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.