In Europe and Asia ....
.... if you permit a brief digression, are "Europe" and "Asia" really separate continents? There is but one "Eurasian" landmass, and if you are going to carve out the European peninsula because it has a separate history and culture from the rest of the landmass, why would you then combine West Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Central Asia and East Asia, all of which are as cultural distinct from each other as they are from "Europe"?
Okay, back to the point.
In Europe and Asia there came a time when the "republican" idea of government clashed with the extant fact of "monarchist" government. Some places became constitutional monarchies, preserving the monarchs as symbolic heads of state while investing all real power in prime ministers. Other places became republics, and their respective royal families disappeared, some into poverty and oblivion, others in relative wealth; a few still use the royal titles they would have inherited as part of their formal names.
In the Americas and Australia, the brutal (lets be honest) invasion of Europeans essentially wrecked existing systems of government entirely. There are countries in the Americas where the majority of the population are indigenous or "mestizo", but any relationship to the systems of government that preceded the colonial invasion are tenuous as near as I can tell.
In Africa it was different.
I am tempted to launch into a speech about colonialism, but this is not the place for that. Suffice to say the apparatus of European colonialism in Africa was a thin crust placed on top of much older, unchanged structures of culture, tradition and identity.
Outside a handful of colonies, there were never that many Europeans (and Asians) in colonial Africa, and the colonial armies, comprised mostly of Africans with very, very few European officers (statistically speaking) were not particularly large either. The British used the term "Indirect Rule" in Nigeria a few other colonies, to describe the process of coopting tradtional governance institutions to supplement the microscopic bureaucracy of the colonial state, but even those European imperial powers who professed to be exercising "direct rule" oveer subjugated peoples had at best tenuous control of vast regions of their colonies beyond certain administrative and trading centres.
To make a long story short, most of Africa never really had the "republicanism" versus "monarchism" debate. In North Africa (Egypt for example) and East Africa (Ethiopia) monarchist dynasties were brought down in favour of republics; in Morocco, the royal dynasty continues to wield de facto and de jure executive power. Elsewhere in Africa, however, the nature of the colonial state, grouping as it did several previously separate and independent entities, left the post-colonial state with a political inheritance that was the hierarchical reverse of the "constitutional monarchy" compromise of Europe.
Where the European monarch became a ceremonial figure who ostensibly sat atop the entirety state as its overall figurehead, the African monarch became a ceremonial figue restrictive to a specific region within the state.
The "President" of the post-colonial African state inherited all of the powers previously held by the European colonial governor, without reform; the European governor was never subject to the people of the colonial state in any democratic, legislative or representative sense, was not accountable to them, did not answer to them, did not tolerate opposition, and did not hesitate to deploy the colonial army and police to destroy any hints of disobedience, protest or "sedition".
The colonial state also coopted our tradtional systems of government, deposing chiefs who did not toe their line, and imposing willing puppets who sometimes were even more zealous about imposing colonial diktat than the colonialists themselves. This too continued into the post-colonial era.
Don't misunderstand me. I am not blaming European colonialism for all of our problems. To be honest, if we didn't have serious problems to begin with, we wouldn't have been so easily conquered by what were relatively small colonial armies (nor would we have been held down in subjugation for quite so long). But this is an entirely different, more controversial conversation. No, I talk about colonialism because much of what constitutes the formal structures of our post-colonial African states are continuations of what existed in colonial times.
To use an admittedly simplistic metaphor, any conversation about the Nigerian judicial system (complete with the funny white wigs) begins with the judicial system imported by the colonial authorities, and not with precolonial Nigeria. It is true that we still practice traditional systems of justice (in my hometown, for example, "land cases" are still decided in a modernized version of the old ways), but much like our traditional monarchies, these traditional judicial systems have been subordinated to the system imposed by the British. In fact, much as our economies have "formal" and "informal" sectors, traditional rulers and traditional justice have become "informal".
As I stated earlier, our pre-colonial, traditional systems of government were not perfect, and some of the pre-colonial governance problems have recurred in post-colonial Africa. We were behind on technology in the pre-colonial days, and paid the penalty for it, when simple military technologies deployed by the European exposed just how obsolete our military tactics were. It is 2010, and we are still technologically behind, and probably wouldn't be able to defend ourselves if NATO or something launched another colonial war. For some reason our political, economic and socio-cultural leaders feel threatened by the prospect of an educated, informed citizenry. It doesn't help that they simply continued the "Bantu Education" systems of the colonial era (to borrow a South African phrase), systems designed to produce complacent bureaucrats happy to occupy the lower rung of colonial administration and not to produce entrepreneurial innovators (who were as threatening to European colonialism as they were to pre-colonial and post-colonial African leaders).
I digress.
The point is we have to come to some sort of decision on what we are going to do with our traditional rulers.
I am very uncomfortable with the nature of traditional government in post-colonial Nigeria. The way their predecessors worked for British colonialism in the days of Indirect Rule is reflected in the way many of them continue to be sycophants for whoever or whatever happens to be the government of the day. On the other hand, they really have no choice; any sign of disobedience, and the post-colonial government will simply depose and replace them with a more pliable character, same as the British used to do.
The best among them are skilled at walking the fine line between being the one thing and being the other, managing to stay in place and do some good without getting on the nerves of whoever happens to be in government at the time. But that raises the question, should they be subject to the power of whoever is in government in the first place? And if they are not, what should we construct as the constitutional rights/roles/privileges/checks/limitations/balance/etc for the institutions of traditional governance?
This brief rant was prompted by this newspaper article. Zamfara State Governor Aliyu Shinkafi was the political "godson" and protege of his immediate predecessor, ex-Governor (now Senator) Ahmed Sani Yerima; after two terms in office, Yerima "engineered" the transfer of his office to Shinkafi. This being the Fourth Republic, an era characterized by serial betrayals by godsons of their godfathers, and consequent, incessant (and violent) fighting between erstwhile godsons and godfathers, Shinkafi turned against Yerima, and even went so far as abandoning the ANPP for the PDP (taking with him his faction of the ANPP).
The Daily Trust article says Governor Shinkafi suspended the Emir of Bakura, alleging "misappropriation of the emirate's funds". The Emir in question is Bello Mohammed Sani, the older borther of Shinkafi's rival and nemesis, Ahmed Sani Yerima.
It is not a coincidence. It is probably not a coincidence that Bello Sani is Emir of Bakura; without doing any research on the matter, I am willing to bet he was appointed Emir by his younger brother. A similar situation has been unfolding in Borno State, where Governor Ali Modu Sheriff has been accused of creating new emirates in order to make his father an emir while simultaneously weakening the power of an emir (of Dikwa) who was not a political acolyte of the governor.
And before anyone comes up with the usual bigotry regarding the north of Nigeria, you should visit my hometown in the southern half of the country, where a chieftaincy dispute has left two halves of the town as politically polarized as North and South Korea, almost literally. During the Second Republic, the entire region around the town was "controlled" by an opposition party, relative to the party that "controlled" the state. The state governor saw an excellent opportunity to sow confusion in the opposition stronghold, declared his support for one of the rival chiefs, and (I kid you not) split the town in two, creating a new "autonomous" town loyal to the governor. It is now 2010, and the 30-year-long argument is still going on; the "real" town and the "autonomous" town have taken each other to court three times over the decades. It is ridiculous.
But back to Zamfara.
Look, this is Nigeria. And this is Zamfara. The fact is, ex-President Olusegun Obasanjo was able, through Nuhu Ribadu's EFCC, to blackmail then-Governor Ahmed Sani Yerima into supporting the Obasanjo administration's plans for the 2007 Elections, specifically the plan to impose the now late then-Katsina Governor Umaru Yar'Adua on Nigeria as Obasanjo's successor. The thing about the Obasanjo administration's arm-twisting is Ribadu was able to threaten targets for extortion with legitimate prosecution, because they were in fact corrupt. Forget for a second that the Obasanjo administration was itself corrupt, and that the political machines that backed Obasanjo were even more corrupt, and focus for a second on the fact that Yerima quickly caved to the pressure, for fear that he would be exposed as a hypocrite ... a man who preached Sharia in the daylight, but who robbed the people of Zamfara at night.
I do not know whether the Emir of Bakura misappropriated emirate funds, and I do not trust the objectivity of any investigative panel created by Governor Shinkafi, but it is more than possible the allegations are true. But even if they are true, remember Ribadu's selective, political-extortion-masked-as-corruption-fighting did nothing to change the culture of corruption in Nigeria, and didn't even make a dent in the record levels of corruption witnessed during the mini-Oil-Boom of the early 2000s. In like fashion, if a state governor is only interested in corruption, if it helps him get rid of his rival's brother, it is not likely to change the state's economic losses due to corruption, since you only need be an acolyte of the governor for the governor to tolerate, protecte and even share in your graft (as did Obasanjo and the Big Men that backed him, while Ribadu pretended not to see).
But here is the thing.
Forget for a second the (possible) corruption. And forget for a second the politics.
As a constitutional principle, do we really want our Emirates and other traditional governance structures to be subject to this kind of ridiculous decision-making? Governors making their brothers and fathers Emirs? Governors dethroning the "royal" brothers of politicians they are in dispute with? Governors creating "autonomous" towns with "autonomous" warrant chiefs for purely political purposes?
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