Freeing Nigeria

 By Obi Nwakanma

By every index, Nigeria as a nation, has very nearly, finally collapsed. It is held together now only by a very weak thread called fate.

*Tinubu

Basically, Nigeria has slipped to the symbolic phase of nationhood. It can only perform symbolic actions of nationness: convoke a parliament which only sits symbolically because it is actually not a parliament; issue laws, which carry only symbolic authority because they have no life, and are unenforceable; issue executive papers that have no administrative force, because it is not connected to institutions that serve citizens. There are no citizens.

This nation has no archive, nor does it have any memories to preserve. Its memos are treatises of subjugation rather than of transcendence. The instrumental phase of Nigeria as a nation is in abeyance. Its survival is tenuous. Those inside Nigeria feel like captives held prisoner by some abstract, colonial will. They no longer feel like they have a common endeavor or a common obligation to share community or build a nation as a mutual aid society. 78% of the inhabitants of this geographical space no longer believe in Nigeria.

The idea of “One Nigeria” today has become, to all intent and purpose, a ruse. No one believes it. People generally do not care anymore about Nigeria. They just want to leave it, or abolish it. There is no longer a happy memory to be shared about Nigeria around campfires, or family dinners, or social club meetings. There is no longer talk about its promise, or its national goals. Nigerians have lost patriotic feeling towards Nigeria, and are praying zealously for its natural death. For many, the situation of Nigeria and its current existence is an insult to their dignity, and a threat to their humanity.

The four horsemen of its apocalypse – brain-frying hunger, disease, war (ethnic and other civic conflicts), and the conquest of Nigeria – have been unleashed on Nigeria. Nigerians do not see the light, but they feel this wave of intense darkness emitting from that sanctuary of Satan called Aso Rock. I want to reiterate a point I made in my last “Orbit” column, to the effect that no nation can claim to be independent and free if it has no sovereign control of its state institutions. Nigeria as a nation has no sovereign control of its institutions.

The primary source of state or executive governance, the Civil Service, has been corrupted, and absorbed into a matrix of systems controlled from outside. It is no longer an organic, apolitical and independent Service, but rather a leaky, bedraggled ship characterized by obtuseness and incompetence. The president does not govern, he “rules” excathedra. The National Executive Council is papier-mache. It is just decorative. It is a very strange council, among which are some of the most corrupt people to enter public life in Nigeria. One of the ministers has been publicly accused of allegedly recruiting and funding the terrorist group, Boko Haram.

He has not denied it, and there is overwhelming evidence that should lead to a National Assembly inquiry, his resignation, and his prosecution for treason against the federation, if found wanting. But he, in spite of all this, is still holding sensitive position. Dear Nigerians, just imagine it. The National Security system is under foreign control. This is not the Nigeria that could deploy ECOMOG. The Nigerian military can no longer defend the territory of Nigeria, much less defend and secure West Africa, because it has been strategically weakened, contained, and confined.

It does not have the capacity of a sovereign military force. It cannot design, develop, build, manufacture and deploy its own tools. It is dependent on the handouts of used and second rate tools from international donor agencies. The Nigerian Armed Forces is an Army on paper. It is operationally weak and almost doctrinally nonexistent. Nigerians can no longer depend on it to defend Nigeria from enemies internal and external, unless it is reimagined, reorganized, redeployed, and repositioned. The facts are too glaring to itemize. As for the Police, it does not exist.

The Nigerian police as it is currently constituted is an embodiment of everything that went wrong with Nigeria. It serves currently, mostly as an enforcement squad for any government in power. Politicians use them as political thugs. Drug lords use them to run protection or execution rackets. In Imo State, just recently, the youth threatened to rise up and expel them because they now constitute an extortion syndicate. They have become far too dangerous a threat to the continued existence of young men and women in Imo State. Therein lies the danger of this moment in Nigerian national life, when the state feels like a “noyau” state, captured and quite frankly, irrelevant to the existence of Nigerians.

When people are pushed so further out that they have nothing to lose, they welcome and embrace death. It becomes better to die than to live in indignity. Many young Nigerians are now embracing death. They have nothing more to lose. They live in indignity. Many young folks have become addicted to crystal meth – the menace and scale of this addiction crisis reflects the increasing alienation of the young folk. In the East they call it “Mkpulumili.” It is the waste of an entire generation. There is industrial scale destruction of the youth of Nigeria. Family ties have fractured and are broken.

Entire towns have been destroyed as the young no longer are there. An entire generation has not only been destroyed, a new generation is already dying in the womb of Nigeria. The youth of Nigeria are giving up on the pursuit of education. It is no longer their dream to serve their nation. There is no nation to serve. Many are also not looking any longer for work. What is the point of striving when it gets you nothing? That is the current mood of Nigerians. The “Japa” option is no longer even an option, because even those who thought they escaped are discovering the intense meaninglessness of exile.

The clearest, most poignant evidence of the collapse of Nigeria happened right before us, this past week. Both the President and Vice-President of Nigeria were nowhere to be found. Both men embarked on foreign junkets. No one was in charge. Nigeria was so totally without government. This is unprecedented. Nigerians now call Mr. Tinubu, T-Pain, on account of the terrifying trauma Nigerians now suffer because of his thoughtless and ungrounded policies. It is heartless. It is reckless. It is without the milk of human kindness.

These are the darkest days in Nigeria. Nigeria is not at war, but aid workers are now reporting seeing early cases of Kwashiorkor among Nigerian children. Mr. Tinubu is clearly, not only clueless, he is unintelligent! Nigeria is evidence of the terrible limits of Tinubu’s mind, and the terrible absence of a well-established National Assembly to contain him. The job of the National Assembly seems pretty straightforward. It exercises oversight over the executive arm, and subjects the president to the constitution. Where the president breaks the laws, or proves unfit to govern, the National Assembly must impeach him.

Mr. Bola Ahmed Tinubu, in my view, given his serial failures, is unfit to govern Nigeria, and needs to be held accountable for what has been done to undermine Nigeria; for his reckless disregard of the constitution with regards to presidential function; for the questionable status of his oath of allegiance to the republic, and for the roles he has played from 2016 in subverting and destroying the institutions of this federation, which he now seems to run like his private estate. The capture of the Nigerian state, starting with the eight cruel years of Buhari, and now this, seems to be leading to its inevitable crack. Built as many observers of Nigerian have pointed out, Nigeria has proved too elastic. Nigerians seem to have an unlimited capacity to endure the worst governments.

But something new also seems to be rising among Nigerians. There is a serious gathering of the clouds. Nigerians seem increasingly to be losing their fear of authority. Last week a crowd of people in Ibadan were shown stopping soldiers on the streets and openly demanding from them to take over government. But Nigerians themselves, not proxies, will have to free Nigeria from state capture. There are three ways of doing this: one is by armed insurrection, and that would require a highly tactical group of Nigerians organizing to arm themselves, and fight street by street. It is a more dangerous, and needless option. The other option is to engage the democratic process, and the democratic institutions.

Nigerians must compel, and push the National Assembly to enforce the democratic will of the republic. The only plebiscitary power the people have under the current constitution, is the power to recall their representatives from parliament, who fail to act for them. Nigerians must organize to exercise this power, recall those legislators who are in the pockets of the executive arm, and push the National Assembly to investigate and prosecute Buhari, recover Nigeria’s stolen wealth, and hold this current president, Tinubu, to account. Failure to do this will lead to the third possibility: the rise of fearless, drug-addled mobs, that will bring down this republic and smash it into smithereens with many ungoverned enclaves. We still have that crucial one minute to midnight to turn things around.

*Nwkanma is a US-based professor of English