31 Mar 2005 |
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I never count on yesterday Because the past can also change —Kamelot Appreciating that the denouement of the on-going National Political Reform Conference, whenever it would come, will be a contentious one requires neither excessive thought nor the peculiar gift of clairvoyance. This potential stalemate challenges one’s faith in the conference. Nevertheless, the show—and one is not just being metaphorical—is on and it would appear despite whatever apprehensions may exist concerning the outcome, to the conferees all must now make their pitch. This, presumably, must have been what motivated one Mr Tunde Araoye to display his rather interesting placard around the vicinity of the International Conference Centre, Abuja, where the conference is holding. Clad even more interestingly only in his shoes and underwear, Araoye predictably made it into the papers thereby ensuring that his message reached not only the conference delegates but Nigerians at large. While Araoye’s courage deserves whatever praises it gets, your correspondent is content to remain fully clothed while still attempting to reach out to both the delegates and Nigerians as a whole. As an Ibibio man from Akwa Ibom State, I have issues with the clamour in some quarters for a return to the old days of regionalism in the geo-political make-up of the country. The ghost—for that is what it is to me—of regional autonomy has been invoked in recent times most eminently by some people from the old Western Region. It is good that although a spattering of people here and there have retorted—somewhat spitefully, I suspect—with a derring-do (or “bring it on!”) attitude that in effect says, “let’s do it,” the greater majority of Nigerians have rightly been scornful of the idea. And so it should be for regionalism should not only stay dead but ought to remain buried in the past where it belongs. This explains why this piece begins with those two lines from the power metal group Kamelot. While the lines under consideration do speak for themselves in some way, to properly situate them in the context of this discourse, their origin needs some elaboration. Briefly, power metal is a genre of rock music. Kamelot is a leading power metal band. The opening quote is taken from ‘Snow’, a song on the band’s 2003 album Epica. The album is a concept project built around the idea of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust. One has only a review’s worth grasp of Goethe’s Faust, but has studied Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus which predates and, according to literary eggheads, shares a similar primary source with Goethe’s work. Although Goethe’s and Marlowe’s treatment of the Faust material differs, both share the basic thread of a man promising the devil his soul if the latter would serve him for a specified time and the throes arising thereof, chief among them the constant battle between good and evil. Of greater significance in this circumstance, Epica, through songs like ‘Centre of the Universe’, ‘Farewell’, the earlier mentioned ‘Snow’ and others, not only evokes these phenomena, the collection soars in places beyond the temporal and is rarely lacking in the philosophical. This, then, is Kamelot’s entrée into this piece and it is with this background in mind that one should situate the idea behind the quote within the deeper and wider vortex of the retrogressive manifestation that spawns those reactionary calls for a return to regionalism. Succinctly, think TRADING TOMORROW FOR A YESTERDAY THAT WILL NOT MAKE TODAY, LET ALONE TOMORROW. (The emphasis is to underscore one means precisely what one has written). To return to the ghost proper, one is convinced that with the passage of time, what was perhaps a moderately progressive epoch in the years circa Nigeria’s independence has now become the halcyon days of equity and galloping development to some people. Pockets of dissent and cries of oppression extant at the time are now conveniently forgotten. Indicative of this trend is the tendency by certain people to perpetually hark back to how even-handed and stellar in performance the premiers of the old regions were. While not taking anything away from those late illustrious sons of Nigeria, one must ask what their eternal promoters really want: that we resurrect them, like zombies, to come back and continue serving us? Obviously, it’s undoable. Neither is regionalism, under whatever guise, revivable. Talk of zones and other centralising manoeuvres raises the question of what—other than an opportunity to temporarily mystify themselves with the trappings and spoils of high office—their advocates really want. For instance, those behind the imaginary South-south zone know the idea exist only on paper, period. On the ground, the Annang people and those of Oron extraction accuse my Ibibio stock, not always without justification, of playing conquerors in our small Akwa Ibom State. And people are talking realistically of a South-south geo-political autonomous zone that would also encompass Cross River, Rivers, Bayelsa, Delta and Edo with all their individual myriad power dynamics problems? I think not. The Tiv/Idoma power-shift impasse in Benue is not news. Similarly, we need not get started on Kaduna’s perennial schism. There are other pockets of issues like these around the country and subsuming the existing states into monolithic zones or regions is certainly not the way to resolve them. Justifiably, the Annang have been calling for Itai State to be carved out of Akwa Ibom State just as the Idoma quite reasonably desire to have Apa State sectioned out of Benue. One recognises that demarcating Gurara State out of Kaduna State would be no picnic. But does that then make it impossible? Naturally, others want states too. But, of course, every group that wants one can’t have a state simply because they want one. However one would wager that a pragmatic appraisal of the forces at work (if not ‘war’) in some of these cases would reveal that there’s everything for the affected peoples and the Nigerian nation to gain in more states and local government areas than either eliminating existing ones or subsuming them in superficial zones or impractical regions. More states and LGAs, it must be said, are no cure-alls for the many problems that result in our collective underdevelopment. But, along with a constitutionally instituted proportional representation scheme that would allow all groups to have a comparative presence in governance, greater devolvement of selected powers from the centre to the states and LGAs, along with the necessary fiscal clout, and a hybrid parliamentary/presidential political system which one has already addressed in part in the past, there are almost certainly great opportunities ahead of us which no old-fashioned regional or new-fangled zonal arrangement can compete with. Even so, to make meaningful progress that would cut across the board, which in no small way means eliminating or at least reducing corruption to the barest minimum, we must demystify the processes of governance by taking the processes as close to the people as possible. When elected and unelected public officers continue to sit in far away capitals and drive around in police-protected, siren-blaring multi-vehicular convoys, people have little direct means of checking their excesses. When they happen to be just around the corner in a moderate office; possibly have to explain their actions or inactions in town hall meetings and perhaps live in their family homesteads in their villages, they’ll think twice about buying bullet-proof tyres, not to mention cars, with sums that can set up useful cottage industries. And for those who would sooner return to the buried days of regionalism, Kamelot has something to say about that: “I never count on yesterday/Because the past may not exist.” Oduobuk is the Group Literary Editor of the Trust papers Services : E-mail news | |
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