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Nigeria, State Failure: Which Type? By Yusuf Nagi Ahmad Driven by what has become a popular euphemism ‘the current security challenges’ (which refers to the many militant insurgencies and acts of criminality around the country including that of the MEND in the Niger Delta, OPC in the South-West, kidnappings and armed robberies in the South-East and more recently, the Boko Haram in the North), all the discussions about the future of Nigeria presently always end up with probing the possibility of the country becoming a ‘failed state’ like Somalia or Afghanistan – the most current archetypal occurrence of the phenomenon presently dominating the global stage. Such occurrences are marked by the collapse of central authority preceded or followed by the fall of the Sovereign and a violent socio-political explosion as a direct result of the total breakdown of law and order. The national territory breaks up into bits, which are immediately taken over by tribal warlords who command the loyalty of pieces of the national army whose command and control will have also broken down. A fierce competition among the warlords then ensues for the control of bits of the national territory and the people, and the resources that could be forcibly cornered to continue to prosecute an internecine war against each other. The violent rivalries then acquire a life and momentum that is difficult to contain as every one of the warlords becomes more and more blood thirsty with every military clash recording more and more vengeful and hateful deaths. Invariably, these break-ups are also accompanied by dire economic hardships and poverty in terms of a real abject lack of purchasing power and the scarcity of the most basic essentials of life. This perspective of the phenomenon of the ‘failed state’ is mediated largely by the perceptions of America and the West, and is informed by the experiences recorded in the Balkans after the fall of Communism, Afghanistan, Somalia, Rwanda, Liberia and Sierra-Leone. The closest Nigeria came to this first type of ‘failed state’ phenomenon was after the country’s first coup d’état which terminated the First Republic, followed by a counter coup and the Civil War 1967-70. As graphically demonstrated in especially Afghanistan and Somalia, the most defining characteristics of this type of state failure are the fall of the Sovereign and the break up of the armed forces among rival warlords; the total break-down of law and order within, and the carving out of enclaves out of the national territory among rival warlords as exclusive areas of influence from where they extort resources to continue to prosecute a war of mutual attrition. Since the successful conclusion of the Civil War, the balance of probabilities has always been in favor of Nigeria overcoming most of the instances in her history, conducive to this type of violent ‘failed state’ phenomenon. But there has been another quite different, archetypal occurrence of the phenomenon of the ‘failed state’ which is generally over-looked, but whose import is more robustly relevant to the case of Nigeria as a federation: namely, the ‘failed state’ phenomenon or state failure that is induced and caused by ethical implosion and a total, national collapse of values, rather than the collapse of authority and total breakdown of law and order. Ethical implosion is caused mainly by rampant and pervading corruption, resulting in the choking up of the State Ethic and the collapse of national values which may not degenerate into a social explosion and/or a total collapse of authority and breakdown of law and order per se. The most defining characteristic of this archetype is the blatant and gross abuse and manipulation of (mostly false) figures especially of the electoral votes which determine the emergence of the political leadership in the first instance, and which subsequently lays down the pattern of treating every other figure in all facets of national life involving the government.
Phantom figures may be concocted of industrial production, Gross Domestic Product GDP and/or other indices of the workings of the economy, which never manifest in improving the standard of living of the people. Such figures though hide the stupendous acts of corruption which are not so tangible, but which may have indeed struck quite deadly blows to the national economy rendering it comatose And with the economy in real stagnation, the general populace in a state of stupor and despair and the ruling elite in an intellectual cul-de-sac, not knowing what to do next, with all intellectual pursuits stunted and numbed by the soporific effects of corruption and totally disengaged from social reality, the State gets stuck somewhat. And without the Sovereign falling, without any form of a breakdown of law and order and without anybody firing even a shot, first the ruling elite and the civil society and then the armed and police forces are simply overwhelmed by the same moral ennui, and the state collapses without any act of violence against it either from within or from without. It was this archetypal phenomenon of the ‘failed state’ or failure of the state caused by ethical implosion which resulted in the collapse and falling apart of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics USSR, or the former Soviet Union, which was very much a federation just like Nigeria and most of the former Communist, satellite states of Eastern Europe. In his book, Perestroika (which reads like a dead, outdated literature right now, but which is indeed still very much alive and relevant to the situation of a federation such as Nigeria), the last President of the USSR and the man who presided over its collapse, President Mikhail Gorbachev, chronicled the issues and events which presaged the falling apart of the component, territorial units of the former Soviet Union.
Chief among the issues was the chronic use and/or abuse and manipulation of blatantly false figures of electoral votes by apparatchiks to maintain the supremacy of the Communist Party in the Soviets’ political space by ensuring that the Party always won almost 100% of the votes cast in ALL the elections for leadership positions in the country. The same party apparatchiks also doubled as industrial managers, and because they had to meet up with officially assigned targets to keep their positions, they also cooked up blatantly false figures of production of consumer goods most of which were actually becoming increasingly scarce to ordinary citizens. Quite naturally the Communist Party, always committed to upholding the superiority of the Communist Ethic, fully affirmed such false figures as the basis of political and socio-economic orthodoxy challenging and/or deviating from which could mean losing the liberty to live one’s life. This was in spite of the fact that as at then, the economies of the Soviet Union and most of the Communist Eastern bloc nations had virtually reached a sort of dead-end, an intellectual cul-de-sac, and their currencies had increasingly become laughably worthless as per their official values, and salaries were ridiculously paltry in what they could purchase. Yet, while ordinary citizens were facing these dire shortages of even the most basic of the necessities of life, the Communist Party apparatchiks and their wards had become a special class of comrades, who continued to enjoy hidden weekends of a life of abundance and ease in choice and specially supplied dachas around some of the best sea resorts in the country. The chief event that was taking place then when the Soviet State finally imploded and failed was the war the Soviet armed forces were conducting just across the country’s border deep inside the territory of Afghanistan.
That is to say while yet commanding arguably the largest arsenal of nuclear warheads and cruise missiles, with the ability to deliver active military power on virtually any spot around the globe and even beyond (late President Ronald Reagan confirmed this with the Star Wars military program!!!) and the most modern ice-cutting warships, the Soviet Union’s military never really broke up into pieces, nor did the Soviet armed forces lose the capacity to defend the national territory nor was there a general breakdown of law and order within its national territory, nor did the Soviet Sovereign lose command and control of the armed and police forces – rather the Soviet armed forces were indeed actively projecting military power deep inside a neighbor’s territory when the Soviet State ethically imploded and failed resulting in the falling away of its component, federating units. Howsoever understood, what clearly emerges from a reading of former President Mikhail Gorbachev’s Perestroika is that a State’s military power and/or the ability to defend its territory and/or even project active military power abroad and/or even its ability to marshal such potent internal security outfits such as the KGB to suppress dissent - all of these are of no consequence for a guarantee against state failure, when it is caused by ethical implosion and the collapse of values as a consequence of rampant and pervasive corruption marked mainly by the abject manipulation, abuse or even total disregard of the significance of figures in the affairs of the State. What was most poignantly enigmatic about the Soviet Communist system was that it quite clearly distinguished between the false figures for political use and/or abuse, and the figures used for sincere and devoted pursuits of especially scientific and technological knowledge. That is why even as the figures of electoral votes and industrial production of consumer goods were always manipulated or out rightly concocted to justify and maintain the dominance of the Communists in the national political space, the Soviet Union still developed a genuine and robust system of scientific and technological knowledge.
The West African state ethic from its cradle in the republics of the liberated slaves of Liberia and Sierra Leone has never developed the same kind of distinction between the figures used for political buccaneering, and the figures that should form the basis of a genuinely factual definition of social reality and/or even natural phenomenon: all figures in this jurisdiction seem to be subject to manipulation, falsification and bastardization. The chief exemplar is political power itself: the figures that define its acquisition are invariably concocted or at least their veracity is almost always dented by obvious improbability. And this is what seems to define the approach to figures in almost all facets of the conduct of the State in Nigeria: because political authority is the most highly prized nexus that defines the laws that constitute the reality of the State, once it is defiled by being defined in false figures of electoral votes, everything else seems to become so easy to defile by also being defined in false figures. It is generally assumed that even with all the so-called ‘current security challenges’, Nigeria has passed the stage of ever becoming a ‘failed state’ of the first archetype – that is of the collapse of central authority, preceded or followed by social explosion caused by the total breakdown of law and order and the breakup of the national territory and the armed forces among warlords. But as for the second archetype that is caused by the collapse of values and ethical implosion as a result of pervasive corruption and characterized by the total disregard of correct figures in the affairs of the State – as for this archetype, nobody can say for certain what future holds for Nigeria. |