USA Africa Dialogue Series - M. H. Kukah: Rebranding Nigeria

PREPARING FOR NIGERIA'S COMING  POWER ELITE

Matthew Hassan KUKAH*

Some men see things as they are and they ask, why? But I dream things that never were and I ask, why not? Bernard Shaw


I am concerned that after 49 years of independence, we have only been concerned with How things are not working in Nigeria and not Why. The evidence is to be found in the hundreds of national and international laurels that Nigerian authors have garnered from caricaturing their country and leaders. Perhaps more than any other country, Nigerian authors have come to imbibe some of the sentiments well captured in Binyavanga Wainaina's extraordinarily beautiful satire titled, How to Write About Africa. This piece (which you can Google by the same title) will crack your ribs but it is biting satire at its best. In it, Mr. Wainaina enjoins any western writer who wants to be taken seriously and with an eye on a prize to ensure that in writing about Africa, they must include: Africa is big: fifty-four countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book. The continent is full of deserts, jungles, highlands, savannahs and many other things, but your reader doesn't care about all that, so keep your descriptions romantic and evocative and unparticular. Š Among your characters you must always include The Starving African, who wanders the refugee camp nearly naked, and waits for the benevolence of the West. Her children have flies on their eyelids and pot bellies, and her breasts are flat and empty. She must look utterly helpless. She can have no past, no history; such diversions ruin the dramatic moment. Wainana could easily change the title to How to Write About Nigeria!

Once the first generation of Nigerian authors focused on this characterization of our life, it became difficult for their students to do anything else. Even in Nollywood today, since the release of Living in Bondage, the major themes have focused on witchcraft, sorcery, armed robbers, and scammers and so on. True, these are representations of our daily life. However, they do not speak to the majority of over 90% of Nigerians who are doing their best and living well, they do not even offer the young ones another mirror they might look at. It is through this prism that outsiders see Nigeria and how often have we been asked within Africa by those who watch Africa Magic if those things really happen in Nigeria? I feel that we have become like the holy man in this little story which I will share with the reader.
 
A holy man found himself constantly distracted from his prayers by the noises of young children playing outside his chapel. They mocked his threats by running away whenever he appeared. He came up with an idea. He told the children that there was a horrible beast in the river with a hundred eyes, twenty mouths, fifty legs, ten tongues, etc. In excitement, the children all ran towards the river to see the animal, leaving him to concentrate on his prayers. When he came out from his prayers, he found the entire village heading towards the river. What is happening? he asked one of the men. We hear from our children that a horrible animal is in the river and we are all going to see it, the man said.  After a brief thought, he himself headed towards the river. Another old man said to him: Surely, at your age, you don't believe that there is such an animal, do you? Well, the holy man said as he headed to the river, even though I am the one who came up with the idea to scare the children, in reality, you never knowŠ

After reading about ourselves and listening to our own voices from our writers, we have come to think the worst of ourselves. Today, thanks to years of indoctrination about race and the portrayal of Nigeria as the demon, even Nigerian comedians who appropriate foreign jokes from the internet ensure that the worst roles are reversed or tailored to fit the image of the Nigerian. Naturally, this image of the Nigerian as a devious, greedy scammer have fed on the popular imagination and they account for the way the rest of the world has come to view us. Our embarrassments at the airports and elsewhere arise from how we have come to define ourselves. For example, can a novel extolling the virtues an ordinary honest Nigerian win an award anywhere?

Recently, Professor Wole Soyinka accused me of what he called uncritical patriotism. I do not think I should defend myself against what someone else thinks about me. However, my position has always been simple; we have problems just like everyone else. However, national identity is constructed by mythology not reality. The issue of the superiority of the white race was carefully constructed. It was the bedrock for colonialism and slavery. These myths then justified the banditry and murders of the Indians in the United States, the Aborigines in Australia or the black Africans in South Africa. The structures and the glitter of every modern state in Europe and America today are perched on an ocean of the blood, bones, and resources of Africa either by direct appropriation or slavery. Europeans   artists, writers, and poets set about writing to justify the claims of the superiority of their race. Wagner's anti Semitic and racist compositions were later adopted by Hitler and they provided the theme song for the Holocaust. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness has often been referred to by Chinua Achebe as having had a great impact on him. Rudyard Kipling's, The White Man's Burden have all come to be associated with the inferiority of the black man and the imperative of the colonial project. .

My case is simple or so I think: I make a case for the fact that our criticisms of Nigeria must continue, but they must become solution oriented and not just an art form and a platform for winning awards. We must remain critical of the structures of injustice, but we must also endeavour to take responsibility in shaping the future of our children. Age, education, experience and exposure challenge us to begin a process of serious introspection in the search for solutions to the problems of Nigeria, twenty or fifty years from hence. No nation ever develops or grows by merely gazing at the navel of opportunism, thinking only of immediate gains for individuals or a generation. So, if now I sound like an uncritical patriot, it is precisely because I believe that although narrative, the How of our life is important, the Why is perhaps even more important. The why seeks to identify the mistakes and perhaps suggest how best we might negotiate a way forward.  The future of our country requires more than just a few good people to lead us. We require more than free and fair elections or sound political parties. What now need is to prepare ourselves for the challenges of a new nation based on a more imaginative vision driven by an elite of another kind altogether.

Next year, we shall be celebrating our 50th anniversary of independence. I am worried that we will end up in the same lachrymal mode, mourning our lack of electricity, good roads and so on. And we must do so. But I believe that we must prepare our nation for the future, a future after 50,000 megawatts, a future after we have 5 lanes on our roads, a period when we have electric trains and so on. Ending dictatorship provides us the best hope, chance and opportunity that we have in planning with some level of certainty and predictability. Democracy does offer us a necessary condition for the attainment of these goals, but these are not sufficient. Some of our worst nightmares are gradually taking a different shape. Take the Niger Delta for example. Although there are still controversies over details of the Amnesty, in principle, only a fool will refuse to acknowledge that things are changing. The President, the Vice President and other leaders of thought in the Niger Delta require our commendation not our denigration. Those who choose the theatre may be running out of actors! Secondly, despite the trauma of our electoral tragedies, we are glad that we are still standing. It will require hard work, time, energy and a range of other developments elsewhere for us to get our hands around the issues of electoral processes. If the elected officials and the PDP persist in their perfidy, then we will lose momentum and enthusiasm on electoral reforms. But, given the robust debate and interest that this topic has aroused, things will definitely never be the same again. Processes are important. Although getting elections right is fundamental, it no guarantee of good governance.

My point is that the next challenge for us must be how to design a road map for Nigeria for the next 50 years. The popular prophesies of our doom by our experts have not come to pass at least for now. Ahead of the 2003 elections, we were told that our nation was on the road to Kigali. We never arrived there because we were not headed that way at all. After the 2007 elections, some experienced western journalists, hung around hotels in Abuja believing and waiting to be the first with the breaking news of the first flames of violence in Nigeria.  That too did not come to pass. Rather than ask what has happened, we have moved to another round of prophesy under a different context. This time it is said that we are likely to end up like Somalia this is despite neither being totally Muslim nor are is the texture of our organization based on clans constantly at war. Clearly, the reason for the war in Somalia cannot be the same with the reasons for Nigeria's crisis. 

Despite all the negative projections, I know we shall not get to Somalia because we inhabit different political time zones and have different destinations. Although these images are popular, they are more a manifestation of our obsession with thinking the worst about our conditions. Despite the confusing and conflicting metaphors in relation to both Rwanda and Somalia which are at least superficially culturally homogenous, these analysts still insist on applying them to Nigeria. But, as we all know, Nigeria will not be Somalia. Rather than our obsession with photocopies of developments elsewhere, the real challenge is to pose the question, why has Nigeria ended up this way? To answer this question, I will avoid the usual narrative and propose what I think should be our next preoccupation, namely, the need to create a new Power Elite.

Although the word elite has crept into the popular discourse on modernity, there is a serious lack of conceptual clarity as to what its identity is. Part of this confusion arises from the absence of a neat process of categorization of what really qualifies an individual or a group to become part of the elite. The processes of recruitment, entry, incorporation, promotion, sponsorship, graduation, or its articles of association remain vague. Very often, the concept is associated with status and wealth. Our concern is not to resolve the controversy but to argue that in general, elite driven principles are important for laying the foundation for a nation's vision.

The concept of a Power Elite was formulated and popularized in 1956 by the American sociologist, Professor C. Wright Mills in his seminal book, The Power Elite:  Essentially, Mills argued that this privileged club contains a small group whose wealth and stature enables them to control and wield influence that is often out of sync with their numerical strength. They are made up of overlapping cliques who negotiate and aggregate power and influence based on their interests. He identifies the Military, political and economic/corporate institutions as the repository of these cliques. In his view, the processes of negotiation or protection of the interests of these cliques have come to shape American life whether in a time of war or peace. Although they have come to have a negative resonance, a well coordinated Power Elite can be a force for good and not necessarily a force for evil.

We must note that today, every nation is the result of the dream and vision of particular individuals, groups or class of human beings who had a dream and a vision. It is clear that the British had a vision of what they wanted to do and how to attain power and control of the world. At its zenith, the British Empire spread through 10 million square miles. A sense of Empire still lingers in the imagination of the English mind because indeed, it was no mean achievement. Ditto the dream and vision of the founding fathers of what is today the United States of America. Today the sense of who they are as citizens of their nations is a function of how their perceptions have been shaped by their history. It will be tough to convince the average American that their country is not the best place on earth and that they are not the most important specie of humanity. All this was constructed by propagating the notion right from the beginning that they were a nation under God and that their country was God's special piece of real estate.

Elites are important because their preoccupation, driven by their own self interests is in ensuring some semblance of law, order, efficiency and security. The fact that even the thieves believed in some form of order and coherence to ensure smooth operations was why the Berlin Conference became so important in 1885. It enabled various nations to exploit their spheres of influence without open warfare. A Power Elite will naturally seek to create a vision of a society based on the quality of its own ideals. Every business man will naturally be interested in doing business in an organized environment. Negative forces which sabotage business whether as gangs, middle men, corrupt bureaucrats thrive in an environment of chaos and lawlessness. The vision of a great and stable nation is often their preoccupation. A Power Elite, at its evolution often focuses on four critical areas.

These critical areas are, the building of institutions to support the state, securing the borders and ensuring its territorial integrity of the state, adopting a system of government (federal or regional), and the provision of a Constitutional basis for administration. They impose norms of civility in a language and manner that enhances national integration. They do this by adopting what has come to be known as civil religion. Civil religion relates to those unwritten codes of conduct and behaviour that enhance the creation of a national ethos which comes to be associated with the people. Some ingredients of civil religion are merely symbolic and mythical, saluting the flag, standing at the national anthem, a manner of greeting that becomes associated with the people, a collective trait, whether it is honesty, generosity etc. Today, after hundreds of years of working on their national identities, we can at least make some generalizations about say, an average American, Singaporean, Chinese or British citizen. The elite can sometimes impose a language, ideology or a religion as glue for holding national identity in place. Loosely, most of us will associate the American with warmth, belief in their superiority over others; we know the British have a few layers which account for their taciturnity and restraint, otherwise known as the stiff upper lip. A Ghanaian is more polite, prone to obedience.

What can we say about the Nigerian? Well, you may have to refer to Peter Enahoro's How to Be a Nigerian or Dan Agbese's recent, Nigeria, Their Nigeria. The difficulty that Nigeria faces in developing a national ethos arises from the complex web that has come to make up the citizens of the country. It is tempting to see the plurality of tongues as an excuse. I doubt. I think that the nature of the construction of the colonial state created its own difficulties. However, I am convinced that more than the colonial project, military disruption severely damaged the fabric of our national unity. The creation of states seemed an attraction (recall the mini celebrations of independence at the announcement), but it tore the veins of nationhood, deepened regional and ethnic cleavages, created a climate of fear and suspicion among the elite and narrowed the confines for the competition for the resources of the state. And, in a mono economy such as ours, this encouraged the banditry that still persists till date. The energies required for nation building were diverted to serve ethno-regional interests. Law, order, discipline, integrity all broke down. This is what has provided the raw material for the negative characterization of Nigeria and its peoples by their own people and outsiders.

I want to argue here that we now need to create a Power Elite that can coherently begin to dream of strategies for reversing the war psychosis that has gripped our people, the sense of helplessness and frustration that leads us to think there is no way out of this. I do believe that there is a way out and that if we plan well and define the strategies that we require so that the next 50 years will cure future Nigerians of the mistakes that we have made. To do this, I will propose a few suggestions that are not scientific but I will hope that we can begin to debate these issues. My hope is that our 50th anniversary must not catch us still stuck in the mud of self deprecation, rant and self hate. The brightness of our future does not depend on the present realities. My optimism lies in the over one million extremely talented young men and women who are today in some of the best institutions abroad. These young men and women are teenagers and it is they and their talent that are the source of my optimism. They are the ones who will shape the greatness of this piece of land which God has entrusted to the black race. I make the following tentative propositions and hope that with more debate, we can clarify the options.

First is the question of the composition and development of man power that will constitute the Power Elite. I believe that in less than twenty years, the generation that brought us war and institutionalized corruption and benefited from the proceeds of the looting of the Nigerian state will die out. Those still alive will be toothless and bound to wheel chairs and with failing memories, they will not be able to plot the rigging of elections. Their children, some of whom they have trained with the nation's stolen loot abroad will at least return to Nigeria better equipped. The good thing about this generation who will be coming into their 30s and 50s in another ten or so years is that they will speak very little if any Igbo, Yoruba, Ijaw and so on. The names of their villages will be remote and intermarriages will have blunted the corrosive cutting edges of ethnicity. Calculate how many men in their 50s now whose children can proudly speak their mother or father tongue. So, thanks to the National Youth Service Corps, NYSC, increased urbanization, the return of a new tribe of young men and women trained abroad with limited infusion of their parent's prejudices, I think we have the building blocks for a Power Elite. Their pride will not be in their father's business empires, inheritance will not be their priority. On the contrary, whether they are orphans, they will belong to the Power Elite. They will be so not because of the Boards they are sitting on or where they live. They will be so because they belong to borderless elite who will flaunt a Harvard, Yale, Oxford, Cambridge, Sorbonne, Princeton, Columbia certificate as a new identity. 

 Second, Knowledge not the Political Class or Bureaucracy will drive processes. Political Parties and the bureaucracy will remain the cesspools of corruption that they are everywhere. With a knowledge economy, political contracting, pimping, touting, banditry as we have now, will be exposed as being dishonourable preoccupation. Think Tanks will generate the ideas to feed politics, business and the bureaucracy. Public policy will no longer become the result of haphazard and sporadic set of interventions leading to confusion and endless experimentation. Excellence in one's career, adding to value to knowledge, scientific discovery and so on will mean more to the new Power Elite than merely making money. While their parents today operate on the fact that my Mercedes (bought with the loot of the sate) is bigger than yours, the new Power Elite will prefer to be proud of designing and manufacturing their own vehicles.

Third, Travel as we all have come to appreciate is one of the major sources of knowledge and perhaps even a far more useful tool for national integration. The bureaucrat who is stealing wishes to buy a car to move his family. Almost every form of corruption is tied to self preservation. This is why even the language of corruption has changed: dash, self help, family support etc. If we create an environment that makes it possible for our citizens to move around freely, we will spring a trap against the forces of prejudice and intolerance. Lack of public transportation has turned our cities and communities into incubators of ignorance and created a sense of Us vs. Them in our country.  Gradually, we can explode Chief Awolowo's myth that to be a good Nigerian, one has to be a good Ikenne and Yoruba man or woman first. More and more of our people will move and hopefully settle well anywhere and everywhere. The idea of home as some remote relic of antiquity evoking emotions will have only a distant echo as most citizens will end up with many homes. As   generations die and the sentiments, attachment and attraction of language and home recede, urbanization will suck the villages into the city, creating new citizens with class or professional attachments. We will continue to speak our languages, but they will not have the same resonance nor become a tool for bargaining.

Fourth, perhaps we can argue that Art merely imitates life. But, we can reverse that by equally arguing that Life imitates Art too. This has to be a deliberate state policy once a nation's Power Elite has defined its objectives. We therefore need a vision that is so big and so seemingly timeless that every generation can only hope to fulfill a little part of that dream. Once done, a nation's Power Elite can then tailor Art, Drama, Theatre, and the entire gamut of activities to fit that nation's ideology. The idea of the Opera was manufactured to create the illusion of class taste. I make the point therefore that properly thought through, a nation can indeed create a taste. Hollywood was artificially created. When Reagan came to power, having served the Guild of Actors in California, Hollywood bought into his vision of America. The Rambo films emerged as a compensation for the humiliation brought about by the Iranian hostage crisis. 

The biggest problem for our country's leadership is that we have never had a single man who has shown evidence that, having studied Nigeria, read about the world, he or she has decided to seek power as a means of enforcing his or her principles and beliefs. The result is that we have had men and women stumbling into power purely by accident than by design. It is the reason why no Nigerian leader has ever delivered a memorable speech to fire the imagination of our nation. Even in our return to Democracy, neither Obasanjo nor Yar'adua could cease the moment to deliver what one would call, the Speech.

The speech I am talking about does need to have the moving power and hold of the Gettysburg speech of Abraham Lincoln, John F Kennedy's Inaugural, Churchill's Sweat, Blood and Tears speech, nor the poetic resonance of Rev. Martin Luther King's, I have a Dream or Mandela's speech at the Rivonia trial. On the civil battle field of Gettysburg in 1776, Abraham Lincoln opened enunciated the philosophy and ideology of the new nation in his timeless speech. In the very first sentence, he projectedŠ a nation conceived in Liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. For over two hundred years, from the American civil war to the war in Iraq, every President envisioned that every law proposed, every business decision, every policy formulated was aimed at achieving these ideals. In his inaugural speech, Mr. Mandela envisioned a rainbow nation where there shall be, (wait for it), work, bread, water and salt for all. It was only after this that President Mandela ended his speech by saying: Never, never and never again shall it be that this beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another and suffer the indignity of being the skunk of the world. It was a measure of Mandela's sensitivity that the provision of salt not infrastructure should be the measure of the success of his new nation. It showed a man in touch with the needs of the least of his constituents. Little wonder, the salt revolt was the most provocative decision taken by Gandhi.
 
Fifth, at the risk of sounding trite, a nation must define its identity. The peculiar and complex tapestry of our history, the manipulation of the colonial state to impose a particular type of leadership on the new nation, limited our independence to a mere battle for supremacy by the regional and ethnic trinity. Thank God, the new Power Elite will not be weighed down by these contradictions as I have mentioned.

What we need now is a careful application of the necessary tools of scientific analysis to enable us make the right projections about the nature of the demographic shifts that might occur in future, the complex state of our human and natural resources, the nature of their baggage and the opportunities offered by their new experiences. It is important to note that this is not to be seen as a national project as such. Rather, it should be the dream, vision and preoccupation of a wide spectrum of researchers, operators of serious Think Tanks removed from the suffocating and putrefying air from the corridors of power. It is hoped part of the vision of the Power Elite will be to have a reservoir of scientific talent housed in a Science city. The inhabitants of this science city will be the elite strike force, the returnees whose source of excitement and fulfillment will be research, discovery and so on. Membership of this community should be the dream of every young professional.

I am not implying that ethnicity or regionalism will disappear in our lives. No, they will be with us for some time. But I am making a case that we need to begin to prepare for a future   where ethnicity and regionalism will lose their salience and resonance. I believe the incestuous affiliations of the present elite based on ethno-regional sentiments have constituted a serious drawback to our development of a national ethos. As we look to the next 50 years, we must seek more salient identities that will drive politics. Another key to the evolution of the Power Elite will be the repositioning of Associational life.

Associational Life is often benevolent, none threatening, encourages volunteerism, wider consultation and participation, altruism and so on. Whether these Associations are based on gender, class, interests, hobbies, or professional, they will encourage quality, discipline and a sense of self giving. Taken together with the ideals of the Power Elite, Associational Life will reduce the tensions and create broad based solidarities, thus reducing the salience of ethnic affiliations. An increase in the identity permutations widens an individual's sense of obligation and responsibility. Associational Life has a wider canvass and is a platform for forming cross cutting identities and cleavages. Think of the spirit of Solidarity expressed at meetings of the Nigerian Bar Association, NBA, National Council of Women Societies, NCWS, Youth Groups and so on. Taken together as components of the Power Elite, these groups will bring professionalism to daily life, put pressure on the system by seeking higher goals and eliminating mediocrity among the political class. In the end, consensus built around these blocks of the Power Elite will dictate the pace of politics, economic and social activities.
 
Sixth, we must note that Empire building was never a missionary excursion. Morality did not have the kind of resonance it has today. From Australia to South Africa or the United States, the stories of the brutality are the same. The murderous exercise did not happen by accident. It required the sophisticated and careful planning of a Power Elite to coordinate the work of explorers, missionaries, pirates, slave dealers and so on to seek glory for Queen, King and country.

The Aborigines for example constitute a good case study of this oppression. Before the white population arrived Australia in the 1780. Aborigines had lived there for over 50, 000 years. While fighting the Aborigines, the white population introduced such deadly diseases as syphilis, small pox; venereal diseases, tuberculosis influenza and so on (Please watch the film, Out of Africa). By 1880, after a combination of disease and gun powder crushed Aboriginal resistance, the whites adopted a new policy. They enacted what they called, The Aboriginal Protection Act. This policy further empowered the government to take away children born of white and aboriginal parents. These children were baptized and made Christians while the white way of life was forced on to them. This implied a concrete expression of the fact that white culture was superior to that of the Aborigines. It took over 200 years for any concrete efforts were made at redressing this tragedy. In 1971, the High Court of Australia ruled that although the Aborigines were indigenous to the land, however, by the principle of terra nullius, they could not lay claim to ownership of the land. For over ten years, the legal battles were fought. It was not until 1993 that Supreme Court overturned 1971 terra nullius ruling and recognized the rights Aborigines. The government finally recognized the rights of the natives over their land by promulgating the Native Title Act. A classical case of too little too late since majority of Aborigines are in prison, dead, or on the streets of Australian life.

The case of South Africa needs no repetition. But, taken together with the United States, the end of apartheid and the installation of Nelson Mandela as President in 1994, the ascent of Barrack Obama to the Presidency of the United States of America are evidence of how a Power Elite can still be mobilized to redeem itself. To this extent, despite the number of years, we can see how many generations later, a Power Elite can help a society can reverse the ugly tide. For, in both cases, it was not Black people that either ended apartheid or made Obama a President. In both cases, it can be argued that the Power Elites both acted in self interests. With dwindling population and the emergence of a bulging population of Black elite, it was difficult for white privilege to be sustained. I wished therefore that the old guard of Nigeria will appreciate the dynamics of change, accept its mistakes and help our nation plan well for the next 50 years. This generation must confess its sins and seek to make amends by embracing the future. Imagine the Northern ruling class throwing its weight around a Presidential candidate that is a Adara Minority from the Middle Belt, imagine the Yoruba elite or the Igbo elite identifying and throwing its weight around a Presidential candidate that is an Ogoni man or woman. This is the challenge that our present crop of dysfunctional elites, diminish by ignorance and selfishness cannot rise up to and this is why they cannot pass the test for being a Power Elite in the last fifty years. The fact that they can find common cause when it comes an alliance of Oil bunkerers, election riggers, commission agents, shows where we are. But, it makes the creation of the new Power Elite I am proposing even more urgent because I know that in their schools in Europe and America, Adamu and Tombari, who have faint memories of  their villages of Idon and Gokana have a common passion to make Nigeria a great country. They will escape the prejudices that kept their parents apart, pretending that they were defending the interests of the Adara and the Ogoni. Without de Klerk, there would probably have been no Mandela, without Ted Kennedy; there probably would have been no Obama. At least not during our time!

Seventh, we may still pose the question, how and where should the Power Elite be recruited? This is a complicated question and it has been partly answered. The process of recruitment has already started. Or, it has been with us from the beginning since our young men and women began to go in search of the proverbial golden flea in the 40s and 50s. The disruption by the military terminated the hopes of any coherent response to the project of nation building which the likes of Awolowo and Nnamdi Azikiwe had already started. Military rule traumatized the society and has created a motley crowd of disjoined elite who relied on military contracts and oil to make easy money. Men and women with little education used their resources to become political god fathers. Thus, in politics, it was a case of the blind trying to lead the one with sight.

The experience of China and other Asian counties is quite different. After its war that led to the creation of Pakistan, India has had no problem with its military elite. They have made no attempt to take over power. Thus, their struggle to create a Power Elite has been uninterrupted. This absence of military intervention has helped to lay a foundation for a Power Elite to continue to reproduce itself. The young men and women of China or India whose parents went to the United States, Europe and so on in the 50s have come on their own. Their children formed the bulk of the Power Elite that ran Silicon Valley, the elite IT haven. They helped reposition the United States and Europe in technology. Their decision to return home in the 90s has created the condition for the upsurge of technology which now powers the Chinese and Indian economies. Had the soldiers not messed us up and introduced connections as a means of ascendancy, we would be well ahead of where we are today.  The energies, competences, professionalism and sheer brilliance are the forces that have forced Thomas Friedman, the New York Times Foreign Correspondent, deal with this issue in his best selling book titled, The World Is Flat. It is a narrative of how the young Indian businessmen and women have taken advantage of technology to change their countries. Politics, economy, and the bureaucracy are now being driven by this new knowledge. This is the type of Power Elite I envision. 

Eight, we need a proper appreciation of the complex nature of the notion of the Power Elite. For a long time, Nigerians have come to associate the concept of Elite with material well being. The problem with this is that it has made it difficult for our nation to appreciate the fact that Elitism is actually an intellectual and not a material thing. This is why the state of our Universities has become so embarrassing. Clearly, the Association of Staff Union of Universities, ASUU has since lost its glory, prestige and public sympathy. The organization has come to be associated with a Labour movement notorious for the adoption of the antiquated notion of Strike as an instrument for blackmailing Government. The result is that they have diminished the prestige and awe of the academia and, by defining their status in monetary terms, the ivory tower which should pride itself with shaping the future of our country is characterize by politics, vendetta, intrigues, back biting and is at best a transit camp for a better life elsewhere. There can be no Power Elite without the prestige attached to academia. A typical University of Oxford Professor has come to be associated with a bicycle as a trade mark! The first layer of the Power Elite has to be based on an appreciation of the privileged position of Intellect and the philosopher king must return to claim his or her mandate.

Ninth, as a corollary, we must learn from elsewhere how nations grow and how every generation must seek to do better than those it has succeeded. Nigeria's ambition for a place in the world will remain contentious for the same reasons and philosophy that has guided western hegemony. It seeks some form of dominance and a place at the table. However, Nigeria needs to set its eyes first on creating a society with some irreducible minimum conditions for all citizens, more or less in the same way that Abraham Lincoln and the founding fathers of the United States of America stated in the Principles of Emancipation, namely, the insistence on Equality, Liberty and Justice.

We cannot rely on the present political structure to create an environment for the Power Elite I am visualizing. What we have now are not politicians in the real sense of the word. We know that what we have are the remnants of the military wine. This is why our politics is not driven by any convictions beyond the promotion of exuberance and feeding our gargantuan appetite. It is the Power Elite that should drive politics more by influence than by direct participation. For example, in the United States where Professor Wright argues that its Power Elite is made up of the triangle of the Military, Industrial and Business elite, this was at play recently during the Iraq war. The trio of George W Bush, an oil mogul with previous business connections in the Middle East, Donald Rumsfeld (Secretary of State for Defense), Dick Cheney, and Vice President put the war together to defend these elite interests. It is what is referred to in the United States as the military industrial complex! The war operationalised it when it became an inevitable tool and mechanism for advancing these interests which were conflated as national interests. (Please watch Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 911). The war was therefore a classical expression of how a Power Elite can use its interests as a foil for National interests. But it need not always be like this.

Tenth, is the issue of the values of the next generation of Power Elites. It seems safe to conclude that the children of the current dysfunctional elite will have a totally different set of values. Even now, many parents may be too ashamed to admit it but they have often been embarrassed by the choices that their children are making, in friends, taste or values. Their children have greater passion for wanting to change things, their children whom they took away from a cloud of danger (as Nigeria was presented to them) now want to come back home. Having met and mixed up with children of the high and mighty, some of them now wonder how their parents have made their money. They are questioning how and why they have so many cars, why their homes in the villages have bore holes that are locked up 358 days in a year. They cannot understand how and why their parents have the only sign of light in the entire village. They cannot understand how and why their parents refuse to help their community. They are revolting against the choices that their parents have made and now, they resent the village because it stirs their consciences. So, rather than inherit the gargantuan edifices that daddy has built, they are saying they want to go to Afghanistan, Darfur, Somalia, where people are suffering. They know they cannot save the world, but they are determined to do something. Rather than have something as their parents planned, they now want to be something, to do something. Their idealism is personal and not based on their father's name and influence. Some of them will come to resent their parents and their avaricious and conspicuous display of wealth. It is this generation that I am thinking about. It is this generation that I believe will ask Why can we not feed ourselves, Why can we not provide medical guarantees for our children? Their parents were concerned with the How things were; now this new Power Elite will be concerned with Why things should be this way. It is this revulsion that will lead to a sense of moral revulsion which will drive the need for a new society.

As I end, let me again repeat myself. The Power Elite I am agitating for will have to be sustained by ideas and a common set of values away from the stranglehold of regionalism, religion and ethnicity which have turned governance in Nigeria into an exercise in hostage taking. The failure of the current band of elites in Nigeria is due to their ideological dissonance. They have no common belief except the outright stealing and accumulation of state resources. They have had no vision beyond their immediate family navel. As such, no policy in Nigeria is free from the gaze of their narrow pigeon holes. Retire military officers who have held public office so that they may not contaminate the political pool as Obasanjo did in 1999 and you are labeled as a hater of a region. Bring in a few competent people who are outside their religious or regional power loop( as Obasanjo did with appointing Ministers or Army Chiefs for the first time from say, the non Muslim minorities Southern Kaduna in Kaduna State who, since 1967 had never represented their state) and they accuse you of hating their region or a religion. Try to re-organise the Civil Service (as President Yar'adua is doing) and you will be accused of neither being a good believer or a defender of the region!

Yet, both their region and religion are actually a mask that they wear in managing their fluid identities for negotiation. One day it wears region, another day it wears religion or class. They have led us for the last fifty years and look where they have led us to. Unless these seeds fall on the ground and die, a new Nigeria will not be born. My conclusion is that we must begin as we prepare for our 50th anniversary, to explore how we might compose a Power Elite devoid of either claims of gerontocracy, autocracy or feudal pedigree. The new Power Elite will be driven by their mind, not the blood group.  Please, again, disabuse your mind of the thoughts that I am proposing the Power Elite as being some kind of an evil Mafia cast in the mould of those characters who are the subjects of such best selling Mafia films as; The God Father, Scarface, The Leopard, The Freshman, The Untouchables, The Sopranos or The Good Fellas.

Finally, this rather incoherent rambling must come to an end. I believe that the ascent of President Obama is the quintessential expression of the kind of Power Elite I am making a case for. No one imagined that anyone could be a President of the United States without being a White Anglo Saxon Protestant, WASP. And we must add Male too. That is how it had been for over two hundred years.

The world has been trying to explain the Obama phenomenon. But, like all good things, they explanations can never be exhausted. This is the beauty of it all. He broke all the fraudulent rules that had existed for over 200 years. Luckily, we don't have to wait that long to explode our own myth. A Power Elite does not have to be a gathering of old men and women in smoke filled rooms, though experience counts. We have argued that a Power Elite has to have the capacity to peddle influence and do it in such a way and manner that they can attract citizen willing compliance. It is clear that a Power Elite has to identify the flash points of history and build on them. Every Power Elite emerges from the shoulders of great men and women devoid of narrow interests. This is why I agree with the anecdotal expression that was popularized during the swearing in of President Obama. It said: Rosa Parks sat so that the Rev King could walk. Rev King walked so that Obama could run. Obama has run so that our children could fly!

To return to good old Bernard Shaw, I am contemplating the emergence of a new Power Elite from the ashes of the men and women of yesterday. And, of course if you ask me, Why I feel so uncritically patriotic, I ask you, Why Not? My confidence is based not on the present but on the future Power Elite that will emerge. It will help if you are part of the vigil. Let the emerging Power Elite quicken their steps. There is a country for us to build. And, we pose the good old challenge, If not us, Who? If not now, When? Roll your sleeves compatriots. Have a happy celebration and God bless the fatherland.


* Vicar General,
Archdiocese of Kaduna.

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Toyin Falola
Department of History
The University of Texas at Austin
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USA
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http://www.toyinfalola.com/
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