Guns, Disaffection and Violence

Back in May of 2009, I wrote this blog post referencing an essay I had written (on another site) before the 2003 elections.

In that 2003 essay I expressed my concerns, my fears actually, about the convergence and combination of a number of factors, including:

(a) A rise in the smuggling of weaponry of all kinds, and sophisticated weaponry in particular, into Nigeria;
(b) A rise in the number, sophistication and variety of armed militia in the country, some of which professed to be crime-fighting "vigilance" outfits, while others bluntly averred an intent to fight for specific ethnic and religious agendas;
(c) Rising dissatisfaction in the population, and an increasing willingness among the most disheartened to grant a measure of legitimacy if not support to some of these militia. Some felt the so-called "vigilance" militia were better than the police at fightiing crime, while others felt the various secessionist and religious extremist forces would bring them the paradise on Earth (or at least a better life)that the federal republic had failed to deliver.

I don't want to go on and on about it, but back in 2003 it worried me. In the decade-and-half prior to 2003, quite a few African countries had gone from seemingly "normal" and "stable" (albeit economically, politically and socially sub-optimal) to "collapse" seemingly faster than a blink. Other countries did not exactly collapse, but did lose vast swathes of their territory to a kind of simmering semi-anarchy, to low intensity conflict, or to civil war.

Meaning no offence to anyone, or to anyone's political heroes past or present, but it occurred to me then that there had never been a time in Nigerian politics when our political leaders had shown any kind of ability to manage tensions and forestall unnecessary conflict. If anything, they liked to keep the boiling pot stirred, so we the people could waste all our time fighting each other rather than asking ourselves the important questions we have ignored since the 1950s.

Our so-called "intelligence" agencies are now and have always been a joke. They spend so much time harassing the political opponents of Any Government In Power, but produce no wortwhile pre-emptive information on domestic or external threats.

At the end of the day, violence has been recurrent in Nigeria, and the after-the-fact response is always a BRUTAL crackdown that subsumes the innocent as well as the guilty. And no one goes back to investigate why it happened, what should have done about it, and how it could have been handled better.

That biggest strength any country has in its fight for internal peace, public safety, security and political stability is its people. The citizenry give their government, and their security agencies, the kind of strategic depth that enemies of peace lack. But while the super-majority of Nigerians want peace, security and economic growth, we have grown so despairing of our country that most of us adopt an apathetic approach, unwilling to risk our selves for the greater good of the country, because we don't think the country gives a rat's ass about us.

The basic belief is if you as a citizen stand up against a militant organization of one kind or another, your fellow citizens would not stand up with you, and even if you "succeed", you would be rewarded with a government (civilian or military) that you did not want, which will inflict policies upon you that you did not approve, making your life worse than it could have been if everything was optimal in Nigeria. The average citizen believes that the outcome of any political fight in Nigeria is like flipping a coin when you know you would lose regardless of which side of the coin lands facing up. Study all of the major political battles that have taken place in Nigeria since 1970, and you would notice it is the Big Men (and a core of their most dedicated followers) doing the battling, while the rest of the country just sits out, tries to dodge any bullets and machetes that may come flying, and waits to see who will win. There are no mass movements in Nigeria; even the Nigerian Labour Congress can not claim to represent more than a fractional minority of our population.

And so there I was, ahead of the 2003 elections, worrying about all the weapons making it into the country, worrying about the rise in the number and sophistication of militia groups. And some mugu wrote back to tell me I was worrying for no reason.

I am well aware of the fact that violence has long been with us in Nigeria. The pre-colonial era was violent. The colonial era was violent. The First Republic was violent, as was the pre-Civil War and Civil War periods. And post-Civil War Nigeria has seen recurrent "communal" violence and "religious riots".

But I am uncomfortable with the surge in violence, be it from MEND in the south or the Boko Haram in the north. Major violence has broken out in Maiduguri, and Bauchi, not too long after MEND expanded their operations beyond the Niger-Delta by attacking Atlas Cove in Lagos. The Nigerian Armed Forces have been deployed in combat in the coastal regions and in the north-east but the bigger question is how we allowed ourselves get to this point in the first place. The things I was worried about during the Obasanjo Administration were not ignored; on the contrary, they were manipulated by politicians for selfish gain. I still cannot believe what the Uba brothers, Emeka Offor, Chris Ngige and Chinwoke Mbadinuju were allowed to get away with ... in broad daylight!

Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander; if you weaken state institutions so as to allow yourself to exploit the state, you should not be surprised if someone else (a "militant" for example) exploits those same weaknesses you created for his own purposes. Nigeria has a long history, dating back to the colonial and precolonial eras, of state institutions being bent and weakened to extend and protect the power of whomever happens to be the ruling class at the time. The powerful and the rich believe the institutions of state must remain hollow and insubstantial, lest they lose control, and we all have to live with the consequences.

I do not doubt Yar'Adua's sincerity in wanting to restore security in the country, but surely he realizes the election that brought him into office was fraudulent; he does not have the confidence of the populace, and is in no position to provide the "national symbol" king of leadership that rallies people to a cause. But this is so much bigger than Yar'Adua, and in fact, his rivals for the presidency are all arguably WORSE options than he is.

I don't know what came first, apathetic followership or venal leadership. Half the time I feel our leaders are a reflection of we the people. The rest of the time I think we the people act the way we do as a rational response to the leadership we have had, post-colonial, colonial and precolonial.

Leadership means looking at the big picture, at the long-term probabilities. It is not just about asking if you have garri enough for today. Our federal republic is not where it was supposed to be in 2009 is we have lacked this kind of big picture leadership. Our First Republic leaders were men who had all been born in a time when "Nigeria" really was just a British colonial expression, and I honestly do not think any of them really had a conception of what "Nigeria" was or should be beyond the fact that it existed and they wanted to govern it; we still live today without a pan-federal social contract and our constitutions are still empty technocratic rhetoric without roots in the land the documents purport to define. The colonial leaders definitely saw Nigeria a "geographical expression", some lines designating an area they ruled by force. One could argue that our precolonial rulers lacked a sense of the "big picture" too, what with their cooperation in the Trans-Atlantic and Trans-Saharan slave trades, even as it weakened and undermined their domains and eventually their independence.

It is baffling. The Nigerian Stock Exchange experienced a major slump in 2008, and the Central Bank of Nigeria under Charles Soludo expended much (perhaps too much) of our external reserves battling to protect the value of the Naira. And in the middle of all this, Aliko Dangote and Femi Otedola, dollar-billionaire businessmen with tremendous influence, have nothing better to do than childishly try to depress each other's stock. What the heck?

Here we are in 2009, and things that we could have foreseen long ago are biting us in the nyash.

Nigeria's social, political and economic leadership think they are clever, but the things they do have a tendency of producing not just the opposite of what the people want, but to a certain degree the opposite of what the Big Men want as well. All of the things that give rise to popular unrest are things that exist only because Big Men believe they can gain wealth and power if things are this way, but they end up killing the goose that is laying their golden eggs in the process. They don't want the goose dead -- a dead goose lays no eggs -- but they cannot bring themselves to doing anything other than the same tired, failed things they have been doing for decades.

But more on this later. This issue is complicated, too complicated to be conclusively discussed in a single blog post. I begin to think the purpose of this blog, and all 71 posts on it (so far) is to continually chip away at different pieces of the issue.