after the troubles

Is Nigeria as distraught as recent happenings in certain parts of the country seem to suggest? Yes it is. The last pogroms in Lagos finally put the lie to the fallacy of a country rapidly returning to normalcy following a comfortless interval at the edge of an abyss.

This representation of convalescence from the throttling grip of military rule has been put about largely by the incumbent administration in the understanding that this image is necessary for the enticement of foreign investment into the country.

Alas, regardless of the best spin-doctoring efforts of the country's current political leadership, quite a lot is still amiss with the country. This interpretation is not just about the much-remarked collapse of economic, social and political structures. Arguably, these have gone downhill with great vengeance in the last two decades, as is evident in the growing immiseration of our people. On the other hand, and in the teeth of this pervasive rot, nothing in the bearing of the current government suggests it has inkling as to what tasks lie before it. Even less does the government look like possessing the competence needed to prioritise these assignments, nor, for that matter, the political will requisite to confront unpalatable decisions and make choices. These conclusions ensure not so much because of the executive arm of government's now notorious penchant for tilting at windmills, nor from the rare instance of decisive action: when it was inveigled into the quixotic use of artillery pieces against civilians in Odi town in order to prove its mettle.

These inferences likewise do not follow from the enormity of the impairment to the country's capacity to work well, as a direct consequence of the collapse of the system of governance. For to a significant degree, this void in the operations of the state has always been with us. Indeed, it is the on-going experience of this emptiness in the state's stead, which looks like having informed the formation of the innumerable ethnic militias that have blossomed in the country of late, and one of which was ostensibly at the heart of the unfortunate events in Lagos. Taking into account the state's reluctance and/or incompetence to guarantee the inviolability of persons/group of persons and their property, it is inevitable that Nigerians should make an effort to organise in defence of and to advance (as they think fit) those interests (chiefly communal) which many adjudge as having been tramelled by the failure of the state. By habitually repudiating every opportunity to address the root causes of this syndrome, the current administration endorses thereby, the seemliness of the status quo. This latter conclusion is the full measure of the government's failure to date.

For the emergence of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), Ijaw Youth Congress (IYC), the Oodua Peoples' Congress (OPC), Arewa Peoples' Congress (APC), etc., is a rejoinder, as it were, to perceptions of orchestrated inequities in the arrangement of the polity. Consequently, these associations are living censures of this selfsame status quo.

Amongst the several options available to the authorities in the husbandry of this crisis, a number readily stand out. Government could choose to show that these perceptions are premised on a sense of injustices. In other words, that they are more apparent than real. In which case, it must conclusively prove itself willing to dialogue with such strata of our society as can coherently organise themselves around a gravamen or two. And by extension, it must demonstrate its possession of the superior moral argument, or contrariwise make clear its readiness to be persuaded by arguments, which are morally superior to its own. Again, government could extricate itself from the fray, compromised as it already is by charges of indifference to partisan perceptions of need, and allow the aggrieved parties to interrogate the verity and extent of their grievances. Not surprisingly, this alternative recommends itself to and has been recommended by most commentators on the recent episodes of inter-communal violence in the country. But, to transact with these expressions of grievance as if they are "law and order" issues is to make a meal of the responsibilities of state. No government can long continue to sweep such matters under the proverbial carpet.

In any case, if the clashes in Lagos reveal anything at all, it is the inability - despite their best efforts - of the people to continue any longer to live in the old way. As real incomes have fallen, and in most cases dropped off completely, the old bonds with which we used to define ourselves as against non- Nigerians no longer bind quite as cosily as we once thought. Ethnic, political, economic and social fault-lines have proliferated across the commonwealth much faster than have the now notorious indices of poverty. And in a great many instances, people find themselves talking past each other whenever collective attempts are made to interrogate the situation.

Inevitably, few answers, which enjoy cross-communal support, have been arrived at. Of course, according to one reading, this is but one half of the condition requisite for change in any pregnant society. The second half of this condition is that government as such, be unable to rule as it previously could. (Un) fortunately, in our present circumstance, and in spite of the collapse of public infrastructure, government may yet feel itself able to rule in the old way. In this case, although it no longer has values other than to take from hydrocarbon exports to allocate, this and the naked forces of coercion at its command would appear to be just enough to keep it in office. Within this vacuum a quasi-revolution looms. In a sense, the inter-communal violence that we all are witnesses to, contain a fore taste of what is to come. But only by so much are these instances of strife bell weather events. For inter-communal violence fails completely in our setting as a template for gauging the popular mood.

For whereas a communal sense of wrong could be posited in the first instance as being capable of being righted by a physical attack on the corporeal embodiment of such hurt, the fallacy of such thinking is very soon exposed.

In a very crucial sense, the anguish and confusion that promptly set in after the Lagos episode more than confirms this. And the question thence is no longer who is to be held accountable for such wrongs (not the Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo, nor that matter, the minority groupings hapless to be caught in between these three major ethnic groups), but what processes make it possible for the conception and perpetration of these wrongs? In this instance, convention wisdom amongst ethno- national groupings is beginning to finger elite-collaboration as the culprit in their marginalisation. It is not just that the elite appears to thrive even as their less well off brethren are sucked under. But the character of intra-elite dialogue (cross-functional and international) increases its vulnerability to charges of collusion with the centres of power and in the disempowerment of the rest of us.

The communal act of redemption might then ultimately lie in atoning with the native elite. This is such that if these outbursts of inter-ethnic intolerance are not properly looked into, the next phase of our troubles may yet witness attacks on the autochthonous elite by ethnic militias convinced that their attempts to do battle with the other is frustrated only by the machinations of their own elite,, whose life-styles, anyway, betray an unexamined reconciliation with the status quo.

The writer wrote in from Lagos, Nigeria