'One Nigeria' is a mere verbal expression

Chuks Oluigbo

Anyone whose knowledge of Nigerian history is even as little as a mustard seed could guess correctly the origin of the title of this piece. It was Obafemi Awolowo, the late premier of Western Nigeria, who made the famous statement that “Nigeria is not a nation. It is a mere geographical expression.”

That statement, uttered in 1947, has proved to be prophetic. Today, nearly 70 years after it was first uttered, Nigeria has yet to attain nationhood and has, therefore, remained a mere geographical expression. There is neither coherence nor cohesion. By the same token, ‘One Nigeria’, a phrase many a Nigerian political opportunist – I detest to address them as leaders because leadership entails higher ideals which they do not possess – likes to bandy when it is convenient, has also remained a mere verbal expression.

To begin with, it’s any easy thing to profess ‘One Nigeria’; to live it or work towards a truly one Nigeria is an entirely different matter. As they say, talk is cheap; walking the talk is where the job lies.

Many who so liberally profess ‘One Nigeria’, politicians as well as their cohorts, do so with their tongue in their cheek. They do not believe in it. Let the occasion call for it and you see them unabashedly display their ethnic biases.

That is why you find that no one is actually building the Nigerian nation, least of all the current administration of Muhammadu Buhari, who pontificated on his ethnic/regional neutrality in his inaugural speech: ‘I belong to everyone and I belong to no one’. (Even that line was alleged to have been plagiarised). But now we know better. Indeed, we now know, and we have seen it in action, that the part of the country that gave President Buhari 97 percent votes cannot be treated the same way as the section that gave him a paltry 5 percent. And by the president’s own admission, that’s only fair. After all, a labourer deserves his wages; even the Holy Bible says so. And considering his inability so far to manage the economy, we can at least make do with his ‘97 percent/5 percent’ legacy. As they say in Warri, at all at all na witch.

That’s also why I don’t believe all the balderdash about detribalised Nigerians. See, no Nigerian is detribalised, not even those born in the comfort of Europe and America, though some are more tribalistic than others. But, fundamentally, we all think like Master in Chimamanda Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun, who says, "...the only authentic identity for the African is the tribe...I am Nigerian because a white man created Nigeria and gave me that identity. I am black because the white man constructed black to be as different as possible from his white. But I was Igbo before the white man came."

Bad as this may be, the main reason for it is the absence of a unifying factor. There is no Nigerian Dream that every Nigerian can identify with and rally around. Not even our so-called nationalists worked for ‘One Nigeria’. While wearing the toga of nationalists, they were in truth pseudo nationalists who played the ethnic card whenever it suited their whims and caprices. We are where we are today because those before us left no good examples for us to copy.   

In a speech to the NCNC caucus on May 12, 1953 in Yaba, Lagos, in which he urged the North to reconsider their stand on secession, Nnamdi Azikiwe talked about our “indissoluble union which nature has formed” between the North and South.

“In my personal opinion, there is no sense in the North breaking away or the East or the West breaking away; it would be better if all the regions would address themselves to the task of crystallising common nationality irrespective of the extraneous influences at work. What history has joined together, let no man put asunder,” he said.

But Azikiwe played the ethnic card against Eyo Ita in Enugu when it was convenient. That was after Awolowo had also played the ethnic card against Azikiwe in Western Nigeria. Ahmadu Bello never believed we could “forget our differences”.

Between 1967 and 1970, a war was fought purportedly to keep Nigeria one, wasting the lives of over three million of our compatriots. But post war, who fought to unite the country, to reintegrate the secessionist elements back into the mainstream? None. We acted, and still act, like a mother who just sat and watched her child die of hunger believing the hunger would suddenly magically disappear. No one cared to enquire, to go to the root of the matter, to understand the immediate and remote causes of the war and tackle them. Like a quack doctor, we ignored the patient’s medical history, left the causal factors of the illness and treated the symptoms instead, making full recovery impossible. Now the illness has become a recurring decimal.

Even now, I doubt if we have learnt our lesson, in spite of the constant reminders in the form of NDAvengers, MEND, IPOB, MOSOP, MASSOB, OPC, etc and the deafening calls for restructuring.

So, in my view, ‘One Nigeria’ is much like ‘One North’, a clearly opportunistic concept. It’s like the ‘independent’ in Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). Even a disinterested passer-by knows that ‘independence’ is not one of the attributes of the nation’s electoral body, which, by the way, has demonstrated gross ineptitude since the exit, last year, of Attahiru Jega, through its inability to successfully conclude any election.

The offering boxes no longer fill up

Chuks Oluigbo

One of the very first things you may notice if you walk into any place of worship or a crusade ground today is that they are getting filled up more than before. Yes, many more Nigerians are turning to God. In the face of persistent economic hardship and hunger in the land, many who hitherto felt they had no use for religion have been compelled to seek the face of God.

A recent poll conducted by NOIPolls in collaboration with BusinessDay shows that apart from cutting down on expenses and adjusting their feeding patterns, a lot more Nigerians are resorting to prayers to cushion the effects of the worsening economic situation in the country.

Indeed, if not God, if not some form of miracle, how would people survive this economy where hunger has become the new normal? Think about the massive job losses, shrinking of household incomes and a corresponding exponential increase in prices of goods and services worsened by a government that is confused about exactly what to do with the economy! How would a man with a minimum wage of N18,000 feed his wife and three children when the price of a bag of rice is higher than his monthly take-home?

So, true, the places of worship are still bursting at the seams; true, the crusade grounds are filling up now more than ever before. The irony, however, is that the offering boxes are not filling up as much as the pews. A lot of people are no longer able to give offering, while many have cut down on the amount they give, and I think that’s a measure of how bad things have got in this country; that’s a clear sign that this economy has hit rock bottom.

To be clear, Nigerians are cheerful givers. A Nigerian Christian, for instance, does not need all those Bible quotations about how God so loves a cheerful giver or how the measure you give out will be returned to you or how givers never lack. When it comes to tithing, he does not need to be ‘threatened’ that refusal to pay tithes amounts to robbing God; he pays willingly even on money he receives as ‘dash’. No, he does not need to be prompted.

But all this has changed in the last couple of months, no thanks to the excruciating hardship brought upon Nigerians by this inept government that has continued to shift the goalpost in the middle of the game, this government that has adopted lame excuses, abdication of responsibility and blame game as its trademarks, this government that has moved from promise of change to change of promise. Even right now, we neither have the promised change nor the changed promise. We have all become like hapless, helpless seafarers in a sinking ship with a slumbering captain.

This is the season of the annual harvest thanksgiving and bazaar, for instance, and many churches have kicked off programmes for this year’s harvest. Building for God is not an easy task, and so every stage of the harvest is usually used to generate funds for the work of God, and the faithful have always been known to donate freely and generously. 

These days, however, many who go to seek the face of God seem to have learnt to hold tight to their pockets, most of which, in any case, are virtually empty. They may be moved by the preachers’ words that sometimes make them feel guilty; their conscience may be pricked; their souls may be lifted by the chorus that says, “Give, and it will come back to you, good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over”, but all that will be like water poured in a basket. They are unable to give because, as they say in Latin, nemo dat quod non habet (no one gives what he does not have).

A few Sundays ago I was in a church. The church was launching one of the items for its 2016 harvest. Usually, the presiding priest would make altar calls, beginning with those who want to give God N1 million or sometimes N500,000, then N200,000, N100,000, N50,000, N20,000, N10,000, and lastly, N5,000, and you would always see people eagerly trooping to the altar. That very Sunday, however, the story was different. Even though the priest began with the maximum of N50,000 instead of N1 million or N500,000, only four people came out to answer the altar call, and they must have ruminated well over it before coming out considering how long it took. Though the number increased gradually as the amount went down – N20,000, N10,000, N5,000, N3,000, N2,000, and lastly, N1,000 – it was easy to see the difference between then and now.  

Times are really hard, there is hunger (even famine) in the land, and everybody is feeling the pangs. It’s everywhere. People are dying. Many families barely feed. Workers are walking a tight rope, scraping from one payday to the next. Go to the markets and see things for yourself. Many traders just open their shops and sleep or play cards till closing time. Buyers are a rare commodity these days. Who still has money to buy anything?

But when the thing enters the place of worship and people can no longer find money for offering, wallahi, the handshake has crossed the elbow.

A season of demystifications

Chuks Oluigbo

On February 3, 1960, the then British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, having spent a month in Africa visiting a number of what were then British colonies, made the now famous historically-significant "Wind of Change" address to the South African Parliament in Cape Town. Some records say he had earlier made the same speech in Accra, Ghana, on January 10, though that didn’t catch much media attention.

In that speech, which signalled clearly that the Conservative-led British Government was no longer equivocating about the granting of independence to its African colonies, Macmillan said: “The wind of change is blowing through this continent. Whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact.”

Subsequent events proved that the change the British PM was talking about was not a ruse as a total of 16 African countries gained independence between February 3 and the end of 1960, though they were not all British colonies. Senegal became independent on 4 April, 1960, followed by Togo (27 April), Mali (22 September), Madagascar (26 June), Congo Kinshasa (30 June), Somalia (1 July), Benin (1 August), Niger (3 August), Burkina Faso (5 August), Côte d'Ivoire (7 August), Chad (11 August), Central African Republic (13 August), Congo Brazzaville (15 August), Gabon (17 August), Nigeria (1 October), and Mauritania (28 November).

In the last one year or so in Nigeria, another wind of change has blown. And this is not just about the illusive, undefined change that was promised (of course, we know change can be positive or negative, and Nigerians can tell better the type they’ve felt and are still feeling since May 29, 2015). It is about a heavy wind that has ushered in this season of demystifications that we are in.

The last one year has seen the shattering of many myths woven around some individuals in today’s government. It’s a year that has exposed their inadequacies, their equivocations, half-truths and outright lies. It’s a year that has underscored the fact that they actually possess no magic wand, forget all that pre-election talk about a serious government fixing power in six months. We have seen through the smokescreen and now know better. We now know how easy it is to criticize a footballer from outside the pitch. We also know they are typical Nigerian politicians, never mind all the integrity and anti-corruption bullshit. All the excuses and blame-game don’t cut it.

As scales fall off eyes, hero worshippers are reviewing long-held beliefs as they behold their messiahs in all humanness, warts and all, and realise that there is only one messiah the world has ever known; that their so-called messiahs are after all mere mortals masquerading as gods. You know, it's like the unmasking, in the village arena – in the presence of non-initiates, including women – of that favourite masquerade of yours that you have held in high esteem for so long, that you actually believed was an ancestral spirit from the land of the dead.

Hero worshippers are realizing that so-called heroes are indeed media creations. But some of us have always known this. Just get a man, weave some myths of omnipotence and infallibility around him, give him sustained media coverage, hide his sins, exaggerate every little good he does, whitewash every dark spot in his life, get Beyonce's make-up artist to make him up and declare him 'flawless', paint him in the most generous epithets, apotheosize him and convince us that he would have come into the world as a god but the Creator changed his mind at the last minute, and boom! another hero is born.

You can also spin an integrity yarn around a candidate, remove his agbada and wear him a tight-fitting dark suit. Forget that he toppled a democratically-elected government or just find the 'right' argument to justify that unnecessary military incursion, 'kill' all reports that highlight the high-handed, draconian and dictatorial tendencies that hallmarked his first coming, including even the fact that the little good that regime is remembered for was actually carried out by a subordinate, baptise him and rename him a born-again democrat, in fact, elevate him to the status of gods, promote this new image of him by hook or crook, and bang!

But public offices have a way of making or marring their beneficiary. A public office can and has unravelled even those to whom we arrogated superpowers. Some erstwhile superheroes have found themselves overwhelmed in a new office, including even some men of God!

Our super-columnists have been demystified in this dispensation. Never mind that they had been churning out incisive Op-ed pieces that farted upon the gates of power since your kindergarten days, when the chips are down, they can lie to you repeatedly, unashamedly, that the president is not sick even when the man says he is going on a sick leave; they can also tell you that not everyone is complaining about the hardship in town (at least, they and their families are not complaining), and they can call you a wailing wailer when you raise genuine concerns about issues of mal-governance.

But in spite of all this, we are overcomers. Nigerians are. It’s well, as we say here. Indeed, this too shall pass.

When 'good men' shun politics

CHUKS OLUIGBO

The need for good men to take active interest in public affairs, especially by getting involved in politics and governance of their localities, has been amply expressed by several generations of great minds, often highlighting the dire consequences of not doing so. This was the point made by the great philosopher Plato when he wrote in The Republic, “The fate of good men who refuse to become involved in politics is to be ruled by evil men.”

Edmund Burke, the 18th Century British statesman, is also known to have echoed the same thought when he wrote in his ‘Thoughts on the Cause of Present Discontents’, "All that is necessary for the forces of evil to triumph is for enough good men to do nothing."

Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., the 26th President of the United States, put in more elaborately and explicitly in his April 23, 1910 speech at the Sorbonne in Paris, France, titled ‘Citizenship in a Republic’.

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat,” Roosevelt had said.

John Eidsmoe, a American professor of constitutional law who previously taught at the Thomas Goode Jones School of Law, Faulkner University, Montgomery, Alabama, narrows it down to Christians in his God and Caesar: Christian Faith and Political Action, where he encourages Christians to join politics.

Against the backdrop of the oft-stated excuse that politics is a dirty game, Eidsmoe agrees that politics may indeed be dirty, but adds, however, that so is business, law, labour, education, sports, and just about every other imaginable human activity under the sun.

“But if politics is dirty (and it is), is that any reason not to get involved? If Christians stay out of politics, they remove the light of the gospel from the political arena and abdicate their responsibility to be the salt of the earth that savors and preserves society... the Christian who refuses to become involved in politics consigns the realm of politics to the secular and the unregenerate,” he writes.

Eidsmoe quotes Senator Mark Hatfield, the late American politician and educator, who once said, “For the Christian man to reason that God does not want him in politics because there are too many evil men in government is as insensitive as for a Christian doctor to turn his back on an epidemic because there are too many germs there. For the Christian to say that he will not enter politics because he might lose his faith is the same as for the physician to say that he will not heal men because he might catch their disease.”

In Nigeria today, in light of the cloud of bad governance that currently envelopes the country, there is an increasing clamour for more good men in Nigeria – in this case successful professionals in different fields of endeavour – to get involved in politics to rescue the country and the citizens from the present quagmire.

Alex Otti, immediate past group managing director/chief executive officer, Diamond Bank plc, while speaking in Lagos recently at the launch of a book of essays in honour of Phillips Oduoza, outgoing GMD/CEO of United Bank for Africa plc, encouraged the retiring UBA boss to go into politics and use his wealth of professional experience gathered over a period of 30 to get his home state of Imo out of the woods. He also urged other Nigerian professionals to join politics now or watch the country further descend into a cesspool.

“When you go out there and see the quality of people who make decisions that affect you and me, you will be ashamed. You can go to Youtube and watch a legislator at the House of Representatives talking about our economy. I don’t remember the name of the gentleman but I remember what he said. A legislator, a House of Reps member was asked how the economy was doing, and he said, ‘The economy is sinking; it is doing like this, like that, like this, like that. If not for this strongman called Buhari, the economy would get under water’. That was his own economic analysis,” Otti said.

“Quite frankly, we need to get involved in how this country is run, and the more of us that get in there the better. Otherwise we will be left with nincompoops, mediocre people who will be answering governors, deputy governors, House of Assembly members. As we know, everything is garbage in, garbage out. If you garbage in, you will garbage out,” he said.

The book, Dynamics of the Nigerian Financial System: Essays in Honour of Phillips Oduoza, is a collection of a total of 30 scholarly essays edited by Michael M. Ogbeidi, a professor in the Department of History & Strategic Studies, University of Lagos.

Otti bowed out as GMD/CEO of Diamond Bank in 2014 and waded into the murky waters of Nigerian politics. He contested the 2015 governorship election in Abia State under the auspices of the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA), but lost to Okezie Ikpeazu of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP). Not convinced that he lost the election, Otti had gone to the Elections Petitions Tribunal in protest. The case later went to the Court of Appeal, and then the Supreme Court, but Otti’s bid to wrest power from Ikpeazu failed as the apex court ruled in Ikpeazu’s favour. Otti has since retired into journalism where he writes a back page column in one of the prominent national dailies while waiting for another opportune moment.

Earlier in February, Bob-Manuel Udokwu, ace actor and senior special assistant (creative media) to Anambra State governor, Willie Obiano, had told this writer in an interview that creative industry people were best suited to rule the country.

Asked why many entertainers were going into politics, Udokwu said the motivation was to serve the people in a different capacity.

“You can’t sit on the sidelines and keep complaining that things are not working right. I went to vie for a position in the Anambra State House of Assembly and people asked me this question a couple of times and my answer is this: I have children who are in secondary school now and they know their father is influential. The things I saw as bad happening to our country when I was their age are still there till today. Now they grow older and ask me: ‘Dad, at some point in your life as a young person you had influence, you were well-known and people loved you, you had the opportunity of going into a political office where you could help to change things. Why didn’t you explore that opportunity to make the country better by becoming involved in what was going on?’ What do you think I would tell them? I would bow my head in shame,” he said.

“But I had to try, and they know I’ve tried and will keep trying. I know it’s going to work but if it doesn’t, my children will give me a pat on the back and say, ‘Dad, you tried. It’s an evil system out there.’ If I succeed, they will say, ‘Dad, you see you have encouraged us and we are proud of you that when you went in there, things changed for the better’,” he added.

Udokwu said a number of big-time creative people have successfully done politics and returned to their creative career, citing American actor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was a two-term governor of the State of California but is now back on the movie set, as well as Nigerian actor Richard Mofe Damijo, who moved from special adviser to commissioner, and is also now back to the movies again.

“Let us come to the critical analysis of this whole thing. What is the qualification for somebody to vie for a seat in the House of Assembly? Primary Six. What’s that for House of Reps, Senate, governor? Cheap. And for president? Most of us have better qualifications than what the country has prescribed for its rulers. These are my leaders today for crying out loud, but I’m sorry to say, I watch some of them on television; some of them are two terms, three terms in the National and different State Houses of Assembly, they go there to warm the benches because they find their way any way into those chambers and they have nothing to offer. And so it becomes business as usual,” he said.

“How many people are in the Senate? How many are in the House of Reps? And how many of them do you see today when they show Senate sessions saying anything? Do we have to continue like that when we have very vibrant, well-educated young men and young women who have shown themselves, the world already knows them? Some of these politicians, we don’t know their strength of character; some of them don’t even have stable homes. All we see are posters and there’s a lot of largesse, but Google up any of these artistes that are vying for positions and the whole world knows them. You can be in Afghanistan and at the click of a button you know who Bob-Manuel Udokwu is. So let people stop questioning the rationale for people in entertainment going into politics,” he said.