Monday,
January 30, 2012 |
Remember that some older columns are available
in PDF)
**********
Last week,
President Goodluck Jonathan extended the charade that is Nigeria’s
feeble, failing fight against anarchy by replacing Inspector General of
Police Hafiz Ringim with a new man named M.D. Abubakar. Mr. Ringim’s
rustication, and the hiring of Mr. Abubakar, came in the wake of a
series of gruesome bomb attacks – in Madalla and Kano – by Boko Haram, a
terrorist group whose anti-Western rant is surpassed in ferocity by its
death-dealing.
If the move to fire Ringim and hire Abubakar was meant to indicate a
new, firm resolve to square off against Boko Haram, the orchestration
fell flat on its face. From the outset, Mr. Abubakar’s headship of the
police was freighted with far from reassuring controversy.
No sooner was his appointment announced than several groups rose to
question his suitability. It is now widely known that the Justice Niki
Tobi commission that investigated a bloody sectarian flare-up in Jos in
2001 concluded that the new IG woefully shirked his duties – to say the
least. The commission asserted that Mr. Abubakar, who was the
Commissioner of Police in Plateau State at the time of the bloody feud
between Muslims and Christians, received the most “scathing comments” in
memoranda.
Numerous witnesses at the commission accused Mr. Abubakar of being
“responsible…for causing the crisis or failing to curtail its severity
or extent.” The commission found the testimonies compelling. It stated:
“The inability of the police to handle the situation resulted largely
from the poor handling of the crisis by…Abubakar at whose doorstep the
blame must be laid.” The Tobi panel stated that, in the build-up to the
bloodbath, as tensions rose, the then commissioner of police continued
to mislead the state government with a “false sense of security that
turned out to be fatal.” The commission concluded that Mr. Abubakar was
“guilty of, at best, gross negligence and at worst, sheer incompetence.”
And the foregoing represented the commission’s milder rebuke. Turning up
its rhetoric, Justice Tobi and other commissioners contended that the
former state police chief – now inspector general – apparently lent
advantage to the Muslim combatants when he, a, reassigned some
divisional police officers as the crisis simmered, b, withdrew vehicles
that would have given certain police units greater mobility to reach
besieged areas, and, c, shielded mosques from attack whilst leaving
churches unprotected and vulnerable to the incendiary rage of Muslims.
The commission suggested that Mr. Abubakar retire from the police, or be
compelled to leave.
It may well be that the Tobi Commission did a huge injustice to a
stellar officer, but the public has no evidence that this is the case.
Was President Jonathan unaware of the cloud over the new IG when he
picked the man to head an embattled, inept, demoralized and deeply
corrupt police? If the president knew of the Tobi strictures, did it not
seem to him pertinent that such a freighted past had to be addressed, an
explanation offered to Nigerians? If Mr. Abubakar’s role in the 2001 Jos
crisis was beyond reproach, the onus is now on him – and on President
Jonathan as well – to put Nigerians’ apprehensions about the new IG’s
record to rest.
But the matter of Mr. Abubakar’s culpability in the Jos conflagration
aside, it should be stipulated that the state of affairs in Nigeria
simply does not conduce to an effective tackling of Boko Haram. A sturdy
campaign against the militant group would demand more than a cosmetic
gesture, far more than a mere change of guards. And that, in the end, is
what the swapping of Abubakar for Ringim represents.
Boko Haram’s audacity, its ability to have its violent way – taking the
war to the military, the police, the SSS etc – bespeaks a fundamental
malaise in Nigeria. In fact, the group is, at best, a symptom of a
debilitating, horrific disease: a space that for fifty years had laid
unfounded, unproven, quite fraudulent claims to being a nation. Boko
Haram’s gratuitous deployment of violence is, in a profound sense, a
proclamation of the hollowness of the Nigerian “nation.”
It would be a mistake, I suggest, to perceive Boko Haram as an entity
sworn to nullify or erase the Nigerian nation. That’s the official line
– and lie – that the machinery of the Nigerian state delights in
propagating. You can’t expunge what doesn’t exist; and Nigeria, as a
viable nation, does not exist. Instead, one sees Boko Haram as a violent
organism spawned in part by a deceptive claim. Were Nigeria not a lie
sustained since British fiat cobbled it together, it would be difficult
for a monster like Boko Haram to take root here.
Truth be told, the British did not leave us a nation; at best, they
bequeathed a shell to us. Yes, we had the option to take the shell and
mould it into whatever we chose, including a vibrant national community.
Such an undertaking would have demanded volition and commitment on the
part of all of us. Rather than embrace that creative challenge, we
carried on as if mere word of mouth sufficed to translate a space into a
national community. But a nation, any real nation, is more than the sum
of its politicians’ speeches. A nation built on sheer political
rhetoric, but no corresponding positive acts, can be no more than a
pathetic pretender. We are caught, all of us, in the cauldron of that
willful contradiction.
Those Nigerians who occupy one political office or another are most
vociferous in invoking the Nigerian “nation.” They are the most liable
to vend the falsehood that Nigeria’s identity as a nation is a settled
question. The reason is not farfetched; it is naked self-interest. Their
lips locked on the trough, they stood – and stand – to suck and suck
from Nigeria’s resources. These men and women cleave to the romance of
shepherding a nation when, in fact, all they do is liberally and
greedily help themselves to the common harvest. Experts in the art of
dispossession and the science of gluttony, they frequently marshal the
police, the military and the SSS to fend off the hordes of Nigerians to
enable them to gorge undisturbed.
The protesters who crowded the streets of Nigerian cities and towns in
January had finally seen through the game. Or – since they have long
been aware of the game – they had finally found the proper idiom to
express their disgust. Unafraid to speak, they called the so-called
chieftains by their proper names: thieftains. They realized that many of
the ostensible leaders are, at bottom, terrorists whose greed has caused
far more misery and deaths than Boko Haram’s bombs. To the extent that
they saw beyond their oppressors’ facile efforts to sow seeds of ethnic
suspicion in order to split the resistance, they began to imagine a
different, inspirited Nigeria.
A space can’t lay serious claims to being a nation when patent criminals
are hardly prosecuted and never jailed, but – as Wole Soyinka reminded
us recently – are turbaned or regaled with chieftaincy titles and other
insignia of honor. We can’t be a nation when elections are turned into
selection fests in which voters have no say; judges routinely sell their
verdicts to the highest bidder; legislators compete with the executive
in devising looting schemes; corrupt governors and presidents are
shielded by the constitution; connected politicians and office holders
contrive to snatch the barest meals from the mouths of the wretched of
the Nigerian earth but treat themselves and their own families to
opulent escapades complete with private jets and carousals on foreign
beaches; one Nigerian is grudgingly handed a monthly minimum wage of
$120 while another – called a governor – carts away $2.2 million each
month in a scam called security vote.
My Endorsement For Igbo Leader?
Last week, a
certain Omunekokwu Eze wrote a piece published in at least two
newspapers and titled “Who will step into Ojukwu’s shoes?” The writer
quoted me as praising Governor Peter Obi of Anambra for taking
extraordinary care of the late Ikemba Nnewi. I want to assure my readers
that the said words ascribed to me were never mine. I am appalled that
Mr. Eze would credit me with words I never wrote and sentiments I don’t
hold. I find the whole exercise sickening.
