Conclusion: Doing away with avoidable anarchy
October 24, 2003
Odia Ofeimun concludes his analysis of the problem of Nigeria with a contention that except the people of Nigeria get the right type of leadership, true nationhood will continue to elude the people. He hinges his contention on the 4/19 elections of this year and warns that if care is not taken, anarchy is what stares the people in the face. This is, after warning of the dangers ethnicity poses to a polity of contending interests like Nigeria’s just as he pointed out the fallacy of thought regarding the mistake of 1914, one which has since become clearly defined by present day realities in Nigeria, as against the perception of Sir Ahmadu Bello.
Otherwise, there should be no shyness in stating it as it is, that the production of oil wealth from the Niger Delta and the privations heaped on Niger Delta people as a result, has made it possible to relieve, somewhat, the Northern peasantry and the Northern minorities from the many execrations that the old and the new feudal classes have heaped on them. The freedom of all Nigerian nationalities, even the little that subsists, has been bought with the blind oppression of the people of the South South. The demand for correction and restitution is not therefore a challenge to only one part of Nigeria; it is a challenge to the whole country. Until it is faced, it behooves the South South to insist on not taking the skin off their backs for their near or distant neighbours. So long as those who benefit from the oppression of the Niger Delta remain indifferent, every means possible must be found to make them see how the logic of entrenched internal colonialism must lead eventually to a mutually assured destruction. The first requirement, on this score, must be the removal of the Federal presumption that if the people of the Niger Delta are left, or made, to fight between themselves, it would somehow in the end make it easy for the Federal Government to perfect a counter-insurgency regime. One Federal administration after another has thrived on this presumption. Although it is merely a rehash of what happens in many other parts of the country where national security is turned into a partisan weapon of ethnic manipulation, the case of the Niger Delta has been pursued with more rigour. Between the Federal Government and its agencies; and between them and the oil companies, there has been such an evident disregard for the human element in the Niger Delta situation that it has become a case of sowing the wind and reaping the whirlwind. The endless inter-ethnic wars between various communities in the area must be traced to the Federal Government¹s attitude of treating foreign companies or people who are not from the Delta, as having more right to own equity on the land than the people who have lived on it for eons. Some kind of extenuation is provided by encouraging a primitive form of accumulation in accordance with which community leaders rather than local governments and state governments are the fit and proper equity holders to do business with concerning proceeds from oil. This of course cannot be done in any proper statutory manner. It involves the buying off of vocal community leaders or, as in the case of intransigent Ken Saro Wiwa and his eight Ogoni siblings, organizing a brazen judicial murder to take them off the scene. It is a mode that encourages competition for loot-sharing, or a resistant ethic based on a profession of arms, rather than a proper resort to statutory sharing of proceeds from oil. Since the Federal Government leads the way in the assumption that force of arms is the most effective language in the determination of equity, almost every kobo a day community leader learns to think of becoming a warlord for the purpose of relevance. This has enthroned anarchy which successive minders of the Federal Government apparently factor into counter-insurgency strategies as the contingencies dictate.
It was in order to avoid the anarchy thus created by Government that a facile distinction was made between off-shore and on-shore oil of which only the latter is supposed to be within reach of haggling by the people of the Niger Delta. The Supreme Court has applied a municipal vice to the resolution of the distinction which predictably has not helped matters. It has merely added up to a future scenario in which a foreign country could take over off-shore oil finds in Nigerian waters if only on the grounds that Nigerian laws, as the Supreme Court has finalized it, determines ownership of sea-ward wealth not on the basis of the lands adjoining or abutting the seas, but on the force of sovereignty that is invoked and can be defended. Such national sophistry! only to prevent minority groups from benefiting from wealth that they sit upon, wealth that has degraded their environment, in some cases, irremediably! The question is: wouldn¹t it have been cheaper to do the right thing for the people of the Niger Delta who alone, as a collective in a state or local government recognized by the Nigerian constitution, may hold equity and pay taxes as all states should to the Federal Government? Surely, such a solution to the resource control problem has a fatter chance of embossing civilized law rather than force as the determining factor in the Niger Delta. This is a way of saying that those who do not want a solution based on civilized law are the ones daring the people of the Niger Delta to defend their citizenship or to prove that they are not second class citizens.
The average observer is bound to wonder whether there is really a proper government in a country where such an ethic is allowed at the center of national decision-making. If anything, it tends to explain the wars that have been declared and fought with so much ferocity and with the kind of sophisticated weaponry reportedly deployed in the recent ethnic wars in Warri. What kind of government waits for that kind of war to be declared and fought without a pre-emptive or immediate tackle, to stem the mayhem? What kind of government talks about a political solution to a crisis in which houses are being bombed and razed and more lives are being lost than in comparable operations in Liberia to which Nigeria has marched peace keeping soldiers? To think of it, it was as if we were back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when tribal wars were set off by slave traders for the sake of effect. Even those wars could be understood from this distance in terms of the absence of a central government between the nationalities and tribes. But in the supposed presence of a central government called the Federal Government of Nigeria, why must we require colonial-type forces to pacify once more the tribes of the Lower Niger? This question is not idle at all considering that a few years back the Senate of the United States debated whether to allow US companies operating in Nigeria to get involved in police duties in order to pacify the natives of the Niger Delta. The chickens from that debate are still coming home to roost in current United States involvement in the pacification process. It recalls the days of the Royal Niger Company which hired thugs to pacify one kingdom after another until all of Nigeria lay prostrate in its grip and could be handed over intact to the British crown. These days, it is Governors in the Delta, frustrated by Federal incapacity or Federal fueling of the crisis in the Delta that are asking for the Royal Niger Solution. At least one Governor actually asked that the United States be allowed to get involved in maintaining peace in the Niger Delta before the recent blow-out in Warri. He could see no other way out. Of course, his is not the kind of call that a Governor makes in a country that takes itself seriously. But it is the kind of call to be expected in a country where successive Federal Governments, as a mode of governance, have sponsored local warlords who create animosities between nationalities in the Delta as a means of containment, if not pacification.
Unfortunately, the implied strategy of deliberately creating inter-communal dissensions never works; it does not even postpone the evil day. Apart from disrupting normal business in the oil industry, it creates room for an escalation of demands for military interventions. The very idea of creating a special police or military formation for the Niger Delta already posits the absence of a situation of civility; it connotes a lower order declaration of a state of emergency which could have the effect of snowballing into other areas of national life. The truth is that insecurity is insecurity whether it is created by ethnic commando groups or counter-insurgency squads whose task is to keep oil flowing against the wishes of those who suffer, without remedy, from it. In this connection, it is not only that the bottling up of the Niger Delta in the throes of special military operations will have a tendency to spill to other parts of the country; it will increase the special feeling of oppression and deprivation that the average Niger Delta person feels in the face of Federal indifference to the real issues of resource control. More than at any time in the past, it will put the matter of internal colonialism on the front burner. Besides, the need to insert military pressure against dissidents calls to question the very rationale of treating the Niger Delta as a special area. It tells of a determination on the part of the minders of the Federal Government, or the nationalities that have overcome the nerves of government, to do unto the Niger Delta what they would not like anyone to do unto them. It is about loot, no more no less. Why, they seem to be asking, must the peoples of the Niger Delta be allowed to be luckier than other states? Or, what are the Governors of the South South doing to justify the size of allocations that is given to them at the moment? These questions do not touch the central issues. The point is that what goes to the Niger Delta is not supposed to depend on whether the people are many or small in number, educated or ill-educated, capable or incapable of utilizing their allocations, or whether they are or are not of good behaviour before they can get their due. A statutory allocation is not a matter of charity or the convenience of the Federal authorities. The people of the Niger Delta happen to be the people from whose lands oil was found. The environmental damage and the unusual burdens and dislocations of normal life caused by centuries of silting and the hazards accruing from it must not be measured by the envy of those who may claim that they were responsible for the debris carted to the sea to create oil in the Delta. A country that seeks co-existence on the basis of such absurd arguments does not intend to remain one.
Besides, to make mention of the smallness of the number of the people, or the incompetence or corruption of their leaders as a means of denying them their due, amounts to seeking for the Delta a cure that is not being applied to other parts of the country. Or what is being said about the fact that all the monies taken from the Federation account on the basis of population by successive Northern Nigerian governments is not justified by the poverty that is so glaringly evident as norm across the North? Why should derivation, the principle by which all the majority groups built up their laagers be denied because it is the so-called minority elements in the South South that now must have it? For that matter, if the desire is to enhance the effectiveness of allocations to the states of the Niger Delta, the Federal Government needs to be capable of ordinary counting and numbering, staking the requisite statistics to mobilize intelligence, to monitor the ways of governance and to generate grounds for accountability in other tiers of government. A Federal Government that can neither count nor number, incapable of enforcing the law when public property is stolen or misappropriated, indicts itself when it denies the states their due on the grounds that they are misusing public funds.
What is more self-indicting in this regard is that the Federal Government has been quite a perpetrator of institutionalized waste, misallocation and misappropriation of funds. From its unitarizing heights, the Federal Government has imposed the culture of waste and corruption on other tiers of government. This is evident from the amounts that are lost, misallocated, and misappropriated annually. In Nigeria¹s oil industry, the losses add up to 800 billion Naira annually. The losses favour bunkerers and other looters of the national coffers who generally fish in the lack of accountability in the oil sector. Add to this knowledge the information made available by the Auditor-General of the Federation: that about 250 billion naira could not be accounted for in the last year of the first term in the Fourth Republic. Or that a 305 billion Naira deficit was registered in the same year. In the face of such an annual binge, it does matter to pay more than a rumour monger¹s attention to the intelligence being touted in international circles that Nigerians have stashed away something in the neighbourhood of 250 billion dollars, much of it unreclaimable, in the international finance system. No doubt, if a fraction of that sum were to be recovered, Nigeria could liquidate the less than 30 billion dollars debts for which a virtual war has been waged against this country in the past two decades by the London and Paris Clubs. To liquidate the debts, instead of the current bids for re-scheduling, is to bring to an end the gory devaluation of the Naira and the consequent despoliation of the labour of all Nigerian citizens that has been perpetrated through the so-called Structural Adjustment Programmes.
In a country that takes itself seriously, the Federal Government could have declared a state of emergency long ago to set things right. That this has not happened is a tell-tale of the unseriousness of the political class and the fact that most state functionaries treat the oil industry as an ex gratia industry, one towards which there is no need to sweat in order to make a killing. At any rate, a state of emergency implies the necessity to block the avenues for financial hemorrhage and, at the least, an effort to recover the loot stashed away abroad. Beyond sheer vendetta, proved by the current fastening of attention on only General Sani Abacha¹s loot, there is no evidence of such a broad-based interest emerging. At least, none that can energize a nation intent on stopping the culture of looting and loot-sharing as a mode of governance. It suggests why the political class may go on shouting against business as usual in order to continue with the business of looting and loot-sharing. Anyone with a smattering familiarity with the history of Nigeria will agree that this constitutes the greatest danger to the national ethos. It is a form of organized anarchy, with anyone in a position of trust being literally mandated by the general culture of governance to loot, as preparation for a rainy day that every act of looting brings ever closer by the day.
Arguably, this is not the only reason why the people of the Niger Delta or any other part of Nigeria, are not getting their due; but it is a major part of it. Beyond this is that it is one of the major reasons why democracy has been largely truncated, that is, when it is not made impossible, in Nigeria. Assuredly, a democratic society, sustained by the rule of law, will throw looters out of government. But not if the looters have managed to organize computer squads and police commando units and private armies to overtake and overcome the electoral process as has happened in the first two elections in the Fourth Republic. The two elections prove the point. They were elections in which there were no respectable voters¹ registers! How could they be free and fair? In fact, after the last exercise, the Electoral Commission managed to admit that it was overwhelmed by police cover and the godfathers of the political parties and their official and private armies. The admission was a case of medicine after death: as only the most obvious cases could be dealt with by the electoral tribunals, many of which have been doing a yeoman¹s job of retrieving the people¹s mandate.
The untold story however lies ahead. It is about a culture of violence at the heart of all the means through which a change for the better could be attempted within the Nigerian maelstrom. What it says is simple: that if the people of the Niger Delta or any other part of the country cannot get their due because they lack the physical muzzle to induce respect for their demands, or because the electoral process has been hijacked in favour of those they have not chosen as their representatives, it creates the basis for a general assumption that only those who can acquire the means of violence, the means of repression or resistance, get their due within the Nigerian system. Our worry must be that if such an assumption is carried into the 2007 elections, there may be no elections at all. The electoral process would be over-heated by groups arming themselves, and mobilizing their own squads and commando units to obviate the kind of circumstance that has enabled even non-candidates to be declared as winners in the 2003 elections. Unfortunately, the hope that such over-heating will not take place is not being shored up.
Take it from the fact that many of the newly appointed Federal Electoral Commissioners are already being dragged to court for being well known members or servicers of the ruling political party. If truth be told: nothing the matter with appointing party members as electoral commissioners if every political party that can muster at least one percent of the votes in a constituency is allowed to be represented in the Electoral Commission in that constituency. The odd pattern is to appoint members of the ruling party and to leave the other political parties in limbo.
Whatever is the case there are pre-cautions that must be taken, and adopted as a part of any electoral reforms if another election in the country is not to appear foolhardy. As I suggested in my comment on the 2003 elections, the necessary, and almost sufficient precaution, which needs to be taken must center on the necessity for every ballot cast at any election to be run through a scan, to determine its validity before results are announced. I dare say that nothing can stop the general tendency for one or a few persons to thumbprint a whole ballot box so long as it is allowed that any thumbprint will do. No. Not every thumbprint will do. Any political party that fails to accept that a scan must take place before the announcement of any results should be deemed a party of fraudsters. Such a party ought to be deemed incapable of participating in a democratic election. Should the present ruling party, for instance, adopting its current gung-ho attitude to all questions and refuse to abide by the necessity for such a scan, it should be left alone to have a one party election and to grab power that the rest of us should feel free to disrespect. If the ballot can be defended against all comers, it would leave a basis for wider participation in national life. Although it may not necessarily guarantee that successive governments will be the best in the world, it will at least ensure that good people will no longer be afraid to stand up in and for their constituencies. Those who are no good, even if they were to find their way to power, would not be able to escape the judgment of the people. I dare say, with a proper electoral register, and the certainty that every vote cast will have its due significance in the electoral process, more people would begin to take Nigeria seriously. As every Nigerian gets to have a say in the running of the affairs of the country, there would be less chance of godfathers overtaking the people¹s mandate; no matter how much loot they can disburse. Even those who may use their access to Police and military power to counteract the wishes of the people would be easier to contain even if they cannot be eliminated from the process. A new poll can always be organized when an earlier one has been purloined. Properly speaking, there may be no need to make the gargantuan security arrangements that are the staple of current electoral battles, if there is a guarantee that only genuine ballots will count. In essence, anyone who wishes to take Nigeria seriously needs to begin by taking the ballot seriously. The alternative is anarchy.
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