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Stemming
Nigeria’s descent into a failed state
By Mohammed Haruna
Newsdiaryonline Wed Nov30,2011
Last Monday I chaired the 12th
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.
Boko Haram : “War”
with no end? By Mohammed
Haruna
Th
This is the document referred to in the Witness
Statement on Oath of Clifford O. Kokogho as
“Exhibit
COK.2”
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