Isokan Yoruba Magazine,
Fall 1996/Winter 1997 , Volume III No. I, Page 44.
Nigeria's Military: A Parasite That Kills its Host
A Review of Wole Soyinka's The
Open Sore of a Continent, by Ropo Sekoni.
In Wole Soyinka's recent book subtitled " A
Personal Narrative of the Nigerian Crisis," the author
makes connections between the problems of sustaining the cultural
and political plurality of Nigeria and those of similar colonial
contraptions scattered all over Africa in the wake of the century
of Africa's colonization by the French and the British. While
Soyinka's authorial lenses are zoomed on Nigeria, the
implications of the Nigerian tragedy of building a modern nation
out of divergent cultural and political values, characterized on
one hand by a commitment to democracy, human rights, and economic
competition, and on the other hand by an age-old dedication to
feudalism, sultanistic despotism, and economic parasitism are
unearthed.
In a collection of four essays, Soyinka
deconstructs or unpacks the inherent artificiality of the
Nigerian state as a collection of once separate nations by the
British for the sake of the British and the Fulani Caliphate.
Soyinka's unpacking of the history of Nigeria brings back to mind
the statement by the Lugard generation of colonial strategists
that the "northern Prince must be married to the southern
bride of means." While acknowledging that Britain's
collection of various nationalities into a larger colonial and
later neocolonial state is not unique to Nigeria, Soyinka points
at the political unreadiness of the northern Prince for
democratic modern nationhood as the source of political
instability and economic chaos foisted on Nigeria by variants of
ethno-military dictatorship in the nation's history. He further
suggests that the experiences of Pakistan and Bangladesh,
northern Islamic Sudan and southern Christian Sudan, Rwanda, and
Yugoslavia are not inevitable and that Nigeria might avoid such
political tragedies if it is cleansed of a culture of repression
and exploitation of the country's human and material resources by
a pampered, indolent, and self-perpetuating hegemonic group with
representatives in both civilian and military sectors. Characters
like Shehu Shagari, Maitama Sule, Ibrahim Babangida, and Sani
Abacha are examples of these representatives while such names as
Sunday Adewusi, Ernest Shonekan, and members of the Association
for Better Nigeria under Babangida and its new variant under
Abacha represent the scions of the reactionary hegemony.
According to Soyinka, political corruption and
kleptocracy are signs of the ruling group's perverse view of
modern nation building. Soyinka traces what is now
internationally popularly known as the "419 ethos" of
fraud and corruption to the feet of civilian and military wings
of the reactionary anti-democratic ruling group in Nigeria.
Furthermore, the book depicts the regime of Shehu Shagari as a
travesty of democratic governance. The reference to the flagrant
rigging of the 1983 Presidential election under the nose of the
co-opted Police Chief, Sunday Adewusi and the complaint of
Omololu Olunloyo about Shagari's financial starvation of a
government rigged for Olunloyo provides a fitting background to
to Buhari's veto coup. Buhari's current supportive role in
the Abacha regime only reinforces the allegation that his regime
was a foreshadowing of the Abacha-Shonekan displacement in which
favored soldiers and appointed civilians simply exchanged the
baton of power whenever it became necessary to shore up the hold
of the northern Caliphate on all other nationalities in Nigeria.
The chapter titled "The Spoils of
Power," attributes political tricksterism to Shagari's
regime and to the Buhari junta that pushed Shagari aside to
ensure the continuity of the control of the country by the
northern Caliphate. What appeared to be an inexorable drive
toward popular democracy that was fueled by Shagari's abysmal
failure was quickly stopped by another set of Caliphate
operatives in military uniforms. The indiscriminate jailing of
southern politicians under the Buhari regime and the relative
leniency with which their northern counterparts were treated,
including the botched-up attempt to bring Umaru Dikko from London
in crates all suggest the hidden agenda of the ruling cabal in
Nigeria. The same Umaru Dikko and General Buhari are now
consultants for the Abacha junta after Dikko's "royal"
invitation back into the country. The emergence of Babangida, the
subsequent self-crowning of Abacha, and Abacha's
"dubbing" of the political program of transition of
Babangida and the governance style of Idi Amin of Uganda
illustrate graphically the politics of domination and exclusion
by military agents of the Caliphate. Soyinka sees Maitama Sule's
superstition-laden theory of the distribution of talents and
division of labor among the major national groups in Nigeria as a
puerile effort to intellectualize a long-standing strategy of
political domination that makes the annulment of the 1993
election and the subsequent self-imposition of Abacha part of a
grand design, which Soyinka describes as a tradition that affirms
that "privilege must never be abandoned nor conceded to
others outside the hegemonic group."
The final chapter, "The National question:
Internal Imperatives," shows the implications of a culture
of political and economic fraud perpetrated by Shagari and
perfected by the various military junta since 1984 for the
sustainability of a country that is constructed out of multiple
nationalities with divergent perceptions of reality and
ideological orientations. Although Soyinka's monastic devotion to
the development of a united modern Nigeria runs through this
chapter, he, in the tradition of his famous warning during the
Nigerian-Biafran War: "to keep Nigeria one, justice must be
done," faces the realities of today's Nigeria when he
deconstructs the discourse of the inviolability of Nigeria's
sovereignty or the territorial oneness of Nigeria as phrases
touted by agents of Nigeria's ruling Sultanate. In this chapter,
Soyinka further problematizes the existence of Nigeria and all
other colonial contraptions that fail to adopt an ideology of
justice and democratic governance as the only means of sustaining
such colonial arrangements. He further argues that Nigeria's
sovereignty and unity, brought about by the June 12, 1993
election, must be returned to the people if the state is to
survive balkanization and achieve democratic pluralism as well as
the much desired modern nationhood.
The focus in the "Epilogue" on the
state murder of Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogoni human rights
activists and the silent murder of thousands of Ogoni men, women,
and children for having been born into the area endowed with
petroleum (Nigeria's proverbial Goose) suggests the
anti-democratic route favored by the ethno-military complex to
keep Nigeria united. Soyinka's fear of the increasing
"ogonization" of southwestern Nigeria and other
nationalities in Nigeria that openly resist the politics of
domination and parasitism suggests that the hegemonic group has
its own plan for suturing Nigeria together without any sincere
effort to "transit" to democratic federalism. To
prevent Saro-Wiwa's death from becoming a foreshadowing of the
death of Nigeria, Soyinka calls on the Commonwealth leaders, the
international community, and even internal collaborators with the
regime of death in Nigeria to join forces with Nigerian
pro-democracy activists to save the "nation from the spiral
of murder, torture, and leadership dementia that is surely
leading to the disintegration of a once-proud nation."
By putting emphasis on the restoration of the
June 12, 1993 mandate given to Abiola by Nigerian people(s) and a
sovereign national conference as sure ways of restarting the
clock of the nation stopped by the annulment, Soyinka finds
reasons for infusing the book with his characteristic
"Nigerianist" approach to the vexing but subdued
nationality question inherent in the making of Nigeria by
external and internal colonial "armies" of occupation.
The book shies away from making concrete suggestios on how to
restructure the federation, which appears, in the context of the
recent creation of additional mendicant states, to be direly
needed anti-biotics for the bacteria of ethno-military
domination. The need for the restoration of self-government to
the former regions or their approximations must not be left out
of the inevitable ways of restarting the clock of the nation, as
the clock of the Nigerian experiment in modern nation building
actually stopped with the suspension of the 1963 constitution.
Since the suspension of the only constitution made in a free
Nigeria, the parasite of sultanistic despotism has been eating
too deep into the marrow of its host that Nigeria may not survive
without an immediate return to regional self-government
guarranteed by the 1963 republican constitution.
For More Information Contact:
Egbe Isokan Yoruba
P.O. Box 90832, Washington, DC 20090
Tel: (202) 270-6382
FAX: (301) 499-5386
Internet: isokan@yoruba.org