Lamido as Epitaph for a Monument to a Successful Protest!
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
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