The national question can be reduced to one word: oil. It is the root of all that is wrong with Nigeria . And I am not merely repeating the banal truism that oil has become a curse to contemporary Nigeria even though that truth is encapsulated in my prefatory declaration. My contention is that an honest conversation about all the major socio-economic and political problems of Nigeria leads inexorably to the question of oil exploration and the distribution and (mis)use of oil revenue. To put it another way, oil is at once the dubious glue that holds the country together and the source of its many woes.

The irony of Nigeria is that, for all the national political elites’ pretensions to patriotism and belief in Nigeria , their commitment to the country is lubricated only by their access to oil revenue. Absent oil, the elites will retreat into familiar, comfortable regional political refuges to build parochial political constituencies.

No nation can construct its unity solely on the appropriation and misappropriation of resources from one of its constituent units. The tragedy of our national predicament is that the only national consensus that enjoys the unqualified commitment and investment of our leaders and elites is the one which calls for the continuous removal of oil resources from the Niger Delta to subsidize the rest of the country. Outside the Niger Delta, there seems to be a pan-Nigerian commitment to the centrality and necessity of Niger Delta oil in the maintenance of a facile appearance of national cohesion.

The problem with constructing nationhood around the elite’s corrupt access to oil is twofold. First, oil is a finite resource. It is thus escapist to count on its longevity as a means of sustaining the union. That is to put off the moment of truth. Second, as long as the access to Niger Delta oil is hegemonic and not negotiated with a decisive deliberative input from Niger Deltans, there will always be an aura of sub-colonial imposition around the exploration of oil. Unrest naturally follows from this sense of alienation from one’s own resources. The unrest can fluctuate, embracing and abandoning overt violence in correspondence to the occasional application and withdrawal of state-funded band-aids. But the pains and wounds of oil exploration by a distant, hegemonic Nigerian state are permanent. This will ensure that the potential for unrest always remains a specter lurking stealthily and ominously around the nation, threatening its illusions and pretensions of cohesion and harmony. Temporarily subsidizing a superficial union with oil sets the stage for an eventual implosion. Worse, it underlines a cowardly refusal to look beyond the familiar, if tense, status quo and envision the coming unraveling.

It is counterproductive to try to build a nation in which one segment out of several is designated as the zone of wealth generation, while other segments are assigned the easy task of consumption. Because consumption is not a capitalist activity, the other units of Nigeria have become a collective drag on the country’s progress, happily but ignorantly complicit in their own underdevelopment. The North may have taken parasitism to a new height, no thanks to the unproductive patrimonial politics of its elites, but the Southeast and the Southwest are also gorging parasitically on the oil of the Niger Delta. It is simply unsustainable for one region of a country to carry the burden and bear the pain of supporting the rest of the country. That such an arrangement is supported by a corrupt, self-interested elite consensus makes it even more intolerable. Something will have to give.

Our escapism has become as elaborate as our conspicuous consumption of Niger Delta oil, which is reflected depressingly in the fact that every institution in all corners of the country is funded wholly by oil money. As a result, when we craft a hierarchy of foundational national questions, oil is strategically ranked low. The centrality of oil revenue to many of the political and economic struggles being fought out by elites and political blocs is erased by this strategic obfuscation. When political contentions come uncomfortably close to unearthing the crude scramble for oil revenue that is at their heart, our elites, united in their insatiable appetite for oil money, pull back, saving, for the moment, the delicate union. Oil has functioned as an instrument of national consensus for so long. But this is never acknowledged in the public scripts of politicians. Instead, political elites speak glibly of imaginary patriotic fervor and of love of nation.

Having perfected their denial of being trapped together by a dishonorable exploitative project founded on oil, our elites prefer to speak of the national question in terms of whether or how to co-exist; what kind of constitution we should have; what formula of political representation we should adopt; what political and electoral system would serve us better, and what roles the three levels of government should play. The subject of our addiction to oil revenue and how this has helped maintain an illusion of unity while dooming the nation is avoided like a plague.

We seldom step back to recognize that these national questions have their origin in the oil question—in the question of what the flow of oil revenue has done to our elites, our government, our institutions, our peoples, and our politics.

Take the ongoing discussion on electoral reform. The debate has focused on ephemeral matters. It has conversely sidestepped the central issue implicated in the worsening tragedy of electoral violence and fraud: desperation for federal and state electoral power. Approaching the electoral reform question from the fundamental problem of electoral desperation will inevitably lead one to seek the root of that desperation, which is the flow of oil money into the different tiers of government and the unbridled access that elected officials have to such funds. Unless you localize the appropriation of resources and developmental initiatives and denude the federal and state governments of their immense control of oil money, no reforms can cure politicians of the desperation to get into a position to control the distribution of oil money.

Even our struggles with democracy stem from the selfish reluctance of invested elites to dismantle our enslavement to oil money. We have come to a sorry juncture in our quest for democracy. The dubious substantive promises of democracy have failed to materialize because the carefully cultivated spectacles and illusions of freely and limitlessly available oil revenue have invested democracy with a magical ability to transform the material worlds of the electorate. Vainglorious politicians have not helped matters with vacuous pronouncements about “the dividends of democracy,” which, of course, is premised on an assured, seemingly unlimited availability of oil money. Nigerians’ disillusionment with democracy stems as much from the absence of these promised dividends as from their perennial disenfranchisement by desperate politicians. The unquestioned access of politicians to oil revenues has helped nurture these illusory associations of democracy and development, which in turn set our people up for their current disappointment with democracy.

The localization of resource appropriation and spending—what some misleadingly call resource control—will be painful for the non-oil producing parts of the country. But, in addition to the obvious effect of stimulating the search for alternative and previously ignored or abandoned economic lifelines, it will reduce the attraction of federal and state office. Office-holding will be transformed from the patrimonial control and distribution of state resources to the sourcing of revenue for the lubrication of government and the satisfying of the demands of constituents. How many of our politicians want to buy into such puritanical visions of political office-holding?

The localization of resource appropriation and the decentralization of developmental initiative will increase accountability at the political grassroots. People who directly bear the burden of revenue generation will hold their leaders accountable for what is collected. They will diligently follow the revenue generated from their locales, ensuring by their vigilance that their resources are not misused. Presently, the foreignness of revenue generation—carried out in the swamps of the Niger Delta and in international oil markets—to most Nigerians removes the incentive for holding leaders fiscally accountable. The current revenue and fiscal system is impersonal. It breeds aloofness and apathy among the electorate, which enable our politicians to do as they please without the fear of recriminations from constituents.

With more accountability, the pressure of public office—of raising money and answering to revenue-generating constituents—will make elections less about access to distantly-generated, always-available oil revenue and more about service. Elections will become a less desperate affair as fewer, not more people will seek public elective office. Less desperation means less electoral fraud. Less fraud eliminates the need for expensive esoteric deliberations on electoral reform. Because some politicians simply hunger after power for its own masochistic sake, there will always be some political desperation, but it will not be significant enough to threaten and mock our attempt at democracy.

The best form of electoral reform is thus the elimination of easy access to oil money through a reexamination of the fiscal dominance of the federal government, and its statutory but predatory appropriation of regional resources—in plain terms, oil. We cannot untangle the electoral question from the oil question. Economics and politics are intertwined domains; to treat them as separate spheres in a shallow effort to reform an electoral system is to ignore the fact that the centrality of oil revenue to governance has given electoral issues overarching economic valences.

The avoidance of the oil question as a framing device also inheres in other discussions of the so-called national question. For instance, some commentators speak of political restructuring as if it would assuage or attenuate the unsustainable and hegemonic appropriation of oil resources from the Niger Delta. Of what use, beyond providing an illusory psychological comfort, is political restructuring without the promotion of political and fiscal accountability, people’s empowerment, and democracy through the devolution of fiscal and developmental initiative?

The escapism is most sharply highlighted in discussions of corruption. Corruption is a natural outgrowth of an arrangement which authorizes the steady, unabashed removal of revenue from—for most people—distant zone of the country and the subsequent superintendence of such revenue by a motley crowd of patrimonial and corrupt politicians unfeelingly sheltered in the mansions of Abuja . All anti-corruption efforts will be limited in their efficacy until the flow of easy oil money into unaccountable hands is drastically reduced.

What I am advancing is neither complicated nor unprecedented; our post-independence constitution was pragmatic in mandating 50 percent derivation revenue for resource-producing regions, for codifying the regionalization of fiscal and developmental initiative, and for taming the authoritarian and gluttonous federal state in the process. As a result, many of the questions that we now glorify collectively as the national question did not need to be posed, let alone addressed.

The creation of an economic Bantustan saddled with the task of producing the nation’s revenues and absorbing the injuries arising from revenue generation is simply unsustainable. It is a sub-colonial arrangement that is inconsistent with the professed quest for a workable, consensual union. It is a recipe for a foreseeable implosion, especially since oil is a non-renewable resource.

Conversely, acknowledging the oil question as the national question and making it less of an issue by returning fiscal and developmental agency to constituent units will force us to invent more permanent, less dubious symbols and interests on which to craft consensuses that will sustain a pragmatic, unforced union.

Robot  Villager

# 1 The national question can be reduced to one word: oil. It is the root of all that is wrong with ...Read the full article. Posted by Robot| 01.08.2008 19:10

katampe  Villager

# 2 It is counterproductive to try to build a nation in which one segment out of several is designated as the zone of wealth generation, while other segments are assigned the easy task of consumption. Because consumption is not a capitalist activity, the other units of Nigeria have become a collective drag on the country’s progress, happily but ignorantly complicit in their own underdevelopment I am surprised you think politicians are building a nation.If they were, they would be more concerned with generating resources outside of oil region, an activity that eventually leads to a balanced economic life of the nation, and less open to volatility of the oil markets. What we have in contrast in Nigeria is a "trust fund" state that makes our political elites have little motivation to reorganize the economic production of the regions since doing it means organizing a tax regime, adequate laws and institutions would open up accountability and transparency on the part of the citizenry. Instead, what we have is a myopic citizenry cultivated on the loot of the oil wealth from the Niger Delta, a complicity that is noted when you subject everyone's life to scrutiny in terms of where the subsidies that has gotten them going came from. Take for instance, the education of people on this forum, where did the monies for education (like payment of salaries, and building of the schools ) come from. It is simple, it is from the oil wealth of the Niger Delta. Had it been that citizens were taxed to their bones, they would have been better pressed to ask, demand and make sure that we had a system that demanded more from our politicians. And for the politicians, had it been that collecting taxes was a challenge, they would have been better taxed to look for ways of encouraging enterprise, creating an environment that generated enormous wealth to enable government have more money in its coffers for spending. Posted by katampe| 03.08.2008 12:56

Ebe2  Villager

# 3 Katampe: Your points are well taken and your excellent insights are appreciated. I agree with you. That phrase should read: "It is counterproductive to pretend to build a nation........" I particularly like this nugget in your post: Instead, what we have is a myopic citizenry cultivated on the loot of the oil wealth from the Niger Delta, a complicity that is noted when you subject everyone's life to scrutiny in terms of where the subsidies that has gotten them going came from. Take for instance, the education of people on this forum, where did the monies for education (like payment of salaries, and building of the schools ) come from. It is simple, it is from the oil wealth of the Niger Delta. I think that is is a very illuminating explanation for why the citizenry--far from demanding accountability from our leaders--actually sometimes encourages them to help themselves to oil money from the Delta. What I don't understand is whether the mass complicity and the resultant emergence of an apathetic citizenry is reponsible for the absence of accountability, or whether the absence of accountability on the part of our politicians implicated everyone and subsequently produced a complicit and apathetic citizenry. This is a chicken and egg conundrum, for sure. Posted by Ebe2| 03.08.2008 15:06

katampe  Villager

# 4 What I don't understand is whether the mass complicity and the resultant emergence of an apathetic citizenry is reponsible for the absence of accountability, or whether the absence of accountability on the part of our politicians implicated everyone and subsequently produced a complicit and apathetic citizenry. The problem of Nigeria in my estimation is two fold. One we need an ethnic political arrangement (having nations within a nation), and natural leaders would evolve to take over the direction and the development of their nations. To the members of the nation, the leaders will be accountable, and within these nations it becomes easier for members to do due dilligence. For instance, Nigeria has three major centres of cultural,political and economic influences;these centers are delineated along ethnic geography.It was around these major centers that political and economic activities were arranged back in the 60's when we had regional governments.The arrangement was fairly successful. But the arrangement was jettisoned. And in the decision to jettison it lies a bit of our problem. It has left us with a structural deficiency in our effort to build a nation, Wole Soyinka alludes to this fact in his essay (Centralism and Alienation) a while ago and he hinged it on our inability to have an ethnic arrangement as part of our political structure for governance, and sometimes I go back to read this essay because of how beautifully he captured it, in its ending. The ending featured a Chinua Achebe Igbo saying that " The eagle shall perch and the hawk shall perch. Whichever says that the other shall not - may its wing break !" In Soyinka's adaptation he reads the " The Tribe shall speak. And the nation shall speak. Whichever dares deny the other a voice, may its jaw break!" I think the original and adapation are both powerful, they capture in a vivid manner the structural problem that is at the bane of everything else. I think that captures the aspect of the problem.The other aspect that makes it easy for accountability to naturally evolve would be within the domains of the competiting ethnic groups. This sort of idea was articulated by Edward Digby Baltzell , the guy that invented the acronym, WASP. He argues that elites, in this case, people of means and recognition, should guide society and should form the upper crop of leadership. For them, when they step into leadership, it is partly a duty borne out of responsibility. Responsibility in turn is borne out of traditional , cultured and well seasoned backgrounds that cultivate the finest of traditions (of men serving without looting because of defending their names).These lineages can be traced in our histories in Africa, and it was the system that the white man destroyed by installing pliant natives to usurp people with pedigree whose perch and position were secure in the traditional societies, and who tended to be more publicly spirited. Sardauna of Sokoto had that fierce public spiritedness of the northern interest. For other interests,the east and the west, the benefit of a good education , the state of enlightenment and an era that pushed qualities of the finest characters amongst men conditioned many leaders who wanted to see the success of their ethnic groups. Obafemi Awolowo and Nnamdi Azikwe emereged in that era. It was easier back then, at least without convulated lines of authority to hold leaders responsible and accountable in each ethnic's own way. In sum, what exactly am I advocating, regionalize the country along ethnicity and we can breathe easier about accountability in our villages and not look to distant Abuja for some shady characters that have no bearing on our culture or heritage. I think that should be the national question. Posted by katampe| 03.08.2008 21:11

denker  Villager

# 5 In sum, what exactly am I advocating, regionalize the country along ethnicity and we can breathe easier about accountability in our villages and not look to distant Abuja for some shady characters that have no bearing on our culture or heritage. ...dat's exactly wat some of us have been preaching for decades....Sovereign National Conference can be a good pointer for now.... Posted by denker| 04.08.2008 05:02