It was neither one of these woolly or pointless polemics from a rabble-rouser nor the do-gooder’s doomsday messages of the imminence of the collapse of Nigeria that are issued regularly by our patrons in Washington. Rather, it was a grounded treatise on the problematic called Nigeria. There is a sense in which all shareholders in Nigeria and both genuine and fake friends of the country need to read Iyayi, not because it has any comfortable messages for their ego but because it is an early warning input. The Nigerian ruling class owes Ambassador Babagana Kingibe a lot of gratitude for being at the occasion and speaking very effectively for the establishment in the face of the most stinging reprimand of his own class in contemporary times. Unlike NPN mandarins who decided against attending any seminars at ABU, Zaria because of the ‘fear’ of Bala Usman’s mouth, Kingibe sat through the entire proceedings, took the heat and offered a consensual counter to the radical alternative to the ruling class.
The signs that the day and the birthday lecture weren’t going to be one of the empty celebrations around Nigeria of today came from Labaran Maku, the Minister of State for Information and Communication who, as the Chairman of the occasion, spoke of John Odah as part of the squad that led Nigerian students’ onslaught on military dictatorship throughout the eighties as well as the defence of the dignity of the African and the idea of standing up for democracy.
John, according to Maku, is not someone who puts himself in the front but a key operator behind the massive action you see in the front. He was an activist whose sense of commitment could cut through any mountain, a real product of communal upbringing in the rural society and its high sense of value, propriety and culture.
NLC President, Comrade Abdulwaheed Umar, re-enforced the image of his General Secretary as a radical combatant who “From the labyrinthine trenches of struggle against military despotism to the gruesome marches in defiance of the antagonists of the working class, Comrade … has remained a consistent comrade, patriot, progressive and defender of human rights and dignity. The NLC President followed this with verbal missiles at Nigerian politicians whose body language towards 2011 he described as worrisome. Comrade Peters Adeyemi, Deputy President of the NLC and Chairman of the Committee of Friends that put together the birthday bash justified the bash in terms of Comrade John having made the kinds of contributions that needed to be acknowledged, saying the occasion provided an opportunity to continue to reflect on the state of the nation.
Into this discursive temperature was Dr. Festus Iyayi invited by MC of the occasion, Cyril Stober, to deliver his lecture provocatively titled, “Assassins of Nation Building, 2011 Elections and Electoral Reforms in Nigeria: Chronicle of a Death Foretold”. Iyayi’s leading argument is that Nigeria is not yet a nation because the Nigerian ruling class whose responsibility it is to build a nation neither understands nor accepts the responsibility for building the disparate groups in Nigeria into a nation.
They are, instead, assassins of nationhood and nation building in the sense that every ruling class that succeeds at nation building offers some specific and spectacular achievement that feeds upon and promotes a sense of national pride and hence identity. The British bourgeoisie not only built roads and industries, it also built an empire. So also the Americans. But unlike the British, American, Japanese or China, Singaporean or Brazillian, Cuban or Indian ruling class, the Nigerian ruling class has none of the tangible and intangible elements towards a unifying image of the national communion. So, the ethnic paradigm reigns supreme. And poverty too.
But painful as these evidences may be, they pale into insignificance when it is noted that Nigeria is about the only country which celebrates its slavery of the British and American empires. It is such that with very few exceptions, the word resistance is not in the vocabulary of the members of the Nigerian ruling class at all.
He gave other examples of ruling class decadence, citing the Nigerian ruling class as the only ruling class which does not produce toothpick, yet, its members insist on eating caviar for breakfast and ride around in hummer jeeps and private jets, the class which does not know how to forego today’s pleasures in order to achieve longer term rewards tomorrow, a class so corrupt it has to rely on foreign collaborators to consolidate corruption as the national culture, to the extent that there are, for example, no meters installed at the terminals where crude oil is taken by global oil companies.
Instead, it is the buyers who tells the seller how much has been sold. Why, he asked, does our excess crude account remain around N3b even when oil is being sold above the projected $57 per barrel? Why has oil production remained between 1.6-1.7 even with the amnesty programme whose success, he said, had been celebrated the way of miracles? Where else in the world will members of a ruling class be buying jets when there is a major downturn in the economy and unemployment has attained crisis proportion? He queried sharing of billions of Naira to captains of industry in the name of bail outs, even though there are no industries and even though these were the same people who argued and crafted the gospel of liberalization, deregulation and the free market. Above all, this class will be spending money celebrating Nigeria’s 50th year of independence without caring that if the country has to survive in the modern world, she cannot exercise the choice of not building a real nation out of the current cynicism, chaos and despair, this being what, for him, makes the 2011 elections and preparations towards them so important. “The elections may turn out to be the last that may be held in Nigeria as one country with the potential of becoming a nation”.
The poser was why this ruling class cannot redeem itself even though, as Iyayi framed it, “the rulers of Nigeria have been told in dreams, market places, pulpits, conferences, newspapers, beer parlours, barber shops … that unless there is a change in their practices and attitude towards politics, elections and corruption, the nation will not survive. Even a date, 2015 has been prophesized as one when the country may well implode. However, in spite of repeated warnings from sages and prophets, the ruling class in Nigeria continues to drive itself to perdition”. Why? Why? Why? A very important question since, according to the lecturer, the Nigerian ruling class is not only driving itself to perdition but its collapse will also bring down the rest of the country with it. This, he said, is the history of all failed states as the example of Somalia shows. So, something has to be done to take the country out of the hands of the ruling class. That task he gave to the working class as a counterweight to ethno-regional parochialism.
He was done. The audience gave him a revolutionary song and the discussants took over.
Comrade Ali Chiroma who had by now taken over as Chairman went full throttle.
He yielded the floor to Comrade Sylvester Ejiofor, who said Iyayi had reminded all of us that any system that is dysfunctional has a terminal date and that our ruling class does not know its mission. The problem, for him, is that unlike when behind the AG was an alliance of intellectuals and the party or when Okpara’s party would oppose Awo’s Democratic Socialism with Pragmatic Socialism or the NEPU would pose Democratic Humanism, today, the field is barren today in terms of ideologically based political parties. He put the blame squarely on prolonged military rule, clarifying though he was not intrinsically opposed to military rule because there have been cases of liberatory military but not the military that imposed SAP on Nigeria. He endorsed the celebration of John Odah because it is the celebration of a position he took at a critical time by going underground with the caucus at the height of the military’s assault on Nigeria, linking up externally and keeping faith generally.
Other speakers such as Dr. Yima Sen, Abiodun Aremu, Ngukwase Chia Surma, Ene Edeh and Frank Kokori basically agreed with Iyayi, with Kokori saying, among others, that “There are no nationalist parties in Nigeria in the way that there is SWAPO in Namibia or ANC in South Africa or FRELIMO in Angola”.
Then enter Kingibe, aka ‘sai Baba’. He had sat through until his assumption of the Chairmanship of the segment. Using the Chairmanship position to make a few comments, Kingibe said he had known John Odah for the only three years, beginning from the 2007 oil price hike negotiations between the FG and the NLC. For Kingibe, John represents an effective trade unionist, “one who didn’t shout, who eschews cliches and didn’t use ideologically tainted words “that mean nothing”. “John as a negotiator presents you little windows so that you can escape, an approach which creates opportunity for dialogue. With John, there is no confrontation, no bravura. I hope you would evolve common grounds which will recognize that something which is wrong is wrong, which is false is false”.
He said that everything Iyayi has said could be said differently in a less alienating language. If you say we don’t have a nation, then we cannot have a ruling class, I heard Kingibe say in response to Iyayi’s thesis. It was an issue he didn’t pursue beyond his argument that part of the problem is that slogans have a way of acquiring the authority of truth when used repeatedly. His own strategic response to the challenge of nation building is the option of what he called ‘informed debate’, insisting that there should be a movement from mutual disdain to mutual respect such that a statement like “people who think it is their birthright to rule” would not be made.
It was a whole huge debate, very much in tune with the spirit of man in John Odah whose capacity for making trouble earned him the name, John Trouble from the legendary Mr Athanasius Angereke, the principal of St. Michaels, Aliade in those days. It is only a John and a trouble maker who will bring together faces of the varied interests and forces that came to debate nation building at his 50th birthday. Comrade John must be fulfilled even if only for providing a rallying point for the left in Nigeria to find its confidence and voice again. Since the collapse of the USSR, that confidence has not been there and the left has, at best, been murmuring.
Mr. Onoja is Media Adviser to Gov Lamido of Jigawa State, ([email protected]
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