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Are We Really All Patriots? By Moses Ochonu My recent article, Critics are Patriots Too, seems to have resonated with many people. There have been many formal and informal responses in the form of internet articles and comments. The small debate that I touched off seems to congeal to one central question: who is a patriot? Answers to this question have understandably conformed to the two main schools of Nigerian commentary: those uncritically supportive of the status quo and those uncompromisingly sworn to opposing it. A smattering of middle-coursers has inhabited the discursive space between these two main camps. My own view, as expressed in the last article, is a nuanced, centrist one. I admitted of the possibility that some pro-status quo, self-declared patriots may in fact be motivated by the love of country. Many others, I argued, are unabashed opportunists and sycophants whose patriotism is at best questionable. I also acknowledged that some pessimistic critics may have crossed into the territory of cynicism, thereby defeating the potency of their patriotic angst and criticism. I now think that I may have been too charitable to the pro-status quo optimists. For instance I wrote this: …the uncritical, self-declared patriot and the perennial critic and pessimist are actually motivated by the same patriotic instincts. Well, sometimes. As I just reiterated, some self-declared patriots are not motivated by patriotic impulses. They are clearly motivated by personal loyalty, pecuniary considerations, and other inexplicably mysterious reasons known only to them and God. So, the generalization about a shared premise in the above quote is insulting to the pessimistic critic, whose criticism of deteriorating conditions and leadership failures in Nigeria cannot be plausibly shown to be motivated by anything other than the love of country and the impatient desire to see things improve for Nigerians. It now seems to me that even self-declared patriots who may have started out as genuine lovers of country are easily corrupted by their unblinking support for the government in power. The corruption can occur in the obvious sense of the word, that is, of getting paid to suppress and defend evil and to attack those who oppose it. Self-declared patriots can become corrupted in another way. They often box themselves into a corner with their paeans to power and can no longer retrieve their good sense to recognize fraud and oppression. As a result, they find themselves defending and making excuses for the universally abhorrent policies and behaviors of their favorite incumbents. It can quickly become a thing of ego. Few people have the modesty to retrace their steps and see the folly of their ways. Fewer people have the courage to condemn evil in people that they built a public persona defending. Such is the plight of defenders of the status quo and self-declared patriots. The main problem of the self-declared patriots is that they are afflicted with a fundamental misunderstanding of patriotism. They equate the love of one’s country with the love of its leadership and its status quo. Similarly they equate a refusal to support the status quo and the Nigerian leadership with a lack of love for country, a lack of patriotism. Here, what the self-declared patriotic fanatics are doing is merely projecting their afflictions onto patriotic critical pessimists. They want everyone to operate by their self-serving definition of patriotism as patrimonial linkage, of patriotism as support for the government in power. This is fascist, not to mention distracting. The venerable Chinua Achebe once wrote an insightful little book in which he analytically reduced the problem of Nigeria to that of leadership. The problem with self-declared patriots is that they fail to recognize that you don’t have to love your country’s problem to love your country, and that you can love your country without loving its problem(s). If the famous Achebean conclusion is correct then the problem of Nigeria are the leaders, who disenfranchise, rob, misgovern, and oppress Nigerians. It follows then that we can love our country and its people without loving its problem—the leaders. Or, are self-declared patriots suggesting that we love all that is bad about Nigeria, including its notoriously corrupt and incompetent leadership cadre? The best analogy that I can come up with is the love that God has for sinners in the Christian tradition. God loves sinners but not their sins. Nigerian critics and pessimists love Nigeria but not its main problem—the destructive and predatory leadership. Until the self-declared patriots expand the conceptual umbrella called patriotism to accommodate the possibility that one could love Nigeria without for instance loving the conduct of some of its citizens like the 419 fraudsters, they will continue in their selfish appropriation of the patriotic rhetoric. Is it not possible to, for instance, criticize the Lugardian foundation of Nigeria— which still defines our co-existence—while professing love for Nigeria’s peoples and cultures? The argument that criticism of one’s country’s leadership discredits one’s patriotic credential is as hollow as it is ignorant. Every dispassionate political observer knows that internal criticisms, that is, criticisms by countrymen (as opposed to criticism by outsiders) are the most potent weapons for encouraging governmental accountability and for preventing or reducing the abuse of power. I have told the Gani-IBB story elsewhere, but it bears repeating here to illustrate the productive, positive contributions of harsh criticisms to governance. To any observer of the encounter between IBB and Gani Fawehinmi, the latter was the former’s greatest enemy, for Fawehinmi was the dictator’s harshest critic. But that, according to one perceptive Nigerian observer, is a simplistic way to characterize those volatile encounters between the dictator and the social critic. Fawehinmi, the observer remarked, was, far from being IBB’s enemy, his greatest friend. Fawehinmi, he went on, was IBB’s only window into the truth about the effects of his harsh economic policies, his corruption, and his failures. IBB, the observer argued, would do well to treasure Fawehinmi as a better friend of his regime than his sycophants and loyalists who only told him what soothed his fancy. This insightful argument is relevant to this discussion. Critics of Nigeria’s failed, corrupt, and incompetent leadership are in fact the greatest friends of Nigeria, the greatest patriots, and the greatest advocates for Nigeria’s hapless and traumatized people. Conversely, those who trivialize the flaws in the status quo, defend the illegal and unconstitutional acts of incumbents, ignore or excuse electoral fraud, corruption, incompetence, and outright evil have the biggest handicap in the patriotism department. They are enemies of the Nigerian people, however innocent their motivation for embracing such a posture may be. Many of them are pseudo-patriots, eternally beholden to unpatriotic ideas and personalities and unwilling to distinguish between those personalities and Nigeria. The great Franco-Algerian scholar of African identity, Frantz Fanon, once remarked that the violence of the oppressed is a statement and proof of his humanity. In a similar vein, the verbal violence of the outraged critic is the proof of his humanity. His vehement criticism of anti-people government policies, bad leadership, corruption, abuse of office and electoral fraud constitutes the most definitive proof that the critic is a caring, compassionate, altruistic, and patriotic Nigerian. He is not just thinking of himself and his friends; he is thinking of all Nigerians, especially the little guys on the street who do not inhabit the islands of opulence and comfort in the Nigerian sea of poverty. One has to care about one’s country to criticize its slide into political and economic collapse. It takes a certain level of patriotic fervor for a Nigerian, especially one living a life of self-made comfort, to devote his critical energies and intellectual endowments to critical commentary on Nigerian affairs. Criticism and pessimism flow from an underlying but subtly expressed love of country. The critical pessimist is subtle in his celebration of the good in Nigeria. But this does not mean that he is obsessed with the bad in Nigeria, or unwilling to entertain the possibility of national regeneration. His subtlety in celebrating the occasional apparitions of good news is informed by his recognition that the fundamental problems of the country remain and continue to overwhelm any isolated good deed with the production of unacceptable social realities. With all these in mind, I am not so sure if one should equate the motive of the self-declared patriot with that of the pessimistic critic, or if one should even credit supporters of the status quo with any patriotic commitment. Clearly, the role of the pessimistic critic as the conscience of Nigeria is superior to that of the self-declared patriotic supporter and defender of a rotten status quo. At any rate, how possible is patriotism in a country as troubled as Nigeria? After all, one's patriotic fervor increases in tandem with the ability or willingness of one's country (by which I mean the leadership) to improve the quality of one's life through the provision of social infrastructure, access, and opportunity. Emptied of these tangible associations, of what use is patriotism? Patriotism cannot be its own justification. It is usually inspired by something moiré concrete. The last word on this matter belongs to Chinua Achebe, who in his characteristic eloquence captured the constraints on patriotism in a country like Nigeria, as well as the hijacking of the patriotism mantra by people motivated by sinister, unpatriotic calculations:
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