PREPARING FOR NIGERIA’S COMING POWER ELITE
Matthew Hassan KUKAH*
Some men see things as they are and they ask, why? But I dream things that never were and I ask, why not? Bernard Shaw
I am concerned that after 49 years of independence, we have only been concerned with How things are not working in Nigeria and not Why. The evidence is to be found in the hundreds of national and international laurels that Nigerian authors have garnered from caricaturing their country and leaders. Perhaps more than any other country, Nigerian authors have come to imbibe some of the sentiments well captured in Binyavanga Wainaina’s extraordinarily beautiful satire titled,How to Write About Africa. This piece (which you can Google by the same title) will crack your ribs but it is biting satire at its best. In it, Mr. Wainaina enjoins any western writer who wants to be taken seriously and with an eye on a prize to ensure that in writing about Africa, they must include:Africa is big: fifty-four countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book. The continent is full of deserts, jungles, highlands, savannahs and many other things, but your reader doesn't care about all that, so keep your descriptions romantic and evocative and unparticular. … Among your characters you must always include The Starving African, who wanders the refugee camp nearly naked, and waits for the benevolence of the West. Her children have flies on their eyelids and pot bellies, and her breasts are flat and empty. She must look utterly helpless. She can have no past, no history; such diversions ruin the dramatic moment. Wainana could easily change the title to How to Write About Nigeria!
Once the first generation of Nigerian authors focused on this characterization of our life, it became difficult for their students to do anything else. Even in Nollywood today, since the release of Living in Bondage, the major themes have focused on witchcraft, sorcery, armed robbers, and scammers and so on. True, these are representations of our daily life. However, they do not speak to the majority of over 90% of Nigerians who are doing their best and living well, they do not even offer the young ones another mirror they might look at. It is through this prism that outsiders see Nigeria and how often have we been asked within Africa by those who watch Africa Magic if those things really happen in Nigeria? I feel that we have become like the holy man in this little story which I will share with the reader.
A holy man found himself constantly distracted from his prayers by the noises of young children playing outside his chapel. They mocked his threats by running away whenever he appeared. He came up with an idea. He told the children that there was a horrible beast in the river with a hundred eyes, twenty mouths, fifty legs, ten tongues, etc. In excitement, the children all ran towards the river to see the animal, leaving him to concentrate on his prayers. When he came out from his prayers, he found the entire village heading towards the river. What is happening? he asked one of the men. We hear from our children that a horrible animal is in the river and we are all going to see it, the man said. After a brief thought, he himself headed towards the river. Another old man said to him: Surely, at your age, you don’t believe that there is such an animal, do you? Well, the holy man said as he headed to the river, even though I am the one who came up with the idea to scare the children, in reality, you never know…
After reading about ourselves and listening to our own voices from our writers, we have come to think the worst of ourselves. Today, thanks to years of indoctrination about race and the portrayal of Nigeria as the demon, even Nigerian comedians who appropriate foreign jokes from the internet ensure that the worst roles are reversed or tailored to fit the image of the Nigerian. Naturally, this image of the Nigerian as a devious, greedy scammer have fed on the popular imagination and they account for the way the rest of the world has come to view us. Our embarrassments at the airports and elsewhere arise from how we have come to define ourselves. For example, can a novel extolling the virtues an ordinary honest Nigerian win an award anywhere?
Recently, Professor Wole Soyinka accused me of what he called uncritical patriotism. I do not think I should defend myself against what someone else thinks about me. However, my position has always been simple; we have problems just like everyone else. However, national identity is constructed by mythology not reality. The issue of the superiority of the white race was carefully constructed. It was the bedrock for colonialism and slavery. These myths then justified the banditry and murders of the Indians in the United States, the Aborigines in Australia or the black Africans in South Africa. The structures and the glitter of every modern state in Europe and America today are perched on an ocean of the blood, bones, and resources of Africa either by direct appropriation or slavery. Europeans artists, writers, and poets set about writing to justify the claims of the superiority of their race. Wagner’s anti Semitic and racist compositions were later adopted by Hitler and they provided the theme song for the Holocaust. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darknesshas often been referred to by Chinua Achebe as having had a great impact on him. Rudyard Kipling’s, The White Man’s Burden have all come to be associated with the inferiority of the black man and the imperative of the colonial project. .
My case is simple or so I think: I make a case for the fact that our criticisms of Nigeria must continue, but they must become solution oriented and not just an art form and a platform for winning awards. We must remain critical of the structures of injustice, but we must also endeavour to take responsibility in shaping the future of our children. Age, education, experience and exposure challenge us to begin a process of serious introspection in the search for solutions to the problems of Nigeria, twenty or fifty years from hence. No nation ever develops or grows by merely gazing at the navel of opportunism, thinking only of immediate gains for individuals or a generation. So, if now I sound like an uncritical patriot, it is precisely because I believe that although narrative, the How of our life is important, the Why is perhaps even more important. The why seeks to identify the mistakes and perhaps suggest how best we might negotiate a way forward. The future of our country requires more than just a few good people to lead us. We require more than free and fair elections or sound political parties. What now need is to prepare ourselves for the challenges of a new nation based on a more imaginative vision driven by an elite of another kind altogether.
Next year, we shall be celebrating our 50th anniversary of independence. I am worried that we will end up in the same lachrymal mode, mourning our lack of electricity, good roads and so on. And we must do so. But I believe that we must prepare our nation for the future, a future after 50,000 megawatts, a future after we have 5 lanes on our roads, a period when we have electric trains and so on. Ending dictatorship provides us the best hope, chance and opportunity that we have in planning with some level of certainty and predictability. Democracy does offer us a necessary condition for the attainment of these goals, but these are not sufficient. Some of our worst nightmares are gradually taking a different shape. Take the Niger Delta for example. Although there are still controversies over details of the Amnesty, in principle, only a fool will refuse to acknowledge that things are changing. The President, the Vice President and other leaders of thought in the Niger Delta require our commendation not our denigration. Those who choose the theatre may be running out of actors! Secondly, despite the trauma of our electoral tragedies, we are glad that we are still standing. It will require hard work, time, energy and a range of other developments elsewhere for us to get our hands around the issues of electoral processes. If the elected officials and the PDP persist in their perfidy, then we will lose momentum and enthusiasm on electoral reforms. But, given the robust debate and interest that this topic has aroused, things will definitely never be the same again. Processes are important. Although getting elections right is fundamental, it no guarantee of good governance.
My point is that the next challenge for us must be how to design a road map for Nigeria for the next 50 years. The popular prophesies of our doom by our experts have not come to pass at least for now. Ahead of the 2003 elections, we were told that our nation was on the road to Kigali. We never arrived there because we were not headed that way at all. After the 2007 elections, some experienced western journalists, hung around hotels in Abuja believing and waiting to be the first with the breaking news of the first flames of violence in Nigeria. That too did not come to pass. Rather than ask what has happened, we have moved to another round of prophesy under a different context. This time it is said that we are likely to end up like Somalia this is despite neither being totally Muslim nor are is the texture of our organization based on clans constantly at war. Clearly, the reason for the war in Somalia cannot be the same with the reasons for Nigeria’s crisis.
Despite all the negative projections, I know we shall not get to Somalia becausewe inhabit different political time zones and have different destinations. Although these images are popular, they are more a manifestation of our obsession with thinking the worst about our conditions. Despite the confusing and conflicting metaphors in relation to both Rwanda and Somalia which are at least superficially culturally homogenous, these analysts still insist on applying them to Nigeria. But, as we all know, Nigeria will not be Somalia. Rather than our obsession with photocopies of developments elsewhere, the real challenge is to pose the question, why has Nigeria ended up this way? To answer this question, I will avoid the usual narrative and propose what I think should be our next preoccupation, namely, the need to create a newPower Elite.
Although the word elite has crept into the popular discourse on modernity, there is a serious lack of conceptual clarity as to what its identity is. Part of this confusion arises from the absence of a neat process of categorization of what really qualifies an individual or a group to become part of the elite. The processes of recruitment, entry, incorporation, promotion, sponsorship, graduation, or its articles of association remain vague. Very often, the concept is associated with status and wealth. Our concern is not to resolve the controversy but to argue that in general, elite driven principles are important for laying the foundation for a nation’s vision.
The concept of aPower Elite was formulated and popularized in 1956 by the American sociologist, Professor C. Wright Mills in his seminal book, The Power Elite: Essentially, Mills argued that this privileged club contains a small group whose wealth and stature enables them to control and wield influence that is often out of sync with their numerical strength. They are made up of overlapping cliques who negotiate and aggregate power and influence based on their interests. He identifies the Military, political and economic/corporate institutions as the repository of these cliques. In his view, the processes of negotiation or protection of the interests of these cliques have come to shape American life whether in a time of war or peace. Although they have come to have a negative resonance, a well coordinated Power Elite can be a force for good and not necessarily a force for evil.
We must note that today, every nation is the result of the dream and vision of particular individuals, groups or class of human beings who had a dream and a vision. It is clear that the British had a vision of what they wanted to do and how to attain power and control of the world. At its zenith, the British Empire spread through 10 million square miles. A sense of Empire still lingers in the imagination of the English mind because indeed, it was no mean achievement. Ditto the dream and vision of the founding fathers of what is today the United States of America. Today the sense of who they are as citizens of their nations is a function of how their perceptions have been shaped by their history. It will be tough to convince the average American that their country is not the best place on earth and that they are not the most important specie of humanity. All this was constructed by propagating the notion right from the beginning that they were a nation under God and that their country was God’s special piece of real estate.
Elites are important because their preoccupation, driven by their own self interests is in ensuring some semblance of law, order, efficiency and security. The fact that even the thieves believed in some form of order and coherence to ensure smooth operations was why the Berlin Conference became so important in 1885. It enabled various nations to exploit their spheres of influence without open warfare. APower Elite will naturally seek to create a vision of a society based on the quality of its own ideals. Every business man will naturally be interested in doing business in an organized environment. Negative forces which sabotage business whether as gangs, middle men, corrupt bureaucrats thrive in an environment of chaos and lawlessness. The vision of a great and stable nation is often their preoccupation. A Power Elite, at its evolution often focuses on four critical areas.
These critical areas are, the building of institutions to support the state, securing the borders and ensuring its territorial integrity of the state, adopting a system of government (federal or regional), and the provision of a Constitutional basis for administration. They impose norms of civility in a language and manner that enhances national integration. They do this by adopting what has come to be known as civil religion. Civil religion relates to those unwritten codes of conduct and behaviour that enhance the creation of a national ethos which comes to be associated with the people. Some ingredients of civil religion are merely symbolic and mythical, saluting the flag, standing at the national anthem, a manner of greeting that becomes associated with the people, a collective trait, whether it is honesty, generosity etc. Today, after hundreds of years of working on their national identities, we can at least make some generalizations about say, an average American, Singaporean, Chinese or British citizen. The elite can sometimes impose a language, ideology or a religion as glue for holding national identity in place. Loosely, most of us will associate the American with warmth, belief in their superiority over others; we know the British have a few layers which account for their taciturnity and restraint, otherwise known as the stiff upper lip. A Ghanaian is more polite, prone to obedience.
What can we say about the Nigerian? Well, you may have to refer to Peter Enahoro’s How to Be a Nigerian or Dan Agbese’s recent, Nigeria, Their Nigeria. The difficulty that Nigeria faces in developing a national ethos arises from the complex web that has come to make up the citizens of the country. It is tempting to see the plurality of tongues as an excuse. I doubt. I think that the nature of the construction of the colonial state created its own difficulties. However, I am convinced that more than the colonial project, military disruption severely damaged the fabric of our national unity. The creation of states seemed an attraction (recall the mini celebrations of independence at the announcement), but it tore the veins of nationhood, deepened regional and ethnic cleavages, created a climate of fear and suspicion among the elite and narrowed the confines for the competition for the resources of the state. And, in a mono economy such as ours, this encouraged the banditry that still persists till date. The energies required for nation building were diverted to serve ethno-regional interests. Law, order, discipline, integrity all broke down. This is what has provided the raw material for the negative characterization of Nigeria and its peoples by their own people and outsiders.
I want to argue here that we now need to create a Power Elite that can coherently begin to dream of strategies for reversing the war psychosis that has gripped our people, the sense of helplessness and frustration that leads us to think there is no way out of this. I do believe that there is a way out and that if we plan well and define the strategies that we require so that the next 50 years will cure future Nigerians of the mistakes that we have made. To do this, I will propose a few suggestions that are not scientific but I will hope that we can begin to debate these issues. My hope is that our 50th anniversary must not catch us still stuck in the mud of self deprecation, rant and self hate. The brightness of our future does not depend on the present realities. My optimism lies in the over one million extremely talented young men and women who are today in some of the best institutions abroad. These young men and women are teenagers and it is they and their talent that are the source of my optimism. They are the ones who will shape the greatness of this piece of land which God has entrusted to the black race. I make the following tentative propositions and hope that with more debate, we can clarify the options.