Nigeria has not consciously addressed the question of designing the country’s political philosophy based on the knowledge of its history – precolonial and colonial, the failures of the present and the opportunities as well uncertainties of the future. As the world experiences mega-shifts from the classic political wisdom that shaped the way the state, morality, governance, ethics, rules and social constructs are understood, it is imperative for us to seize on the opportunity to put our thoughts forward. The real question is whether the country can think through its history and political struggles to map out possible pathways out of the political and economic decay we have been embedded in. If we develop a better understanding of our past, the choices for moving forward become clearer, and the blockages that tear us apart can be shoved aside.
In 1986, my workplace, the Department of Political Science of Ahmadu Bello University, published a book entitled Nigeria: A Republic in Ruins. The book was an outcome of a National Conference on the State of the Nation, which was hosted by the Department and concluded nineteen days before the fall of the Second Republic. The book accurately reflected the intellectual mood in Nigeria during the final days of our second experiment with democracy. This was followed by a flood of literature on “Endgame in Nigeria”, “Twilight in Nigeria” and “Crises and Collapse in Nigeria”. The language has gotten worse as Nigeria’s patrimonial State continued to promote booty capitalism as successive political classes define governance as the reckless raid on the Nation’s treasury. The more parasitic and predatory the political class has become, the more fragile the state has been.
The working model of the Nigerian state is the promotion of the interests of individuals, factions, cliques, etc., within the patrimonial ruling class to secure, maintain and expand their access to state resources while trying to exclude the access of their rivals. This ruthless struggle for access has fueled the increasing instability of the state. This is because primary sociological categories of an absolute nature, such as religion, ethnic group, language and region/zone, have been the most effective instruments for political mobilisation.
Although Professor Ade Ajayi told us that, “Nigeria was not a mere geographical expression. Nigerian history did not begin in 1914 or 1960, or with the British conquest, or with the coming of the Portuguese. Nigerian history was the history of the Nigerian peoples from the earliest times to the present;” no one listened. There was no attempt to search for the massive long-term interactions and linkages that we have built over the period that could be used to improve the coherence of the threads holding us together.
Professor Peter Ekeh told us the story of colonialism and the two publics, the primordial and the civic. A state that wants to endure cannot have a leadership that has only one interest, access to the “national cake” that is embodied in State power. He recalled that the colonial State in Nigeria saw itself as an arbiter that did not participate in the struggle for accumulation but was a guarantor and arbiter of the rules for so doing for its constituency, British capitalists. The colonial State, therefore, had a certain ethos, the creation of a public domain where the administration and its agents were supposed to serve the general interest embodied in the imperial State instead of their personal interests. Our nationalists had no interest in imbibing this ethos; it was simply their turn to eat, and the focus was on those with access, who ate and had no thoughts on growing the cake so that the ordinary people, too, could eat.
In 1950, the emergence of NEPU in Kano signalled the proposition of an ideology of liberation with the SAWABA DECLARATION.
The Northern Elements Progressive Union holds:
1. That the shocking state of social order as at present existing in northern Nigeria is due to nothing but the family compact rule of the so-called Native Administration in their present autocratic form.
2. That owing to this unscrupulous and vicious system of administration by the Family compact rulers and which has been established and fully supported by the British Imperialist Government, there is today in our society an antagonism of interest, manifesting itself as a class struggle between the members of the vicious circle of Native Administration on the one hand and the ordinary Talakawa on the other. The emerging ruling class understood the message. In the 1950-51 election, the NEPU majority disappears as rigging is invented.
In the south, the Zikist Movement, founded in Lagos on February 16th 1946, by four young men: M. C. K. Ajuluchukwu, Abiodun Aloba, Kolawole Balogun and Nduka Eze, emerged. They had wanted to defend and spread the message of Zik. His book – Renascent Africa (1937), which called for the five canons of the new African philosophy:
Social regeneration
Mental emancipation
Economic determinism
Political resurgimento
Spiritual balance
The Zikist Movement organised Osita Agwuna’s 1948 lecture “A Call for Revolution,” which called for a boycott of British goods, education and jobs in the police and army, withholding payment of taxes to the colonial state, to be paid to the NCNC instead. The colonial court declared the lecture to be seditious, and he was jailed with Tony Enaharo, who chaired it and others. The result was that Zik abandoned the Zikist Movement as they went to jail and focused on his access to power. When the Zikist Raji Abdallah declared himself a “Free and independent citizen of Nigeria with no allegiance to any foreign Government,” and was sent to jail for two years, there was no one to defend him. The chapter was closed when Zik’s response in the West African Pilot described Zikists as: “Fissiparous lieutenants and cantankerous followers acting without my knowledge and consent”. The transition from colonialism to neo-colonialism was smooth.
The question of a philosophy to guide Nigeria got embedded in our grand norm with Chapter Two of the 1979 and 1999 Constitutions. Under Articles 16 and 17 of the Constitution, it was decreed that the State shall:
Control the commanding heights of the economy
Be self-sufficient
Provide maximum welfare for the people
Engage in planning (not free enterprise)
Prevent concentration of wealth
Provide jobs, free healthcare and education to all
Olusegun Obasanjo came into power in 1999 and reversed it by taking directives from the World Bank and IMF and completely abandoning the interests of the people. The text remained in the Constitution, but the philosophy was rejected, and we all kept quiet.
We need to reflect on this abandonment of Chapter Two. Meanwhile, we should all read the inspiring book called “Formation: The Making of Nigeria From Jihad to Amalgamation”, written by Fola Fagbule and Feyi Fawehinmi and published by Cassava Republic in 2021. They discovered a magical formula that the writing of history is too serious an agenda to leave in the hands of historians. These young professionals, both of them in the financial sector, decided to read history books written about the Nigerian land area and write a compelling narrative which, in a sense, is about the inevitability of the emergence of Nigeria as a Nation. Their basic thesis is that, given the dynamics of social and political movements in the Nigerian land area at the beginning of the 19th century, whether or not colonialism had occurred, a country very similar to Nigeria of today would have emerged. The argument for the counter-factual is that the colonial regime only tinkered slightly with what they found, focused as they were on their task of exploitation. They did not build a State; they found a State in formation.
What the authors offer Nigerians is a compelling story of their creation. All nations have a story of formation. It is always partly historical and partly creative. It finds the heroes of the nation and edifies them. It draws attention to the enemies and vilifies them. The language is good, the narrative is clear, and the book is fascinating and reads like a novel with interesting characters, plots, mysteries, love, hate and epic battles. No one, for example, can respect the pompous, incompetent, arrogant, trigger-happy and love-frustrated Fred Lugard and his wife Flora Shaw after reading this book. Both suffered the terrible trauma of frustrated love affairs in their lives and directed their anger at dealing with Nigerians while telling glorious stories of their alleged contribution to building a civilised Nigeria in books and newspaper columns.
In other words, the book challenges us to reject the idea that Chimamanda Adichie, for example, articulates: “I am Nigerian because a white man created Nigeria and gave me that identity. I am black because the white man constructed black to be as different as possible from his white. But I was Igbo before the white man came.” The real story is that the White man came and found States and political communities that they essentially messed up. Indeed, way back in 1960, Okoi Arikpo emphatically stated that Nigeria is not an accident. It is not “an arbitrary block of land chopped off the surface of tropical Africa”. On the contrary, Nigeria is a “cultural melting pot” where cultural influences from all directions have met to produce a most dynamic cultural complex.
To go back to Formation, the book tracks the unlikely series of events and characters that were turning a collection of disparate nations into a major state. In 1800, the Oyo Empire was disintegrating, and the survivors had congregated in Abeokuta and later Ibadan, while Ilorin was about to secede. The story of Nigeria has a backbone, the river Niger and its sister, the Benue. The authors describe the River Niger as the best-kept tropical secret because, from the time of the Romans, the European world wanted to know where it started and ended for good reason. These were the arteries along which people fished, farmed, emigrated and transported themselves to make wars, capture territories and enslaved others, evangelized, in short, engaged in extensive relations. The book outlined the state of play, starting with the story of the Jihad of 1804, which had started at Gobir and within a short period federated the Hausa States, the Fulani Kingdom of Adamawa, Nupeland, Borgu and even Ilorin was seized from the crumbling Oyo Empire. Subsequently, Lugard was to add the autonomous peoples north of the Benue to Northern Nigeria and Bornu, which the British got after negotiating with the French. The book also tells the story of the incorporation of the peoples of Southern Nigeria and the traumatic story of the transition from the slave trade to the commerce in other goods.
I loved the story of the Dahomean all-female battalions, the Agoji. To amuse themselves, they will climb over a mountain of thorns, enjoy their skins being torn in anticipation of the man tied behind the thorns, who they will kill to their heart’s satisfaction. Ask the Egba what they suffered from these feminist warriors. For those who dare insult them by saying “you are nothing but a man”, the punishment is death. As for me, I would loathe to be in the same room with one of them. I prefer modern feminists.
Lugard from day one was focused on having a great legacy as a builder of British imperialism and wrote flowery books about his “contributions” – A Tropical Mandate in 1905 and Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa after retirement in 1922. Formation draws attention to the numerous flowery articles written to support his career by Flora Shaw, the girlfriend of George Goldie who the British State gave a Royal Warrant to exploit the resources of the country. Goldie was a philanderer, and Flora was one of his numerous side chicks. After Goldie’s wife died, Flora waited for a proposal from her boyfriend, which never came. Desperate, she broke with convention and wrote him a letter asking that he marry her. He had been paid by the British State for the Niger Company, but he refused and went to China to enjoy his wealth, and she went into depression. Fred Lugard, on the other hand, as a young man, fell madly in love with the wife of his officer in India, but after some time, she became realistic and spurned him. He developed a serious trauma and decided to come to the Niger area and die fighting for the glory of British imperial possessions. Having failed in their love lives, these two married in their late forties. Flora was six years older than Fred, and for more gossip on these characters, read the book.
Lugard’s career was one of brutality. Even the British Colonial Office found his excesses unbearable. After the massacre at Satiru (Sokoto) in 1906, he was ordered out of Nigeria because he could not be trusted not to be a repeat offender. It was when the British State decided to amalgamate the Northern and Southern Protectorates that they decided they needed a brutal administrator to deal with the aftermath, so they brought Fred back in 1912. Flora refused to follow him, so he brought his junior brother, Ned, as his personal assistant; it’s called nepotism. It was Ned Lugard who invented the term “trousered natives” as an insult against the educated Lagos elite who were criticizing the administration of his senior brother. J. D. Davies of the Times of Nigeria responded to this invective by calling Fred a “negrophobist” as the word racist could not be used in the press, considered as libel. Lugard was angry and got the court to charge him 100 pounds for insulting Oga. For much of Lugard’s second coming, he had a huge fight with the Lagos press – Kitoye Ajasa (Pioneer), George Williams (Lags Standard), John Payne (Lagos Weekly Record), among others. Lugard’s greatest enemy was, however, Herbert Macaulay, Bishop Crowder’s grandson, a Land Surveyor in the Colonial Service. For criticizing Lugard, he was framed for corruption, sacked and jailed, with Lugard calling him an ex-convict. He took it as a badge of honour, laughing at the idea of conviction for criticising colonialism.
Lugard, the murderer, was a repeat offender with the Inemo massacre of 1914, with 60 people killed, and the 1918 Adubi incident, where Lugard organised the killing of over 600 Egba protesters. He was immediately retired from service after the incident. To close the chapter on Lugard, Port Harcourt should reflect on why their city was named after Lord Lewis Harcourt, the man who agreed to re-employ Lugard after his first disgrace. Harcourt was a sexual predator who committed suicide after the revelation that he had raped a 12-year old boy.
The very last paragraph of the book closes on an interesting reflection. The 120 years of history traced in the book from the Jihad to Amalgamation draw attention to one key characteristic. The Nigerian State has consistently resorted to violence and military force to address political differences. Maybe, just maybe, we need to start addressing the question of how to build a political philosophy that could help us build our Nation.
