There is only one thing that unites driving a ship through a terrible storm, marshalling an army for an offensive against the enemies and governing a state in ways that ensure the empowerment of the citizens. These three significant endeavours require some blueprint or methodology; an approach or some kind of technique by which the ship would weather the storm, the army would limit its casualties and still win the war, and the government would harness all its material and human resources to facilitate good governance. It is very interesting that the Greek word that ties these three endeavours together is derived from the metaphor of war. For the Greeks, the word strategia stands for “generalship.”
Strategia or strategy is the blueprint or approach by which a sailor pilots a ship through a difficult wind, the stratagems by which a general overcome enemy maneuvers, and the policies by which the strategic president or governor transform the lives of the citizens. The sailor, general and president are therefore critical strategists with specific plans and tactics by which to get some unique and definite visions achieved.
Strategia, as the Greeks used it, speaks to an important element in nation building, especially in a state like Nigeria. Strategy in this sense underscores the urgent need to fashion an integrative framework by which people, cultures, religions and other variables are brought together into one coherent and united whole. Nigeria is a plural state. By this we mean that as a state, it is made up of too many disparate constituents that task, and sometimes hinder, the possibility of nationhood. After the amalgamation of 1914 that lumped too many square pegs into one round hole, it became the responsibility of the postcolonial leadership in Nigeria to find some blueprint by which the centrifugal forces of religion, culture, ethnicity and language could be integrated into one civic and indivisible form called a nation.
This is the reason why we refer to the Nigerian state as a project. Who calls her country a project? And the task underlying that project is that of national integration—making out of many nations, ethnicities and peoples “one nation bound in freedom, peace and unity”, as the Nigeria’s national anthem demands. Unfortunately, and since independence in 1960, Nigeria has remained a project that has defied consummation into a fulfilling completion, the sense in which Chief Awolowo was right in describing Nigeria as “mere geographical expression.” And the reason is simple: national integration or social cohesion has eluded the Nigerian state, despite the best efforts of her leaders. Nation building anywhere has never been an easy task.
From the United States to India, we see the arduous dynamics of trying to wield disparate elements into one national frame. From the former Soviet Republic to Rwanda, we see how centrifugal challenges could tear any state apart—either a state confronted by many ethnic components or another with just two major ethnic groups. The Soviet was fragmented out of statehood, and Rwanda had to go through a genocidal war.
In Nigeria, the challenge is not any bit easy as the 59 years of postcolonial politics and governance have revealed. The Nigerian Civil War, barely seven years after independence, is an attestation of how nation building has never been a smooth walk in the park. The challenge is a complex one: how does a state harness its ethnic diversity into national capital? Nigeria has over four hundred ethno-cultural and national groups, two major religions that operate on absolutist theologies, and three major ethnic languages, all of which demand a framework of national cohesion. To use Prof Peter Ekeh’s analysis, Nigeria after the amalgamation is made up of primordial loyalties that needed to be converted into civic oneness. In other words, when Nigeria came into existence, those who found themselves in the political entity called Nigeria do not automatically feel a sense of responsibility to that political space. There were Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo, Efik, Urhobo, Nupe, Igala, Tiv, Ebira, Fulani, Ijaw, Ibibio, Kalabari, Itshekiri, and countless other ethnic groups who identify themselves in terms of their ethnic affiliations, but whose sense of belonging needed to be converted into a loyalty to Nigeria. And this is because there has not surface yet a common national ground which unites all those who would be Nigerians.
The idea of social cohesion is founded on the search and the strategy for achieving national integration. There is no state in the world that can ever make any substantial or substantive developmental progress if its centrifugal forces are not converted into a centripetal framework of national capital. And the key factor in achieving this is to seek for common ground that will serve as the basis for social cohesion. This implies reducing polarities and minimising as many forms of disparities as possible. The starting point for a project of national cohesion is invariably ideological. That implies that there is a leadership that has crafted a compelling vision. Such a vision is then translated into a strategy for action in measure that matches rhetoric with action in developing and promoting an overriding philosophy that can serve as touchstone for defining national goals and for developing strong national consciousness which will in turn drive the process of national integration. Critical to that whole dynamic therefore, is the need to articulate a vision of the sort of country that Nigeria aspires to be.
Social cohesion is essentially about the management of national diversities. This is the core of nation building. And this is the reason why many states have had to contend with internal conflicts that ultimately challenge the sovereign authority of the state itself. Social cohesion therefore refers to the ability a state has to facilitate good governance that ensures the well-being of the citizens. The essence of good governance is to ensure that the citizens are sufficiently empowered to live good lives and achieve self-realisation.
There is no doubt that a leadership that is polarised along the fault lines of ethnicity, religion and extreme parochialism cannot generate the united voice and front that are urgently required for harnessing the human and material resources necessary for transforming the fortune of the society. Unfortunately, that is the Nigerian predicament. What we have is a cacophony of discordant voices shouting at cross purposes over a wide chasm of seemingly unbridgeable differences. The discordant infighting is further complicated by the instinct for primitive accumulation that turns leaders into looters of the common weal. From religion to academics, and from politics to society, it becomes extremely difficult to identify a critical mass of exceptional leaders with the consummate professional vitae, attitudinal and cultural mindset as well as a value dynamics that could inject them right into the problematic of the Nigerian society and its resolution.
The difficulty in recruiting this new generation of leaders is consequently due mainly to the percolation of an inimical dynamics of negative values trickling down from the current set of leaders into the impressionable consciousness of the emerging community of possible leaders. In summary, what we have in Nigeria is a problem of lack of firm direction regarding the envisioned great Nigeria of the future that we are building. There is as yet a nationally shared vision regarding the Nigerian of our dream to which the leadership is committed in spirit and in truth. Rather, Nigeria is being piloted metaphorically by three pilots in the cockpit. While one is looking to Saudi Arabia for vision, the other is looking to Israel in a manner of speaking. The third pilot however wishes that the plane should crash after he has escaped using the parachute, so that whatever is left could be his as the ‘biggest contributor’ to the commonwealth. The consequent sociology from these confused ideological underpinnings of the envisioned Nigeria is contrived in the dubious behaviour of a political leadership class that repeats the same old game of playing chess with the destiny of the Nigerian nation. It is this leadership failure to come up with a shared vision of the direction that they are leading the nation that makes it difficult for them to promote, through such policies as the quota system, Federal Character, NYSC, the rebranding Nigeria project, Change Begins with You, and any such initiatives, an active citizenship in Nigeria. That would be the kind of citizenship that encourage individuals to work beyond their personal interests in deliberation and action, and to take their civic responsibility seriously – as common national aspiration that the political leadership is trusted in all its actions to achieve
And the first condition a state must facilitate before it achieves social cohesion is to achieve the principle of social justice. This principle demands that all forms of social inequalities—gender, income, class, political and material—are minimised as much as possible. In any society, like Nigeria, where the wealth gap between the rich and the poor is excruciatingly wide in ways that are even facilitated by the government through its tax regime, the social strain of such an inequality undermines social cohesion. In any state, again like Nigeria, where the ethnic diversity is so virulent as to constantly undermine the government’s civic efforts, social cohesion also becomes near impossible. And lastly, in any country where there is a disproportionate sharing of the scarce resources in ways that enable one group to have more than the other, we already have a recipe for social disorder.
Prof Olaopa is a retired permanent secretary
END
Be the first to comment