves as the
“greatest nation,” “hope of Africa,” and “hope of the
Black race.” It is more a declaration of intent or deification
of potential, than a statement of fact. It is a triumph of hope
that defies unpalatable reality. Somehow the country never quite
manages to live up to its own self-proclamations but however
tired and tested “the sleeping giant” and her inexhaustibly
hopeful peoples they continue to dream that one day, one day,
the country will, a la Martin Luther King Jr.'s exasperated
dream about America “live up to the true meaning of its
creed!” For now in all intent and purposes, the country and
the peoples' dreams remain an enduring “great notion!”
Over the years it has been a compelling
wonder to many pundits, sympathetic and unsympathetic observers,
why the country continues to stand and weather all kinds of
foretold collapse and imminent catastrophe. It is neither at war
nor is it at peace. And at the moment it is not a military
regime and it cannot be described as a democracy without huge
qualifications either.
It should not be difficult to understand what
makes the country tick. The political economy is built around
“the Black Gold” (OIL). For as long as it continues to flow
the country will be kept together by hook or crook. The rancour,
bitterness and acute value placed on political power is to
enable the various competing cliques and sub-cliques within the
political and military elite to get more and more of the
proceeds from oil for their own class and
self-aggrandizement.
Both by nature's selection and deliberate
political engineering Oil remains essentially a resource that is
predominantly found in areas occupied by National minorities.
The logic of Nigeria's center-centric
Federalism is simple: What cannot be claimed as the exclusive
monopoly of the Big Three (i.e. Hausa-Fulani, Yoruba, and Igbo
political elites) belongs to everybody. But what belongs to them
individually is theirs. That is why the country operated a more
balanced federalism in the immediate post independence period
with powerful regions controlled by the three dominant groups,
which were dependent on agricultural commodities. As Oil gained
in importance and became the main source of national revenues
the near confederal consensus gave way to a virtual unitary
state.
This process was aided and abetted by
prolonged military rule.
No military can function without a clearly
defined command structure and commandism. Thus you have the
current situation where the center continues to divide and rule
unchallenged by breaking the country into more states. And at
state level every village will, with time and oil still flowing,
become a local government. The theory is that government will be
closer to people at the local level the smaller the unit of
administration. But in practice this has not been the
case.
And there are many reasons. The main one has
to be the fact that none of these mushrooming layers of
administration can sustain itself through taxation or production
from the people they serve. They are distributive units for Oil
money.
Before Oil the citizens had a sense that they
were the producers of the wealth of the country and therefore
believed that government must be accountable to them. As a tax
based economy it was vulnerable to protests and popular
pressures. That is why the colonial period and Nigeria's first
republic were full of tax riots and popular actions by dominated
classes. With Oil not even those from whose land and shores the
black gold is pouring out have major contribution to its
production.
In a situation where majority of the people
are not directly involved in the production of the wealth of the
country how can they expect accountability? In a country where
the notion of “tax payers money” has been rendered
meaningless outside of the comparatively small population of
civil servants, declining workers in industry and manufacture
and others in formal employment whose taxes are deducted at
source (against their wishes), the democratic demand that
proclaims “no taxation without representation” is rendered,
as lawyers will say, “superfluous.”
Who are these taxpayers who want
representation? Consequently simple democratic demands have
become privileges dispensed by the governing elite as and when
they please. Democracy becomes a hollow shell to legitimize
oligarchic politics of greed and naked opportunism. No wonder
the leadership have contempt for its people and acts so in the
most brazen way. Otherwise how can one explain why an allegedly
democratically elected President could sit idly by pleading
“deregulation,” “market forces” and “liberalization”
and increase the price of fuel on the eve of Nigeria's (In)dependence
anniversary as the government did last October ?
For a government that came about as a result
of Nigerians' undiminished desire for a government of their
choosing the Obasanjo regime has frittered away all the good
will and it is today compared poorly with the sadistic regime of
Abacha. It is a false comparison but that this is a popular view
tells us more about the depth of despair that the country has
sunk to than Nigerians' love for autocratic rule. Is the
President listening and does his government care? Do the people
expect them to? On the evidence of a recent trip to the country
it was not difficult to gauge the dangerous indifference from
both the government and the people.
It is a paradox that while Nigerians desire
serious and focused government the administration of General
Obasanjo seem to wallow in the market illusion that it is
deregulatiing. The claptrap about deregulation is becoming a
recipe for chaos. Lawlessness and derogation of government's
minimal responsibility to guarantee human security for its
peoples.
"Forward Ever Backward never" Kwame Nkrumah
Source: THURSDAY POST CARD NOVEMBER 6 2003
Tajudeen28@yahoo.com / posted
8/22/03
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Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem
Tajudeen has been General Secretary of the global Pan African
Movement since 1994 and is resident in Uganda and London.
Tajudeen is Nigerian by origin. He was a Rhodes Scholar at
Oxford where he gained his D.Phil in political science. He was a
founder member of the Africa Resource and Information Bureau,
London, and has been at the centre of numerous initiatives to
promote peace and democracy in Africa. Tajudeen writes and
lectures on Africa for several journals and universities. He is
Chairperson of the Centre for Democratic Development and the Pan
African Development Education and Advocacy Programme.
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update
24 November 2007 |
