PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

Stemming Nigeria’s Descent Into A Failed State

Last Monday I chaired the 12^th Annual Colloquium of the Ajasin Foundation. The foundation, whose 12-man board of trustees is headed by retired 80 year old Right Reverend Emmanuel Bolanle Gbonigi, is based in Owo, home town of late Chief Michael Adekunle Ajasin, the first elected governor of Ondo State (1979 to 1983) and a founding father of the Action Group, the leading opposition party in the First Republic (1960 to 1966) and the ruling party in Western Region during the period.

The colloquium, however, held in Akure, the state capital. Its theme, “Is Nigeria a failing state?” couldn’t have been more apt given the crisis of nation- statehood that seems to have gripped our country, a crisis symptomatized by the rising threat of Boko Haram to our national security and rooted in the general sheer incompetence, selfishness and impunity of our leadership in virtually all sectors and at all levels of society but particularly so at the centre.

In his welcome address, the Right Reverend Gbonigi seemed of the view that Nigeria is not just failing as a State but has already failed. “Whether you settle for the former or the latter,” he said, “the crux of the matter is that the ravaging socio-economic, political, environmental, moral, religious cankerworms plaguing Nigeria today have been identified as the fundamental attributes of a failed state...What other label or name should a country that has invariably failed in its responsibility to be sensitive to the plight and predicament of its citizenry deserve?”

The reverend put the blame for the country’s predicament squarely on the shoulders of its leadership. “If,” he said, “(Libya’s) Ghaddafi deserved a bullet in the head in spite of the prosperity he bequeathed to the Libyan state and its people but fell short of ruling the country along human rights and democratic lines, how many bullets do our leaders deserve for the insanity and rots that have pervaded every nook and cranny of the Nigerian state?”

Governor Rauf Adesoji Aregbeshola of Osun State was billed to give the keynote speech but was inadvertently absent. Instead Chief Ayo Opadokun, a well-known chieftain of NADECO, the main battle tank of the fight for the realisation of “June 12” up until the departure of the military from power in 1999, spoke ex-tempore and eloquently on the governor’s behalf and came to the conclusion that though the Nigerian State is yet to fail it looks certain to do so sooner than later. That is, he said, unless a sovereign conference of the country’s ethnic nationalities is convoked to overhaul the country’s “rules of engagement.” This was hardly a surprising prescription for a NADECO chieftain.

Senator Olorunimbe Mamora, two-term speaker of the Lagos State House of Assembly before he went to the senate, spoke on the topic of confederation as a solution to the country’s crisis of nation-statehood. His conclusion seemed to be that true confederation has never really worked anywhere in the world and is not likely to do so in Nigeria. However, for the Nigerian federation to work, he said, its six unofficial geo-political zones, South-South, South-East, South-West, North-Central, North-East and North-West should become autonomous with each zone free to make its own laws but ceding areas like foreign policy and the military to the centre.

Mr Theophilus Adebowale, a youthful lecturer at Adekunle Ajasin University, Akungba, spoke on the role leadership and followership in Nigeria in creating the crisis of the country’s nation-statehood. True, he said, Nigeria has had a serious crisis of leadership. For him, however, it seemed that of a lethargic followership was even worse.

Nigerians as followers, he said, have far too easily allowed their leaders to get away even with blue murder and unless they end their lethargy and rise to challenge their leaders’ impunity, the failure of the country as a state is a foregone conclusion. It was, however, not clear, at least to me, how he thought Nigerians could end their lethargy without someone or some group taking the lead in getting them to, as they say in civil rights activist circles, organize rather than merely agonize.

A communiqué was to have been issued at the end of the colloquium but it was not. Rather it ended on a rather chaotic note when the organisers unwisely started distributing snacks and drinks among the audience as we moved into what would most probably have been a more interesting finale of audience participation.

However, even without a communiqué it was pretty obvious, from the reactions of the audience to the speeches from the high table as well as the reactions to the interventions from the floor before the decent into chaos, that our youthful lecturer, Mr Adebowale, was in a minority in his conclusion that poor followership among Nigerians was more to blame for Nigeria’s predicament than its poor leadership. And the audience, I believe, was right in not sharing his position.

No doubt lethargy among ordinary Nigerians is a fundamental problem. Certainly there is a lot to be said for the aphorism that a people get the leaders they deserve.

At the same time it is also a historical fact, indeed human nature, that no society has ever changed without an individual or a group providing the appropriate leadership, invariably in spite of the power of the status quo.

Several things have made it impossible for this kind of leadership to emerge in Nigeria. One of them is that our system which by and large used to reward hard work and honesty seemed to have gone into the reverse of rewarding sloth and dishonesty, beginning from when oil became the king of public finance from the late ‘60s, and worsened by the militarization of our politics from 1966.

Another, and perhaps the most important factor of them all, is our general notion of leadership. For almost all of us the leader is that fellow on top of the heap whether we put him there or he imposed himself on us. We forget, perhaps conveniently so, that each of us has a role to play in moving society forward and that that role implies leadership, no matter how seemingly insignificant it is, at one’s own level.

Each of us, as both the Holy Qur’an and the Holy Bible or whatever deity you believe in say, is a shepherd and will be held accountable for his “flock” or whatever he was entrusted with, no matter how big or small, if not right here on earth, certainly in the hereafter.

Unless and until each and every one accepts to do his own bit for society and adopts the attitude that that bit, no matter how small, will make a difference between society’s decay and progress, our country is guaranteed to fail as a state, perhaps sooner than the 2015 the Americans predicted in 2002, a prediction which predictably provoked so much indignation among our leaders.

More than Senator Mamora’s restructuring of our Federation, more than Chief Opadokun’s NADECO mantra of sovereign conference of the country’s ethnic nationalities (assuming that this is indeed a solution, an assumption I do not share), I believe it is this acceptance that each of us is a leader in his own right and at his own level that will stop Nigeria from continuing its steep descent into failed statehood.