Sitting calmly under a coconut tree and drinking fresh and delicious coconut water at Elmina Bay Resort in Central Ghana, I very much enjoyed Femi Orebe's "Lest Nigeria Stray Into War". Saadly, it did remind me of another prophetic piece I read (as Ghanaian Journalist working in Nigeria and UK, respectively), indeed before the beginning of Nigeria's catastrophic civil war. That published column was titled, "Before Darkness Falls."
In my legendary Baba Ijebu's vernacular, is Orebe's current piece, akin to "Before Darkness Falls", a doomsayer's prediction? I hope not because, given the state of daunting economic affairs in basically all West African nations, spearheaded by unemployment of our highly-educated youth, war is not needed. As a Nigerian at heart, I am wondering if our Nigerian brothers and sisters are not proud that the young-and-fast-groweing Nigerian fedmale writer (Adichi) is the only black female face among the 15 notable or impactful females, whose effigies (or photos) grace the cover of the bumper Vogue edition being edited by the Duchess of Suxess?
When the honored Nigerian female writer (Adichi), a successful novelist and commentator, signed one of her books for my family and me at University of Oregon, my spouse and I attended her event (co-sponsored by my wife's office), where Adichi extolled and lamented the passing of Professor Chinua Achebe, whom she also described as a generous mentor.
"This is a future Nobel Literature Laureatye-in-the-making!" We concluded in unison. So, as Baba Ijebu would have counselled: Let our Nigerian brothers jaw-jaw, but not war-war!! After all, war -- civil war or otherwise --is not a pretty business.
A.B. Assensoh.
---------------------------------------------------------
Sent: Monday, July 29, 2019 4:23 AM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com; Femi Orebe
Subject: [External] USA Africa Dialogue Series - LEST NIGERIA STRAY INTO WAR-Femi Orebe
Lest Nigeria stray into war
In Nigeria today, it is increasingly looking like: to your tents
O Israel, with challenges daily mushrooming.
Re your last week article: Rwandan genocide: Elementary lessons of history. The historical account you gave on what triggered the First World War, and what culminated in the Rwandan genocide, are as scary as they are frightening. And it requires no extra-sensory perception to know how indicative they are of what may befall Nigeria if President Buhari remains undecided as to the way out of the near implosion in our country – Emmanuel Egwu.
In Nigeria today, it is increasingly looking like: to your tents O Israel, with challenges daily mushrooming. In vain have I severally made the point that nation building is not a sprint, but a marathon. While my listeners claim to understand this, they say emphatically that the various ethnic groups are not equally yoked, and that there is no level playing field in respect of anything. Not one of them has failed to mention President Buhari's seeming disdain for restructuring. Tell them he has already proclaimed his love for true federalism and you are promptly asked what one move he has made in that direction since, or whether the report of his party's El Rufai Committee on Power Devolution is not already dead and buried; even though a central part of the APC's manifesto?
Add to that the continuing murderous and kidnapping activities of the Fulani herdsmen and the idea of a Ruga settlement, which not a few see as indicative of Fulani expansionism, and you become seized of why literally every ethnic group looks poised for a break up of Nigeria.
This past week, I had the privilege of being invited by the Afenifere Renewal Group (ARG) to give a pre – meeting talk and bad as things are, I remained sanguine enough, to make the theme of that talk a total disdain for war in Nigeria or dismemberment of any kind.
I underpinned that optimism on a few fundamentals one of them being the fact that even in the Southwest , where this has become very trenchant, of late with some of our most important Obas weighing in, and the Egbe Omo Oduduwa, having in their hands, a draft Yoruba constitution preparatory to what it calls a Constitutional Re-Negotiation of Nigeria, (the Igbos are actually ahead in this respect), it is not as if Yorubas did not once see the possibility of President Buhari's emergence further cohering the country. Wrote Professor (Senator) Banji Akintoye, unarguably Afenifere's most cerebral chieftain, at a point: "Now that the most solid group of our (Southwest) leaders in the partisan political arena have selected Gen. Buhari as presidential candidate (with our brother, Yemi Osinbajo, as his running mate), we have a task to do. Buhari is a very capable, highly disciplined, and resolutely focused man. If he wins, he will be a much more competent, and much more principled, president than Jonathan has been in the past five years. But how good his presidency will be for Nigeria and for our own nation in Nigeria will depend on the directions he chooses to go. Without doubt, he will suppress corruption, indiscipline and inefficiency in public life – and that will be great. But that would be insufficient. Corruption, indiscipline and inefficiency can easily be revived after his presidency – as they were after his brief and impactful military presidency in the 1980s. But if he helps to restructure our federation properly, puts Nigerians back to work by investing heavily in the development of economic efficiency and the promotion of enterprise, he would have changed the direction and destiny of Nigeria for the better – and unchangeably. I am not trying to push any partisan direction; but we do have here a very good candidate and running mate, and I believe we have the duty to help make their thrust as good as possible for Nigeria and for our own nation and all Nigerian nations. We need to find ways to achieve this effect."
You would hardly ever see my teacher more glowing than that, but only this past week, he was among the eminent Afenifere elders, literally on the barricades, demanding that Fulani herdsmen leave Yoruba land; similar to what Nigerians have not stopped berating the Northern Elders Forum (NEF) for. Put that to abridged hopes.
In his article captioned 'Egbe Omo Yoruba and the Nigerian Project', Segun Gbadegesin, a Professor of Philosophy , wrote: "In Failed State 2030: Nigeria- A Case Study, a 2011 Occasional Paper No. 67 by Colonel Christopher Kinnan and others of the Air War College, USA, the authors noted that in a 2007 Failed State Index, "with the largest population in Africa and a top-20 economy, (Nigeria) was ranked 17th most likely to fail" on a list of 148 countries. It is a dire assessment of the state of the nation. But there are, he notes, more notable points in the study.
First, the factors that the authors identify as conducive to state failure include "an uneven economic and social development; a failure to address group grievances; and a perceived lack of government legitimacy." All three are unfortunately as Nigerian as our national anthem".
Second, in 2011, the study notes that "the youth bulge in Nigeria may swap roles from productive laborers to disaffected rebels in the next two decades." In 2019, we are already witnessing widespread banditry, kidnapping, armed robbery, and cultism by rebellious youths.
Zamfara surely takes the cake.
Third, the authors suggest that a state that fails may require up to 56 years to recover, or it may actually never recover.
Fourth, a failed state is a threat to the survival and prosperity of ethnic-nationalities. Therefore, when a multinational state like Nigeria fails, even the quest of ethnic-nationalities for independence may not be realised. So much then for the drumbeats of war and our passion for ending it all so we could go our separate ways".
Gbadegesin, who you can never accuse of being a spring chicken then wrote further: "What does this all mean for our present heightened political rhetoric? First, another civil war is not an option simply because it will not end well for any zone. 2019 is not 1967. To borrow an analogy from the study authors, our china plate is so full of many cracks now that allowing it to drop on a hard floor will lead to many broken pieces".
So what to do to turn back from this road to Golgotha?
For both President Buhari, and the ruling party, but more for the president and his Southwest party chieftains, who apparently no longer talks about restructuring or even Power Devolution, their job is already well cut out beginning with a serious return to the recommendations of the El Rufai Committee on Power Devolution. They can no longer delay if they did not set out, ab initio, to deceive Nigerians, nor can the president now renege on his panegyrics to true federalism which he sang right there on national television.
Like them, I consider the Jonathan 2014 national conference which the party disavowed of ab initio, opportunistic being, primarily, a decoy to help the sitting president wangle two more years, and ensure his electoral victory in the Southwest, both of which failed. I cannot, by any means, suggest that President Buhari should implement the recommendations of a conference the convener washed his hands off as soon as it failed to achieve the promises made by Afenifere, its promoters.
However, President Buhari should now rapidly involve the entire nation in improving the El Rufai committee recommendations which key segments in the South South, the Bayelsa State governor, Seriake Dickson, inclusive, commended. A summit, in manageable numbers, as against the usual jamborees, but representing every section of Nigeria, should now be convoked to thoroughly interrogate, and significantly, improve on the recommendations. At the same time, the National Assembly should be encouraged to pass relevant laws to emplace a referendum to which the final recommendations should be submitted for ratification by the entire citizenry.
Conjunctively, President Buhari should rejig the country's security apparatti and do everything within his powers to rein in the murderous activities of kidnappers, bandits and criminals of whatever hue. In particular, he must show that ethnic considerations does not influence his actions on Fulani herdsmen/ kidnappers who, truth be told, and going by the testimony of almost all kidnapped persons who were lucky to tell their own story, are responsible for no less than eight out of 10 kidnaps. The president should have by now been briefed that literally all Nigerian ethnic groups are now discussing how to be free of this Fulani herdsmen's menace.
These, in my view, are the irreducible tasks confronting the president while ensuring that the economy, poverty reduction and alleviation, youth employment, infrastructural development, health, education and agriculture, are not left behind.
I am sure the president needs not be told that Nigeria is on Tenterhooks.
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue+subscribe@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/CAE0NUSZW5twA5a_r62i_h0Q5fZAmaSO5kvnUNNnZ8rvdpjTJNw%40mail.gmail.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment