The Nigerian Elections 2015 and the Fate of Africa -By Stan Chu Ilo

“I asked: ‘where is the black man’s government? Where is his king and his kingdom? Where is his president, his country, and his ambassador, his army, his navy, his men of big affairs? I could not find them, and then I declared: ‘I will help to make them…’ I saw before me then, even as I do now new world of black men, not peons, serfs, dogs and slaves, but a nation of sturdy men, making their impress upon civilization and causing a new light to dawn upon the human race.” Marcus Garvey, The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey.

This weekend Nigerians go to the polls in what many observers have called the most closely fought election in recent history. Many Nigerians, both at home and abroad, are deeply interested in the outcome of this election. The whole world is watching Nigeria. As the most populous African country, successful elections in Nigeria and a workable Nigeria would be a source of pride and hope for Africa.

There are three main issues which are at stake in these national elections that I have noted from discussing with Nigerians and reading or listening to commentaries in the press. Even though there are no clear answers from the two leading parties in the country — PDP and APC — on how to meet these challenges, they are the most important concerns for most Nigerians. The first is the question of national security. Nigeria is not a very safe place to live in and most Nigerians will admit as much. Heightened insecurity may be concentrated in some parts of the country, but in general violent crimes and kidnapping by criminals and many unemployed young men and women are common place in every part of Nigeria. Scattered around Nigeria are all kinds of local militias, political thugs, and village or city vigilante groups, para-military security groups who easily mutate from being body guards or civil agitators or prayer warriors in one area of the country to being armed robbers in other parts.

Before the birth of Boko Haram, Nigerians had considerable concern and unease about the security of lives and property. Boko Haram has placed Nigeria in the infamous league of countries struggling with the virus and destructive impact of radical Islamic fundamentalism and its associated anti-state and anti-Western rhetoric. With this has come a senseless and asymmetrical warfare, with its radical and aggressive theocracy under a distorted Islamic eschatology. But Boko Haram is only a new phase in what has been a succession of violent uprisings, localised conflagrations, and random acts of violence, mayhem, and violence which have hampered the safe and easy movement of goods, services and people across the country. Stamping out Boko Haram which is proving to be a will-o’-the-wisp for the government will definitely not stamp out violence in Nigeria or the unexplained disappearance of people and random assassinations and armed robbery in the country. The security apparatus — police, military, civil defence etc. — needs to be purged of their brutality, corruption, lack of professionalism and flagrant abuse of human rights and human lives. Furthermore, there is the need to deal with the weaponisation of Nigeria by politicians and ethnic and religious extremists who all have their own security apparatus and trigger-happy ‘o yes boys.’

The second issue is about the economy. There is need to evolve an economic model for Nigeria which is home-woven and builds on the assets of our people. Nigeria should not blindly copy some exogenous Western models of neo-liberal capitalism or some of the death-dealing borrowed economic orthodoxies dictated by Western financial institutions, donor agencies and governments. Nigeria is a richly blessed country. The wealth of Nigeria is not simply her national oil wealth or her rich deposit of mineral wealth or her rich vegetation and fertile arable land. The wealth of Nigeria is above all in the quality, ingenuity, creativity, resilience and spirituality of her citizens. The New York Times reported recently that Nigerians living in the USA, of all immigrants who come from different parts of the world, have proven to be the most successful. According to the media house, “About 380,000 Nigerian immigrants and their children live in the United States, up from 25,000 in 1980. They have settled in metropolitan areas like New York, Houston and Washington, and as a group, they are far more likely than the overall American population to receive undergraduate and advanced degrees, according to a 2014 analysis done for the Rockefeller Foundation and the Aspen Institute.”

When placed in an enabling environment, most Nigerians, like their African brothers and sisters, tend to flourish. Nigerians are also deeply religious, most of the times. Nigerians take God seriously and they love life and the good things of life. It is only a strong people who will be dancing around and having fun in the very suffocating socio-economic miasma of the times in the country and the absence of the basic necessities of life and the unexplained deaths of many young people. But I marvel at the genius of Nigerian people and the amazing cultural tapestry of the over 500 ethnic nations which make up these lands. When Nigerians claim that their country is the giant of Africa, they mean it. This is why Nigeria gave her national team the title ‘Super Eagles’ because for most Nigerians — whether other Africans or non-Africans affirm it or not — our country is as big and super as you can get. Even though the national team could not make it to the African Nations Cup this year, most Nigerians still see the ‘super’ component as synonymous with the Nigerian character: great intellects, great writers, great scientists, great journalists, great scientists and technologists, great actors and Nollywood stars, great poets, great novelists, great musicians, great journalist and the list goes on. The only thing that has not been great in Nigeria in the judgment of most Nigerians is the quality of her leadership and her political and religious elites who have failed this country.

This is why it is important for Nigerians both at home and abroad to ask themselves why Nigeria with so much wealth has remained a poor and beggarly country? Why the diversity of cultures, languages and religions, instead of being a source of pride, creativity and celebration, is always a source of division, stereotyping, and polemics? Why is it that our social services are in decay and our power sector has remained epileptic and comatose? Why is it that our best brains and talents are not appreciated in our land and can only flourish outside Nigeria, helping to develop other countries? Why is it that Nigerians don’t seem to work together, but rather are easily eaten up by rivalry, in-fighting, intrigues, and other negative vices which hamper mutual collaboration, co-operation and community? Why is it that many people in Nigeria cannot obtain basic and affordable health care and why our young people are dying before their prime and our elderly people spend their last days in penury and in tears because of poverty and neglect? Why is this richly blessed land constantly failing her citizens and failing to rise to her destiny? What economic model is being offered by any of the parties which will mitigate the impending economic crisis following the steep fall in oil prices?

The third issue for this election which follows from the last is the question of failed leadership and corruption. Not only has Nigeria not evolved a workable political structure for governance, the country has not also created a healthy framework for the emergence of good leaders. Failed leadership and corruption in public and private services are the twin evils destroying Nigeria, and most Nigerians know it. The irony of it all is that if you asked the current President what he considers the main problems of Nigeria he will say that it is leadership and corruption. No one accepts responsibility for the rot in Nigeria and everyone blames every other person but themselves for the rot. Unfortunately, no one ever gets punished in Nigeria for being a bad leader or for corruption. This is why the political actors today are some of the disgraced and discredited corrupt politicians of the immediate past. Our present leaders are recycled throwback from the past whose failed leadership by direct action or through their association with the past ruling military cabals brought this nation to her knees. Both President Jonathan and General Buhari, notwithstanding their pretensions to being converts to a new Nigerian agenda and to a new redemptive purity of intention, are the products of this stinking political chessboard manipulated by a few thin top layer of the Nigerian political, military and religious elite.

Nigeria has not had the fortune, since independence, of producing a national leader who embodies the dreams and aspirations of the people, especially the 99% of Nigerians who only want to have the basic necessities of life in a safe and secure country. What Nigeria has produced have been ethnic and sectional leaders who were lionised by their tribe’s men and women, and who rode to power on the banners of religion and ethnicity. When people are elected to power on the bases of ethnicity or religion, or because of regional or sectional power rotation and on mere sentiments, we lower the bar of integrity and character because these are not easily determined through appeal to these identities. In addition, we make it hard for the kind of quality we need in a leader to be assessed, evaluated and determined in a more objective and comprehensive manner. National leaders who are elected on the basis of religion and ethnicity end up being champions of their own sectional interest. This is why our leadership has been shun of integrity, clear vision and large-hearted perspicuity.

We need a national leader whose ideas and ideals could stretch the bandwidth of national leadership so that it can transmit the kind of vision, sacrifice, patriotism and idealism which can unite the nation and lift up the land from this constant bubble in the cycle of decay and in the darkling passivity of diminishment. The long suffering Nigerians are tired of being exploited and insulted by failed leaders.

Governance is the greatest challenge facing Nigeria. Failed leadership in Nigeria cuts across not only the political elite but also religious leaders and leadership of the public and private sectors. We often sacrifice merit for expedience, quality for quantity, and character for sentiments, and creative criticism for destructive and dishonest adulation and cult of personality. Leadership is all about how individuals can influence the rest in the organisation or social setting to collectively channel their energies and talents to realising the ultimate purpose and mission of the group. But in Nigeria, leadership at most levels is all about what people can gain for themselves.

The battle for political leadership has become an all comers’ gladiatorial fight with a high attrition rate. Political leadership in Nigeria is also an elitist game of hide-and-seek with a constantly revolving door that has similar faces all appearing in different robes and roles. The two main parties in these elections share common values and common cause which is simply the accession to power and the use of power to settle political scores and to share the national wealth to their reference group and acolytes. We run a patron-client exploitative and prebendal system which is a throwback to the dark ages in Europe with its feudal lords and profligate matriarchs. Our leaders are not our servants; they are our masters. We the people of Nigeria are unfortunately clients to our leaders and fall on our knees in propitiation to them to receive crumbs from the master’s table when we all should be eating at the same table. Most Nigerian leaders are scions hewed from the same political tree and the change from one party to another by politicians is as simple as how ordinary and poor Nigerians attend the campaign of both parties based on which party will share yams, vests or at best ‘mobilise’ the people through some Naira rain (monetary reward).

As Nigerians go to the polls, the immortal words of Marcus Garvey (Where is the government for the Black man?) should remind us of who we are as a people. It seems that sometime we Black people and more so those in the motherland, Africa, forget our sad past and the lessons of history. We forget easily the complex unjust structures we have found ourselves in the sinful world order of today. We forget ‘the labours of our heroes past’, as our national anthem says, and the sufferings of our people in the past and the ongoing condition of Black people throughout the world. We must set these elections and the travails of Nigeria under bad leadership and under the asymmetrical warfare of Boko Haram in context.

The construction of our ethnic or religious identities and their framing into narratives of exclusion and inclusion and the antinomies of light and darkness and other narratives of ‘the saved’, and the ‘damned’, the ‘Muslims’ and the Christians’, Ndi Igbo or Hausa, Ogoni or Yoruba is a very recent event. They are the result of the hybridity of post-coloniality which holds Nigeria in thraldom. As an Igbo, I may be falsely led to think that the Yorubas are my problem in Nigeria. However, if one looks further and deeper, we see that there is a global order which has effectively placed Africa in a very unworkable structure which she must break loose from in order that our people can live again. Racism, colonialism, imperialism and the marginalisation of Africans and Blacks in the world are realities which most Africans cannot forget when they fight to finish in their small worlds or when they parade themselves as ethnic saviours or when they exploit and destroy their countries as new internal imperialists and turncoats.

At core, there is something of an ‘Aboki’ in me, something of an ‘alaye’ in me not only because of our common humanity as children of one God, but more so because of our racial origin. I am not saying that the ‘out of Africa’ theory is without its limits but I am proposing that the survival of our race is very vital in every decision people make in Africa and that it is more so important especially in elections like this one in Nigeria. When Keith Richburg wrote the sensational book, Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa, many people claimed that he was pandering to an essentialist narrative of Africa and Blackness. Keith recounted the barbarism he saw in many parts of Africa, the brazen brutality of African war lords, the conscienceless corruption of African gate keepers who parade themselves as leaders, and the brutality of African despots. As an African American whose ancestors came from Africa, his home coming to Africa left him heartbroken to see the wretchedness of life in Africa as a result of the failed leadership and the failure of Africans to live together as brothers and sisters. Thus after seeing the bodies of so many Africans littered on highways and floating on the rivers as a result of wars, violence and hunger, Keith thanked God that his ancestors entered that slave ship and got to America.

A different sentiment, however, was expressed by President Obama when he addressed a joint assembly of Ghana’s parliament in 2009 on good governance and the future of Africa. Obama had warned that a new narrative for Africa cannot emerge unless Africans addressed the failed leadership and the collapsing social and economic structures which have kept most Africans down.

In his last speech to parliament before he retired as President, Nelson Mandela begged African leaders to embody a new spirit of service and sacrifice in order to reinvent the soul of Africa. It is no longer enough to blame the West for the problems of our continent or the racism which still shapes most narratives about Africa and Blacks. Like the Yoruba say, the grass cutter which steals into my barns to eat my yam, will come back again unless I firm up my fences and close the hole in my barn.

A richly blessed country like Nigeria cannot have an excuse for the emergence of Boko Haram, for corruption which has turned our public service into a cesspool of corruption, for sprawling inefficiency and collapsing social services. We cannot blame the West but only ourselves for the lack of decency, civility and transparency in the conduct of ongoing electioneering campaign and the tension which all these have generated and the low quality of leadership which we have tolerated in Nigeria for a long time.

We cannot blame the West for the kind of false religious posturing and prophecies, and the materialism, myth of gigantism which surround our religious and cultural life. Marcus Garvey asked the question: Where is the Black man’s government? I hope that he and many giant Black souls like Olauda Equiano who told the stories of an Africa that was a rich land of blessing and beauty will be smiling on us from the ancestral home in the years to come about the leadership which will emerge from these elections in Nigeria. I still hope for a better future for my country of birth even though I wonder how any of the two main contenders for the highest office in the land can be a new point of light in a night full of clouds of darkness, fear and doubt. I pray that these elections will come to pass without bloodshed and that someday in our life time we will have a country of which we can say in the words of our old national anthem: Nigeria, we hail thee, our own dear native land; though tribe and tongue may differ in brotherhood we stand!

Stan Chu Ilo is a Research Professor with the Center for World Catholicism and Inter-Cultural Theology, DePaul University, Chicago, USA.