Lamido as Epitaph for a Monument to a Successful Protest!

By

Adagbo Onoja

adagboonoja@yahoo.co.uk

 

There is an intriguing consensus on one issue that must set us thinking about social progress in Nigeria. That consensus is the way divergent forces are endorsing Jigawa State Governor, Sule Lamido’s redistributive politics. It was a powerful message when the Sultan of Sokoto declared Lamido a leader with conscience who was doing what should be supported by all men of goodwill. So also the approving position of the different religious and traditional leaders. At the last count, no less than five national newspapers have written approving editorial comments so far, excluding those of notable columnists. This consensus demonstrates a new and encouraging attitude to the politics of the Radical Tradition in the North. Is it possible that all the forces which used to work across purposes as far as hostility to that tradition have come to, in a way, accept the ideological and leadership claims of that Tradition? Hence the idea of Lamido as an Epitaph for a monument to a successful protest?
 
 Kayode Komolafe of Thisday actually set me thinking along these posers via his Wednesday, September 5th, 2007column. This was not because he considered the Jigawa State social security regime the stuff of the tradition of 100 Days in its canonical sense but because he was, by implication, passing a verdict on the radical praxis in Nigerian politics. For, the Jigawa social security regime is not just about caring for physically challenged indigenes by paying them a monthly survival allowance but, most importantly, an ideological project. Given the ideological poverty of Nigerian politics, the consensus spanning the media, traditional and religious authority, Nigeria’s strategic elite such as epitomized in the Sultan, international voluntary agencies and development partners in favour of that social security regime is not just a vote for Lamido’s governorship but also an endorsement of whatever this ideological impulse is. Hence, the phrase used as the title of this piece.
 
Permit a digression into the history of the revolutionary phrase which, however, came from the establishment American Political Scientist, David Easton. He used the phrase to sum up on the debate between the Behaviouralists and the Traditionalists in Political Studies. The Behaviouralists believe that any knowledge generated which is not based on observed behaviour is, scientifically speaking, nonsensical. Thus, for Behaviouralists, the old Political Science of splendid speculation epitomized by Plato and company produced wisdom but not science. Behaviouralism carries the stamp of American pragmatism particularly when they stormed the discipline of Political Science in the post World War years, looking for a science that could solve practical problems, especially of how to dominate other people.  It was the resistance by old guard Political Science, particularly with the argument that man, as a social being, is not amenable to the ‘scientificity’ of Behaviouralism that provoked the debate whose outcome Easton used an ‘epitaph for a monument to a successful protest’ to capture.
 
There is a sense in which the phrase succinctly captures another debate, this time in Nigerian politics. I am referring to the challenge posed by the Radical Tradition to the established order in Northern Nigerian politics since the early 19th century, whether it was the social revolts of 1804 or the Aminu Kano dimension in the 1950s or the PRP tendency in the late 1970s. Like the Behaviouralists, (if we must make such a contradictory comparison), the Radical Tradition in the North had been shouting, ‘give us the power, we can do better’. But, because power is not handed over that simply by power holders, what the elements of the alternative tradition got was repression and sidekicks. That was until the massive pauperization occasioned particularly in Northern Nigeria arising mainly from the effects of structural adjustment and ‘reform’ regimes in the last 22 years made talakawa of the entire region itself, including its bourgeoisie proper and the petty-bourgeoisie of course. The subsequent poverty of vision, (to borrow from Lamido) has seen a bungling regional elite, quite incapable of the kind of transformative engineering carried out by even the pioneers of Northern nationalism. Although this ideological or political and organizational disarray is not unique to the Northern elite, seeing as even the South-West and, of course, the South-East elite are in no less utter incoherence as far as popular interests and even their own class interests are concerned, the complete agrarian character of the North has, however, aggravated the Northern case.
 
Therein lies the significance of Jigawa today to the extent that Lamido, as an administration is, according to an independent observer, reversing the trend of history by bringing back the idea of social protection for physically deformed citizens of Jigawa state at a time governments in developing countries are withdrawing social protection for its citizens in order to appease the market- oriented international community.
 
This assessment, coming from the Quarters it emanated from, must be fulfilling to every conscientious Nigerian, particularly those of us who are children of poor peasants. The peasants are not directly exploited in the class sense but in Africa, they are the ones who experience what it is to watch one’s child die of preventable diseases. Growing up in rural Idomaland in the 1970s, I am, for example, surprised how I escaped into adulthood untouched by attack of malaria, diphtheria, amoebaisis, worms, cholera, dysentery, polio and the other members of the 7 deadly diseases responsible for high infant mortality in Africa. This, I am sure, is also the experience of millions of the elite who rule Nigeria today if one takes the content of the blurb of one of Festus Iyayi’s novels as an indicator.
 
Since the peasantry is a universal category, my utter fulfillment is being part of a government redistributing resources in their favour and that of women and the urban poor. Lamido’s argument that we must re-position certain social groups even as we try to liberalize the economy is beyond challenge, not even by the IMF. I have heard Lamido say this too many times but I never knew he would translate it into action if he got power. His being able to do so is the second time Lamido would surprise. The first was his refusal to join in the diplomatic coup the ‘British’ Commonwealth was brewing against President Mugabe in early 2000. Although it was the official policy of the government of Nigeria then not to allow Mugabe to be stabbed, a greedy Foreign Affairs Minister with shallow sense of History could have messed it up. And Zimbabwe would have been a different story by now if there was not Lamido insurrection against the Commonwealth intervention. Such a figure should interest all students of African security in a dangerous world.
 
For, as undergraduates of Nigerian universities even in the early 1990s, one of the most tasking courses was The politics of Development.  The question the course tried to answer is what is development and how do we develop? In our time, it was a compulsory course unit in most of the social sciences based on the assumption that development is the most important issue in all developing countries and the universities should produce people who are experts in the theory and practice of developmentalism. Okpari!
 
The take-off point of the course is the notion that there is a theoretical state of being at which a society is presumed to be developed. There is no agreement anywhere what that state is or how to measure it in a universal sense. Is it the skyscrapers in New York or the possession by a country of Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles or the high dignity of the human person the Scandinavian countries like Norway, Sweden, etc have achieved? What would be considered the correct role of state power in all these? How best can the masses, the elite, women, the armed forces and the trading class be mobilized into the developmental train?
 
This study has been dominated by two broad perspectives. The first is the liberal perspective which says that to achieve development, all that a developing country like Nigeria needs do is open its borders to foreign expertise, technology, investment, loans and credits, multi-party electoral democracy, openness to CNNisation and Coca – Colanisation. This is the liberal theory of modernization as marketed by top American Political Scientists in the post war years.
 
There is the radical alternative which says that the above theory can only develop the underdevelopment of developing countries like Nigeria and that the correct way for these countries to go is to start by mobilizing the people to harness national resources thereby bringing development. The above are crude summary of the two dominant perspectives but they should suffice for a newspaper piece. The point is that there are criticism and counter-criticism of each of the theories and there is no consensus till today but most of the students graduate looking forward to regimes that would head in the direction of the radical perspective.
 
And that is my fulfillment in Jigawa today because the populist track Lamido subscribes to is a sub set of the radical divide of the debate about the politics of development. Lamido’s operationalisation of populism has completely and permanently shattered the notion that some ideas and approaches to developing our country are university ideas which are unrealistic or impracticable in the Nigerian setting. He has also seriously questioned elite aloofness and their happily irresponsible attitude to deep privations of the poor. Lamido questioned it with his approach of personal touch through painstaking interaction with the talakawa at their natural domains such as birthdays, weddings, burials, condolence to those bereaved, (no matter how low or high), personal visits to those in the hospitals, routine and regular inspection of the schools, the hospitals, facilities, projects, the local governments and the palaces. If governance has been characterized by such routine supervision, we must have recorded less and less infant mortality, for example. Bringing authority to the level of the people matters a lot in societies at Nigeria’s level of development where the great majority of the citizens do not have what it takes to access the modern political space.
 
Whatever observable limitations, there is still something worth defending and promoting about this praxis because it is suggesting a meaning of power different from the prevalent feel happy privatisation and personalization of power. In fact, my thesis here is that this is what the above consensus is a recognition and an endorsement of. It is tempting to dismiss my thesis as the self-serving volubility of a political appointee but even that should be contextually excusable in the light of the above discussion.
Onoja is Special Adviser on Media Affairs to Jigawa Governor