Remapping the Nation: National Boundaries and Normative Bounds – by Tatalo Alamu

“A nation is defined by its normative bounds and not its territorial boundaries.”

Mapping the realm: The Architecture of governance

AS Nigerians, we live in unusual and ethically challenged times. The old moral compass with which the various nationalities that make up contemporary Nigeria negotiated politically turbulent waters and inclement weather has disappeared in the crucible of time and enforced evolution. Rather than being seen as politically primitive and backward looking, the political charter and memoranda of association of some of these people bespeak a sophistication and sensitivity to social nuances which would have been the envy of the most socially and politically advanced societies in the world.

But within the context of a multi-national nation-state, such ethical apparatuses have lost their power and efficacy. With nothing to replace them except the faint promise of modernity, the falcon no longer hears the falconer, and anarchy beckons.

Having heroically fought off a creeping military despotism, the people of Nigeria have suddenly found themselves trapped in the murky waters of the Bermuda Triangle of ethical voidance. But rather than despairing and becoming despondent, this should be seen as one more manifestation of what is known as the cunning of history, as one more challenge in the march to authentic nationhood.

There is no deus ex machina, and no one is coming to solve the problem for us. There cannot be a more auspicious time to determine the ethical destiny and destination of the country. Therefore if the very idea of territorial boundaries and normative bounds within the context of  governance and democratisation  sound quaint and anomalous, let this serve as a pointer to the urgency of the matter at hand.

The question may be asked: Why should we be talking about bounds and boundaries when we should be addressing the seemingly more pressing issues of electoral reforms, grass root empowerment, political rascality among the ruling class, devolution of power, local government restructuring, the regulation of political parties within the context of economic deregulation, the flagrant monetisation of politics within the ambit of accelerating general poverty of Nigerians, and the ethnic census that often goes by the name of voting in post-colonial Africa?

Having heroically fought off a creeping military despotism, the people of Nigeria have suddenly found themselves trapped in the murky waters of the Bermuda Triangle of ethical voidance.”

There can be no doubt that all these are urgent and pressing national issues. Yet a closer and deeper look however suggests that they are a mere political sub-text, a superstructure masking a deeper political structure— or lack of it.

The problem with solving Nigeria’s problems lies in an enduring fascination with symptoms rather than the actual disease, and a tendency to put the cart before the horse. It is important then to put the endemic crisis of governance and democratisation in a proper perspective and order.

Thus whether the problems manifest as a malfunctioning post-military polity, whether they appear as a nation-crippling ailment, whether they are pathologies signalling the imminent miscarriage of the democratic process, or whether they combine to make the nation itself unworkable or democratically ungovernable in the last instance, they must be seen for what they truly are: the symptoms of a greater disease.

Consequently, while political actors quarrel and wrangle about zoning, rotational presidency, open ballot, power shift etc, the wise men and  women of the country must remain focused on the total picture and its structured nuances which often elude gladiators in the heat and passion of the political arena but which ultimately condition and colour the nature of success in the same field. Any scheming, power-obsessed maniac may plot to preside and perpetuate himself in a technically failed state but, in the end, such efforts are bound for the footnote of history.

A nation, just like the democratic project, is a permanent work in progress. There is no ideal democracy anywhere in the world, and nation-building is a continuous process which can only terminate when the nation-state paradigm itself mutates into something else. And has history has shown, this itself can never be a globally uniform affair.

But the democratic and nation-building projects presuppose a firm and durable foundation on which to build upon. Just as the building of a house does not conclude with the procurement of an architectural plan, the occupation of a territorial space does not a nation make. It is a mere declaration of nation-building intent. Indeed where that occupation is forcibly undertaken and against the fundamental will of the constituting people, where the occupation produces a potentially explosive cocktail, the visionary prowess and imaginative gifts of the leaders are often tested to the limit.

The problem with solving Nigeria’s problems lies in an enduring fascination with symptoms rather than the actual disease, and a tendency to put the cart before the horse”

The preliminary conclusion from the above is that a nation’s territorial integrity is not an eternal given, bound as it is by historical and social circumstances. Without normative bounds, there can be no national boundaries. A nation without normative bounds may have national boundaries but it is only a territorial space waiting for more serious claimants with a superior project.

The history of the modern nation-state is replete with nations that have disappeared, nations without accompanying states and states pretending to rule over non-existent nations. Each is a macabre fiction often enacted over the biblical sufferings and agonies of captive people. What then are the normative bounds without which there cannot be said to be a nation? To answer the question, we must first address what constitutes a nation in the first instance.

CONSTITUTING THE NATION

When the Nigerian authorities recently conceded a substantial portion of the Bakassi Peninsula in accord with the World Court ruling, they wittingly or unwittingly exploded certain myths with which succeeding Nigerian rulership have constantly negotiated the Nigerian nation and which ironically betray the limited resources of creative nation-building available to Nigeria’s post-independence ruling elite.

First, the myth that the territorial integrity of Nigeria is a sacred, sacrosanct and inviolable given. Second, the myth that Nigeria is created by an act of divine will. Finally, the myth that Nigeria was created for its inhabitants and not an arbitrary act of colonial masters who had acquired the military power and coercive means to territorialize and de-territorialize Africa at will at a particular point in her history.

The World Court ruling itself remains an affront to natural justice as it rubbishes the very notion of social, economic and political kinship. Yet not to have acceded to the verdict would have been to turn Nigeria into an international outlaw and a pariah in the comity of nations. Therefore the act of deferring ought to be commended for its statesmanlike sobriety and rectitude. But what the whole episode showcases is the continuing power and potency of the post-Westphalian nation-state paradigm, the vice-grip of its ultimate consolidators and why Africa remains a fundamental hostage to political misfortune.

But there is also a sense in which the World Court ruling could be seen as a manifestation of the failure of the Nigerian nation, of its stunted and atrophied institutions, of its aborted destiny as a haven and a Mecca for black people, and of its swift descent into a hell-hole on earth.  Success has many fathers but failure is a forlorn orphan.

Yet in another and more philosophical sense, all nations are artificial constructs. But some are more artificial than others, particularly post-colonial nations created in the image of their colonial founders. They are nothing but flawed mirror-images of a flawed picture. In the absence of a divine decree, most nations are precariously held together by certain myths, legends and national illusions.

The very idea of a national community is a grand illusion. But without the great myth of a national community, of an imagined commonwealth of like-minded citizens and people, there can be no nation.  Such myths are strengthened by shared pains, shared national calamities, shared triumphs and a shared faith in the immanent destiny of the nation. It is from such momentous encounters that the storied core values of a nation emerge and are subsequently codified.

When the English subjects wrested the Magna Carta from King John in 1248, they commenced the normative mapping of the emerging nation-state. It was an epic journey that was to culminate via a revolution, savage wars, bloody upheavals, intellectual, spiritual and literary rebellions in full citizenship, liberal democracy and the right to free association and property.

It is to be noted that at that point, the Welsh were yet to be subjugated. Neither had the Scots been forcibly co-opted. But once incorporated, they all participated in the normative cartography and the sanctification of the grundnorm of what was to become  modern Great Britain. Over eight centuries, the territorial boundaries of the nation have gone through drastic remapping, but the normative bounds have only slowly transformed into the Rock of Gibraltar on which the British nation is founded.

Today, no one tells a British government or its ministers when and how to depart. The norm is very clear.

As the founding fathers of America sat down to give the citizens of the new nation a founding charter, they knew precisely where they wanted to take their  people: a new nation shorn of the feudal   privileges which had been the bane of the Europe of their forebears, and a new society governed by merit and innate ability.

This daring vision, a radical and revolutionary peep into the future of civilised mankind, was enacted over an America that was yet to include many of its contemporary states. They were not incorporated into a normative void. Indeed a radical American philosopher propounded the thesis that it was the manifest destiny of the new nation to bring a new type of governance and economic relations to the modern world.

At birth, Nigeria was a normative orphan. Its founding charter was the notorious ‘dual mandate’ propagated by its colonial primogenitor, Lord Fredrick Dealtry Lugard whereby the economy of the new territory was to be administered to the ‘mutual benefit’ of the colony and its metropolitan colonizers.

Embroiled in a battle to gain political control of the new nation, none of its modern founders saw the need to map the normative bounds of the emergent nation. They were all working at cross-purposes as it is usually the case with all ethnically and religiously polarised nations. For its two most paradigmatic leaders, Nigeria was at best an unworkable contraption.

Their historical memory circumscribed by the folkloric horrors of unabating ethnic wars, both Awolowo and the Sardauna saw the nation in terms of unfinished pre-colonial business. For Awo, the nation was at best a mere geographical expression. For the Sardauna, Nigeria was the mistake of 1914 and his grandfather’s filched empire.

By the time Chief Obafemi Awolowo, arguably the most intellectually endowed of them, got round to propounding his vision for a democratic and egalitarian Nigeria, it was already too late. Caught up in the political turmoil and sectarian bitterness of the time, his efforts became indistinguishable from a vote-catching gimmick rather than a normative intervention in the political process.

Not even the most radically pan-Nigerian of the whole lot, and the one who carried the least historical baggage ironically because of the lack of a centralising authority among his people, could come up with a founding order for the nation. Steeped in the political shibboleths of the American Civil Rights Movement and the liberationist African American rhetoric of America’s deep South, unwilling and unable to seize the day, Nnamdi Azikiwe could only come up with flamboyant but ultimately unhelpful tropes such as ‘economic determinism’, “political resurgimento”etc…

Immensely unaware of the irony of his own situation but acutely perceptive to the end, the grand old man of Nigerian politics would later ask for the “grundnorm” behind the infamous annulment of the June 12, 1993 presidential election. The point is that the annulment itself is a grave symptom of the absence of a normative order in the country.

Having missed the boat at its birth and inception, Nigeria has continued to flounder in a normative vacuum which is the mother of all political disorders.  Not being philosopher-kings or ethical warriors, none of the military and political leaders thrown up by the dysfunctional system could boast of the intellectual and spiritual wherewithal to provide a normative map for the nation.

Those of them who had the humility and courage to ask for intellectual assistance were too enmeshed in the desperate game of personal survival and too smart to set what would have become a fatal trap for their power project.

But as we have seen from examples from other lands, this is not just a failure of political leadership it is an elite failure in all its intellectual, philosophical, spiritual and literary ramifications. If there is no King John or an Oliver Cromwell, there has also been no Milton or a John Locke or a Thomas Beckett for that matter. A nation’s leadership is nothing but a reflection of the sum total of its political elite.

     *This article by Tatalo Alamu (a.k.a Adebayo Williams) first appeared in The Nation of June 23, 2019