STAR SPEECH: Wole Soyinka's Nigeria, Hovering Between Realism and Unitarism

[Mobolaji E. Aluko]

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POST EXPRESS
Category: Politics
Date of Article: 10/28/99
Topic: Nigeria is Hovering Between Realism and the Legacy of Unitarism
- Soyinka

Author: In this speech by Prof. Wole Soyinka at a conference on
federalism held in Canada recently, he posits that because of the
legacy of military, Nigeria is hovering between realism and unitarism,
which is a major impediment to our federalism.

Full Text of Article:

MAJOR-General Aguiyi Ironsi, who took over power in January 1966 after
the ill-fated, first ever coup-d'etat of Nigerian history, set that
nation on a course whose scars we all bear till today. He issued an
edict that was purposely aimed at vitiating the federal structure and
substituting a unitary one, beginning with the unification of all the
regional civil service structures, the police etc. We, who considered
ourselves progressive - let this be admitted - were ecstatic. I recall
driving through the length and breadth of Nigeria- was involved in a
documentary film project at the time-and the sensation shared by all
the occupants of our station-wagon on that journey was that we were
driving into a new nation that had been magically produced from thin
air. Everything was suddenly transformed, and we all shared a kind of
political upliftment that turned us into citizens, not so much of a
place, as of a New Era. Nigeria had become not so much a geographical
entity, as a space in futuristic time. It did not take many days alas,
as we drove into other parts of the country, to realise that our sense
of Utopia was not uniformly shared. To say that we were astonished
would be putting it middle. How could anyone not be happy with this
project of national fusion. We were about to lose that embarrassing
stigma-tribalism - no more North, West or East, no more Igbo, Hausa,
Yoruba, Tiv, no more Ijaw or Kanuri - each and everyone of us was
about to become a synthetic, conflict-free clone of one another. The
politicians had been responsible for the backwardness of regionalism
and ethnicism, now we had been liberated to discover our true national
identity in consonance with the progressive formation of states
through the world-how could there be any lack of enthusiasm! Even
before we entered parts of the North, however, where leaflets were
being distributed in the local languages calling for 'Araba'- or
secession-our thoughts had become rather sober, and chastened.

Could the agenda for progressive change have pursued a less suspicious
route? The first admission of course is that we had been subtly,
mentally coerced - not brainwashed, no simply coerced - and not even
by the political but by the anthropological connotations of the
language of the external world, operating through the mechanism of a
single, loaded expression - Tribe! Or Tribalism. There was also the
ideological imput, a potent contribution to this spirit of
self-misapprehension. That ideological pressure not only proposed a
socialist course as the rational option for emerging colonial states,
it preached a socialism that was equated with centralism. The lesson
of the powerful, 'anti-imperialist' Soviet Union was clear, and hadn't
the twin-popes of the new religion, Marx and Lenin poured vitriolic
scorn on the fractious petty-nationalisms of backward states and their
impediment to self-realisation? Asian and African societies had even
being placed outside history, incapable of realising their full social
being. Trapped in a tribal narrowness of identity, these races had
not- according to the gospel - transcended the most rudimentary stages
of socio-politicial evolution that would qualify them for entry into
world history. Naturally, we had no desire to remain outside history.

In the process, we blithely ignored the contradictions within the
Soviet Union itself, which insisted on paying lip-service to a
federal system but had institutionalised a monolithic centralism.
And there was Ghana, under Kwame Nkrumah, the first at the tape of the
independence stakes. And Sekou Toure in Guinea. For both, the
'undivided and indivisible' nation was the only guarantee of true
liberation from a colonial past. As a lesson in contrasts, we were
witnessed to how the Congo was tearing itself apart - not as the evil
seeds of Belgian King Leopold come to fuition but from tribalism. The
secession of Katanga under Moise Tshombe would underline even more
strongly that the tribal configurations and allegiances of newly, or
about-to-become independent nations was the Achilles' heel that
rendered these nations vulnerable to exploitation by neo-colonial,
capitalist forces etc. and prepared the way for their second coming.
The Belgian Congo was the ultimate horror story, the cautionary
negative model, and so the doctrine was: eliminate the tribal
distinctions of any colonial holding, and the birth of nation was
assured.

The truth is, much of my generation intellectually rejected objective
reality and succumbed to an anthropological denomination of that
objective reality. The word 'tribe' became a malediction, and in the
rush towards inserting our self-awareness into the mainstream of the
world history, we wanted to jettison it completely wash ourselves
clean of the opprobrium. A question from any outsider - especially a
European or American (white or black) which remotely approached, "What
tribe are you'? was answered with a defiant, "I am African." If that
was followed by "Well, but from what part"?, that questioner became a
closer enemy of political emancipation. Occasionally, in a generous
mood, we might concede the identity of 'Nigerian' or 'Ghanaian,' but
mostly, it was 'African', and heaven help any questioner who so much as
insisted on that basic unit of identity - tribe!

We are speaking here of that period of the great pan-African dream, at
least in those heady late fifties and early sixties. Nkrumah dreamt of
a Union of African states, with a joint African High Command to forge
a continental unity. Even a proposition, or comment of distinction
between Arabised Africa and black Africa south of the Sahara was
considered backward, neo-colonial thinking, near treasonable. The
vision was noble, combative and uplifting. Africa was divided, from
this dominant observatory, not on tribal, but on ideological lines-the
Casablanca group and the Monrovia group to start with - one radical
and progressive, the other neo-colonial and reactionary. Neither group
gave much thought to any cultural or historic parameters in their
adhesion, nor admitted the necessity of at least recognising the
internal an regional economic and developmental histories of the
micro-nationalists that made them up.

Africa was being organised from the very top. Kwame Nkurumah did not
meet an Egyptian princess and fall in love with her, no, he needed to
seal the unity of the African continent with the symbolic consummation
of marriage - black African with the Arab world - to obliterate, via
the nuptial couch, all cultural and historic divergences, even the
nagging memory of the slaving relationship between both worlds. And
so, he formally requested a bride from Abdul Nasser, the radical
leader of the Egyptian nation. With this symbolic continental
unification, not the essence of Unitarism made flesh at the pinnacle
of leadership, the younger generation could hardly be blamed for
refusing even to consider the clamour of the so-called 'tribe' that
sought expression of their own voices within the smaller organisms of
independent nations.

We need only cast a casual glance at the national configurations of
the West African coast. There, the verticialism of designated nation
territories wages a war of logic against the horizontal actuality of
organic, and linguistic national units. It narrates the entire story
of anomaly that must be accounted as being - at the very least
-partially responsible for the haemorrhage that still drains away the
vitality of that sub-region. We can list a number of other causes, but
this is one that is constantly understated, so it is time that it is
recognised in its full substantiality. This anomaly is partially
responsible for the horrors or Liberia, of Sierra Leone, the violent
disintegration of ancient communities and the traumatisation of their
humanity for decades to come.

Is Somalia a nation at all today? The Sudan cannot really claim to be
a single nation, at best, it is a de facto federation of the North and
South. My intention is not spend much time rehashing the obvious
question of anomalous boundaries, which the Organisation of African
Unity, in its nerveless wisdom, declared sacrosanct and immutable..
What requires stressing is simply that, will it or not, the inherent
contradictions in contemporary society-or even mere peoples, of the
validity of their nation belonging. I am amazed by the way, threat
Eritrea, and Ethiopia have yet to be drummed out by the OAU for
failing to respect the sacrosanctity of their colonial boundaries -
but more on the current crisis in the Horn, I hope, before this
conference is over. This is festering boil that must be quickly
lanced, and we could do worse than propose some kind of initiative
here, never mind the seeming intractable nature of this conflict that
has left both the OAU and the UNO apparently stymied.

I see the fundamental nature of the question before us - for the
African continent at least - as relating to how to effect an internal
reconciliation of evident misalliances within national entities, how
to reconcile peoples of distinct histories with the consequences of
colonial arbitrariness and the timidity, the lack of will, the failure
of the first-generation leaders to boldly tackle the fault-lines of a
continent that often run along- or originate from - the very boundaries
that have been inherited. This reconciliation process may take several
routes; one of them commences with the recognition of semi-autonomous
entities within the current nation space. Not that this is without its
dangers, and if ever a model presented itself as a comprehensive text
for the study of such dangers, it is clearly complex tortured history
of Yugoslavia and the consequences of extreme nationalist
assertiveness that had made her nationalities rivals of Sierra Leone,
Rwanda, Somalia and Sri-Lanka in the stakes of national
self-violation. The hard part of confronting that cautionary model
however, is to draw the accurate lesson from its travails. One crucial
lesson - apart of its convoluted history - is of course the
disproportionate role that the personal inclinations, even psychology
of power-besotted politicians play in the manipulation of differences
within nation states for their own narrow advantage. This constitutes
a field of critical study on its own, and obviously cannot be
meaningfully addressed within the present context.

What is the end purpose of a call of a National Conference that is
heard repeatedly in Nigeria today, a National Conference with or
without the 'Sovereign'? What do people mean when they say, the nation
must be restructured? They indicate simply that the relation of the
parts to the whole, and to one another must be re-examined , but this
time, from within, in full freedom, as equals and from the point of
view of exposing the attractions of remaining together and working to
eliminate all obstacles towards a continuing co-existence. On the
negative import, they are saying that Unitarism and centralism have
been tried and have resoundingly failed. Unitarism has in fact
manifested itself as a contradiction in terms, since it has
demonstrably fostered, not unity, but its very opposite, disunity. We
find ourselves in an age of recognition of the monumental failure,
indeed the very anti-people definition of the over centralised system
of government, its very structure of alienation from the people on
behalf of whom society, and thus the state was evolved or invented.
The non-viability of centralism has been manifested overwhelmingly,
not merely by the collapse of the Soviet Union, but in the evident
failure of its economic system, which was one of centralist
production. If Slobodan Milesovic had a second chance, it is not
beyond consideration that he would accept that, tragically, especially
in the crisis of Kosovo, Federation was the road not taken. Or indeed
Sri Lanka.

Today, Nigeria is still hovering between realism and the legacy of
Unitarism imposed by a discredited army.

Once upon a time, it was still possible to consider the state as an
expression of monarchical will, the monarch in effect as the
embodiment of the state, the sun from which life itself radiated
downwards to the people. We all know the fate of the most tenacious
adherents of that doctrine. The notion of the state as the embodiment
of an Ideal, or Spirit, in which the unraveling of history processes
was reflected also ran its course in its own time. That Ideal was also
sometimes merged with the monarch-especially the few 'enlightened'
ones. Mostly however it retained its aloofness and purity as the
inscrutable Mind or Divine Principles of whom sometimes the monarch,
sometimes a Supreme Pontiff, sometimes a combination or collaboration
of both became the infallible embodiments. The earthly state was the
perceived as a pale copy of the heavenly realm, towards whose absolute
perfection human society aspired. There are societies that constantly
resurrect and refurbish this anti-human dream of Spirit Idealism whose
earthly agents parade themselves as the Supreme Pontiffs and
Interpreters of the Divine Will- you will find their ruthless
successors in Afghanistan. And of course the world was either
mesmerised or terrified for three quarters of this century by the
Ideal as Utopia whose custodianship belonged to an elect, the
expositors of the dialectics of class formation to whose immanence
millions were sacrificed - from 'revisionist' intellectuals to
bewildered peasants. History was working in a discernible mechanistic
fashion, stage by stage, dialectically ascending towards the pinnacle
of the Ideal where all social contradictions would be dissolved and
humanity would emerge as one classless, egalitarian paradise.

Now what do all these stages have in common? The centralism of power
of course, the eradication of diversity in social mores, in
development initiatives, in cultures, in conduct - sometimes even in
attire, as witness the Utopia of Mao Ze Dong; or the comic opera of
the pathetic marxist adventruirsm of the Republic of Benin; or more
gruesomely under the Marxist terror of Miriam Mengistu's Ethiopia, not
to forget the holy terror of the Taliban. In all these instances, we
encounter the absurd extreme of centralist conformity in matters that
extend to clothing and a mandatory length of beards-some mystic virtue
in both these outward expressions that will perhaps propel humanity
towards the Ideal state of social perfectibility. The centralist
mentality is one that is at war with, not merely diversity but with
human creativity and initiative. Its attributes - uniformity and
conformity - are not the end however, but mere servitors of the
ultimate goal - power, Absolutism, Domination and Control of the many
by the Elect.

This is why we are obliged to denounce the lie. This is why, at the
end of this century of this millennium, we are obliged to insist that
the centralist idea propagated by ideologues and political theologians
is a construct of mystification that has merely provided arrears for
the advocates of alienated power. The Ideal realm, for us, is the
humane space that empowers the citizen at all levels of social
organisation and enables the total flowering of his or her human
potential, as individual or as member of a basic unit of society. The
most congenial systems of governance to the attainment of this may
sound prosaic, but their very ordinariness means that the palpable
reality of existence is not being sacrificed to some obscurants notion
of the Ideal, means that the ideal will be found in the very process
of the citizen's self-regeneration , the richness of identities within
the community to which he or she belongs, and the security of a system
that succeeds in merging the autonomous realm of self-regeneration
with a collective identity, and an equitable share in the fruits of
productive collaboration. In short, a stable, non-judging polity, the
assembly of partners and equals, not an abstract System serviced by
subservient units. If this century of Rwanda, Somalia, Sierra Leone,
Liberia, Congo, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia etc. have taught us
nothing else, it is that the lure of centralised power must yield to
its diffusion among people at tiers of responsibility which merely
vary from nation to nation because of their different histories and
even population sizes. Avoidance of this principle will continue to
stress the casing that holds such peoples together. Even the remaining
powerful monolithic empire, the Republic of China, though with
excruciating slowness, appears to have begun to realise this. Whether
it comes to a full practical embrace of this wisdom in good time for
its cohesive survival is a question that will surely be resolved
within the next generation.

Size alone is not of course the issue. On the face of its, we might
say that we cannot imagine East Timor, Gambia, Liberia, Liechtenstein
or Monaco even considering a federal structure of governance without
descending to the ridiculous. But the internal dynamics and history of
any given society differ in imponderable ways from the next, and those
of a tiny nation like the Gambia may actually find correlations with
those of a vast territory and conglomeration of people as in the
Republic of China. Every nation state has its unique features and of
course, shares characteristics with numerous others. The common
denominator for all is always - the humanity. It is by, and towards
the enhancement of this dynamic unit that society was created, and it
is for this entity, in present wisdom from millennia of experience,
that systems of governance must adapt. Dependency on pinnacles of
social organistion has proved to be nothing but latter-day idolatory:
at the base of the pyramid even of representative power-this is where
we must seek the Ideal realm.

An Igbo saying, much favoured by my compatriot Chinua Achebe - who
however should not be blamed for any inaccurate rendition on my part -
sums up the equitable approach to the dynamic of governance. "The
eagle shall perch. The hawk shall perch. Whichever says that the other
shall not - may its wing break!". Adapted for the present context. let
it read - "The tribe shall speak. The nation shall speak. Whichever
dares deny the other a voice may its jaw - break!"

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