Some mothers do have them indeed. But just as it is in the human family, so it is in the comity of nations. There are nations and there are nations. Just as Leo Tolstoy, the great Russian novelist, said of the human family, we can now extend to the nation: all happy nations are the same, every unhappy nation is unhappy in its own way. If Nigeria is compared with its neighbours, particularly Ghana and the Republic of Benin, but unlike Togo which shares the genes of perpetual and pathological unhappiness with Nigeria, this historical truism is even more obvious.
Last week, Boni Yayi, the Beninois president, came to bid his Nigerian counterpart a rousing and moving farewell having completed the second term of a maximum two term presidency. As usual, the outgoing president of Benin was urbane, exquisitely polite, charmingly diffident, pleasantly remote and courteously self-effacing. Having served his nation and people to the best of his ability, Monsieur Yayi will now retreat to the shadows of stellar statesmanship, unlike Nigeria’s meddlesome and quarrelsome former rulers.
In another Francophone African country, Senegal to be precise, another epic milestone quietly passed. Monsieur Macky Sall, the president, dramatically announced the reduction of the presidential term of seven years to five famously noting that it was not the length of tenure that matters but the institutionalization of certain elite behavioral pattern. Modelled after the French Gaullist monarchical model, the Senegalese presidential system has finally shaken off the yoke of colonial paternalistic rule.
It was the same Macky Sall who upon coming to power in a landmark election in which the ruling party was humiliatingly defeated, dramatically abolished the Senegalese senate, noting that it was an absolute waste of the nation’s time and resources. Heavens did not fall. In fact the people applauded. It is not by accident that the widest and longest boulevard in Dakar, the Senegalese capital, bears the name of the nation’s most revered and iconic intellectual avatar, Cheikh Anta Diop.
A nation that has no institutionalized memory will have no memorable monuments to inspire it or galvanize its people in moments of stress. In retrospect, it would appear that the energies released by the dramatic sacking of the Kerekou dictatorship by the Constituent Assembly of Benin in 1990 and events surrounding the deposition of both Presidents Abdu Diouf and Abdoulaye Wade in Senegal have continued to galvanize the two nations towards genuine emancipation .
By contrast, this past week Nigeria also celebrated a milestone. That is the fiftieth anniversary of the military coup that ousted the founding civilian administration. It was so to say a jubilee of infamy which traumatized the nation and bitterly polarized the political elite along ethnic, regional and cultural fault lines. As far as milestones go, this one has become a millennial millstone around the neck of the nation with anguished cries from the graves and from dazed family survivors crying for justice.
Fortuitously or otherwise, fifty years after the original coupists stridently highlighted the ills of the country that they had hoped to eradicate by force and bloodshed, we have in place another government trying to confront the advanced manifestations of those grave nation-threatening ailments. Nigeria has been stolen blind by its leading citizens. There is no name for what has gone on other than organized state banditry. Nowhere in the world has this kind of feeding frenzy occurred, this Gadarene rush on the exchequer, without provoking a popular uprising.
This past week in a historic appearance at The Nation newspaper premises, Ibrahim Mustafa Magu, the boss of EFCC, noted that there is no morning he prepares to go to work without shedding tears for a nation so badly defiled by its own children. Magu’s quiet, unruffled mien masks a chilling resolve and a ruthless capacity for maximum psychological offensive.
It will be interesting how this confrontation with Nigeria’s band of looters shapes up in the coming months. Never in the history of humanity has a country been so serially gang-raped by its own denizens. The Ottoman Turks had a unique coinage for the plunder and rapine that followed brutal conquest . We have to find our own word for this millennial mayhem.
Such as been the historic heist and the colossal scale of thieving in all its bizarre manifestations that we may at some point of restitution have to invite the world’s leading clinical authorities to come and adjudge on the psychiatric status of some of these fiscal psychopaths. The stealing without compunction suggests a systemic collapse that has no equivalent in contemporary human history.
Yet despite the wholesale crime against humanity, it is obvious that the Nigerian political elite are badly polarized and bitterly divided about what course of action to take against the looters. While the generality of the Nigerian masses seem affronted and on the same page with the Buhari administration, a significant section of the elite appears to demure, citing the authoritarian excesses of the president, the flagrant disobedience of the rule of law and growing contempt for constituted judicial authority.
Their argument is interesting and points at the ideological occlusion which occurs when a ruling class has its back to the world and the masses are roused to fury and pitiless vengeance. Fighting corruption is okay but it must be institutionalized and legally routinized otherwise it may slide into arbitrary tyranny and a thirst for vendetta and vengeance masquerading as public good and order.
Rather than coming up with a holistic legally foolproof conceptual framework for combating corruption and official malfeasance, they aver, General Buhari is on an exhibitionist and messianic circus show which will come to naught. In extremis, they even argue that it may eventually be shown that despite his famous aversion for graft, Buhari himself exists in a state of antagonistic but paradoxical complicity with corruption.
The main argument of those who urge for a draconian settlement of accounts with all those responsible for the economic adversity of the nation irrespective of the rule of law and legal niceties is this: what level of civility and civilized conduct must one extend to people who have been so uncivil and uncivilized in their economic brutalization of their own people, people who have caused the nation so much trauma by sending thousands to their untimely death, people who have been responsible for the untimely deaths of thousands of gallant servicemen who were sent to warfronts without adequate weapons or means of defending themselves against an incredibly savage enemy?
The nation must not press its luck any further. For so long this country has camped at the edge of the abyss and has flirted with suicide that it is a miracle that it has survived intact. With this level of the bestialization of the armed forces and the traumatization of the citizenry it is a tribute to the residual discipline of the armed forces as well as the residual fatality of the people that major mutinies and popular revolts have not broken out.
But we must not tempt fate any further. All those responsible for these crimes against humanity must be severely punished as a warning and as a timely reminder for succeeding generations. Men are hanged not because horses are stolen but so that horses may not be stolen. The rule of law must never be equated with the reign of lawlessness. You cannot violate the Lockean covenant between the ruled and their rulers only to seek refuge in the rule of law.
With the history of revolutionary upheavals in their societies weighing upon their mind, ruling classes in advanced nations shy away from this nasty conundrum by sacrificing those who have desecrated the land for the very sake of the survival of their class. From time to time and ever so often, an admiral is quartered to encourage the others, as an English wag famously noted.
But in doing this, we must be mindful of the larger picture. It has been noted that the strength of every revolutionary upheaval is also its weakness: the thirst for social justice is also accompanied by the passion for social vengeance. While the one is noble and uplifting, the other often degenerates into mean vendetta and sheer bloodlust. We call on President Buhari to manage the mass hysteria unleashed by this consuming national tragedy with some rectitude and restraint so as not to appear to be personally fanning the embers of mass-hate and discord.
With the humungous number of culprits, it should be clear that we are dealing with a systemic collapse of societal values far more dangerous than individual aberrations. As Durkheim famously noted, whenever a social phenomenon is explained by a psychological category, we may be sure that the explanation is false.
Even if he spends the next ten years on this, such is the mammoth pan-Nigerian scale of the economic infraction that the retired general from Daura may not be able to bring all the looters to book. This is where a theoretically integrative and holistic conceptual framework for dealing with this national emergency is imperative.
In addition to jailing looters and seizing their loots, President Buhari should immediately inaugurate a National Restitution Commission comprising of eminent Nigerians of proven integrity and soundness of mind that will undertake a comprehensive inquiry of what went wrong and how to prevent a future reoccurrence of this national tragedy.
NATION
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