“Quid pro quo”: ‘Liberating fathers’ for ‘looting fathers’? -By Segun Ige

In this paper we provide an epistemic lacuna of the phenomenology of Independence, especially as expatiated in Malcolm X’s “Message to the Grass Root”, a speech that, with common-or-garden use of words, addresses the existential reality of ‘Nationhood’ and ‘Nationalism’.

With regard to the Machiavellian method of marshaling ‘turn-the-other-cheek’ masochism, Malcolm X contends, even asserts, that African countries, particularly Nigeria, have invariably been ‘smiling’ and ‘suffering’ from the naked power of the White who did not seem human; who did not know love; and who are ‘wolves-in-sheep’s-clothing’. Surely, the pursuance of independence might have been precipitated from the distance-of-power between the leaders and the led, in this case the White and the Black, that is, the European and Nigerian demagogues. Of course the travail and turmoil and trepidation made the ‘field’ and ‘house’ Negro-Nigerians engage in teeth-for-tat bolekaja with the blue-eyed and gold-rimmed-eye-glasses Master and the majority of the masses – remember, they were the field ‘Negrorians’ who saw the necessity of a new ‘nation’, a black nationalism, a bleak neonatal-and-‘nonviolent’ democracy. Apparently the leaders-leading-nation fought for a nation. But whose nation; whose nationalism; whose – er –whose nation, I mean? Perhaps the ‘Nation’ Nigerian nationalists, or the European imperialists, founded on the ‘Land’ (and, in part, hasn’t it always been because of land, yes, because of land, that people show their naked brutality and bestiality?) is a white-or-black nation or a white-and-black nation, if one were to pay considerable concern to the Independence Day speech of Tafawa Balewa and one Valedictory speech of Obafemi Awolowo, namely, “Awo’s Valedictory’s Speech to Western Region House of Assembly”.

Awolowo’s assertion When the battle for 1956 as a target date for independence raged fiercely in 1953 it was our Legislature alone that passed resolutions in support has at least three presuppositions. First, we might mime from it the notion of Resolution, especially when it comes to a group of people perceiving a gross imbalance between themselves and the ‘Falconers’ or ‘Vultures’. Secondly, and far more importantly, it might be argued that there is ‘a battle for independence; that ‘independence involves resolutions’; and that ‘independence does go with ‘bitterness, bloodshed and bleeding’. To be sure, in founding a nation, whether a white nation or a black nation, all because of independence, all because of land, either by the ‘Landlords’ or ‘Tenants’, there usually emerges every possibility to killing so “fiercely” one or person or another. In fact, real resolutions, I mean real resolutions, involve a ‘do-me-I-do-you-God-nogo-vex’ ragbag cadavers. The “battle” Awolowo is taking about, then, for the independence of Nigeria would have been the one that took lives of key political actors and participators, thereby undoubtedly given that Nigeria is, in line with the presuppositions under consideration, a black nation, indeed a nation, with a black nationalism, an ‘independent’ nation, which itself must be, historically speaking, “irresolutely” governed by its leaders.

For Balewa, however, Nigeria’s independence appears somewhat radically different from Awolowo’s. Consequently, the proposition This great country, which has now emerged without bitterness or bloodshed, finds that she must be at once be ready to deal with grave international issues clearly suggests that the so-called independent nation is that founded by the white, which therefore makes, in particular, Nigeria a white nation, with all its attendant colonial mentality among the Nigerian peoples and the ‘house’ Negrorians – remember, they were the ones perpetuating the slave-master untoward relationship, so that Nigeria remained un-bloodshed non-nation, because of its ‘irresoluteness’ and powerlessness. And since independence involves resolution, which itself involves bloodshed and bitterness, it might be presupposed that, from Tafawa’s assertion, Nigeria is not an independent black nation.

All told, it would have been sharply concluded that, and with the annulment of Anthony Enahoro’s 1956 proclamation of independence and self-government motion in the House of Representatives, is a both a white nation and a black nation: a white nation because it so youngish and so needs yet another master to which to depend; and a black nation because of the seemingly uncompromising commonality of the masses at the grass root, the ‘house’ Negros who always love their Nigerian masters, even as the masters cannot love themselves – isn’t it, for obvious reasons, because they are rather fortunate to eat the ‘guts’ – I mean gut-eaters they are – and others are unlucky to be gut-eaters as they are – that fall from the masters’ table, like Lazarus in the Biblical narration? Furthermore we not sure whether to talk about how Nigeria had her ‘In Dependence’ or ‘Independence’, considering the fact that, so far so good as we are concerned, Nigeria as a nation is white – therefore typifying the underlying structure that she still needs a master, she is in fact in dependence, so dependent on her master for one reason or another; at the other end of the scale, Nigeria could be opined to be actually independent in the real sense of the word, particularly if one had be observant of the near-death dutifulness of ‘Uncle Toms’ for the Nigerian-white masters on the ‘plantations’. And interestingly for us, Obafemi Awolowo cleverly tells us in the said speech that “By means of resolutions unanimously passed in the honourable House … field [Negros/Nigerians, or, as we have been using it, Negrorians] … served as the precursor[s] to national independence, and as the most powerful instrument for accelerating the advent of Nigeria’s freedom”. Obviously Awolowo as a master-builder would have been a believer in the ‘getting-all-by-all-means’ doctrine, and this might be argued to be the crux of his all-important speech for the Negros, the Nigerians, and, for followers of his firm persuasion, Neonatal democracies. Little wonder, then, why we are neither here nor there; suffering from what Abiola Irele calls “crisis of consciousness” and what Wole Soyinka terms the “Abiku syndrome”, going and coming these several seasons, wandering like lonely clouds in far-away Land, because we have drunk from the gall of bitterness and sweetness. We are lonely so lonely here.

Backpedal to the present, when we talk about nation building I often ask myself: what are we really building? Is it the nation that had and now has no founding fathers? Shall we continue to build the brazen brigandage, the venality, the cowardly silence and the stinking hypocrisy of the liberating fathers? The looting fathers themselves are building (building what?) the future (for whom?) for their unborn children. These are fathers of many nations in the corridors of power always turning the widening gear: 36 States have fallen apart since the center cannot hold, gloss-filled with coconut-heads composite of cabals kowtowing at the altar where they sacrifice human realities at the expense of their buccal cavities. The Buharisation of the burgeoning catch-cry of undistributed and unshared power invariably becomes a discombobulation as we are “waiting for the godot” who will really build, not rebuild (for I protest to see that prefixation of that nominal; because we should talk about building something and not building on a will-o’-the-wisp), some nation, especially someone somewhere someday who will stand on the true modus operandi of accountable governance: That governance has, as it were, to be corruption-free, people-centered, pro-people, pro-active, and pragmatic. This is the maxim I particularly enjoyed of Nerada Modi, the Indian Prime Minister. By the way, did you notice the concatenation of rise in Buharisation? Well, you might begin to reason the obvious: the scatological statistical bifurcation and disequilibrium of unemployment and population; the merchandisation of miscreants meet for political ends meet; the mummification of 1999 Constitution by here-and-there leaders; the sporadically exponential increase in the price of rice from “7, 000 to 24, 000”; the rise of the number of graduates produced every year in a very pitiable contradistinction to the availability of jobs; the sudden subtle “centralization” of Abuja, as state governors have been monochromatically programmed and functionally disempowered to perpetually pursue the penance and left-overs of the dividends of “favouritism federalism”.

Segun Ige
08141688084; igesegunadebayo5@gmail.com