Nigeria and the unlearned lessons of history

Reflections on Chinua Achebe’s The Trouble with Nigeria

CHUKS OLUIGBO

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the 19th century German philosopher and major proponent of German idealism and dialectical thinking, is notable for the assertion, “We learn from history that we do not learn from history”.

“What experience and history teaches us is that people and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it,” Hegel extrapolated.

Aldous Leonard Huxley, 20th century English writer, novelist, philosopher and author of Brave New World, re-echoed this point when he said, "That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history."

But there is a grave danger, nay, a severe consequence, in not learning from history. According to George Santayana, Spanish-born American philosopher, essayist, poet, novelist, and author of The Life of Reason, "Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

Nigeria today is burdened by the lessons of history that we have failed to learn over the decades as history continues to repeat itself with reckless abandon. And, true to Santayana’s ‘prophecy’, the country has remained in perpetual infancy nearly six decades after it gained independence from the British colonial overlords.

In a 2013 blog post, Bill Fawcett, author of Doomed to Repeat: The Lessons of History We’ve Failed to Learn, said, “The march of history is less a steady stride than a series of stumbles and forward falls. And the stumbles the United States, Europe, and the rest of the world are taking at the beginning of the twenty-first century are neither new nor unique. Many of our most pressing problems are not original. If ancient Rome had CNN, the reruns of their news reports from the second century could be played with name changes today and would sound totally familiar to modern listeners.”

A glance through the history books shows that there is absolutely nothing new about the innumerable problems holding Nigeria from achieving its God-given place in the scheme of world affairs. Indeed, Nigeria’s hydra-headed problems did not start today. Every single problem in the country today has been there since 1960 and beyond; some are in fact legacies of colonial rule. The only difference is that things have gone from bad to worse over the decades as each problem continues to reproduce its kind and assume wider dimensions – whether it is leadership deficit, tribalism, corruption, social injustice, indiscipline or any other ill. 

“The truth is that Nigeria has no glorious past to remember with glee. Every problem you see today has been there from the beginning. Our so-called nationalists were tribal overlords in the true sense of it. The First Republic was corrupt. There were a series of crises, such as the 1962/63 census controversy, the Awolowo-Akintola fracas in the West, and the 1964 Federal elections crisis, among others,” said a historian who does to want to be named, adding that it was for this reason that the January 15, 1966 coup was celebrated with euphoria across the country in the first instance.  

Describing the situation that necessitated the first military coup in the country, Adewale Ademoyega, one of the masterminds, pointed to a generally disaffection with the Tafawa Balewa government.

“Economic, social, educational and political problems were not solved. Corruption was rife and nepotism was the order of the day. The safety valves of the nation were reposed in such institutions as the courts, the Census Commission, the Electoral Commission, the Police, and finally the Armed Forces. But the sanctity of those institutions was being politically assailed, assaulted and dragged in the mud…. It became obvious that the national leadership was nearing its collapse and that the ship of the nation was heading for the rocks,” Ademoyega wrote in Why We Struck: The Story of the First Nigerian Coup.

The situation remained fundamentally the same in 1983 when Chinua Achebe, foremost African novelist, published The Trouble with Nigeria in which, like a diviner, he outlined everything that was wrong with the Nigerian system.

Today, 33 years after The Trouble with Nigeria, the trouble with Nigeria has remained the same as things have remained unchanged. Nigerians have demonstrated that we have not learnt anything from history. Even the lessons of the 30-month civil war were clearly not learnt as there are drums of war everywhere. Our politics remains a do-or-die affair, characterised by thuggery, violence, ballot snatching and stuffing, and rampant rigging. Even politicians have remained virtually the same.

The only observable change so far has been in terms of the dramatis personae, even though many of the key players of the previous eras are still in fray. And secondly, politicians have also got more audacious with each new regime. For instance, while politicians in 1983 looted the public treasury in millions, today’s politicians steal in billions and trillions. But essentially, everything we see in Nigeria today has always been there – reckless, irresponsible leadership, tribalism, lack of patriotism, social injustice, indiscipline, widespread corruption, among others.

Leadership deficit

According to Achebe, “The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership. There is nothing basically wrong with the Nigerian. There is nothing wrong with the Nigerian land or climate or water or air or anything else. The Nigerian problem is the unwillingness or inability of the leaders to rise to the responsibility, to the challenge of personal example which are the hallmarks of true leadership.”

We see this today in the tendency of successive governments to always blame the administration before them. For instance, President Muhammadu Buhari, who ruled Nigeria between 1984 and 1985 and was essentially contributed to the present rot, has demonstrated a failure or unwillingness to accept responsibility for fixing the present challenges. He and his cabinet have rather continued to engage in blame-game and buck-passing, blaming their non-performance on the immediate past administration of Goodluck Jonathan.

“But I say why me? Why is it that it is when they have spent all the money, when they made the country insecure that I returned? Why didn’t I come when the treasury was full? Oil price was over $140 per barrel and when I came, it slipped down to $30. Why me?” Buhari lamented in a February 5 interview with Al-Jazeera.

Even in his much-touted anti-corruption fight, a major plank of his administration’s policy thrust, President Buhari, just like those before him, has failed to rise to the challenge of personal example as he is said to be shielding allegedly corrupt people in his government from public or judicial scrutiny.

Tribalism

“In Nigeria, in spite of our protestations, there is plenty of work for tribe. Our threatening gestures against it have been premature, half-hearted or plain deceitful... A Nigerian child seeking admission into a federal school, a student wishing to enter a College or University, a graduate seeking employment in the public service, a businessman tendering for a contract, a citizen applying for a passport, filing a report with the police or seeking access to any of the hundred thousand avenues controlled by the state, will sooner or later fill out a form which requires him to confess his tribe (or less crudely, and more hypocritically, his state of origin),” Achebe wrote.

“As a student in Ibadan I was an eye-witness to that momentous occasion when Chief Obafemi Awolowo ‘stole’ the leadership of Western Nigeria from Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe in broad daylight on the floor of the Western House of Assembly and sent the great Zik scampering back to the Niger whence he came... [N]o matter how anyone attempts to explain away that event in retrospect, it was the death of a dream-Nigeria in which a citizen could live and work in a place of his choice anywhere, and pursue any legitimate goal open to his fellows; a Nigeria in which an Easterner might aspire to be premier in the West and a Northerner become Mayor of Enugu. That dream-Nigeria suffered a death-blow from Awolowo’s success in the Western House of Assembly in 1951,” he further wrote.

No doubt, tribalism, as exemplified in Buhari’s appointments of persons to key positions in his cabinet which are obviously tilted in favour of Northern Muslims, has remained one of the major drawbacks to Nigeria’s progress.

False image of ourselves

In analysing this factor, Achebe draws a comparison between a speech made by former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt of West Germany on the one hand and another made by Nigeria’s Olusegun Obasanjo one the other hand, both in 1979.

While Schmidt had said that “Germany is not a world power; it does not wish to become a world power”, Obasanjo had said of Nigeria, in that all-too-familiar highfalutin, self-conceited, delusional, egotistic manner, “Nigeria will become one of the ten leading nations in the world by the end of the century.”

“The contrast between these two leaders speaks for itself – sober, almost self-deprecatory attitude on the one hand and flamboyant, imaginary self-conceit on the other,” Achebe submitted.

No doubt, like Obasanjo, many Nigerians, politicians as well as followers, suffer this delusion of grandeur, a fixed, false belief that one possesses superior qualities such as genius, fame, omnipotence, or wealth.

To the insistent reference to Nigeria’s greatness, which still reverberates today not only among the political class but also among the masses, Achebe delivered what may be called a technical knockout: “Nigeria is not a great country. It is one of most disorderly nations in the world. It is one of the most corrupt, insensitive, inefficient places under the sun. It is one of the most expensive countries and of those that give least value for money. It is dirty, callous, noisy, ostentatious, dishonest and vulgar. In short, it is among the most unpleasant places on earth!”

He also drew attention to one of the key issues that has today permeated virtually every segment of the Nigerian society, cargo cult mentality, the belief that things will get better without any conscious effort to make them better, which he says is a mark of stark underdevelopment.

“One of the commonest manifestations of underdevelopment is a tendency among the ruling elite to live in a world of make-believe and unrealistic expectations. This is the cargo cult mentality that anthropologists sometimes speak about – a belief by backward people that someday, without any exertion whatsoever on their part, a fairy ship will dock in their harbour laden with every goody they have always dreamed of possessing,” he wrote.

This cargo cult mentality is, to a large extent, behind the messiahnic expectations that Nigerians often repose on politicians, the type that ushered Buhari into power in 2015. But even the disappointment of these expectations does not prevent Nigerians from hoping the next time around.

Patriotism

“In spite of the tendency of people in power to speak about this great nation of ours, there is no doubt that Nigerians are among the world’s most unpatriotic people. But this is not because Nigerians are particularly evil or wicked; in fact, they are not. It is rather because patriotism, being part of an unwritten social contract between a citizen and the state, cannot exist where the state reneges on the agreement. The state undertakes to organise society in such a way that the citizen can enjoy peace and justice, and the citizen in return agrees to perform his patriotic duties,” Achebe wrote.

“National pledges and pious admonitions by the ruling classes or their paid agents are entirely useless in fostering true patriotism... [One] shining act of bold, selfless leadership at the top, such as unambiguous refusal to be corrupt or tolerate corruption at the fountain of authority, will radiate powerful sensations of wellbeing and pride through every nerve and artery of national life,” he added.

Social injustice and the cult of mediocrity

Achebe talked about the consistent inclination since we assumed management of our own affairs “to opt for mediocrity and compromise, to pick a third and fourth eleven to play for us”.

“And the result: we have always failed and will always fail to make it to the world league. Until, that is, we put merit back on the national agenda.”

The cumulative effect of all this is evident in collapsed public utilities, inefficient and wasteful parastatals and state-owned companies.

“If you want electricity, you buy your own generator; if you want water, you sink your own borehole; if you want to travel, you set up your own airline. One day soon, said a friend of mine, you will have to build your own post office to send your letters,” he wrote.

On social injustice, he said, “The gap between the highest and the lowest paid public servants in Nigeria is one of the widest in the whole world. Certainly nothing like it occurs in any country worthy of respect. And let it be understood that I am talking about salary alone. If we were to add the innumerable perquisites which accrue legitimately to the people at the top such as subsidised housing, free access to fleets of official cars, free shopping sprees abroad, etc, and illegitimate perquisites such as uncontrolled acquisition of state land, procurement of market stalls under fictitious names for rental to genuine traders; even procurement for resale of government-subsidised commodities such as rice, beer, cement, etc – if we were to add all these ‘invisible’ emoluments to the salary, there would be no word in the dictionary adequate to describe the institutionalised robbery of the common people of Nigeria by their public ‘servants’.”

Indiscipline

“Indiscipline,” Achebe wrote, “pervades our life so completely that one may be justified in calling it the condition par excellence of contemporary Nigerian society.”

The best way to understand that nothing has changed is to remember that during his first coming as a military dictator, Buhari had launched the War Against Indiscipline (WAI). Today, 31 years after the abrupt termination of that regime, Buhari is back and still talking about indiscipline and has actually re-launched WAI.

Corruption

The Trouble with Nigeria was published in 1983 during Shehu Shagari’s Second Republic. Describing the situation on ground then, Achebe wrote that “corruption in Nigeria has passed the alarming and entered the fatal stage; and Nigeria will die if we keep pretending that she is only slightly indisposed”.

To buttress the point, he referred to a story in the National Concord of May 16, 1983 with the headline “Fraud at P&T”, in which the then Federal Minister of Communication, Audu Ogbe (who, by the way, is currently Minister of Agriculture under the Buhari presidency), as revealing that the Federal Government was losing N50 million every month as salaries to non-existent workers.

“In the course of one year then Nigeria loses N600 million in this particular racket…With N600 million Nigeria could build two more international airports like Murtala Muhammed Airport in Lagos; or if we are not keen on more airports the money could buy us three refineries; or build us a dual express motorway from Lagos to Kaduna; or pay the salary of 10,000 workers on grade level 01 for forty years,” Achebe wrote.

He also drew attention to an editorial in The Daily Times of the same day, titled “The Fake Importers”, which highlighted “a story of Nigerian importers who having applied for and obtained scarce foreign exchange from the Central bank ostensibly to pay for raw materials overseas, leave the money in their banks abroad and ship to Lagos containers of mud and sand”.   

Today, the ghost worker syndrome continues to take a toll on public treasury, both at the federal and state levels. In February 2014, the then Minister of Finance, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, announced to Nigerians that 46,639 ghost workers were uncovered in the federal civil service. In May this year, the Minister of Finance, Kemi Adeosun, disclosed that 43,000 persons had so far been discovered as ghost workers on the payroll of the Federal Government.

On why corruption thrives, Achebe said: “Although Nigeria is without any shadow of doubt one of the most corrupt nations in the world, there has not been one high public officer in the twenty-three years of our independence who has been made to face the music for official corruption.

“And so, from fairly timid manifestations in the 1960s, corruption has grown bold and ravenous, as with each succeeding regime, our public servants have become more reckless and blatant.”

Even though the country has also had some rulers who were said not to be personally corrupt, those rulers’ inability to rein in the ravenous beasts around them, then as now, has remained one of the drawbacks in the fight against corruption as helpless integrity has always failed to solve the problem of rampant corruption.

“As we have sunk more and more deeply into the quagmire [of corruption], we have been ‘blessed’ with a succession of leaders who are said to possess impeccable personal integrity but unfortunately are surrounded by sharks and crooks,” Achebe wrote.

He therefore admonished Shagari, and by extension those would come after him, including President Buhari, to be decisively bold and unshakable if they ever hoped to tame the monster of official corruption.

“But to initiate change the President of this country must take, and be seen to take, a decisive first step of ridding his administration of all persons on whom the slightest wind of corruption and scandal has blown. When he can summon up the courage to do that, he will find himself grown overnight to such stature and authority that he will become Nigeria's leader, not just its president. Only then can he take on and conquer corruption in the nation,” he wrote.

Last word

Perhaps the greatest disservice the Nigerian political class has done to the country and its citizens is the excision of History as a subject from primary and secondary schools curriculum, which became effective from the 2009/2010 academic session. Consequently, Nigerians know nothing about their history and therefore continue to flounder like a ship caught in the midst of an angry wave.

As Emeka Anyaoku, former Secretary-General of the Commonwealth, rightly said during the 70th anniversary of the National Commission for Museums and Monuments (NCMM) in Lagos, “Without the knowledge of the past, there will be no fruitful projections for the future. The knowledge of the past is very vital to the development of the country, and we can only solve present societal problems when we know what was obtainable in the past.”

The lessons of history are all too glaring, but our so-called leaders continue to turn a blind eye to these lessons. As such, the blunders of the past keep returning, leaving the country wallowing in the dark, in a state of motion without movement and perpetual infancy, burdened by the lessons of history we have refused to learn.