Author: Chido Onumah
Publisher: Parresia Publishers Ltd.
Place of Publication: Lagos, Nigeria
Pages: 214
Reviewer: Chidi Anselm Odinkalu
Faith
is a Nigerian. That is why the average Nigerian response to the question: “How
are you” is “We thank God”, “I bless God” or “Alhamdulillah”. Symbolisms of serendipity and the
divine loom large in our leadership choices and political economy. A recent
President had a name that rhymed with “Doer” and was married to a wife whose
name is redolent of a popular Satellite phone brand, Thuraya. He was succeeded
by a President whose first name guaranteed luck in abundance, accompanied by a
wife named Patience. The irony of why a doer needs a satellite phone or why a
man with all the goodluck in the world needs it garlanded with patience escapes
us all. Before them was a President who claimed to have “walked through the
valley of the shadow of death.” After them, numerologists busied themselves
with the significance of the fact that the current President was returned to
office, on All Fools Day, 30 years after his first stint.
Preoccupied
as we always are with extracting the divine from the mundane and addicted to a
dependency on the Almighty, the country appears to be “sleepwalking to
disaster.” This is the sub-title of the Chido Onumah’s latest book We Are All Biafrans, published 50 years after the
birth of the author to parents who came from the secessionist territory of
Biafra to which the title pays homage. Anyone who thinks, however, that this
title is about breaking up Nigeria would be mistaken. The author is an unapologetic
Nigeriaphile who believes only urgent action to re-balance the country will
save his beloved country from implosion.
Unsurprisingly,
the author lays out a clear premise in his personal experience for this voyage
of essays: My parents are from Imo State in south-east Nigeria. I wasn’t born
there. I didn’t grow up there. I live and work in Abuja and I am married to a
lovely woman from Ogun State in south-west Nigeria. Yet I have to “claim” Imo
State because in the crazy world of Nigeria, your “state of origin” confers on
you certain privileges and opportunities, depending on what you are looking for
and where you find yourself. I am sure there are millions of Nigerians who
share my unease.
This
book is an appeal to those “millions of Nigerians” who share the author’s
unease about the “crazy world of Nigeria” to remake a country in which they can
all coexist as equal citizens. It is, therefore, a passionate argument for
those things he believes could be done to save his country and a
no-holds-barred declamation of the tendencies, institutions and people who
stand in the way of achieving these.
Will Nigeria
Disintegrate?
An
essayist, journalist, and activist who has previously moonlighted as a public
servant, Mr. Onumah develops in this latest book arguments that he has flagged
in a previous volume concerning the Nigerian federation and the need to make it
a more just and equitable federation. This book is thus best read as a sequel
to his last volume, Nigeria is negotiable.
We Are All Biafrans is a
collection of 43 articles organized in five chapters all authored since 2013.
It addressed contemporary and perennial problems of Nigeria’s political
economy, including the nature of the federation, the need to restructure it and
the challenge of democratic leadership. The first chapter contains nine essays
focused on “the politics of 2015” general elections, including, in particular,
the emergence of the All Progressive Congress (APC) and of General Muhammadu
Buhari as its candidate in the election as well as the challenges that they had
to confront. From here, the book works its way back to Nigeria’s perennial
problems which made the 2015 elections so riveting. Chapter two addresses
Nigeria’s habit of “Dancing on the Brink” in four hard-hitting articles that
focus on the question whether or not the country would survive and if so in
what form or process. In Chapter three, the book explores the “Unmaking o
Nigeria” in five essays that each and all make the point in different ways that
the existence and sustainability of the country cannot be taken for granted.
Chapter
four contains 17 essays on sundry “Scoundrels and Statesmen” (and women) who
exemplify Nigeria’s leadership crisis. The final chapter contains eight of the
most recent essays by the author dealing with various aspects of Nigeria’s
“Missionary Journey” including, military exceptionalism, that is the fact that
“for as long as I can remember, persons in uniform in Nigeria have always
assumed that they are superior to other Nigerians.”[2]
Preceding
these, the prologue by Edwin Madunagu, the Marxian, Mathematics Professor and
essayist from the University of Calabar, dwells on “Settling Accounts with
Biafra”. Following them, three appendices publish transcripts of interviews
done by the author on various aspects of the Nigerian pathology including
violence and corruption.
Essentially,
this book addresses three basic arguments not necessarily in the logical order
of its chapter plan or chronology. First, the book asserts that Nigeria is a
colonial invention “founded on injustice.” Few would disagree that colonialism
was an injustice or that that injustice created territories to perpetuate
itself. But the author rightly points out that “Nigeria is not the only country
that was ‘created’ for economic and imperialistic reasons.” Unlike the others,
however, we seem to have failed to create what he calls a “functional state”
but rather remain largely a collection of ethnicities defined by profound
asymmetry between the ethnicities or ethnic groups and the federating units
which are the States. “After 100 years”, he laments, “it is time we stopped
seeing ourselves as Yorubas, Igbos, Hausas, Ijaws, Efiks, Ibibios, Fulanis,
Tivs, and everything in between. It is time we began seeing ourselves as
Nigerians.”
However,
secondly, the author admits this will not be easy and concedes that it is
indeed possible that “there is nothing sacrosanct about Nigeria” and that
“Nigeria will disintegrate unless we collectively do something about it.” Recalling
martyred former Attorney-General of the Federation, Bola Ige, a Senior Advocate
of Nigeria SAN) whose assassination in his home in 2001 remains unsolved, the
author asserts that “there are two basic questions that must be answered by all
Nigerians. One, do we want to remain as one country? Two, if the answer is yes,
under what conditions?” In
his opinion, the country now confronts three options: “either it degenerates
into anarchy (Liberia and Somalia) or disintegrates (Yugoslavia and Soviet
Union), or the whole nation meets to save itself.” The
author concedes that “it might be difficult for Nigeria to disintegrate into
ethnic republics” but warns that “the Somalianization” of Nigeria is a “clear
and present danger.” Tantalising
as this point is, the book stops short of fully developing the threat of
“Somalianization” and what it could look like. The ethnic cartography of
Nigeria and historic inter-marriage among ethnicities makes it somewhat
difficult to sustain the comparison with Somalia which comprises only Somalis.
That said, however, the author’s preferred outcome for Nigeria is a National
Conference that fully develops the bases for Nigeria’s co-existence.
Part
of the reason for Nigeria’s failure in constructing a functional state,
thirdly, is our collective tendency towards convenient amnesia. Nigeria, the
author argues, “has not engaged with” those that it excludes. According to him: Nigeria has not
engaged with Biafra and there is a lot that is still unresolved about the civil
war. But it’s not just Biafra and that tumultuous period of our history. There
is a lot that is unresolved about Nigeria as a whole and about many aspects of
our existence as a country. Nigeria has not engaged with June 12, just as we
have not engaged with Boko Haram, to mention only two of the more recent
episodic convulsions that threaten the very foundation of the country. In a
sense, the Biafra experience could be a metaphor for the many unresolved
problems that confront us as a country.
No One’s Barn
The
author is uncompromising in his use of language, analysis and descriptions. He
damns Nigeria’s national legislature as a “do-nothing National Assembly”; inveighs
against “the egregious folly of those who think this piece of real estate
called Nigeria is their grandfather’s barn”, and
bemoans that “governance in Nigeria is a big scam because the nation Nigeria,
as presently constituted, is a great fraud.” Concerning
former military ruler Ibrahim Babangida and recent civilianized President,
Olusegun Obasanjo, the author says they “remind one of the devils in Ngugi’s Devil on the Cross, who commit murder and then don
their robes of pity and go to wipe the tears from the faces of orphans and
widows.” Elsewhere
in the book, he dismisses President Obasanjo as “narcissistic” and
adds that “Obasanjo has outlived his usefulness.” Former
First Lady, Patience Jonathan, is the subject of one essay titled “Her
Excellency, Madam President”. Of
the former ruling party, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), he warns that its
“implosion is imminent because of its insufferable worthlessness.” Even
those who disagree with some of the judgements and opinions communicated by the
author will acknowledge and respect his passion and the fact that he cares
about his country, deeply.
The
author’s panacea is largely encapsulated in one sentence: “we can build civic
nationalities where ethnic nationalities currently exist.” As
earlier pointed out, he evinces that this can be done by a national conference
which will be sovereign. While many people will not necessarily disagree with
the possibility of a National Conference, however, bringing about a sovereign
one is difficult. The author acknowledges this but does not fully wrestle with
the problematics of how to overcome the political and institutional obstacles,
merely claiming that “the military decree which passes as the 1999
constitution…. is not worth the paper it is printed on.” It
is indeed true that the 1999 Constitution is a schedule to a military decree
but there is now a political reality around its existence that the proponents
of a sovereign national conference must deal with.
This
tendency to avoid the specific with a generalization, is at the heart of the
main problems with the recommendations pursued by the book. For instance,
elsewhere in the book the author had argued “for a moratorium on the general
elections scheduled for February 2015” But
it remains unclear how such a moratorium would have worked or alleviated the
problem of a disintegrating country which is what he wanted it for.
Perhaps
the greatest achievement of the book, however, is in the courage of its title
which succeeds in taking the word “Biafra” out of the closet by deploying it as
a metaphor or straw for addressing the subject matter of the inherently
exclusionary, anti-majoritarian and anti-utilitarian tendencies of Nigeria’s
political economy. Ingeniously, the author converts “Biafra” into a forensic
tool for auditing the Nigerian state. The outcome is not reassuring. Some may
see this rather negative or despondent. In the hands of this author, however,
the outcome is a challenge to Nigerians that invites us all to take a state in
remaking a great country. On the whole, We Are All Biafrans makes a compelling case for taking
Nigeria and its various centrifugal tendencies seriously. If his goal was a
retrospective on his first 50 years on earth, then the author may well have
assured through this work that his country has a chance of surviving the next
50 years if only it can address some of the issues posed by We Are All Biafrans.
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