Campbell and Rothberg on Nigeria as a Failed State: Reflections
Moses Ebe Ochonu
Toyin Falola
Moses:
Is a dysfunctional state same as a failed state?
Who rebuilds a failed state?
If there is state capture (which is the metanarrative around the so-called Fulani territorial and political ambitions), who collects back the power.
Who cumulates the individual successes?
TF
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Biko Agozino
Emeagwali, Gloria (History)
Prof. of History/African Studies, CCSU
africahistory.net; vimeo.com/ gloriaemeagwali
Recipient of the 2014 Distinguished Research
Excellence Award, Univ. of Texas at Austin;
2019 Distinguished Africanist Award
New York African Studies Association
Sent: Friday, May 28, 2021 9:47 AM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Campbell and Rothberg on Nigeria as a Failed State: Reflections
Please be cautious: **External Email**
Cornelius Hamelberg
“And the seas began to part
And the people that confronted him were many
And
he was told these last few words
Which
opened up his heart
"If
ye cannot bring good news, then don't bring any"
At this point I have not yet read “Nigeria is a Failed State" by Robert Rothberg and John Campbell, but intend to do so on Sunday. What kind of magazine, journal/ website is this Foreign Policy, anyway? Would the same kind of article appear in e.g. Jacobin ? The Economist?
Tomorrow, we expect that someone's Saturday column is going to signal more disaster on the way, or is going to open up another can of worms and is going to examine and re-examine some stinking, festering, putrid sore so that the stench gets to the nostrils, pervades the nation’s nostrils, invades the national nostrils if you will, not at all good for those who inhale that stench deeply, and frequently, but I suppose that that’s the point of those columns and it’s all up to you, you don’t have to inhale. All this crying wolf, you can push the delete or the ignore button and that too could be to your own peril according to this Søren Kierkegaard story about another clown shouting “fire!” , “beware!”
The premise is that we all (some more than others) love Nigeria. One doesn’t have to have a Nigerian National ID card to qualify for that human honour or to love at least a (one) Nigerian, man or woman, many men, many Nigerian women, people, or like me to be able to say that the most upsetting, the most doggone irritating thing about Nigeria is that blessed with such human capital – highly evolved spiritual human beings, such cultures, and such vast potentials, she continues to stumble on, to slouch on in fitful starts and stops, spurting like an engine in trouble, some say that big brother Nigeria continues to snore as in deep hibernation as “Africa’s sleeping giant” even as all the warning signs point to the ship of state sailing towards the abyss. We pray and we expect the brakes to stop the disaster in the nick of time. We pray that insecurity will not be Brother Buhari’s lasting legacy. I for one wouldn’t mind if he felt that he was feeling tired and decided to hand over to VP Yemi Osinbajo, until further notice. Even Pope Benedictus Erectus resigned ( just musing)
Looking forward to Crown Prince Ochonu’s elaborations on the question he was asked: “Is a dysfunctional state the same as a failed state?”( Just trying to imagine, but not looking forward to it, if on the Day of Judgment - not election day – but THE DAY OF JUDGEMENT - the QIYAMAT - whole nations were going to be sent to Heaven or consigned to the other place just because their country was judged to have been a “failed” or “dysfunctional “ state/ mosque/ synagogue...
Jeffrey Sachs is optimistic and alright, but Campbell and Rothberg are the kind of foreign doomsday prophets that some of us don’t want to hear from. Not even about “the bitter truth”. I believe that Africans should listen to African and more Africa-oriented & African-atuned prophets and the diagnoses from African doctors. What could be wrong with that? ( For instance all the Hebrew Prophets except one prophesied in the Holy Land. Why should they listen to other prophets?
Today, thirteen years later the scourge of corruption in Nigeria has not changed, it has only shifted gears and Hon. Minister Louis Farrakhan is still sympathetically on the same side as Brother Buhari and the law, in his war against corruption. So are we all (progressives). The war against corruption can only be won when the law of crime and punishment is strengthened and implemented and when, without exception, even in Nigeria, nobody is above the law. As of now the poor Nigerian man and woman can justifiably say, that the Rock, not Plymouth Rock, but Aso Rock was landed on us/ them – us as them, until the day that you are me and I am you...
I trust that I didn’t get him wrong here, because everything that he says in this posting only elicits sympathy, we are on the same side , almost to the extent that he is speaking on behalf of all of us, the frustrated ones. “Take a cue from Africans who, despite living abroad” etc., coos Professor Ochonu - well, we are to suppose that the Diaspora Africans in voluntary or involuntary exile in the West - including those pontificating from their ivory towers also want to claim that they are also fighting, albeit in “the metaphorical trenches”, unlike Wole Soyinka (“to sing the blues you have to pay some dues”) Omoyele Sowore, Aminu Kanu, Fela, Gani Fawehinmi, Ayo Olukotun, Toyin Falola, Jibrin Ibrahim, Auwal Musa Rafsanjani, Salihu Moh. Lukman, ten men that cannot be accused of “big grammar” - language that the revolutionary, long suffering masses don’t aspire to (although some ignoramuses who know no better could be impressed by men who want to decorate & elevate themselves and their official language above our heads, as better than us – this is what colonialism did to some of us) but about the aforementioned ten -Moses Ochonu, eleven, each one sticking his neck out, no fear of the metaphorical sharp edge of the guillotine...
In This life the first time I came across that expression of nationalistic / patriotic zeal was when Wofa Akwasi reported here that there he was (as a young reporter) literally “fighting in the trenches”(I could picture him with a crash helmet on his head, a hand grenade in one hand, a pen in the other, the rest of the body in full battle fatigues or camouflage uniform (to deceive the enemy)
My own personal experience is that there was a certain level of ire - resentment and distrust by e.g. some of the Sierra Leone people who had weathered the storm, had actually been in the trenches – the real trenches, not the “metaphorical trenches” during the eleven year long RUF/ Civil War, the period before that and this latest period still suffering unimaginable punishment - fear, poverty, pain, and they imagine that they were going through all those ordeals whilst the diaspora people were surfing in California and have a good time with some ashawoes in New Orleans...
Just as The Last Poets put it, ”When the revolution comes some of us will probably catch it on TV, with chicken hanging from our mouths”
Cornelius Hamelberg
Seriously, the most important place to proceed with this discussion is to consider what Tony Nnadi has been saying the last couple of years and especially here and elsewhere.
I hope that Professor Falola will soon be engaging him seriously in TheToyin Falola Conversation Series, all of which , so far have been contributing steadily to our grasping the total picture , from Nigerians, themselves - Nigeria as Nigeria sees itself. Nigeria is also of concern to the rest of Africa for precisely some of the reasons advanced by Rothberg & Campbell.
The structural adjustment programs they’re going to recommend are far away. The security situation will first have to be improved,
The challenges are formidable. At the moment it looks like it’s as difficult or more difficult to achieve a United Nigeria than a United States of Africa. This is not meant as a hyperbole, the way that some professors write, because they think that that is how a professor should write/ think in public. Of course, not when they are taking off their trousers, or the high status job of getting into their pyjamas. I know and have known quite a few professors, intimately, and not just over bottles of beer. But some third world professors on migrating to the West think that they have become a special breed and no longer belong to the endangered species back home. Endangered by Boko Haram. It’s still your country dude and if you let them you will only have yourselves to blame when they raise the flag of the New Nigerian Caliphate over Abuja. As one such big grammar professor said recently, speaking in plain English so that both folks at home and his native American students can understand him, “ It’s only a matter of time before Boko Haram invades Abuja and takes over!” I'm sure that if ( God forbid) that ever happens fatigued or not he’ll raise his status to prophethood – at least in the eyes of his beholders/ admirers with a “ Don’t say I didn’t warn ya”
Nigeria is a failing state because vital – essential manpower - so much needed at home is away on holidays or working abroad. It’s not only Nigeria. There are more Ethiopian Doctors in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Atlanta, Austin, Philadelphia etc. than in the whole of Ethiopia. In the case of Sierra Leone some of the stiff upper lip Creoles say that “the country has gone to the dogs.” I don’t know. I was last there and only for ten days April to May 1970 and then back to Ghana.
Some people, sometimes, deliberately get everything wrong, especially when they can’t differentiate right from wrong. Of course, it would be patently absurd to say that it’s not OK for instance the Palestinians to be told by non-Palestinians about what’s going wrong in the territories still under Israeli control.
It’s personal. I wish it was serious or deep enough to merit calling it a “reflection” because, off the cuff, to write about Africa, when writing very personally or - no poetic pretensions, and I imagine even in a pretentiously literary “style” modelled on past/ immortal masters or self or unselfconsciously, personally with very truthful and excruciating accurate material – for verisimilitude and with insightful psychological detail, even with the very best of intentions truth becomes stronger, stranger and more surreal than fiction. A simple shorti story or a sound bite of memoir and your Oyibo friend says, man you must be putting me on, is this satire or science fiction?
Alain Mabanckou knows what I mean. He understands.
This is the Nigeria that the majestic we / I would like to see: Here Comes The Sun King
“Here
come the sun king
Here come the sun king
Everybody's
laughing
Everybody's happy
Here come the sun king
Cuando
para mucho mi amore de felice corazón
Mundo paparazzi mi amore
chicka ferdy parasol
Questo obrigado tanta mucho que can eat it
carousel”
The United Nigeria / The United States of Nigeria that Fela Kuti & Roy Ayers are still dreaming of in 2,000 Blacks
Unfortunately, as long as we’re still here walking the surface of this earth my brother, it’s always a matter of
“For
sure he's always missing
And something’s never quite right
Ah,
but who would want to listen
To you, kissing his existence good
night? “(Walking
Man)
Reflection. Reflecting like a mirror of someone’s mind. There are so many unique, personal ways of measuring time. By coffee spoons is one way, another way, for example, the next Sabbath is always on its way this 5781/2021
Right now, with regard to Nigeria and things Nigeria, there’s the period before reading Messrs Rothberg & Campbell, when all was quiet in my own mind although far away from me the peace and quiet was viscerally absent, being shattered daily, throughout the Nigerian Federation, with Maiduguri as the epicentre of the on-going Boko Haram mayhem - inspired by Iblis, the disaster, anarchy still spreading relentlessly in all directions to everywhere where anarchy reigns supreme. If you’re not there - then it’s all in the mind – you, living vicariously, in “ the metaphorical trenches. Or is it the metaphysical trenches? I’m thinking of Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju who says that that he is “Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge". Well, he shouldn’t have to go too far, he could start with searching for Boko Haram in Maiduguri. Mission : Search and destroy. Real , not surreal trenches. Surely Boko Haram should not be too difficult to find, Boko Haram is not your cliché needle in a haystack. In his autobiographical poem “ Another Life” Derek Walcott pop the question
“So
what the hell is your captain?
A
fucking microbe? “
(Another
Life//The
Schooner Flight
Equally difficult to see or apprehend Sheikh Abubakar Shekau the chairman of the Boko Haram terrorists who was recently reported dead – which could be inaccurate, the demise of the head of the Nigerian military, less so, the Boko’s Sheikh Shekau must still be laughing)
So there was the period before and now there’s the period that started immediately after my mind was poisoned after imbibing Messrs Rothberg & Campbell’s diatribe. Not that they contributed anything new (forgive another cliche – it was like them carrying coal to Newcastle – in this case to Enugu , telling us what we already know so well, but it hurt nevertheless , coming from them – it’s like being diagnosed by your enemy doctor - ( imagine Trump being diagnosed by a Chinese doctor from Wuhan that ( God forbid) he Trump had just caught “ the Chinese virus”, after the second dose of Pfizer)…
They (Messrs Rothberg & Campbell) are in no doubt about it, with an air of infallibility, they say that Nigeria is “a fully failed state”. Not such a big surprise after all when you consider where they
re actually coming from - when you consider that their Godfather/ founding father – the founding father of “Foreign Policy” is no other than Samuel P. Huntington , he who wrote and unleashed the perception known as “The Clash of Civilizations” on the world
Nota bene: Rothberg & Campbell’s very next sentence after “Nigeria has become a fully failed state”, is also a total exaggeration - that “...the peace and prosperity of Africa and preventing the spread of disorder and militancy around the globe depend on a stronger Nigeria.” Really?
And then they go on, “Most of all, failed states are violent” – like Uncle Sam, both at home and abroad - at home, no gun control,
some hooligans storming the capitol and it’s still “crime is increasing, trigger-happy policing… and other regular, mass shootings -
I’ll just stop here, Idiot Wind
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