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Between ‘Dividers-In-Chief’ And Dividers-In-Law
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By Wole Soyinka
I am notoriously no fan of Olusegun Obasanjo, General, twice former president and co-architect with other past leaders of the crumbling edifice that is still generously called Nigeria. I have no reasons to change my stance on his record. Nonetheless, I embrace the responsibility of calling attention to any accurate reading of this nation from whatever source, as a contraption teetering on the very edge of total collapse. We are close to extinction as a viable comity of peoples, supposedly bound together under an equitable set of protocols of co-habitation, capable of producing its own means of existence, and devoid of a culture of sectarian privilege and will to dominate.
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| *Soyinka and Buhari |
To reel off any achievements of a government – genuine
or fantasised, trivial or monumental – is thus to dodge the issue, to ignore
the real core concerns. No government, however inept, fails to record some form
of achievement – this was why it were elected, and it takes real genius to
succeed in spending four years actually doing nothing. What it fails to do, or
what it does wrongly, deceitfully or prejudicially is what concerns the
citizenry. Across this nation, there is profound distrust, indeed abandonment
of hope in this government as one that is genuinely committed to the survival
of the nation as one, or indeed understands the minimal requirements for positioning
it as a modern, functional space of productive occupancy. Donald Trump is not
without a governance pass mark here or there – indeed, he has been touted for
the Nobel Peace prize in some quarters, backed, predictably, by the quota
Nigerian columnist – yet who dares deny, outside Republican diehard circles –
that the great United States of America is brutally divided, and is even
unraveling under the Trumpian phenomenon!
Back to our own yaws however: Are pensioners still
considered human, deserving the rewards of labour without further labour?
Many collapse from that extended labour of recovering routine entitlements.
Even routine access to that basic human requirement – food – is now under
question, as farmers are chased off their farms in large numbers. Instead of
timely action – urged stridently by beleaguered governors and of course by
‘professional agitators’ — appeasement of the violent food saboteurs was the
preferred route to food security – operating under fancy names like RUGA. So
how do you persuade graduates and young school leavers to try their hands at
farming instead of flooding urban centres looking for non-existent white-collar
positions? To get killed and dismembered? And what is the score within those
much-coveted urban precincts? Lop-sided appointments to crucial positions in
Civil Service and parastatals! Consider the prime economic cash cow –
petroleum – exposed a few months ago as a reeking cesspit of nepotism. Who is
the Minister of Petroleum under whose watch such an unprecedented contempt for
geographical parity – uncontroverted till today — became entrenched? That
happens to be none other than the nation’s president – and he did make a show
of astonishment at the gross disparities, promised to subject the anomaly to immediate
enquiry. May one ask what action has been taken to rectify that presumably
“nation-unifying” compilation? It all casts a long, unedifying shadow
backwards to those days of agitation by Tai Solarin and the mercuric engineer,
Awojobi when the same Buhari took forceful charge of that ministry, promised to
get to the root of the flying charges – anyone still recall the saga of
the missing millions? He made a beeline for the home of a prominent
political leader and carted away loads of files in his illegal possession. In
vain the nation awaited enlightenment – Nothing!
National divisiveness? Just where does culpability
lie? Does centralist usurpation divide or bind? The answer is obvious in
daily effects. We have even heard the charge laid at the feet of governors.
When the constitutive units of this nation take steps to rescue themselves into
the ‘unifying’ quagmire into which they have been plunged by a creaking,
clearly unworkable centralised system, guess who squawk, gnash their teeth and
threaten to call down thunder even where such remedies are backed by
constitutional provisions! Alas, the dare of ignorance! And after being
confronted by the legitimate right of states to at least salvage their
existence and protect their citizens, guess who trundles out constrictive
parameters, and attempts to dictate to governors how such state prerogatives
should be exercised! Come under the umbrella of a failed Inspectorate Usurper –
ordered the Garbled megaphone. Just on whose authority?
We do know – let this be stated for the umpteenth time!
– that the rains did not just begin to beat us yesterday in this nation. We
know when the clouds began to gather, where the deluge began and turned to
severe pounding. We can pinpoint the first trickle of the torrent of appeasement,
of illegal extortions and concessions. Past leaders will not be permitted to
forget or gloss over own self-centred interests and nation corrosive lapses
that brought us to this parlous present. But we do endure in this here and now,
in the immediacy of current governance, so let no uppity flunkey attempt to
divert attention from current realities, realities that now clearly pronounce
this nation of once promising prospects a basket case of abject penury and
insecurity, where hordes of trained minds and sturdy limbs roam the streets as
beggars, as haphazard vendors of the products of other peoples, other lands!
Inequity reigns, and solutions are trivialised. Again
and again voices are raised to urge the dismantling of a crude, militarised
centralist contraption – repeatedly exposed in illegalities — and
substitute a more efficient governance system, decentralised, providing
broader access to opportunities. All such efforts are turned into
opportunities for legislative junketing and budget padding. Legislators watch
with indifference in this day of human advance, as individuals are sentenced to
hang for expressing their views on the relative apprehension of religious
avatars, not a squeak emerge from such lawgivers. Pedophiles and cross-border
sex traffickers are honoured in the act, granted immunity on cooked-up alibis
of religion. Is this nation a theocracy? Nigeria is a suppurating
slaughter slab, and it boggles the mind that supposedly wise and lettered men,
sheltering under any religious mandate, would go into a solemn huddle to
‘legitimately’ augment the toll of mindless killings that now plague the land.
Presumably, the ongoing ‘national security’ persecution
of Obadiah Mailafia is a sign of national unity? I invite our marionettes to
read deeply into history. Oh, excuse me, history has been banned from
learning structures, so look not for history books! However, straightforward,
first-hand testimonies abound, exposing structural flaws, deceits and
conspiracies against this presumptive national edifice. They are perpetrated by
highly placed servants of the state, some of whom have since risen to even
higher national positions. I draw attention, for instance, to detailed
revelations of plots against the nation, plots that resonate in the present. Such
is the two-year old interview of a former ambassador to the Sudan, Bola Dada – The Punch Newspapers. Archives
remain ever obliging. They avail us vivid material to decide whether or not a
sinister script is being acted out today with copious libations from Nigerian
blood.
I think, in public interest, The Punch should re-run that interview, most
especially in view of recent claims by a columnist in The Nation – Femi Abbas Sept.
4 — regarding how and by whom Nigeria was corralled into the OIC. When
you abolish History in institutions, you open the gates wide for rampaging
revisionism while the same gates are shut against a grasp, however
tenuous, of why, for instance, a Mailafia becomes a target of serial
interrogations and harassment, rather than those boldly named in his
revelations. Is it he who constitutes a danger to the nation, or the indicted
fanatics of unlimited impunity and callous disregard for humanity? Why the
ostentatious pretence of investigative zeal? The man has told you where to look.
Well, look in that direction and report back to us! In the meantime however,
ensure that he meets with no accident!
Still on security: any tear that is shed for the
arch-bandit and multiple murderer Akwaza, known as Gana, is an obscenity.
However, tears of trepidation are falling fast and furious over the conduct of
an army that eliminates a captive in cold blood, side-tracking the rationality
of professional investigations and legitimate pursuit of felons and other
enemies of society. The issue here is not one of the appropriateness of a
policy of Amnesty – that constitutes a larger debate in its place. The issue
here – and a critical one — is that a Wanted Man, on his way to
surrender, has been killed in cold blood. I read yesterday that the Army has followed
this up with a demand for the bounty earlier placed by the Benue State governor
on the head of the WANTED man. However, all reports so far indicate that he was
on his way to surrender? And so, is this bounty demand a joke? An end then to
such gallows humour! And certainly not now, not while the nation is
freshly reeling from the latest horror of the targeting of unarmed Road
Safety officials, gunned down in cold blood in their commuter bus, and the mass
kidnapping of survivors. Shall we presume that the surviving casualties
of routine duty rosters are also nation-dividers if they scream out for
protection and deplore a breakdown in the entire security architecture of the
nation?
We must however concede one remedial initiative to this
government. Perhaps it was a belated awareness that the roof of the national
edifice was on fire that instigated the effort to appropriate all available
water resources in the nation — a desperate move to put out the flames with one
hefty splash! Presumably, even the rains that fall on earth will belong to the
Exclusive List? We shall have to learn to gather such rain before it
strikes the earth, or else queue for a licence to tap it later for domestic
use. Get ready to pay stiff fines when we get rain soaked for lack of public
transportation. Distractions upon distractions, but dangerous distractions!
Provocative moves that deeply erode any lingering faith in the even-handed
claims of governance, of respect for the rights of independent peoples that
were brought together to form a nation, and the justice of equality of access
to the land’s resources. But the fault is not one-sided. Let governors
also wake up to their constitutional rights and duties. There are vast areas of
those rights that have been trampled upon, usurped for far too long. Forget
legislative jamborees of constitution reviews – we have had our fill of them –
all the files are gathering dust. It is time for Reparations! Dust up those
files and head for the courts. Prepare for name-calling, just as long as such
names embody – Dividers-in-law!
Only then shall we uncover who are the real
Dividers-in-Chief? If individual voices rankle, then perhaps it is time to
convoke a Nation Survival Conference. Let all sections and group interests
place their cards on the table and starkly articulate what we all know and
endure on a daily basis, and proffer solutions, debate moves towards a
collective – rational and sincere — undertaking of nation formation. The
ongoing governance posture of aggressive evasion spells only one end:
collective suicide.
*Wole Soyinka, Writer, Nobel Laureate and Human Rights Activist, resides
in Idi-Aba,
Abeokuta, Nigeria.
Sept 15, 2020
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