The real question is, are our leaders putting Nigeria first? Are they patriotic enough to put the interests of this country first rather than loot its treasury and create violent divisions among the different ethnic groups?
By Chimezie Chika
The graveness of the Nigerian predicament in the third decade of the 21st century is the lousiness of national ailment. The terminality—or congenital?—of its ailment is such that the vectors have mutated into too many malignancies to diagnose. Yet, for the conscious observer such as I, it should be easy enough to tell the etiology of its most obvious problems.
To this end, having recently reread Chinua Achebe’s timeless essay, “The Trouble With Nigeria”, I am going follow Achebe’s lead and state the obvious first, directly and clearly, so that I do not leave anyone under any illusions as to what I am saying or the direction to which this disquisition will go. Nigeria’s problem is not merely that of leadership; it is a complex combination of poor leadership and the most ruinous tribalism ever to exist anywhere on earth.
Achebe’s Indictment of Nigerian Leadership
From its beginning (the first sentence famously reads: “The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely the problem of leadership”) to the end, Achebe’s damning indictment of Nigeria’s rulers in the essay still holds eerily true. Every single sentence, paragraph, and page felt as if they could have been written yesterday.
How could a country be so arrested and regressive in its development that all that was said about it more than 42 years ago remains completely and wholly true? Early in the book, we feel the rhetorical despondency of a man who is at pains to make sense of the Nigerian problem:
“Why is it that our corruption, gross inequities, our noisy vulgarity, our selfishness, our ineptitude seem so much stronger than the good influences at work in our society?” Then, a second question which to me should be posed two hundred and thirty million times today: “Why do the good among us seem so helpless while the worst are full of vile energy?”
Well, then, there is no other way to put it: we are living in a country that has been wittingly frozen in the time capsule of its vilest manifestations. The country has become the epitome of its own worst nightmares in the twenty-first century: everything Achebe had written about it in “The Trouble with Nigeria”, from leadership to corruption to tribalism (add sectarian and inter-ethnic violence) is at presently its worst incarnation.
For many young people like me living in Nigeria of today—with the realities of rigged elections, herdsmen and bandit violence, Boko Haram, a compromised judiciary, the recent political vendetta in Rivers State, gender inequities, impudent looting while basic infrastructure is decayed and neglected, an intensely politicalised oil industry that forgets that our oil wealth is owned by all Nigerians not by oligarchs, nepotistic appointments and contracts, a volatile inflation that oscillates between 35% to 25%, a messy foreign relations image with its related passport redundancy—one often feels like the guinea fowl of a catastrophe that began long before our birth.
Achebe knew, too, that the dangerous and kleptomaniac antecedents of his time would lead directly to the rootless unbelonging of the 21st century youth. “The fear that should rightly haunt our leadership (but does not)”, he wrote, “is that they may already have betrayed irretrievably Nigeria’s high destiny”.
Hear the far-thinking man again posing an important cross-generational question to his peers: “Does it ever worry us that history which neither personal wealth nor power can pre-empt will pass terrible judgment on us, pronounce anathema on our names when we have accomplished our betrayal and passed on? We have lost the twentieth century; are we bent on seeing that our children also lose the twenty-first? God forbid!” (Well, sir, you should see the 21st century and judge for yourself!) So concerned is Achebe’s voice here and he was right to be.
The enormity of his warnings can be felt everywhere in Nigeria today, so that the routine utterance of the Nigerian youth—our leaders have stolen our destiny—is an elegiac chorus of a country that has unforgivingly failed its youth even before they had any chance at life.
One of the biggest shortcomings of Nigerian leadership from its inception—with a precious few exceptions here and there—is the inability to look far into the future. No country has ever progressed with visionless leaders. Political economics has taught us that it is the visionaries (no matter how controversial), the ideologically sound,—we will come to that—that drive development.
The examples of Mao’s China with his rapid-development policies and Yew’s Singapore, to mention a few, buttresses this. On the contrary Nigeria seems to have a gross scarcity of visionary leaders—or as Achebe observed, the good individuals are dissimulated and not allowed near the hallways of power.
As far back as 1975, at the height of the wealth of Nigeria’s oil boom, the then Nigerian military head of state, Yakubu Gowon, reportedly told a New York Times correspondent that “Money is not Nigeria’s problem, but how to spend it”. Thus Nigeria lost a great opportunity to industrialise to a myopic leader and his superficial myopia.
The wealth of Nigeria’s ‘70s oil boom was spent not on infrastructure, electricity, health, education, and industries, but was squandered on a bloated civil service, the notorious Udoji Awards, and some of the most bizarre importation policy lapses which began the geometric inflation that has brought the country to its present crossroads. Indeed, the quality of individuals who have ascended the Nigerian leadership leaves frustratingly much to be desired.
Tribalism and Grift
First, a necessary disclaimer: Humans are inherently tribal. In almost any scenario of dissent in views, humans tend to quickly divide into factions. I am not referring to only politics here; it is there in the plainly quotidian, in scenes of ordinary human interaction. A hypothetical fight between a certain Nonso and Tubosun would have onlookers consciously or unconsciously—and mostly against their better judgment—take sides with either.
The bias for this side-taking could be anything ranging from being friends, being siblings or relatives, being classmates, being business partners, being of the same religion, community or ideology, or of course being of the same ethnicity or race.
Tribalism, I am now thoroughly convinced, is the biggest problem of Nigeria’s existence. The extent of its prejudicial penetration into every nook and cranny of the country is staggering. Having seen this manifest itself since my childhood, I have chosen to jettison the word “tribe” for the less-battred “ethnic”. (Nonetheless, for practical purposes here, I may have to use “tribal”.)
Though it reveals the same basic, unconscious form everywhere (both at the apex of country’s affairs and in the lowest rungs of the society), its most formal execution happens at the top, if we are to judge from history and the prevailing status quo.
For all intents and purposes, it is the official posturing of the Nigeria state, steeped deeply into its body polity, with each president and federal political office holder surrounding themselves with hundreds of aides and SSAs from their own ethnic groups, even while brazenly enacting policies that favour only their own ethnic group.
The Nigerian version of federalism systematically encourages and entrenches tribalism. Perhaps, the most important of these is the manner in which elections are conducted in Nigeria: they are done in such a way as to highlight and reward tribal allegiance. A country where the ultimate allegiance is to tribal rather than national interest will have a problem attaining any collective goal.
But this is not only limited to the top. The average Nigerian is quite honestly a tribal bigot. I am not merely stating this: the extents and complications of this is today most acutely felt in the arenas of social media where insults and recriminations are hurled and dodged at will along tribal lines (words such as yariba, yibo, nyamiri becomes the potent currency).
It is the very reason why the few promising politicians who hold transformative promises are rejected in favour of less desirable individuals from the tribes of these voices of unreason. It is the reason why watching Nigerian politics from close is like watching a mafia power-play. Non-indigene voters exercising their constitutional rights are violently warned to vote only indigenes of the state where they reside, as we saw in the last elections.
So bad is it that individuals from countries that see themselves as tribalistic come to Nigeria and realise that whatever they have in their countries are mere sibling scuffles. Such is the extent of what we are doing to ourselves here.
The glee of electoral malpractice, the excesses of tribal blindsiding in governments, the nepotism and violence in high and low places, and the constant gloating and schadenfreude between groups across ethnic divides, are all testament to this condition.
This is also one of the reasons a major revolution is almost impossible in Nigeria; there is simply no firm ground for collective agreement (if such an agreement happened, a group somewhere in the loose chain will almost certainly jeopardise the chain with reinvented stereotypes about another ethnic group).
As a problem, tribalism is not new to Nigeria. One can go as far to say that it is synonymous with Nigeria’s existence. It has been Nigeria’s parasitic companion through its major historical periods and their attendant upheavals.
It was there during the colonial era (Ahmadu Bello had a special hatred for the Igbo; “They dominate everybody”, he claimed in a 1964 interview with a British journalist, as if the accusatory “domination” is not mere condition of the Igbo being the better educated and outgoing Nigerians at a time when the civil service and other sectors was in dire need of educated and adventurous Nigerians; the linked video is one of the most instructive ones on the nature of Nigerian tribalism: a Nigerian politician or ruler would rather have an incompetent tribesman in a position than a competent one from another tribe); it was there in the immediate violent postcolonial era that culminated in the 1966 pogroms and Biafran War (1967-70); and is still even more tellingly with us presently.
The Nigerian tribal relation is never too far from degenerating in violence. It is linked, by the country’s own social and historical conditions, to religious violence. The evidence that history presents in this case is unimpeachable. This country can simply not get anywhere politically and economically if it does not find a way to eclipse its tribal sentiments to a certain level at least.
In “The Trouble with Nigeria”, Achebe noted the extent of the damage that the word “tribe” has brought upon the Nigerian consciousness. He regretted the events that saw Awolowo win the Western House of Assembly in 1951, which, in his opinion, was a lost opportunity for Nigeria to be truly politically detribalised (I wonder what the tribal jingoists in South-West Nigeria of today would think of this—a dismissal of Achebe, to be sure).
But Achebe, even though he didn’t spare much time on his commentary on tribe, has a great point therein. Nigeria may never be able to progress if it does not find a way to detribalise its politics. In a country like the United States, filled as it were by millions from different races and ethnicities, the right to contest in a state governorship or representative elections does not include being ethnically or originally linked to the state.
Many congressmen and legislators of US states are only linked to the states they represent and govern by virtue of residency. Would it be possible to have a Yoruba local government chairman in Onitsha or Hausa senator in Iseyin? Needless to say, as things stand presently in the country, such a policy would cause a second civil war in Nigeria.
Even if the policy is enacted, one would wonder if it is honestly realistic. As it is, several independent actors and the policy of the Nigerian state itself prevents full integration of non-indigenes of other states. Sometimes one wonders if it is the same country or different countries. (A suggestion: Perhaps, we can rethink this in a more positive light, if we are so hell-bent on internal separation within the state; we can adopt a confederal system and work maximally with the already divisive consciousness that has been part of this country from inception; perhaps then the country would be on the path to real progress.)
I am afraid, however, that my verdict here is as pessimistic as anybody would have detected by now. I do not think there is a viable way to solve tribalism in Nigeria—education could help to a certain level but not completely (a future Nigeria with an 80 percent average literacy rate could perhaps achieve something reasonable). As things stand, in the present skewed setup, there is no scenario in which tribalism will not continue to weigh down the country.
The connection between tribalism and grift should be obvious enough to any observer. It does not take much to see that a person who is emotionally or maliciously biased towards another would arrogate much more power, importance, and resources to himself and his group than is understandable or necessary, which would directly lead to a complete mess of transparency and equity, which are supposed to be the hallmarks of democratic formations.
Reloading Achebe: The Case for Ideological Politics
I will not be the first to decry the lack of ideological underpinning in Nigerian politics; many of our dialectical polemicists have uttered the same. Ideology can be dangerous and self-gutting, but it serves the purpose of at least providing a sense of direction. And when it is positive, it is in practical terms the quickest way to drive a country towards visible progress.
My thesis here is that the lack of ideology is the reason why Nigerian politicians massively underperform, as well as the reason why the Nigerian state seems to lack direction or vision. Nothing on the scale of achievable decade-by-decade plans and practical policies.
In the ‘60s and ‘70s, Nigeria leaders often claimed that the country would become developed by 2000 without doing in practice to achieve. It is if they believed that the mere utterance of such an ambition is enough to move mountains. You cannot, for instance, say you want to save a hundred thousand in a year and then promptly go about squandering every money that comes into your hand on food and trendy niceties.
In “The Trouble with Nigeria”, Achebe demonstrated the inordinate self-interest of the typical Nigerian politician, whose main interest is to make as much money as possible from public funds. Sadly, that statement still holds true today. It explains the vast amount of financial sponsoring and underhand exchanges that go on in the cultic arena of Nigerian politics and the immense celebration that occasions each election win in different groups.
The celebration is often akin to the capturing of a rival ship during the Viking era in Europe. When politicians from this kind of background ascend to power, they become equally directionless, self-centered and clique-centric. There is no interest whatsoever in advancing the development of a pre-formed policy framework.
It is my belief that a politician that has no theoretical framework he’s working with will struggle to find direction or stance on policy making. Such politicians tend to flow with the wind, which is why eight years (two tenures) are often wasted with nothing achieved, except the repositioning and rewarding of party members (This happens everywhere, but is so extreme in Nigerian politics that it is better witnessed than reported).
This is why once a new ruling party comes to power in Nigeria, Nigerians immediately begin to carpet-cross into that party. Why is this even possible? Because the different parties are not working with any principles that distinguish them from the next party. There are no Greens, Socialists, Democrats, Conservatives, Liberals, etc—all of which make for a healthy national politics. Here, in the decadent Nigerian politics, whatever comes, goes. Anything goes.
Non-ideological politics innately engenders a tribalism impulse; for a party with no ideology of any sort or level typically leans towards a low-down cliquey mindset. This isolationism is often the case in many developing nations, especially in Africa, where it sometimes provides the perfect conditions for the rise of an autocrat who then consolidates power for the next four or five decades.
When a country is filled with political parties with no ideology or politicians with virtually no distinct philosophy on how the economy should be handled, such political insipidity tends to greatly affect the development of that nation. I feel strongly that ideology and development—or manner of development, if you will—matters greatly. Most serious governments across the world which brought tangible development to their people had, at least, some sport of guiding principle.
It is impossible to see otherwise when you think about it; the evidence is there all across Europe, South America, Asia, even America.
The forms of Nigerian—and African—politics must be rethought and recalibrated. Is this sort of superficial democracy (it is fair to say that Nigeria is not a democracy even though it has the appearance of one) working for us? Is there a way to create an entirely different political approach suited to the Nigeria situation and environment?
These questions must be asked and answered in all seriousness, if this country wants to progress. To wit, I think I was wrong that Nigeria politics has no ideology. It, in fact, has had one for a long time. We shall call it Nigerian Mobocracy: the dictatorship of the tribal mobs.
There is a sense in which Nigerian politics is littered with tribal ideology, fomented by Nigerian rulers and the populace that enables them. True, it is the populace, the citizens, the people, that allow the entrenchment of the worst people as leaders. It needs no sugar-coating: the badness of Nigerian leaders is a reflection of the mindset of Nigerians.
To this end, Achebe says something I consider very crucial: “It is the duty of the enlightened citizens to lead the way in the discovery [of good leaders] and to create an atmosphere conducive to their emergence. If this conscious effort is not made, good leaders, like good money, will be driven out by bad”. How prescient! How clairvoyant!
The Nigeria of today is suffering from Achebe’s pinpoint diagnoses. The enlightened citizens of today have either joined forces with looting rulers or have given up entirely—a dangerous state of affairs, to say the least.
We have come to an unfortunate point in which a typical Nigerian election is filled with no single worthy candidate. In the few cases where there might be at least one decent candidate, they are rejected by Nigeria’s tribal mobs for a member of their corrupt political class. Nothing can make a country as hopeless as when its supposedly enlightened class decides to destroy every attempt to discover—in Achebe’s words—a true leader.
In “The Trouble with Nigeria”, Achebe warns continuously that the many problems of Nigeria must be taken seriously and not confined to the region of small talk and minor squabbles. Regrettably, his warnings might as well have been spoken to a wall. Today, that position has been taken by social media.
Whatever unfortunate thing that happens in Nigeria—rigged elections, sexual harassment by politicians, nepotism, corruption, regressive policies, banditry attacks—gets amplified on thousands of social media accounts, dissected piece-by-piece, commented upon, appraised, condemned and rejected, after which the entire rabble is promptly forgotten or abandoned for a new trend. Most of the time, no one really does any real work to try to change whatever has been complained about. It all grows and dies on the ADHD-inducing premises of social media.
To truly understand the full enormity of this country’s present predicament, it might be instructive to use the analogy of a public limited company, which I have been trying to think through for some time.
If Nigeria were a company whose finances are tottering after over 60 years of corporate existence, how will the company’s problem be examined and what part of the company would be blamed for its imminent bankruptcy? The management? The shareholders? The investment prospects? The market? The products?
The economic precedent is that most of them would have played a role in the company’s woes to a certain level; but usually there is an overriding variable that contributed the most. In many such scenarios, the immediate direction of anger and dismay would be towards the company’s management, and quite rightly, for they control the company’s day-to-day activities.
However, the shareholders and the market can simply not be overlooked in such a situation. The demands of each can be overwhelming in competitive situations, since markets are marked by spatial or temporal variances.
Spatial variables would mean the company’s location and all legal and feasibility issues that come with that. Is it possible for the company’s location to no longer be feasible? Quite possible, if such a company is involved in activities such as retailing or extractive industries and suchlike, not otherwise.
With a democratic country, there are correspondences here. The management (leadership) and shareholders (the citizens) matter greatly. Location is a fixed matter, but it could also be a political variable.
The truth, what I am getting at really, is that people who are being facetiously optimistic about Nigeria in its current politically and tribally charged environment should ask themselves where Nigeria would be if it were located in Europe or East Asia.
A 64 year old country in these areas is likely to be an upper middle income country, if not outright developed. And many of those countries have been through multiple wars and revolutions, yet they have moved on and advanced economically and technologically. This is a reality that should sober up even the most heedless chauvinist in the country, if they could be made to understand.
Here are the questions I am getting at: Who are worse, we the people or our leaders? Why is it not possible for us all to put our troubles and differences behind us for the progress of the country?
My present answer, which may change in the future, is that it comes down to the lack of patriotism and the downright inability of Nigerian leaders to put their country first. At present, all over the world, there seems to be policies and campaigns of such ramifications in many prominent countries.
We hear President Donald J. Trump of the United States frequently use the phrase “America First”. In the ideological halls of British politics of late, we have begun to hear “Britain First”, at least from the Boris Johnson years. Even as far as India, Prime Minister Modi’s government has expressed “India First” sentiments a few times.
The real question is, are our leaders putting Nigeria first? Are they patriotic enough to put the interests of this country first rather than loot its treasury and create violent divisions among the different ethnic groups? Are the ethnicities able to end sycophancy and put the country first? For so long, Nigeria’s problem has been rulers and people who cannot put Nigeria first. Tribal politics remains its ultimate albatross.
Chimezie Chika is a staff writer at Afrocritik. His short stories and essays have appeared in or forthcoming from, amongst other places, The Weganda Review, The Republic, Terrain.org, Isele Magazine, Lolwe, Fahmidan Journal, Efiko Magazine, Dappled Things, and Channel Magazine. He is the fiction editor of Ngiga Review. His interests range from culture, history, to art, literature, and the environment. You can find him on X @chimeziechika1