Re: Between nation space and nationhood By FIDELIS LONGBAN In addition to this, the US National Defence Council’s prediction which forecasts Nigeria’s possible break-up by 2015 has continued to feature as a buzzword in several analyses by scholars. Though the US has since made a volte face by retracting the prediction, it remains a reference-point and a pointer to the fact that the country could not have been wrongly included in a document of such sensitive nature. Over the past five decades, the country has been “revolving” and transforming itself-with subtle but dramatic changes in all spheres of life. In modern day Nigeria, we have seen efforts at “restructuring” the country by past and successive governments. Apart from the creation of states-an exercise which now leaves us with a 36-State structure with a Federal Capital Territory from the original 4 regions and 24 provinces, Nigerians have been compartmentalised into six geopolitical zones. We have transited from the aberration called military regimes to a full-fledged participatory democracy. All these experiments have been brought into play within the concept of our 60-year-old “federalism”, a political contrivance aimed at the forging of national unity on the unity-in-diversity principle. These are structural transformations and reforms which have hardly engendered the much desired national integration or addressed the problems of ethnic jingoism and ethno-religious irredentism. Deafening calls for resource control, derivation, local government autonomy, creation of more states, devolution of powers, fair revenue allocation formula, June 12 revalidation, power-shift power-rotation, electoral and judicial reforms, and in extreme cases, “secession”, amidst claims and counter-claims of marginalisation and injustice have become symptomatic of the underlying problems. Our constitution-making exercises have most often been coloured by ethnic, religious and sectional considerations rather than by the overall national interest. It is this kind of mindset that has produced a constitution which has failed to contemplate the logjam in a prolonged absence of an ailing president or governor, a country or a state held hostage by a “cabal”-a national embarrassment that can only be voided by a pressurised “doctrine of necessity”. The series of constitutional conferences and reviews from inception to date including the recent sustained calls for a Sovereign National Conference bespeak of the weariness and frustrations of some Nigerians with not only the present allegedly rickety configuration of the country but also with the shoddy manner with which our Federal arrangement is being operated by the powers-that-be. Apart from indicating that we are still searching for the best form of federalism in Nigeria; such agitations also signal the lack of faith in the various policy prescriptions aimed at pulling the country out of the woods. The degree of such doubt is such that Chief Wole Olanipekun sardonically describes Nigeria as a “country in search of a birth certificate”. This figurative pessimism appears to have driven home the point that the manner of caesarean delivery and christening of the country was abysmally defective. Some Nigerians thus see a Sovereign National Conference as a desideratum for resolving most of the so-called national questions that have continued to haunt our national psyche. A conference, whether sovereign or not, can only but present a menu of solutions or panacea for our teething problems if and only if we speak frankly towards erecting an efficacious template for national rebirth and consensus. While offering some radical opinions on the state of our federalism, some scholars like M. Y. Mangvwat are of the firm conviction that the basic problem of Nigerian federalism is best understood from the perspective of the materialist conception of history together with the incorporation of Nigeria into a dependent capitalist social formation from the mercantile, to the colonial, to the post-colonial epochs. It will suffice for me to state here that we have erected our federal structure on the American model. By the time of the war of American independence of 1776 it had become obvious to the founding fathers that only a federal arrangement would preserve the identities of each of the nationalities making up the 13 colonies under a national unity forged under the name of United states of America. Today, it is a federation of 50 states with each of them operating its constitution, deriving its powers not from the Congress but from the people of the states concerned, but in order to preserve national unity, there is no liberty of any of these states to secede from the strong Union. We are mere copycats who have refused to play by the rules of the game, and that is obviously why a president can sack a governor, or a governor can show a council chairman the way out, as he pleases. That is also why a governor can implement Sharia in his state without recourse to the constitution-the Grund-norm of the land. That is also why a president can withhold the subventions of a state for over 20 months without being sanctioned for subverting the principle of fiscal federalism. Such subversions and pervasions are not allowed in a truly federal arrangement with an established reign of law and order. Now, back to their diatribes about religion which Soyinka sees as “an enemy of the State”, I have come to learn more about the integrative role of religion and its destructive instincts, so to say. These are attributes which, to me, are based on how religion is manipulated or handled by its practitioners. I must state that, because we are incurably religious, many scholars have often evaded slamming the role of religion in the society for the fear of being branded as blasphemous or apostatic. Those who insist sometimes end up with brand-names like “radical”, “atheist”, and “anti-Christ” amidst other names. This holier-than-thou attitude has become an albatross over our necks as our vision to expose some of the ills of the society has become rather blurred. Today the rise of religious extremism as witnessed in the Boko Haram insurgency is attributed to this attitude of staying at akimbo in the face of injustice and oppression. When I cast my mind back to Yusuf Bala Usman’s “The Manipulation of Religion”, I appreciate that its theme is quite relevant to our contemporary situation. What is noticeable is the fact that the theses of Soyinka and Bala Usman on the role of religion are intertwined at least in their radical bends. According to Bala Usman “the real basis of the manipulation of religion in Nigeria today is the need to obscure from the people of Nigeria, a fundamental aspect of our reality; that it is the domination of our political economy by a class of intermediaries who are being increasingly exposed. This is to enable the class to cover themselves with religious and ethnic disguises in order to further entrench division amongst the people, slow down their awakening at any cost and even the unity of the country for which so much has been sacrificed”. There are many benefits of organised religion, but there are negative effects as well. The decades-old Catholic-Protestant war in Ireland is an example of this. The protracted Jewish/Islamic conflict in the Middle-East and the Bosnia- Herzegovina war are other examples. So many hate-crimes like the current Boko Haram insurgency in Nigeria are also anchored on the deficiency of organised religion. Why in most cases the role of religion has continued to receive oblique comments for the atrocities committed by adherents is because majority of Nigerians appear to be practicing religion and not godliness. The culprits who are often fingered for standing religion on its head are the politicians and elite who have seen religion as a strong factor for political and social mobilization. This view resonated in the perspectives of Soyinka and Bala Usman. Why religion is perceivably disintegrative in Nigeria may not be unconnected with the emergence of cultural plurality as a factor for religious diversity in Nigeria which, according to Ali Mazrui, has imposed on Nigerians and African states alike, a legacy of the “triple heritage”. In our present circumstance in Nigeria, the principles of “pan-Arabism and subsidiary” (in the words of Asemota, SAN) have taken the centre-stage in governance. Rightly or wrongly, in this country the bond between religion and society is so strong an iron-cast that separating them is a daunting task. When religion came to replace ethnicity as a more veritable tool for mobilization, some of the ethnic nationalities see the shadow of religion as a good means for causing confusion within the nation-space. I agree wholly that neither Christianity nor Islam preach violence or intolerance. The religious leaders and miscreants who misapply and misappropriate the divine messages are guilty of the mayhem that has come to be associated with religion in recent times. Let me pluck some loopholes in “Wole Soyinka’s Thesis”. He has refused to accept that, just like the literary world, the pulpit has for long been a sacred platform for hard and harsh preachment against injustice, evil, greed, avarice and naked oppression-it is on record that the church and the mosque have severally become martyred for standing on the side of truth. They have become prayer-points against many ills in the society-like bad governance, and what it stands for; and for the peace and unity of peoples. We recall the recent peace message of Pope Francis for Christians to embrace Muslims worldwide. We do not suppose that religion is the harbinger of the current trend of bad governance, injustice, bribery and corruption in Nigeria. My view against Kuka’s claim about the role played by religion in some countries towards the dethronement of bad governments could be couched in these simple questions: what has become of these entities today? And what has become of the initial religion-inspired nationalist aspirations in those countries? Naked oppression and injustice have returned to Iran after Khoemeini; disintegration along social and economic lines has already dissolved the Soviet Union; and South Africa is also reeling under the yoke of corruption and rampant cases of rape. In this vein, the simple reason is that the role which religion had set out to play in the reformation and transformation of these countries was not sustained.
Posted on: Sun, 27 Oct 2013 12:08:19 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015