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Nigeria: A Nation in Denial

By Obi. O. Akwani
MGV Editor

Posted September 1, 2009

Since the July 2009 visit of President Barack Obama of the United States to Ghana and failure to visit neighboring Nigeria during that African visit - something most Nigerians saw as a pointed snub and indictment of the country's poor leadership, many people in the most populous country in Africa have begun some measure of soul searching. They are asking what is wrong with their country; what they are getting wrong and how they are getting it wrong.

That soul searching was intensified after last month's visit and lecture to the Nigerian legislature by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

The news media have begun asking if Nigeria is heading toward a failed state status. That was the topic of the day on the afternoon of August 31 during the TV magazine program, Matters Arising, on AIT. 

That question may be taking the matter to the extreme. From our vantage, Nigeria is very far from a failed state. With its strong military and solid - if deeply corrupt - apparatus of state, the country can well contain the crisis - such as the situation in the Niger Delta or uprisings by extreme religious sects such as the Boko Haram - that crop up from time to time.

In this article, the argument is that Nigerians are not looking at the real issue that is at the bottom of all the country's problems; and that until they do so, those problems will likely continue and President Umaru Yar Adua's goal of bringing Nigeria into the fold of the first 20 economies of the world by 2020 may not be realized.

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When it comes to their nation and polity, the Nigerian people are in denial. They are in denial about who they are as a people. Make no mistake about it; Nigerians are altogether sure of themselves in their ethnicity. People have no doubt what they expect of and for themselves as Edo, Hausa, Ibibio, Igala, Igbo, Ijaw, Kanuri, Yoruba or other. The trouble begins when it comes to their identity as Nigerians. People don't seem to know what to expect of themselves and of their government in their Nigerianness. They seem only able to understand their desires, aspirations and obligations in terms of their ethnic or religious identities. Therefore they make contradictory, unsustainable demands on their Nigerianness. And when, inevitably, problems arise due to this limited perception and contradictions in Nigerianness, the denials begin.

Unfortunately, this failure to understand themselves as Nigerians affects the leadership more than any other Nigerians. This is why a situation such as exists in the Niger Delta could have been allowed to fester to the point it is at today. Leaders of the country, not being primarily Niger-Deltans, failed to empathize with or see things from the point of view of the people of the region. A very useful tool in this process is corruption - paying off select regional leaders and denying the reality, carrying on as if the poor agitators are mere fools.

This psychological state of denial has existed since before the country's independence in 1960. It was during this period that a budding national spirit was turned against itself. And ever since, Nigerians have been in denial, acceding to a balkanizing spirit that, to this day, keeps the country unstable and racked with corruption. It has made the people often brutal with each other to tragic results and has turned the Nigerian people into perpetual victims of circumstance, philosophically accepting everything that happens to them - from poor electric and water supply, poor sanitation in the big cities, and over-billing by utilities and other government service providers, even to electoral manipulations that deny the vote of the people. the balkanizing spirit kills, ultimately, the momentum of positive initiatives that from time to time arises spontaneously from the Nigerian people for their own good. All this because the people are in denial and refuse to face the truth about themselves.

To face the truth would entail repositioning their perceptions about their reality; about their history and its outcomes and how those outcomes relate to present times. But this is something that many Nigerians are loath to do. One sign that Nigerians abhor scrutiny of their own history is the fact that there are hardly any new scholarly works being produced and popularized for public consumption. If you are, for instance, looking for ready references on Nigerian political history and turn to the internet, you must contend with Encarta, Britannica and others like them. What these references have on Nigeria is from foreign scholars and factually questionable. One reason for this is that Nigerians can hardly agree on the narrative of Nigeria. Most of the writings that have emerged in the last decade have been non-academic works done by political agents with an agenda. So the ordinary Nigerian is left with these misleading works and it shows in the way most Nigerians tell it: Their past heroes never made mistakes and were strong nationalists. And where the logic of this telling fails, there is silence.

Failure to face the truth and reposition their perception as a people condemns Nigerians to repeat past errors and to remain asking "Why?" even as their despair often spills over into brutality and mutual condemnation. As Nigerians are forced to face these inevitable outcomes, their listless national soul seems overwhelmed and they do no better than roll with the punches and make alternative philosophical explanations for what is happening to them.

There is no greater evidence of this refusal to face the truth about themselves as a nation than the general reaction of Nigerians following each major election. The people go to the polls expecting to elect candidates of their choice, but ultimately when the votes are counted (after days or weeks of delay), the person they expect to win is not the one declared the winner. Protests follow, but those soon dwindle out and all revert to business as usual.

That was the case in the 2007 polls. The people did not really have a choice then. The candidates were foisted on them by the party bigwigs. The outcomes of the elections were fait accompli in most cases. After the elections President Umaru Musa Yar' Adua acknowledged the highly flawed nature of the polls and promised to institute reforms to eliminate flaws in the electoral process.

Upon settling in as president, Yar' Adua set up an electoral reform panel headed by former chief justice of the federation, Mohammed Uwais. However, when the Uwais panel tendered its report in 2009, the president suddenly grew reluctant to make the report public or implement its recommendations. Instead he produced his own two-page synopsis of the voluminous report and asked the legislature to deliberate on that two-page subjective interpretation. There must be something in the rule of law (a favorite recourse of Yar Adua's) or the constitution that prohibits such maneuvers. In any case, such conduct on the part of the president amounts to gross contempt of the legislature. The Senate, to the relief of most Nigerians, refused to debate the watered-down version and demanded instead to be given the full report. That is where things stand at the moment. The president's electoral reform promises appear destined to thus fade away. The legislature should not let things die like that. If the president refuses to make available the Uwais report for public debate or implement its recommendations, the legislature should commission their own report and use that to give the Nigerian people the electoral reform that they want.

This trend shows that the balkanizing spirit remains alive and the denial is still strong. This is evident at the top, among the entrenched political leadership. They may pay lip service to Nigeria, but their greater concern is for self-interest presented through the sanctioning of ethnic and regional concerns. Self-interest makes them highly vulnerable to influences by outer interests, compromising national interests. Even the intelligentsia seems somehow to be tainted by the denial; unable or reluctant to call a spade a spade.

One of the most respected minds in Nigeria, Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka, weighed in on the Uwais electoral reform report and other issues in a newspaper article (Vanguard, June 28, 2009 pp 20, 50) and mildly pilloried the president for stymieing the electoral reform process with his decision to release only his own two-page version of the full Uwais report. But to one's utter amazement, the outspoken Soyinka appeared to stop short of laying the blame on the president's door step; instead, like the denial-prone Nigerians who have also weighed-in on the subject, he seems to put it on the Independent National Electoral Commission chair, Maurice Iwu, whom he refers to, sarcastically, as "our electoral organizing genius".

One is hard put to believe that Soyinka is one of those in denial, but by saying that "the fount of all electoral malfeasance rests firmly in the director's chair," he seems to be suggesting that the INEC chairman should be held responsible for the corruption of elections in Nigeria. Soyinka himself acknowledges, speculatively, that Iwu "is, without question, being encouraged to utilize the same alibi of 'decision-making' to justify what is already looming as another electoral debacle..." The 'encouragement' is of course coming from the entrenched political leadership. This clearly suggests that Soyinka is aware that Iwu is not the ‘director’ or an ‘independent’ chairman of INEC. But many Nigerians are already clamoring for the removal of the INEC chair before the next general election, claiming that this is the way to ensure the absence of fraud in the next election. Talk about being in denial! These are the people who actually believe that Maurice Iwu is truly responsible for what happens during elections. By not being clear enough in what he wrote, Soyinka is aiding and abetting this type of thinking. Joining chorus of the many calling for the ouster of the INEC chair is not the answer. The INEC chairman cannot on his own challenge the corruption in the electoral system. Remove this Iwu, and another "Iwu" will be brought in to take his place.

The truth which Nigerians must face is that their country can not survive with balkanizing interests ruling supreme. Those who envision Nigeria in terms of 'federal character' only are balkanizing this country. Those who insist that it is the north’s turn to rule are balkanizing this country. These types are the ones who make corruption prevalent in Nigeria. They are the ones who make it difficult for the wealth of the nation to be properly deployed for the general good. They are the ones who undermine Nigeria's democracy and will rather destabilize the nation than concede national leadership to any other than people of their own choosing.

To bring about change, Nigeria needs a strong leader that can galvanize the country to think Nigerian. The type of electoral reform needed is one which will produce such a leader. Nigerians don't want a strong northern leader or a strong southern leader, answering to entrenched northern or southern interests, to manage the country. They want a Nigerian, not just to manage the country, but to give it vision, inspire the people and unite them as a nation.

To begin with, here is a simple electoral reform for Nigerians to consider: For presidential elections, Nigerians don't need political parties to select for them the candidates for leadership of the country. If there are 10,000 or 140 million individual Nigerians who want to be president of the country, let them enter the arena, as many of them as meet the basic requirement. Let each one of them build his or her own machinery and go out and win the hearts and minds of the Nigerian people. After a preliminary period of campaigning, a national referendum should be held in which the number of presidential candidates shall be reduced to the six most popular persons. The surviving six would vie for the presidency in a general election. The best two among them would become president and vice president, respectively. All election results should to be counted and collated at the place of voting immediately the polls close. The result for each polling booth should be announced in place as the votes are being counted.