Goodbye, Nigeria?

 By Obi Nwakanma

The Federal Republic of Nigeria is now, to all intents and purpose, like a patient etherized on life support in hospice care. It is suffering multiple organ failure. There is just very little hope of a rebound. Anytime soon, it is bound to code. The hawks are circling. The grave diggers are ready. The obituary writers in the world’s great Metropolitan Centers are waiting in the wings. A great elephant is finally about to take its last breath. The thing is, there are no winners in this outcome. Even the separatists will soon discover that this country which we have all managed to kick in the groin was “the black man’s last hope.” 

With the death of Nigeria, much of Africa will be rendered orphans. A light will leave the eyes of this continent. Nigeria, until it began to thaw, held West Africa in its firm grips. Analysts have predicted that the death of Nigeria as a sovereign state (even so, it is that only in name currently) will throw sub-Saharan Africa into 100-year turmoil, and unleash a demographic movement that might disrupt the social fabric of the continent. 

The fall of an elephant – even a sick elephant – makes a great noise in the forest. And nature abhors a vacuum. The East Africans seem to be getting it together, and providing the new path for African leadership and growth with men like Museveni in Uganda, Kagame in Rwanda, Ruto in Kenya, the late Magufuli in Tanzania, and so on and so forth. Listening to the leaders talk; measuring the public postures and values, and weighing them against the Nigerian example, it becomes quickly clear why Nigeria is on death watch. But let us be all clear on this: Nigeria screeched to a halt a long time ago. 

This nation was already panting in the Casualty Ward by 1999. The pro-democracy movement fought the corrupt dictatorship that had returned to power from December 31, 1983 until the soldiers were pressured out of power by May 1999. Compared to what we have now, Nigerians are beginning to seriously long for the military years of Babangida, not because of any significant achievements of the Babangida years, but because those years are beginning now, against the fatality of this very moment, to seem like a “golden era.” That is how sad it is. A huge effort was made to revive Nigeria following the exit of soldiers. 

Too many factors were however at play – some external and some domestic – all of which converged to flatten this country and turn it into a minion state. For instance, I was at the Jos Stadium in 1998; watching and reporting proceedings of the PDP presidential nomination at the Jos City Stadium. I was struck by what seemed to me to be a very surreal and incongruous development. 

There I was, watching two distinguished Nigerians, Dr. Alex Ekwueme, and Mr. Philip Asiodu, both of them ex- King’s College, Lagos; both highly educated – one from Oxford, the other from a distinguished American University; one a former Super-Permanent Secretary – a dyed in the wool public servant who knew where all the bodies were buried – the other a former Vice-President of Nigeria, who had a clean moral pass by the judicial panel set up to try him for corruption by the military that had ousted him.

 They returned a startling verdict that said: “Dr. Alex Ekwueme left office poorer than when he entered it; and to ask more from him was to set a standard which even saints could not meet.” This was when judges were still judges and the judiciary still stood with dignity to render justice fearlessly. But the point of this is to just simply note that there was an Ekwueme, by all public affirmation, a brilliant, honorable, distinguished and incorruptible man, who was not only properly educated but publicly demonstrated the values of a highly cultured and temperate man. He was principled too. He took the gauntlet, and faced down the military when many of his peers stood behind all kinds of shibboleth, in excuse against fighting the soldiers. 

At Jos, Ekwueme gave a very simple and precise speech about why he wanted to be President. Standing behind him, in elegant and distinct worldliness and expertise, was Philip Asiodu, one year his junior at King’s College, also vying for the PDP presidential ticket. Asiodu gave the most eloquent and most capable speech that night. Indeed, Obasanjo was uninspiring. 

It was light and darkness. If Nigeria wanted to move in a different direction – on the path to greatness, it needed to make a very distinct choice – an Ekwueme presidency, with Adamu Ciroma as his Vice-President in 1999, would have turned Nigeria in a different direction. An Asiodu presidency would have given Nigeria a new lease of life. But no, both Ekwueme and Asiodu came from the wrong side of the track. 

So, Nigeria once again failed to take advantage of the immense talent and capacity right before them. Yes, indeed, the PDP chose Obasanjo. The rest is history. In Obasanjo’s defence, he tried with his team to retrieve Nigeria from the edges of the proverbial precipice; and from the morass of the years of waste when military Generals stole Nigeria to stupor. He put certain policies and principles in play. But the contradiction that brought Obasanjo to power did not permit a new lease of life for Nigeria. 

The years of military rule had defaced Nigeria completely, and Obasanjo was a product of that culture of impunity. The history of an unresolved civil war continues to haunt Nigeria. A vast population of the Igbo felt isolated and targeted, and discriminated against by federal policy. The Igbo returned to Nigeria at the end of the civil war which they had fought against the federation, and enthusiastically embraced the idea of Nigeria. Quickly they fanned across Nigeria with the idea of rebuilding Nigeria quickly and repositioning her among the great nations of the world. That, once, was the dream of the Igbo. But quickly, they found themselves shut out of opportunities. Their spirit slowly left Nigeria. 

Most lost allegiance to the idea of a Nigerian nation. Igbo are, today, more of citizens of the world than citizens of Nigeria. The Nigerian project is no longer for them, and there is concrete evidence to support their skepticism about Nigeria and the Nigerian project. The central problem of Nigeria is not leadership, as the great African novelist Chinua Achebe himself an Igbo, once declared it in his now famous pamphlet, The Trouble With Nigeria. 

What Nigeria has is an “Igbo problem.” In a young, clearly artificial nation such as Nigeria (well every nation is, by the way, an artificial construct), with its primordial structures still in place, the dynamic border-crossing, boundary-bursting Igbo carry the germ, and embody the danger of sovereign displacement. They change the face of long settled communities. They build new nations from the old. That is their greatest undoing. But Nigeria is now in a state where, even the Igbo have grown to be, no more the lone victims of Nigeria. 

Every part of Nigeria, North and South, is now, very clearly, a victim of all those years when Nigeria destroyed itself by trying to fight the Igbo, or stopping their way from defining the Nigerian idea: the egalitarian, republican idea, where all men are born free and equal. There is no king or peasant, just citizens, who must have the right to life, to free conscience, to prosperity and security. Just last week, the chickens came home to roost: pump price for petrol climbed to N651, and it will still climb. The economy is stalled. Mass poverty stares Nigeria in the eye. 

Once affluent Nigerians, who felt themselves above the common toil, now feel the very pinch of a social malaise which is going to build into a demographic bomb. I see a Green Revolution. It is inevitable, because people can endure for only so long and within such a human limit. Now, as Nigerians stare mass death by hunger in the face, two things are in the making: a public revolt. 

It feels just right by the corner that I am tempted to set my watch by it. Even if the courts confirm Mr. Tinubu, he is not going to sleep easy, because Nigeria is at the cross roads of history: the gathering forces are too mighty, and the implosion is going to be felt worldwide, and we will either be Somalia, or we will be Russia in 1917. Either way, it is goodbye to Nigeria as we knew it.

*Nwakanma is a US-based poet, academic and public intellectual