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Lessons of the US Report By Abdulrazaque Bello-Barkindo
The claim that the US government did not sponsor the report that Nigeria has 15 more years as a country should be taken with a pinch of salt. Instead, since the report bears the official stamp of the US National Intelligence Council, it must not be taken as lightly as our garrulous power-mongers are already doing. To wish the report away or to describe it as dubious is to accelerate leadership misdemeanour. The report, we all know is and cannot be the gospel truth, just as it is by no means a prophecy or prediction but a summary of a collection of information available to the US body and a wake-up call for the country. But reactions to the report since its release in Nigeria, have been anything but edifying with the most brazen coming from the president who himself described it as mere “glib talk”.
To be candid, our newspapers are not the only source of the information used in arriving at this distasteful report as the PDP national chairman Col. Ahmadu Ali thinks but our news media like any other media have a role to play in projecting the way we handle our affairs, even if that role cannot be entirely culpable. The US has several ways of collating its information. These include such subjective ways as the reasons people tender for seeking asylum outside Nigeria and even more subjective reasons, like reports from their nationals who visit us.
Most people seeking refuge in foreign lands do us incalculable havoc and do not bother about it so long as they achieve their goal of staying abroad. While in the past prisoners of conscience, defenders of human rights and their ilk could easily gain refuge abroad, the situation is different now. Most of these countries expect us to put our house in order instead, because not only do they have problems of their own, they are also beginning to realise that many asylum seekers are no more than economic refuges. Somehow, Islam continues to take the flak because our escapees capitalise on the introduction of Sharia in the twelve northern states to push their case, even when they clearly have no contact with Shari’a. Such people concoct gory tales of persecution by the Islamic establishment to embellish their case.
Let’s face it Nigeria has been facing its darkest days since and there has been no paucity of reports of deplorable events and conditions in the country in the last couple of decades. We might argue that it is the same, over the world, but it is most shocking, frightening, bloody and horrendous that negative reports that come out of Nigeria are even more prevalent in this era, which is by and large, a democracy, making Nigeria’s share of anguish, misery, despondency, distress, gloom and hardship especially unwholesome by every stretch of the imagination.
The first thing that comes to mind when one reads the US report is India and Pakistan. The separation of the Indian sub-continent in 1947 could very well pass for the case of sour grapes in a once united country. India which became independent on August 15, 1947 represented a secular and egalitarian society based on the universally accepted ideal that each man has value, was created equally and should be treated as such. Pakistan, which officially came into existence a day earlier, was based on the premise that Hindus and Muslims constitute two different nationalities and could not co-exist. The partition created two different countries with most Muslim majority areas of undivided India going to the newly created nation, Pakistan (Land of the Pure). Originally Pakistan was made up of two distinct and geographically unconnected parts termed West, and East Pakistan. West Pakistan was made up of a number of races including the Punjabis, Sindhis, Pathans, Balochis, Mohajirs (Muslim refugees from India) and others. East Pakistan, on the other hand, was much more homogeneous and had an overwhelming Bengali-speaking population.
It wouldn’t have been necessary to bother with recapping all this but since we have some similarities like false homogeneity, Islam, mutual resentment and denial, with the region it may suffice. Reaction of Nigerians to the US report obviously shows that many people are languishing in the slumber of denial. Although the Eastern wing of Pakistan was more populous than the Western one, political power since independence resided, for some inexplicable reason, with the Western side. This caused considerable resentment in Eastern Pakistan and a charismatic Bengali leader called Sheikh Mujibur Rehman articulated that resentment by forming the opposition Awami league and demanding more autonomy for the Eastern side. In 1970, his party, the opposition won majority of the seats fair and square and Mujibur Should have been the Prime Minister of Pakistan or at least the leader of his people but West Pakistan was so dismayed by his quest for autonomy and instead put him in jail. Could this be a scenario that we all remember now?
After so much water had passed under the bridge, what followed eventually and logically became known as Bangladesh. This brief historical perspective is a pattern that can easily be adapted to the Nigerian situation. The concentration of the army on one side and the political brainlessness of our power elite can lead to a situation with dire consequences and that is exactly what the US report is saying. We have unjustifiably jailed election victors in the past and sent agitators of regional autonomy to their untimely death. Rigging elections is becoming the norm rather than the exception in our country and people are sitting in Abuja wagging their mouth about how they have been able to keep Nigeria together in spite of warnings from the international community. It is a spin-off of a spin-off that lead to total anarchy not isolated cases of injustice.
Love between the north and the south of Nigeria has for long been lost, and as the US is saying, the protagonists in this love affair dislike each other but are afraid to admit it. We behave like a woman who remains in an abusive marriage for the sake of her children. What is more, there is no longer any certainty that if war breaks out in Nigeria, the middle-belt will side with the rest of the north or that north-east and north-west will go to the trenches as one indivisible entity. In fact, who wants to be laughing stock in a cancerously depraved and unjust society as ours? Those who decide to go to war to save the name of Nigeria are simply going to be laughed at because the most prevalent opinion one reads about Nigeria in print is that Nigeria is not worth dying for. Similarly, the fissure between the west and the east can only deepen. In spite of the chorus of hatred for the northern section of the country by the south, there seems to be much more disagreement between the south-west and the south-east than meets the eye.
It is true that the US report can be as far off the mark as blunt falsehood can be, but we can only treat it with disdain at our own peril because whenever life decides to imitate fiction it does so with a vengeance. The situation in Nigeria is almost at a head where pockets of resistance are becoming more daring for us to contemplate. Who would have thought that the strike action by the Nigerian Police Force could ever have been possible; or the emergence of Asari Dokubo in the Niger Delta region, or even that the Nigeria minted “Taliban” could brazenly overrun a police station in Geidam?
Those who concur with the presidential effrontery may be doing so because of the allegations of Iraq’s or Saddam Hussein’s possession of weapons of mass destruction which the US intelligence community has been unable to prove to date but to use this as their only benchmark is most regrettable indeed. Such powerful Senators as Kanti Bello, Nasir Ibrahim Mantu, Bode Olowoporoku, Tunde Ogbeha and others, may not currently feel totally off the mark, but it is the likes of Uche Chukwumerije, who see the report as a challenge and warning in disguise, David Briggidi whose candour about Nigeria’s problems and the need to address them and Retired top-cop Abubakar Tsav who admits that the report can only be wrong if justice, equity and fairness return as the hallmark of our society that carry the day. In other words, we should take the report as a wake up call.
We are all no doubt familiar with the Old Testament story of Samson who met a lion by the wayside during his travels. He used his strength to rip the lion apart and dump its carcass along the way. Passing the same route a while later something caught his eye and it was a swarm of bees that had taken over the carcass and again, Samson raided the hive. Samson’s subsequent comment, after the incident, that “out of the eater came forth meat and out of the strong came forth sweetness” should be our guiding principle as it is a metaphor for the phenomenon of extracting beneficial things from even the most evil of circumstances. That is how to look at the US report considering the magnitude of havoc mankind will face should the worst come to pass.
razaque
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