Domestic Impulses Of International Disgrace —Ademola Araoye

The impulses that have led to the official branding of Nigerian society as accessory to international terrorism by the United States administration, and by implication, in international circles, are domestic. They are constituted by the same factors and forces that have driven the pervasive and historic dysfunction of the Nigerian state and the murderous fractiousness of its society. The malaise of the Nigerian state and its society has now acquired dangerous connotations for the security of the international community. The transformation of Nigeria into a certified catchment zone for international terrorist movements was inevitable. It is only a logical destination given that the Nigerian space, practically and to all intents and purposes, has been a murderous enclave that has, as far one can remember, fed on its own citizens with blatant impunity. It has been convenient for state institutions to tolerate the cannibalistic instincts of this fractious society. In fact, prominent actors in the state and their protégés have been complicit in instigating and unleashing the deadly forces of mass killings as a convenient political sport. Murders, assassinations and mass killings are prominent in the lexicon and have become central to the discourse of social-political dynamics of the Nigerian space. Our new rank in the assemblage of the most dangerous political spaces globally is but a mere expression of the unholy trinity of political debauchery, entrenched social malfeasance and disjunctions as well as the extremism of hegemonic faiths, whose antecedents are extraneous to our essences as a people, that Nigeria has fanned throughout its existence. The new branding of Nigeria deserves more than passing attention because it manifests the inextricable linkages and the mutually reinforcing character of the unholy trinity that may eventually bring to extinction the very concept of a Nigeria. Notwithstanding the tears in official circles, our unenviable elevation may be perceived as a demonstration of the consequences abroad of our domestic contradictions. This alarming development also reflects the contrived incapacitation of the country to address the challenges that are inherent in it as a long experiment that in fifty years has gone nowhere. Nigeria’s malaise thus rests on a conspiracy of status quo elements determined to thwart any attempt to seed and cultivate an appropriate national civic theology whose tenets are required to release the transformative energies of this vast country into a constructive universe for its own inhabitants and diffuse a positive impulse as its contribution to the advancement and progress of humanity.

The vacuum created by the absence of a national civic theology has bred all manner of strange ideas and ideologies that underpin a monumental national crisis. A civic national theology would be the clearly accepted lowest common and universally dominated values, ethics, morality that should transcend the parochialism of the hegemonic faiths that the Nigerian society and individual Nigerians grow up to define as the axiomatic foundations of their society. Its tenets then become the barometers to gauge adherence to established conventions of the community and deviations from societal norms across the wide spectrum of diverse and divergent social, ethnic and religious spaces and communities in the Nigeria polity. The Nigerian is not left adrift as he is firmly anchored on an understanding of his essences as a member of a definite community glued together by this common civic theology. The closer the civic theology is to traditional values and traditional understandings of the universe the more salient it becomes as a practical guide for daily existence. The multi-dimensional crisis bred by the lack of a civic theology impacts not only all facets of national life, but also permeates its larger decadent society. Worse of all, the family, the building bloc of society, is caught in a tailspin as it disintegrates.

Lounging from one confounding internal disaster to the other due to lack of a national civic theology, Nigeria’s new unenviable status in international circles has been long in coming. The Inspector-General of Police ends up in chains for stealing the wages of his men. The national Chief Law Officer is assassinated in his living room without consequence. Another Chief law officer upends the constitution and the law to protect his dubious political associates and nebulous political interests. Legislators, mostly of questionable pedigree, with brazen contempt for the citizenry, appropriate the national treasury for themselves. A hitherto singularly well respected pretend democrat president with a military background on whom many placed their hopes for national redemption turns out to be an unrepentant, hubristic, born-again gargantuan fraud. His vice-president is cited in questionable deals in the world’s financial capital that ruin careers and reputations of their prominent friends abroad in climes where accountability at all levels is a norm. The elite rob the people blind and sequester their ill-gotten wealth in Dubai and other emerging havens of contemporaneous pirates and blood sucking draculas in the public domain. Above all, murder has been instituted as the normative currency in the political contests. Governance is governed by brinkmanship. He who dares does not need to win. The daring simply appropriate power.

In this jungle emerged concepts like 419. In following the footsteps of their depraved leadership, Nigerians who do not have access to the national till developed their ingenuous, even if perverse, instruments of extorting and extracting resources from equally gullible fraudsters. At first, this was a domestic enterprise. Later, it was refined for export abroad. Nigeria arrived in the international fraud league with a bang. We put the renowned mafia to shame with the incredulous smoothness of our operations. We ruined lives and fortunes. A cabal of Nigerians broke a multi-billion dollar Brazilian bank without firing a shot. Such was our daring that in one incident a poor and innocent Nigerian diplomat was shot dead in the premises of the Nigerian consulate by a distraught Yugoslav, who was determined to avenge his life ruined by a Nigerian fraudster. A local musician translated our criminal daring to accolades for the Nigerian fraudster “winner” and scorn for the victim “mugu”.   We elevated our art to scientific heights such that no serious international business house will do business with Nigerians without taking extra safety precautions. Transactions costs have been jacked high if not prohibitive. The Nigerian business environment has become a high risk and high dividend avenue in the compounding context of an extremely weak legal and institutional business framework. In plain language, doing business with Nigeria has become acknowledged in serious international business circuits as a big gamble: kalo-kalo in Yoruba. While these unfold, another strand of Nigerian humanity is perfecting the art of kidnapping for ransom. Other compatriots are into piracy on the high seas and have made a maiden adventure into international waters already. Now, it is not only a big gamble to do business with Nigerians, it is a life-threatening risk to travel on the same boat or fly 35,000 feet high in an aircraft with a Nigerian. The latest badge of dishonour derives from the third of the unholy trinity of forces highlighted earlier.

Extremism in the practice of the hegemonic faiths, the third of the unholy trinity, has been a major bane in the affairs of the Nigerian state and its disoriented society. The trajectory of Nigeria’s evolution conjures up gruesome images of matchetes, butchers’ knives, spears, arrows, clubs, tears, broken limbs and the acrid smell of death by burning in a litany of religious riots led by a Maitatsine, El Zak-Zaky, Sharia, Jos, Bauchi, Kano, Sokoto, Minna and most recently, Boko Haram jihads, to name only a few unsettling episodes that recur with tragic regularity in our national life. Each episode here represents the brutal hacking to death by muslim extremists of at least a thousand fellow Nigerians. Government reactions to these flagrant destruction of lives have, at best, been tepid. But before we venture deeper into these horrendous existential realities of Nigeria, let us look at the opposite end of the clashing religious divide in Nigeria, or even Africa. Nigerians today survive merely as aping appendages to the empty allure of anything foreign, and in particular of foreign religions, as Nigerians grope for salvation in the absence of any national civic theology.

The dominant belief systems in the country have stultified the sensibilities of the people and eroded time-honoured values that underpinned communities before the deluge that swept traditional communities away. And there is a commonality in the unfathomable capacity of the African and blacks in general to imbibe without question every foreign imposition, with incredible threshold to assimilate and run away with these ideas, internalise them, rationalise them as indigenous and finally begin to propagate them with a passion and fervour that often surprise those who infused those ideas into them in the first instance. This is more so, even where these ideas even lead to the suicide of their imperiled souls. This is the state that the hegemonic religions have driven the Nigerian, indeed African, societies; to the very nadir of our ignominy.

Africans, including our black descendants all over the world, cry louder than the bereaved. They are more Catholic than the Pope, more Baptist than John the Baptist, more fundamentalist than the Church of Christ, more Jewish than the Israeli rabbis and more Christian than those who corralled their forebears into accepting Jesus as their Lord and saviour. Many muslim sects in parts of Nigeria are more muslim than Mohammed. While 7500 people stop being Christians everyday in the West, roughly that number become Christians in Africa. This is against the backdrop of phenomenal expansion of Christianity and Islam in Africa. Almost every fourth standing structure in Lagos is a house of worship. The expansion of Christianity in 20th century Africa has been so dramatic it has been called the fourth great age of Christian expansion. It is projected that by the beginning of the new millennium, one in every five Christians would be African. If the black Diaspora were added to this, black humanity would have become the principal purveyor of Christian traditions on the globe. Africa would have become one of the main center of gravitas and the heartland of Christianity. Kenya has the largest yearly meetings of Quakers outside the United States, while more Anglicans attend masses in Uganda than in England. Since then though, wealth, salvation and redemption have remained an elusive commodity as Africa has sunk more and more into a quagmire of poverty, instability and a state of anomie. Only the leaders of congregation have prospered materially.

Monuments to the facility with which black humanity can be sucked or beaten into compliance by powerful influences that force feed it with foreign ideas, including conceptions of God, abound. Blacks can run uncritically without looking back with these ideas. Femi Kuti, the son of our very own famous Africanist Afro-beat musician, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, observed that churches can be found every 10 yards on Lagos streets. Beyond the sheer number of places of Christian worship, is the shameless grandeur with which black humanity parades his vacuous followership of everything foreign that comes its way. That is the case of the Basilica of Our Lady of Peace of Yamoussoukro in the heart of tropical Africa. This basilica in the tropics, which was consecrated by Pope John Paul on 10 September 1990, in 2005 was reputed to be the largest Christian place of worship on Earth.

On the other side, a scenario that unfolds with unremitting disturbing constancy was replicated on Easter Monday in 2009 when rampaging youths of religious fanatics clashed in Minna, the Niger State capital. Divided along the lines of Muslim and Christian, they, as usual, tore at each other’s throats. At the end of this skirmish 26 were wounded, five churches and a few cars were reportedly burnt. The casualty was nothing compared to what Nigerians have come to expect from the perennial face-off between Christians and Muslims. A month earlier, in Jos, a local government election was fought along ethno-religious lines. The outcome of the election had the potential to determine whether the administration and local governance was going to fall into the controlling hands of those who saw themselves as indigenes of the area and who identify themselves as Christians or those the former group considered immigrants from neighbouring predominantly Muslim states. The election was transformed into a full scale war as each side mobilised fellow fanatics and ethno-religious allies from not only neighbouring states but across the national borders. Over 1000 were reportedly killed as property worth billions of Naira were destroyed.

As soon as the war was brought under control, the manipulations to score political points over the tragedy began between the Nigerian muslim president and the state governor. The President invoked his constitutional powers to set up a panel of inquiry into the madness. But his panel was Muslim-dominated and was envisaged to blame the local Christian community. At the same time, the governor set up his own panel led by an eminent personality and prominent Muslim unaffiliated with any of the feuding communities. National umbrella organisations of the two religious bodies continued their manoeuvres to protect the interests of their communities. These communities identify themselves as Christian and Muslim first before being Nigerian or even African. The clashes however were a local incarnation of the struggle of competing Euro-America-Christian or Arabo-Islamic competing on which one would be ascendant in the socio-cultural space under contention. It is this intense struggle of fundamental muslims in northern Nigeria to annihilate other world views that is now intertwined with local politics and has created a conducive environment for a formative phase of a potential Nigerian terrorist. If, in the long run, the local Nigerian fundamentalists and their international allies win the contest for Nigeria, the Nigerian project will certainly become history.

It is in this context that Umar Farouk Muthalab, the Nigerian terrorist, has come to personify the contradictions that have been and still manifest in all facets of national life that the country has collectively refused to confront. The Pakistanis in London and the Yemenis intervened to complete the tragedy of the evolution of our society into a terrorist accessory. While the Nigerian establishment seems to have come to some disturbing cohabitation with the pandemonium, including a blatant disregard for the sanctity of life, that now characterise our society, the world has given its damning verdict in its justifiable refusal to accommodate the murderous insolvency of the Nigerian malaise and the explicit madness that underpin the chaos at all levels of our society.

– Dr. Ademola Araoye wrote from Houston, Texas.

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