A Timely Warning: Reversing the Ethno-military Domination
By
THE times are bad, and ominous signs and inexplicable portents perfume the land with their incarnations of death and desolation.
Nearly 15 years of unbroken military dictatorship has laid waste the best of the nation's potentials. National wealth and resources have been scandalously
pillaged by a band of armed booty-seekers and their retinue of civilian collaborators. Not content with the destruction of the economy; not content with
inflicting enormous social dislocations on the polity; not content with raping democracy; people and fundamental rights; not content with institutionalising
conception as a national art form; and not content with causing the decay of the nation's agricultural, industrial, and social infrastructure, including the
environment, the health and educational system through their planlessness and visionless leadership, these single-minded despots have moved into the area of
violating the nation's honour, sense of worth and dignity, and through that caused the massive debasement of the humanity of Nigerians in the eyes of the rest of
civilised humanity.
How did this last scenario come about? The past three years have witnessed the most horrendous animalisation of everything that the
nation stands for, and ever stood for. For it was in October, 1995 that the present military dictatorship announced its transition to civil rule programme, at the
end of a bazaar of mindless men and women who crafted a self-perpetuating document that goes by the name of a draft constitution. Ever since then, calculated
steps have been taken with fanatical commitment, unbridled enthusiasm and effusive bravado that have ensured the national descent into hell. The hell is not only
physical but equally spiritual. The process, procedure and the strategy of effecting this hellish state are well known and contain the following, though not
exhaustive ingredients:
At inception, the Abacha military dictatorship announced that its tenure would be short, sharp and brief. Nearly five years later,
Nigerians are still witnessing its short, sharp and brief tenure, his death last week notwithstanding.
At inception, the regime claimed that it was a child of compelling historical circumstances and is set to resolve existing social and
political crises in a just and equitable form. Nearly five years later, the regime has not resolved one single political crisis and has inflicted a lot more,
previously unexperienced national political maladies on the polity, it has failed to effect true national reconciliation and has pitched groups and interests
dangerously against one another as never before in the entire history of the nation. Nigeria and Nigerians are more divided, more alienated, more pessimistic, more
separated and more conscious of their difference than at any other time in their history.
In order to bring out the tragic implications of this unwholesome situation, as it affects or impacts on the Igbo people and nation,
it will be necessary to examine these currents and forces in some detail, and use such an analysis to explain the present Igbo political presence in the political
and democratic processes that have been shaping the Nigerian polity since the annulment of the June 12, 1993 presidential election which was won by Chief M.K.O.
Abiola.
Despite any nostalgic effusions about our common brotherhood and deeply binding affinities, Nigerians are essentially separated from
one another by historical, cultural, linguistic and ethnic differences. This is so because the different ethno-cultural entities that make up Nigeria existed as
autonomous, semi-autonomous, independent and semi-independent entities with varying degrees of sovereignty before they were virtually hastily coupled together in
the amalgamation of the North and South protectorates in 1914 by the British colonialists.
Amalgamation was therefore not an organic process of building a legitimate nation-state but a coldly calculating strategic move in
furtherance of British economic, political and administrative interests and conveniences. Recent researches have shown that prior to the 1914 amalgamation, the
Southern protectorate was an economic self-reliant and self-sustaining unit with yearly budget surplus, while the maintenance of the Northern protectorate
depended, in the main, on grants, aids and loans from the colonial office in London. It was actually the looming First World War that compelled the British to
amalgamate the two protectorates because of the committal of national resources to the war effort.
Once this artificial geo-political expression became a nation-state in 1914, its different ethnic nationalities never lost sight of
their historical rooting and cultural diversities despite colonial administrative strategies and the pan-national political and ideological consciousness spawned
by the anti-colonial nationalist agitator during the colonial period and thereafter. Thus, whether the Igbo people like it or not the principal and most
fundamental of all national social forces is the ethnic nationality factor and this is demonstrated throughout the intervening post-independence decades
(1960-1998) as the following illustration proves.
Despite the initial pan-national reach and programmes of the NCNC, the main political parties of the First Republic, including the
NCNC (subsequently) became expressions of the nation's ethnic and geo-cultural reality.
The coalition government of 1960-1964 was based on a delicate ethnic balancing, just as the emergence of national coalitions for the 1964 general elections was
equally predicated on inter-ethnic consensus
It is still debatable what the real intentions of the January 15 coupists were; it was clear from the onset that the counter-coup of 29 July, 1966, the May 1966
pogrom and the September-October pogroms were initiated and executed with ethnic and geo-political calculations in mind.
The Civil War of 1967-1970 was fought mainly on ethnic and geo-political basis;
The post-war national political, economic and other institutional arrangements were based on the reality of the ethnic and
geo-political axis that won the war and that which lost it.
The marginalisation of the Igbo people and the ethnic minorities of the East between 1970-1998 was on the basis that these ethnic and
geo-political formations lost the civil war.
To effectuate the domination of power by the North, the military became ethnicised from August, 1966 in such a way and to such an
extent that it became an expression of Northern geo-political desire to dominate power, probably in perpetuity. The ready ascendancy of another northerner
following Abacha's death last Monday is another evidence of this.
This is also seen in all Northern-led coups that saw to the emergence of the dictatorships of Generals Buhari, Babangida, Abacha and
now Abubakar.
The victory of M.K.O. Abiola during the June 12, 1993 presidential election was an end-result of ethnic and geo-political protest by
the subordinated entities who wanted power shift.
The annulment of the June 12, 1993 presidential election was occasioned by the desire of the Northern-dominated military in concert
with the conservative wing of Northern civil political leadership to forestall this shift in power;
The corollary of the above is that Chief M.K.O. Abiola's electoral mandate was annulled because he is a Yoruba man
The present clamour for the Head of State, General Sani Abacha to succeed himself in office was a carefully camouflaged strategy of
furthering the goals of ethnic and geo-political domination of Nigeria by the North, to the extent that the legitimation of that self-succession strategy was
meant to bury forever the June 12, 1993 presidential election which Chief M.K.0. Abiola, a Yoruba southerner won.
Without a doubt then, all Igbo people who were part of that self-succession plot were consciously and unconsciously aiding and
abetting the perpetuation of ethnic and geo-political domination of the North over the rest of the nation;
The struggle for a just and equitable resolution to the June 12, 1993 election impasse in both a democratic and national struggle in
that it will create the enabling environment for the entrenchment of real popular democracy in Nigeria and assure all the nation's ethnic nationalities that they
can successfully vie for the nation's highest office.
Based on social and political empirical data built over the 38 years of Nigeria's Independence, it is very remote for an Igboman or
woman to successfully aspire for the presidency if Chief Abiola's mandate is lost, that it has become buried by even this offshoot of the Abacha administration.
This is the reality that stares every Igboman and woman in the face. It is the reality that must be studied, analysed and confronted
with conviction, sense of purpose and commitment. There is no way the struggle for national affirmation can be separated from the struggle for popular democracy
and the sovereign will and power of the people. In today's Nigeria, the two are inter-locked. For the Igbo people, the choice before them is a clear one: To lend
their energy, resources and talents in aid of military collaboration and persuasion (the present role of the Igbo clowns who imagine that they are history's new
agents) and through that help in perpetuating the political hegemony of the North (in which case they have accepted to be slaves, errand boys and second-class
citizens), or to become active participants in the process of democratic re-making of Nigeria (the just resolution of Chief Abiola's mandate), the end result of
which will be the affirmation of the equality of the nation's various ethnic-national and geo-political groups and the certainty that the presidency is a position
which the Igbo can successfully aspire to.
It is not my intention to ignore the other two mentioned social forces that equally shape the character of the Nigerian state. Religion and class differentials have continued to play their vital parts in determining the attitudes, orientation and consciousness of Nigerians. The Igbo cannot afford to ignore them. In fact, at certain points in the nation's history, either of these elements have been held up as the main, decisive social force at work in the polity. However, in the real calculation of the national journey so far, there is no denying that they have always subordinate role regarding the issue of power hegemony and political domination. They have variously been used as support mechanisms in ensuring a kind of national continuity that is founded on oppression, and all manner of regime violence.
On a final note, nothing better explains the nationality question and the struggle for democracy in Nigeria, on the premise of the
determinate social forces that shape the Nigerian polity than Chief M.K.O. Abiola's present predicament. A Moslem who belongs to the "right" social and economic
class, he is being denied the presidency that he won in a free and fair election. I wonder what chance an Igbo christian who belongs to the "right" social and
economic class stands given Chief Abiola's case. It is principally for this reason that it becomes incumbent on the Igbo that the struggle for national and
democratic affirmation must begin with just and equitable resolution of Chief Abiola's presidential mandate. To fail to do so, is to confine the present and
future generation of Ndigbo to a slave status in their fatherland.
January 1993