Thesis #1: Lugardism and the Lugardist state

In a broadcast on January 15, 1970, General Yakubu Gowon, the then Head of the Lugardist state of Nigeria, proclaimed the Lugardist doctrine that justifies the continued existence of the Nigerian state. He said: 

“Our objectives in fighting the war to crush Ojukwu’s rebellion were always clear. We desired to preserve the territorial integrity and unity of Nigeria. For, as one country, we would be able to maintain lasting peace amongst our various communities; achieve rapid economic development to improve the lot of our people; guarantee a dignified future and respect in the world, for our posterity and contribute to African unity and modernization. On the other hand, the small successor states in a disintegrated Nigeria would be victims of perpetual war and misery and neocolonialism. Our duty was clear, and we are today vindicated.”

--Gen. Yakubu Gowon. Excerpt from his speech on Jan. 15, 1970 formally accepting the declared Biafran surrender and the end of the civil war.

Source: Insider Weekly, August 8, 2005

This doctrine states the reasons for the continued existence and public toleration of this Lugardist contraption called the Federal Republic of Nigeria. I think we are all living witnesses to the fact, which our newspapers daily confirm, that none of these claims is true and that none has been vindicated. Has the Lugardist state preserved the territorial integrity and unity of Nigeria? No! Just think of Bakassi. Has it maintained lasting peace amongst our various communities?  No! Just think of the inter-communal clashes reported periodically from Plateau, Kano, Taraba, Benue, Delta states and elsewhere. Has it achieved economic development, let alone ‘rapid economic development’ or improved the lot of our people? No! Just think of the daily deterioration in the condition of life of our people, and recall the coup-day rhetoric we heard regularly for the past 40 years, denouncing each ousted regime for its failures in this regard. Has it guaranteed a dignified future and respect in the world for our posterity? No! Unless it counts as earning the respect of the world Nigeria’s appearing, year after year, on the list of the poorest and most corrupt countries in the world? Have we escaped neo-colonialism? If so, why are we still in the debt trap where we are being robbed by the Paris Club and the transnational corporations? And what are the agents of the IMF, the World Bank and other imperialist organs doing in the offices and corridors of power in Nigeria?

What has the Lugardist state actually accomplished in its century of existence?  It has destroyed our sense of community and atomized us into the Hobbesian condition of a ‘war of everyone against everyone’ in the ruthless struggle for money to buy what it has brainwashed us to consider ‘the good life’; a condition of chronic insecurity, of ‘continual fear and danger of violent death’—as from ‘accidental discharge’ from the guns of its policemen; or from its rampaging soldiers, like at Odi, or Zaki-Biam and other places, or from assassin’s bullets targeted even at such big people in its system as Kudirat Abiola, Alfred Rewane, Alex Ibru, Bola Ige, Harry Marshall, A.K. Dikibo, etc in the last decade; a condition where life has been ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’ for everyone—even for Generals like Bisalla, Vatsa, Shehu Musa Yar Adua, and Chief MKO Abiola,  let alone for the APO Six and countless ordinary victims of the police and armed robbers. Thus, even without Nigeria’s disintegration, we have been victims of misery, neocolonialism and perpetual war inflicted on us by the Lugardist state itself.

From the foregoing, we can see that each and every one of the itemized claims of Lugardist doctrine is demonstrably false. The Nigerian state has failed to satisfy any of its own advertised justifications for its continued existence. This goes to show that Lugardism is a hoax.

In 45 years, under local comprador management, this Lugardist state has reduced Nigeria to a shanty country, a refugee camp where there is no order or authority; where social anarchy reigns, since government has abdicated its responsibilities and anyone can, with impunity, disturb the peace and, with noisy loudspeakers blaring songs and drums and prayers all night long, keep others from sleeping.

“Development” has been so successful that we now have industries everywhere: the 419 industry; the ‘wetin-you-carry’ industry that recently yielded N70billion to its Chairman of the Board; the Authority-stealing industry that has piled up billions of dollars in the foreign bank accounts of high state officials; and the gospel and miracles industry on every street; the thugs and ethnic militia industry that provide “jobs” for the tens of millions of the unemployed and lets them extort their livelihood from people on the roads. We have all these strange industries, but no iron-and-steel or machine tools or aerospace industries. It seems that the comprador managers of the Nigerian state overheard that a STEEL industry was vital for development and have built a STEAL industry instead That’s probably their best understanding of what a steel industry means!

This Lugardist state has, within a century, destroyed every society and killed every culture it trapped in its prison, and has reduced its traumatized captives to a 100million mob of Hobbesian idiots who have lost all sense of community and solidarity with one another. Nigeria is now a place where the unspeakable is routine news. With the decay of both the state and social authority structures for arbitrating disputes, neighbours resort to do-it-yourself justice using privatized violence—hence the spate of acid and machete attacks by people on their neighbours. Nigeria has been reduced to an amoral land where greedy people think nothing of kidnapping their neighbour’s children and selling them to be killed for fresh body parts to be sold abroad for organ transplants. That’s the racket being covered up by the epidemic of so-called ritual murder we read about these days. It used to be that, in Lagos, if you were attacked by robbers and you shouted Ole! Ole! ( i.e. ‘Thief! Thief!’) your neighbours would assemble and lynch the thief in solidarity with you. Not anymore! Now, the people around will run away and leave you to the mercy of your attackers.  Fear, acute individualism  and deep insecurity have killed the community spirit.

In the 35 years since Gowon propounded his doctrine, this Lugardist state has been unable to do those things that, it claimed it exists to do; and it has done terrible things that it ought not to do to the society. It has inflicted cultural schizophrenia and social decay; it has fostered an ethos of greedy incompetence; it has replaced the work ethic with a criminal instant-riches mentality, and it has turned governance into brazen gangsterism and planted Al Capone on Aso Rock. It has thereby been an instrument of large scale culturecide.

How did this Lugardist state achieve this feat of social destruction and culturecide? The chief instruments were economic: principally, [1] the commoditization of land and the introduction of individualist land tenure a century ago, which slowly dissolved the communal holdings; [2] the emergence, with the discovery of oil, of a rentier state which dominates the economy with its huge rent revenues derived from foreign concessionaries-- this has turned the economy upside down, and made everyone dependent on state favours instead of keeping the state dependent on the economically active population for its revenues; [3] the Land Thief Decree, a.k.a. Land Use Decree, which robbed communities of their ancestral land, thereby quietly turning the population into a vast rootless proletariat with no landed communal interest to sustain their local structure and cohesion; [4] the ravages of SAP and other economic policies which have impoverished most people and left them without financial stamina; [5] an education system that trains people for non-existent bureaucratic jobs, which makes its products unfit for self-employment in productive activities. By such measures, imposed in the course of a century, this Lugardist state destroyed the communitarian foundations of the African societies it trapped in its cage.

This Lugardist state nowadays parades itself as a federal republic and a democracy. But it is neither federal nor republic. And its democracy is all fake. So,

what is Nigeria actually?

Nigeria is a prison camp into which British soldiers, merchants, missionaries and political agents herded the peoples of the assorted villages, towns, statelets, kingdoms and empires they had, between 1850 and 1914, conquered by force or fraudulently dispossessed of sovereignty. The herding process was begun by Sir George Goldie, and was finalized by Sir Frederick Lugard in 1914 when he set up this Lugardist state apparatus to control the prisoner-of-war camp which he named Nigger Area, or Nigeria. What Lugard, the founding father of Nigeria, set up was a despotism to serve British interests, an instrument of the British monarch, for the subjugation, exploitation and control by terrorism of the captive population, for the profit of the British. This despotism of the British monarch was handed over, in 1960, to comprador agents recruited from among the black inmates of the prison camp. The original state imposed by Lugard has never been disbanded and reconstituted by the population. It lives on under black management, and has continued to behave despotically towards the population it got into its absolute power long ago. After all, none of its so-called constitutions has been submitted to the population for approval. As John Locke stated in his “Second Treatise of Government” (1690):

He who attempts to get another man into his absolute power does thereby put himself into a state of war with him: it being to be understood as a declaration of a design upon his life.

We can, therefore, see that this Lugardist state contraption has been making war on us, the victim population which it got into its absolute power a century ago.

It should not, therefore, surprise us that, since its agents see us as prisoners of war, they extort from us and plunder us at every opportunity. And they kill us with impunity whenever they feel the itch to shoot.  And to keep us cowed and discourage rebellion they go on pacification sprees in which they massacre whole towns and villages. So, you see, there is a method to the madness of the ‘mad dogs’ at Odi and Zaki-Biam, and to the accidental discharges at Apo and countless checkpoints. These are random acts of state terrorism that are calculated to instil fear in the population and keep us insecure and passive.

This despotic, Lugardist state apparatus has never been reconstituted as a republic by the people.  The Nigerian state is not an instrument or agent of the Nigerian people. It is not under their control, or answerable to them, and never has been. For the first half of its existence, i.e, 1914-1960, that was clearly the case. Since then, it has remained the case, the so-called independence notwithstanding. Whenever the Nigerian people have tried to actualise their nominal sovereign control, tried to become the masters of what claims to be their state, the state has rebuffed them. It has been a case of a novice horseman trying to mount his new and wild horse, and getting thrown off each time. The coups of 1966 aborted the initial attempts by the people’s elected representatives to sit securely in the saddle into which the departing British had lifted them. The coup of 1983 ended the second attempt. The June 12 annulment in 1993 aborted the third attempt. The emasculation of the National Assembly by the executive branch since 1999, together with the flagrant rigging of the 2003 elections has killed off the fourth attempt. The claim that Nigeria is now a democracy, or, as some prefer, a “nascent democracy,” is false. Nigeria is no democracy at all! Never has been. And is not likely ever to be. The Lugardist state will not permit it. It continues to do as it pleases, regardless of what the people say or wish. And the Nigerian people have yet to find enough courage and skill to make and enforce demands on the untameable state apparatus.

Nigerians have not awoken to the fact that, as Frederick Douglass said “power concedes nothing without a demand.” We resignedly think that some day God-- that imaginary big-man-in-the-sky who is part Santa Claus and part Ojuju Calabar-- will intervene and solve our socio-economic problems and rescue us from the despotism of the VIPs—the Vampires In Power. We forget or haven’t heard Martin Luther King’s remark that, “To accept passively an unjust system is to cooperate with that system.” “Shuffering and shmiling”, we wait and hope that things cannot get worse, yet they get worse with each regime. We forget or haven’t heard that there is no limit to which tyranny will not go if unopposed. We haven’t heard what Frederick Douglass said:

 “If you want to know how much a tyrant will impose on a people, find out how much they will take.”

And the Lugardists keep proclaiming that we should accept this prisoner-of-war camp as a blessing, as a gift from those British who said they came to civilize us by enslaving, terrorizing and robbing us. Well, that’s like the guards at the Nazi concentration camps claiming that the camps were a blessing and should be preserved at whatever cost; that remaining obediently in it is the duty of the prisoners. But the guards would say that, wouldn’t they? But do the inmates have to accept the guards’ doctrine? Nigerians have not awoken to the fact that Nigeria is going nowhere because, Nigeria is like an elephant with two heads, one in front and one behind, with each head pulling in the opposite direction from the other.  Clearly, for any two-headed elephant to move properly, one of its two heads must vanish. In Nigeria's case, one head is incorrigibly nostalgic for the ways of seventh-century Arabia; the other head lusts for the conspicuous capitalist consumerism of the European world.  Note that I have not accused it of lusting after capitalist producerism -- which it passionately abhors. Now, since neither of these two heads on the Nigerian elephant is appropriate for national survival, there is a need to chop off, not one, but both heads, and to graft on a new head -- a single head that is passionate for production, that is indoctrinated with producer values and nationalism.

By the way, I must stress that Lugardism is not peculiar to Nigeria. All the states now in Africa are Lugardist. They were founded by white imperialist invaders from Europe for the exploitation of Africans to the benefit of Europe; every one of them in the AU is Lugardist. Lugardism is the doctrine that they are sacrosanct and should be preserved, that they should continue to exist even if they destroy the societies they hold prisoner.