The greatest threat to the security of the Nigerian nation is the Nigerian state. This formulation is so paradoxical and oxymoronic that it can only be offered in times of extreme stress or when everything is out of joint and a nation has its back to the wall. This is because the principal reason for the existence of the state is to provide security for those who have surrendered their fundamental rights to its powerful will.
But where it has been shown that a state is fundamentally incapable of providing security for its own people, in fact where it has been consistently proven that rather than provide security the state is indeed an enabler of insecurities, then it is time to look for another name for the organogram of brutality that parades itself as the post-colonial state in Nigeria and Africa.
What we have at the moment is nothing but organised banditry disorganising the nation and the people for its own larcenous purposes, even as the rot threatens to overwhelm the missionary and messianic do-gooder at the helm of affairs. It is the stuff of a Shakespearean tragedy.
The fact that the state is the greatest threat to the security architecture of the society opens the nation to several possibilities, all dire and none very appetizing. Such a state can never unify the people behind it for major national projects, and neither can the nation itself coalesce into organic coherence under its baleful watch. A nation without a dutiful state is a modern Roman coliseum where opposing gladiators collide every second.
In such circumstances, those who offer the compelling argument that restructuring the nation is a way out of the sheer malevolence of the state dream in vain except in a situation of revolutionary turmoil and upheaval in which the moribund state becomes the target of a hostile take-over bid from the antagonistic and deeply contrary and contradictory forces it has spawned. The Nigerian state has to be confronted with the condition of its own lack of stateliness.
In other words, and further concrete reasons that will be adduced below, it is the state itself that must first be restructured before we can even broach the possibility of restructuring the nation. A nation cannot be restructured by a state structured principally for extractive predation and for preying on the nation. Whether this radical surgery can be performed by the current hegemonic faction of the Nigerian ruling class and for the benefits of the captive people of Nigeria is part of the drama currently playing out.
The Nigerian state is playing out its historical antecedents as a state of occupation designed principally to facilitate the processing of raw materials and labour for the metropolitan market. But there is a difference between colonial occupation and post-colonial preoccupation. Whereas colonial occupation provided security for the people, the preoccupation of the post-colonial state is how to steal the nation blind even as it aborts the national will and the possibility of a nation in itself becoming a nation for itself.
In order to deepen the argument, we need to go back to the origin of the modern nation-state. Contrary to widespread myth, the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 did not inaugurate the modern nation-state. As Philip Bobbitt recently argued so brilliantly, it merely restored sovereignty to the religion of the subsisting ruler of a territory after centuries of sectarian wars between and within religions. The dividend is encapsulated in the saying, he who rules let his religion prevail. (Cuius region, eiusreligio). Those who were not at peace with the religion of a particular rulerwere at liberty to move to the territory of their preferred ruler.
In other words, the organising principle was identity by religion and not by nationality. It was theTreaty of Utrecht in 1713 almost sixty five years later which consecrated territoriality or what we propose as delimited space as the organising fulcrum on which the power of the subsisting ruler revolves and around which the modern nation-state is organised.
From then on the logic and imperative of ruling over a particular nation, whether it is pre-colonial, colonial or post-colonial, demand that it must be done with utmost seriousness and a sense of mission. Failure to do so, particularly in the context of people newly empowered with a radical consciousness of their rights, often results in revolutions, civil wars, outright liquidation of the ruling class and the phenomenon of asymmetrical warfare which often sucks in the ruling classes of several countries at the same time.
Given this possibility, one is often perplexed and at a loss as to why the post-independence political elite of Nigeria persist in courting suicide or flirting with martyrdom. Let it be noted that physical protection is the most banal aspect of state provided security. There are more subtle and “softer” aspects of national security which impinge on the people and how a state is perceived. The state in Nigeria is underperforming in both aspects.
This last Friday, yours sincerely had an urgent business at the international airport and was out before the cock crowed as they say. Even before Six O’clock in the morning, the entire area known Ikeja Business District was taken over by a serpentine fuel queue which snaked its way towards Agidingbioccasioning a nasty traffic snarl even that early in the morning.
When yours sincerely, in a moment of genuine confusion,noted that the people must be such early risers to have generated such a monstrous queue so early in the morning, the person driving wondered why it had not occurred to one that most of them passed the night in their cars while waiting for the elusive black gold. Everywhere on the route to the airport, fuel queues clogged up roads and their arteries. If the patience of these people were to suddenly snap, one began to wonder.
The fuel conundrum has now gone on for too long and one is beginning to notice some desperation and defiance in the crowds at the stations. While it is unfair and unjust to blame the current government for the misdemeanour and incompetence of past administrations, it is important to remind General Buhari that this was precisely why it took a pan-Nigerian commotion to bring him to office.
The president and his economic team must now roll up their sleeves and begin to think out of the box. This is a national emergency. Apart from making use of several idle and under-utilized refineries in friendly African countries, the government must induce and facilitate the establishment of local refineries in Nigeria however initially crude and unsophisticated. We can also approach friendly countries for fuel vouchers which will be redeemed when the situation normalizes.
While President Buhari must be applauded for his efforts at staving off economic cannibals who profit from the misery of the Nigerian people, it is now unfortunately clear that the rigid and monolithic price regime can no longer be sustained in the short run. What is haunting the retired general is theuneven and unequal nature of economic production in mutually incompatible parts of Nigeria.
The current fuel crisis and the virtual collapse of the power sector after trillions of naira had disappeared reinforce the notion that the Nigerian political class are incapable of grasping the concept of integrative prosperity and shared national wealth so crucial and critical to the security architecture of a nation.
There can be no national security where a tiny fraction is stealing and seen to be stealing what belongs to an entire nation. There can be no national security where the state is unable to provide an enabling condition for the education of its teeming youth or is incapable of creating the conducive environment for their meaningful employment.
There can be no national security where the living conditions are so harsh that people have to resort to extra-legal stratagems to get by on a daily basis. Soft security which relies on the benevolence of a caring state and its ability to provide the goods and goodies for the populace is always superior to hard security which relies on state belligerence and the apparatus of coercion.
The history of the modern world is littered with the example of various visionary men and women who firmly believe that lifting millions of the underprivileged from the trough of misery and despondency is the bedrock of national stability. The middle class is the buffer zone between needless poverty and heedless prosperity. Through their various empowerment schemes, Awolowo and his lieutenants created a modern Yoruba middle class which bypassed the old feudal aristocracy even as it energised the timeless peasantry with the possibility of self-reproduction on a higher social scale.
It is rare to find any statesman in contemporary Nigerian politics waving this magical wand of social transformation. What we have in abundance are people waving the flag of class decadence and debauchery even as they further the disgrace and debasement of the very institution that has catapulted them to national prominence.
This collective and individual assault on our vital national institutions by those who ought to know better is perhaps the greatest threat to national security. Even before the release of the Panama papers, it was clear thatthe senate president could only continue in office at the expense of further desecration of the integrity of the institution that has shot him into national prominence.
The release of the Panama papers, amidst even more outlandish revelations of state scams, just about nailed his coffin. Yet at the time of writing this the chap has not seen it fit to save the senate from further embarrassment by falling on his own sword. How he hopes to survive after such damage to his person and institution and without bringing the whole edifice down remains a mystery.
Yet what must worry Nigerians is not the collapse of the senate as a national institution but the apparent frailties of countervailing institutions. As at the time of writing this no ranking statesman, member of the Council of state, retired justice of the apex court or old military supremo has come out openly and forcefully to condemn the attempt by a single individual to defame and drag the entire political process into the peatbog of infamy.
By contrast, the swift resignation of the Icelandic prime minister and the querulous unease of the British Prime minister to insinuations of corrupt enrichment show how a great and durable system rises to the occasion even where some of its vital institutions have been compromised. So far mum has been the word from Nigeria despite the outing of some of the most influential members of the old military oligarchy.
But you cannot plant yam and expect to harvest cassava. It can now be seen why the state is its own greatest enemy in Nigeria. It is not entirely by accident that the greatest political trial of our time involves a ranking scion of the feudal oligarchy, influential military officer and former Adviser on National Security. If his notions of national security are anything to go by, then we must find another name for the current political arrangement in Nigeria.
NATION
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