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

Normative bounds are the absolute ethical and moral limits a nation sets for itself; the irreducible minimum standards required in the conduct of political business; the core values which set the frontiers for the behaviour of political elite accompanied by the institutionalisation of a culture of “naming and shaming” and the entrenchment and enthronement of a patrolling force which metes out punishment to transgressors with abstract and impersonal rigour.

Without such normative bounds, the nation continually trips and eventually topples into the abyss of moral and political degeneracy such as we are witnessing in contemporary Nigeria. In the absence of such a delimiting map anything goes, the most outlandish acts of political and economic brigandage are possible; the most impossible political fiction becomes actual reality in what has metamorphosed into a Kafkaesque penal colony.

….there are disquieting signals that the ordinary people are beginning to see through the smokescreen of elite chicanery. As this apocalyptic momentum proceeds apace, the danger to democratic governance cannot be over-emphasized.”

The people retreat from the sledgehammer of a malignant state into the fatal embrace of spiritual merchants and other parasitic profiteers masquerading as religious leaders. It is a war of all against all, and there is no comfort zone or refugee camp.

But history waits for no nation. The irony of it all is that while Nigeria continues to wallow in the abyss of unfulfilled nation-states, its original founders are moving in another direction. Having used up the resources of their colonial creations to consolidate authentic nationhood and establish a unique identity as the bearers of modern civilisation, they are now deploying the forces of globalisation in another direction: the post-national frontier.

While post-colonial Africa remains a weak and degraded object of history without a say in its destiny or destination as opposed to a history-making subject, the nations of Europe are moving towards a supra-nationality which curtails a tendency to national fascism even as the United States is being slowly transformed before our very eyes into an empire in denial.

Yet as we have seen with the example of the Asian Tigers, the nation-state remains the most potent site of resistance to this new imperialism, the most powerful countervailing force against modern serfhood. But Africa is again a passive spectator in a great historical drama. Being the most potentially powerful conglomeration of black people on earth, if Nigeria does not get it right, Africa may have already lost out again in the new millennium. This is why the fate of Nigeria is too serious a business to be left in the hands of professional Nigerians.

THE NATION AS A NO MAN’S LAND

As it is currently constituted and governed, Nigeria is a normative no man’s land; a classic example of ethical disorder. In the final analysis, there are no failed nations, only failed states. Except for the odd border skirmishes, Nigeria has not fought any external war to revalidate its territorial integrity.

Yet since independence, its internal borders have been permanently and often violently contested. A civil war, a paradigm shifting coup attempt and a history-defining minority rights movement have tried to violently redraw its borders, and this is not to talk of countless social, political and religious upheavals. All have ended with Nigeria foaming in blood.

Without normative bounds, preserving Nigeria’s national boundaries is an exercise in futility, and only divine luck has carried the nation thus far. But there are grave signals that even divine luck has its elastic limits.

Internally, the authority and legitimacy of the state and its monopoly over the instruments of compliance are being contested by the menace of sophisticated armed robbery, armed insurgency in the Delta region and a slew of ethnic militias. Politically, the hallowed space of the modern state and its fabled secularity is being disputed by the phenomenon of politicized Sharia and its attendant international concern.

The political terrain is as murky and muddied as ever. The absence of a normative order has occasioned the rise of individuals whose sum total appears to be greater than the sum total of the state itself, a modern political absurdity if ever there is any and a negation of the very notion of the state. These individuals annul national elections with impunity, abduct or murder state officials with alacrity, rig elections with audacity and raid the national treasury with tenacity.

Before them the state is prostrate and the nation is powerless. A noted sociological analysis has spoken of two publics in Nigeria: the one a pre-modern space still regulated by traditional authority and its enduring code of conduct, the other a postmodern Pandora Box of ethical mayhem teeming with felons and amoral zealots.

To these we must now add a third public: the privatised public: a transvaluator  of values in which all manner of social obscenities are foisted on the nation. This is the realm of national contagion, of a pan-Nigerian pandemic in which corruption and graft have assumed a transnational efficiency, in which tribe and tongue may differ but greed and gluttony do not; a rainbow cartel of influential crooks and criminals. Having closed off the Nigerian state and barricaded themselves in, the cartel members have hung up the notice: “eating in permanent progress”.

We are dealing with not just a failure of leadership but also a collapse of the political elite. There are no tyrants without those willing to be tyrannised over, and there are no dictators without those willing to be dictated to. No one has misruled Nigeria without the active collaboration of the dominant sectors of the political elite and the larger society: intellectuals, leading journalists, religious leaders, traditional rulers, student leaders etc.”

Any wonder then that the larger society is characterised by widespread insecurity of life and property, lawlessness and arbitrariness and the political space permanently overheated with no credible order of succession, no credible election, no credible party, no credible mechanism for effective change of political guard and no credible and effective alternative? The crisis of democratic governance in Nigeria is also the crisis of core values.

In the absence of a normative order, political disorder is the order. It can now be seen from the foregoing that the threat to the territorial integrity of Nigeria is internal rather than external. One cannot talk about territorial boundaries in the absence of normative bounds.

The endemic crisis of nationhood in Nigeria underwrites the crisis of democratic governance. Any solution to the latter, be it power shift, rotational presidency, one term tenure, etc, is a futile and feeble whistling in the dark without a solution to the former. A closed state hermetically sealed from normative restructuring has open borders. What then is to be done?

TOWARDS A NORMATIVE MAP FOR NIGERIA.

It has been observed that the first time intellectuals attempted to change the world rather than interpret it, the result was a tragedy of world-historic proportions. But this cannot preclude reasoned arguments and the proffering of solutions. The unexamined life is not worth living. The first urgent national task before committed Nigerians is also a humanitarian service to the Black race.

How do we dislodge those who have closed off the Nigerian state and barricaded themselves in before they eat themselves to death or expire at the banquet of self-engorgement without fouling up the entire nation? How do we obtain restitution and remission from them without appearing to cut off our nose to spite our face? If they are to be put on trial for contributing to the economic and political adversity of the nation, we are likely to run into an ethical conundrum.

We are dealing with not just a failure of leadership but also a collapse of the political elite. There are no tyrants without those willing to be tyrannised over, and there are no dictators without those willing to be dictated to. No one has misruled Nigeria without the active collaboration of the dominant sectors of the political elite and the larger society: intellectuals, leading journalists, religious leaders, traditional rulers, student leaders etc.

The list is long and lengthy. If anybody is to be tried for contributing to the economic and political adversity of the nation, a case can also be made for arraigning those who have contributed to the intellectual, spiritual and cultural adversity of the nation. Here, we are likely to encounter the Kigali impasse in which the prisons cannot contain the accused.

Yet somewhat and somehow, the national will must be summoned to deal effectively with the pandemic of graft and official banditry. Being the product of a corrupt and utterly corrupting electoral process, the current dispensation cannot logically and politically be expected to transcend its own origins and antecedents without provoking a calamitous backlash from the very forces that ensured its ascendancy in the first instance.

They should accept our sympathies. But this raises the fundamental poser as to whether corruption can be clinically eliminated under the current paradigm of democratic governance foisted on the nation by a military oligarchy in disarray and disorderly retreat.  He who comes to equity must come with unsoiled hands, since no straight furniture can be made from crooked timber.

This is where the profound moral difficulties facing the current government in its anti-corruption drive must be contextualised and appreciated. But what must not be condoned is the government’s recourse to ad hoc and arbitrary measures in dealing with corruption. The current efforts are too unsystematic and haphazard to satisfy the yearnings of average Nigerians for equity and social justice.

At best they could lead to a miscarriage of justice. At worst, they revive fears of petty personal agenda and a spiteful and vindictive settling of personal scores. The solution, it seems, is to make an example of the outstandingly debased while letting off the smaller crooks with a warning.  At the very least, those who have been found to have misruled Nigeria before and who are still nursing the dream of a triumphant return should be firmly informed that they constitute a normative menace to the nation.

For in their hubris they risk pushing the nation in the direction of revolutionary anarchy and insurgency. Having denied Nigerians their democratic and economic rights, they must also be willing to sacrifice their democratic rights in order to set Nigeria firmly on the path of righteousness and rectitude. If they continue to push their luck, they risk the possibility of mob justice at the very least or the eventual dismemberment of the country they hope to preside over in a worst-case scenario.

Already, there are disquieting signals that the ordinary people are beginning to see through the smokescreen of elite chicanery. As this apocalyptic momentum proceeds apace, the danger to democratic governance cannot be over-emphasized.

As an intellectual and ideological underpinning of the current efforts, the Federal Government, as a matter of national urgency and emergency, must inaugurate a Normative Bounds Commission consisting of respected patriots, which must come up with an ethical charter for the nation. Among other things, this august body must answer the question of what is and why is Nigeria and its manifest destiny as a Noah’s Ark for a black race trapped in the abyss of the Fourth World.

One of the duties of this commission will be to re-examine the distribution of National Honours which as at now reminds one of the undesirable honouring the unenviable; a veritable proof that there may indeed be honour among thieves. In enshrining our core values, the commission must set for itself the task of modelling roles and rolling out the models of patriotism and rectitude who still abound both within the country and its traumatised diaspora.

It must also come up with the machinery for cultivating a cult of heroic example for the directionless youths of the nation. Finally, it is the task of this commission to redesign and reinvent the Nigerian state. The failure of the post-colonial state in Nigeria and indeed sub-Saharan Africa stems from the fact that it was not invented for the constituting people. By drawing a normative map for Nigeria, we will also for the first time be remapping Nigeria for Nigerians and eventually for the black race.

 *Concluded. Maiden lecture of the Centre for Demilitarization and Constitutionalism, December 23, 2003.

*This article by Tatalo Alamu (a.k.a Adebayo Williams) first appeared in The Nation of June 30, 2019