Jihadi Daddy

Truth be told, we are all hardwired for sectional materialism – and how that skews our perceptions in public life is becoming clear too, especially in the light of events following the 2023 elections. The “yes daddy” saga, for instance, is underscoring just how blind the “us-versus-them” paradigm can make people when they try to process political information. Once this sectional mentality kicks in, the brain almost automatically pre-filters facts – even noncontroversial ones – that offend our political sensibilities.

The sociology of human civilization has painstakingly made homogeneity the primary anchor of social, intellectual, political and spiritual identities over thousands of years of social evolution. The Law of Survival has also taught man, through blood and iron, that security is the one overriding sacrament that can never be compromised on – and that even an enlightened awareness can be subordinated to the base impulses of primordiality. I mean, you could be eaten alive by a pack of Obidient guys and gals for accusing Peter Obi of such a thing if “yes-daddy” was never a thing.

Homogeneity aggregates the will of a community into a unified force streamlined accordingly in the pursuit of common interests; hence homogeneity is the most reliable index of security. Man wants to be able to gather his mind and his strengths, address weaknesses and threats with a view to grow, ‘have’ or ‘become’, in accordance to the objective of evolution towards something that is of greater value in the grand scheme of nature – maybe something in tune with the idea of Nietzsche’s Ubermensche.

The Theory of Evolution suggests that life began in the ‘soupy seas’ and therefore, the first marine creature that emerged to terrestrial life had to learn to breathe anew or die. Akin to this physiological adaptation, evidence is mounting to the effect that humanity is at the threshold of a great sociological evolutionary bridge – the type that may warrant a new adaptation of reality. Either we do this or we go extinct. Perhaps I am simply parroting my own understanding of biology and what it all means. But, on the off chance that this is true, what next? A new set of civil principles must guide human society if it is to survive.

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As it is, once you trip the livewire of human sectional identity, you become a part of the ‘us-versus-them,’ equation – and it is almost like your consciousness becomes re-coordinated in how it views people and ideas. Our predisposition to sectionalism is itself a product of evolution – forming groups is how early humans survived. That is indeed helpful when trying to master a difficult environment with crude means or the lack thereof. It is much less so when trying to foster a functional society in today’s Nigeria.

Understanding the other side’s point of view, even if one disagrees with it, is central to compromise and any hope for civility in civic life. So if our brains are blinding us to information that challenges our predispositions, how can we ever hope to find common ground? It is clearly a challenge that is stumping both the masses and the leadership that represents them, or the leadership that wants to represent them.

Policy decisions, administrative responsibilities and other state functions are functions in name only – opportunities for politicians and sectional demagogues to grandstand rather than talk with each other. And the political discussion, even among those well versed in the issues, largely exists in parallel red and blue universes, mental spheres with few or no common facts to serve as starting points. Both Lai Mohammed and Peter Obi are well educated and exposed, yet both would have us believe that the other is only a little more sophisticated than a caveman.

But rather than despair, we can see the causes of this as reason for hope, raising tantalizing prospects: with enough understanding of what exactly makes us so vulnerable to partisanship, can we reshape our political environment to access the better profiles of our nature? The “yes daddy” drama is testing one of partisanship’s more frightening features which is its tendency for allowing us, even pushing us, to dehumanise those we categorise as “them”.

The willingness of human beings to dehumanise is often mentioned alongside some of the darkest chapters of history – the Nazi Holocaust, the genocide in Rwanda and yes… the Biafra Civil War – when political establishments went to great lengths to build anger and animosity against “the other”. In our own case as Nigerians, much relies on a personal/sectional identity reinforced since birth.

But to create the base “us and them” structure, none of that is needed. The brain is so hardwired to build such groups that anyone on the street can instantly become a partisan. And it happens subconsciously too – once you are primed by something, and it could be the flimsiest of triggers, to be ‘one thing’, you become dyed-in-the-wool against the ‘other thing’.

There doesn’t even need to be anything at stake. But within moments, instant-partisans will like their compatriots better than they like the other guys. You are more likely to look at someone who shares the same beliefs and values with a human face – so to speak. The other side responds the same way. One would also be inclined more towards sympathizing and empathizing with people they share a certain part of their identity with – that is the reason, I suppose, you find more listening ears, better concurrence and the works in the demographic cluster you belong to in terms of personal identity. That is why, I suppose, “Obidience” is a hit in Igboland but an anathema to the collective consciousness of the rest of Nigeria.

When it comes to politics, how troubled should we be by this reality? Nigeria’s sectional divide is as old as its independence in 1960 or even its very foundation in 1914. It is neither feasible nor desirable to hope for a broad-based national consensus on every issue. Even if we all worked from the same set of facts, and even if we all understood those facts perfectly, differences of opinion would – and should – remain!

Those opinions are not the problem – the trouble is when we are so blinded by our partisanship that it overrides reason, and apparently that is happening all the time. Letting this out now and talking it out means we have one less monster in our closets because we all have one lying somewhere around. This will be something we will laugh about together, something that will leave us the better.