I have written to some degree on this blog about the need for transformative reform in the Nigerian Armed Forces. I am sure I will write more in the future, because the Armed Forces are a vital institution of the federal republic -- a vital institution that has been, and is now, dysfunctional.
As I have said elsewhere, I do NOT hate the Army. Besides, castigating 100,000 men based on the proven actions of only a few of their number is about as bad as blaming entire ethnic groups for decisions made by a multi-ethnic micro-minority. Which is sort of the point, as Army detachments are too frequently guilty of acting on the old colonial principle of "collective punishment" -- exacting revenge (if you can call it that) on entire villages or socio-cultural groups for the crimes of a relative handful of members of the group. If they were honest with themselves, the good officers and enlisted men of the Armed services would admit their organization is not what it should be.
Whatever I write in the future about the Armed Forces will not be new. Nigerians know what our Army is, and know what we all wish our Army was. I would not be telling you anything you didn't already know.
So I will aim this post at something different, at militant groups and the people who support them.
Nigerian citizens are frustrated. All of us are. We all have a certain vision of what we want our country (and our lives) to be, and the reality we are compelled to live with is nothing like the dream.
A journey of a thousand kilometres begins with the first step, however you need to have a sense of where you are going and how to get there, otherwise you will take a thousand steps in the wrong direction. This is a core issue in Nigeria, because every argument or debate about why we are not where we want to be invariably ends up sprinting in the wrong direction. And the actions we take, based on these misdirected thoughts, become a sort of self-fulfilling loop -- we ourselves create the very thing that we thought our actions were correcting, and then we use the existence of what we in fact created as proof that what we did was necessary.
Complicated? Maybe. Not really.
Ideally, Nigeria should have a strong and effective police force (civil force), and a strong and effective defence force (military force). Ideally the federal republic's citizens should be bound to each other by a social contract, and by our shared culture and spiritual faith (underneath exterior "differences" driven more by geography than anything else, our core ways of life and moral codes are the same).
We do not really have these things. But rather than work on building these things, people seem to lend their verbal (and sometimes active) support to things they perceive to be viable alternatives, or to radical/extremist/militant voices they perceive to be fighting to change things for the better.
As a consequences there is never any energy behind the battle for natural, organic, dare I say centrist/moderate reform, so it does not happen. We instead pour all of our energy into efforts that (at best) will predictably fall short of the goal, or (at worst) lead to minor and major (e.g. the civil war) catastrophes.
Some of the most cherished, most loved, most dedicatedly-supported men and movements of years past are in fact guilty of pointing our journey-of-a-thousand-steps in the wrong direction. A lot of these popular champions believed themselves to be doing the right thing, but if they had individually and collectively done things differently, Nigeria would be a different place today. I mean, we all complain that the 2007 elections were a disgrace, but it was no less so than the elections of the 1960s. The events that ultimately led to the Nigerian Civil War started in the 1950s, when the approach of Independence reoriented us away from a shared opposition to colonial rule, and towards a deep distrust of each other. In the 10+ year run up to war, the "elections" of the 1960s, federal and regional, can only be considered part of the causative chain. Nigeria started off heading in the wrong direction (towards war), and we are even now in 2009 still dealing with the aftermath of that major conflict (and the many, many minor conflicts), talkless of trying to chart a new, more proper course for the federal republic. People are more interested in pointing the finger of blame for those events, too busy looking at the trees to notice that that entire forest was problematic; much like our current socio-politics, there was almost zero possibility of optimality emerging from the "forest" that was the socio-politics of the 1950s and 1960s. ALL of the chief decision-makers made their decisions in a context in which they were unlikely, perhaps even unable, to make the decisions that would take us where we needed to go. The same holds today.
I am starting to digress.
This bit of reflective thought was sparked by something specific, by a fellow I sort of know (indirectly). A fellow who passionately supports MEND.
Now I am the first person to tell you that there is much about our federal republic that needs to be drastically changed. And the Niger-Delta, like every other region of the country, has indeed suffered neglect. There is and has always been much injustice surrounding our drilling and exporting of crude oil. And there is nothing in the contemporary politics of Nigeria to suggest that we are on a path to transformative reform, not just for the Delta but for all of us.
But is supporting a group like MEND the right way forward?
History is littered with examples of armed movements of one kind or another, that began with a holy-sounding rationale, as well as the support and adulation of the respective mass citizenry and of certain sections of the intellectual classes. Many of these entities eventually turn to organized crime, brigandage, terror against all civilians regardless of political inclination. The rest, the ones who do seize power, tend to recreate the very system they were allegedly fighting against, the only difference being the erstwhile militants take the place of the people who used to run the system before.
More often than not, the mass of citizenry who initially supported these armed movements come to regret it. As for the intellectuals, well, many of them just keep making excuses and offering explanations for why the movement is nothing like it was advertized. Some serve in the governments these former militants set up, continuing to insist that steady progress towards change is occuring, even as nothing of real substance changes at all.
This has happened all over the world. Actually, some of the biggest and best known criminal organizations on Earth started out as freedom fighters, or as militants opposing an unjust system. In a particularly unfortunate African variant, successful anti-colonial movements more or less continued the colonial system of governance, with black faces replacing white ones.
I thought about the fellow who passionately backs MEND recently, when reading about the resurfacing of information connecting Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf to Charles Taylor's National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL). Madame President Sirleaf wholeheartedly supported Charles Taylor's National Patriotic Front of Liberia in the beginning, providing money and supplies, believing it to be a force capable of freeing Liberia from the violent tyranny of the late Samuel Kanyon Doe. Alas, Taylor turned out to be worse than Doe, and Mrs Sirleaf switched sides to back LURD, a militia dedicated to overthrowing Taylor. I do not blame her really; Samuel Doe was a violent tyrant and who would not be tempted to support the only force willing to force him out? Still, what must she think of the fact that she helped bring about the regime that will forever be remembered for the "long sleave or short sleave" mutilation of Sierra Leonians via their Revolutionary United Front proxies?
This is a problem, maybe THE problem for citizens who think about bringing about reform, transformation and change. To use a simple example, I am glad the late Julius Nyerere sent in Tanzanian troops to depose the late despot Idi Amin. On the other hand, I am not so glad that the purpose of the intervention was to restore his friend, the late dictator Milton Obote. One thing led to another, and Yoweri Museveni's Patriotic Front came to power .... installing another dictatorship, albeit one marked by rigged elections.
I am not a pacifist. One of the most unfortunate truths about life on Earth is that there often (too often) comes a time when people have to fight. If there is nothing in the world that you are willing to fight for, you will end up a society of serfs, villeins, slaves and subjects. It is your willingness to stand up for your rights, violently if necessary, that enables you to have rights in the first place. It is good for leaders to be just a little bit scared of the led, to fear loss of office would follow upon any act publicly perceived as unconstitutional or tyrannic. (Of course, leaders can opt for Macchiavelian deceptions and Orwellian New Speak rather than direct coercion, but that is another story).
While I am not a pacifist, there is something to be said for the Martin Luther Kings and Mahatma Ghandis of the past, present and future. They sought to slowly and patiently build political majorities in support of their goals, rather than engage in violent campaigns. The thing with violent campaigns, small and large, is you are in control of starting it, but once it starts you are no longer in control of where it is going to go. Even so, it is hard enough to keep control of even peaceful change! What was once India would ultimately split in three on religious lines despite Ghandi's wishes; and he was assasinated because of his opposition to the split. And there is much that happened in African-American communities over the 40 years between 1968 and today that would have dismayed Dr King.
He who fails to learn from history is doomed to repeat it. The thing that worries me most about people who opt instead to support extremists and rebel militia is they do not seem to remember (or care) that the road to "failed state" designation in Africa usually passes through a critical stretch when militia of one kind or another rise up, and the official army and police lose control of swathes of territory. That is not to say that the official army and police are "good", but to say that what replaces them (the violent rule of warlords and militia) usually makes the bland stagnation of the years prior look like paradise by comparison.
It is so much easier to try to change something that is at rest, and so much more difficult to change something that is in violent, stochastic flux. And once violence crosses a threshold, the people start to prefer a restoration of Big Man rule (albeit under newly-minted, Western-powers-approved Big Men) which is usually achieved as a by-product of the peace treaties and "elections" that mark the end of the militia-consequent wars.
Positive change in Nigeria is most likely to occur if we are not in the middle of fighting each other. And the route to change lies with building a movement that patiently campaigns to build (from scratch, sadly) a large enough majority (cutting across ethnic, regional, religious and military/civilian lines) for transformative reform and change. I have spent my adult life (and to be honest, my teenage years and my latter childhood before then) hoping some sort of movement would emerge to campaign peaceably for a pro-transformation majority.
It would actually be much better if there were more than one such movement; when there is only one movement it tends to lead to a one-party state (de jure or de facto) once the old system is overthrown. Of course if there is going to be more than one movement, each would optimally be built around a particular vision of what this transformation should be or mean, as opposed to built on ethno-regional/religious pillars. As it stands, our federal republic is a place where ultra-conservative Christians and ultra-conservative Moslems agree on 95% of the issues, but would not be caught together in a single movement, an attitude that exists among all such other groups of Nigerians who should (in theory) be on the same side of any discussion about what and how to transform in Nigeria. It is part of what makes it difficult to build effective and active pan-Nigerian majorities to aggresively support anything other than the national football teams.
But I digress again.
I guess this is part of the reason I started this blog. As I said in my first blog post months ago, it doesn't matter if you agree with me on any particular issue or on any issue at all, provided we have a more substantive discussion of the issues than is usual in Nigerian political discourse. It is only in such arguments and debates that we start to discover people who share our beliefs, people who are willing to join us in fighting for particular ends.
Like Martin Luther King and Mahatma Ghandi, we have to then mobilize enough of these disparate and otherwise competing movements to rally together into a majority large enough to force change. And then these movements will have to respect each other and the citizenry enough to put their different ideas of transformation to the test in free-and-fair elections, not one "election" but a sequence of them over a critical 20-year period in which the Nigeria of today becomes the federal republic that our children and grand-children will cherish.
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