Cry, the Unloved Country
Ogaga Ifowodo

I borrow the title for these reflections from Alan Paton’s famous novel, Cry, the Beloved Country. As I ponder further the tragedy of the April elections and the incredible venality of Nigeria’s power oligarchy, I find that Paton’s title, evocative of apartheid South Africa, would do as well for my country with a mere change of prefix. For the utter contempt in which Nigeria’s power clique holds their own country and people must rank as unparalleled since the rise of the modern nation-state. Certainly, the word “patriotism”  —  love for or devotion to one’s country  —  means nothing with reference to Nigeria. Indeed it is no surprise that the word has gradually gone out of the lexicon of the power-crazed incubus called Nigeria’s political elite. Were a social scientist to chart the short-lived career of the concept of “patriotism” in Nigeria, the data would lead unmistakably to one conclusion:  the farther away we got from the independence era, the fainter the echoes of the love-of-nation sentiment. Why is this the case? Is Nigeria different from other lands where patriotism, for good or for ill, has enjoyed better patronage?

I cannot give a scientific answer to my question, though I will hazard a guess. Before doing so, however, I would like to elaborate on my opening statement which, in essence, accuses Nigeria’s rapacious power clique of treason. As we all know, treason is a political offence, but we may add the common crime of rape to the rap sheet of this unfeeling class. More precisely, serial rape. We are accustomed to the poetry of describing the land of our birth as the motherland. The figure of mother, which stands for nurture and sustenance or the more humanising aspects of our existence, has come over time and across all cultures to symbolise the image of the nation, where a simple definition of “nation” itself is “place of birth.” Hence the “natural” attachment or loyalty we are supposed to have to our nation. “East or West, home is best,” is a maxim whose sentiment every child imbibes literally from the cradle. What then can it be except serial rape if this same mother, this mother-land, is relentlessly and remorselessly assaulted by the brazen few of her many children? It may be countered that this argument literalises the hallowed metaphor of nation-talk, but metaphors hardly mean a thing if we cannot imagine them in literal emblems.

No doubt, Nigeria’s politicians, astute as they are at manipulating the cultural symbols of authority, know this rude fact. Yet they do not squirm at their own excesses. Rather, they hold their depredations out as the very epitome of selflessness, going as far as invoking every secular and spiritual authority they can summon in defence of actions that daily beg the heavens for redress. Witness, for instance, the ease with which every rigged election is declared to be an act of God. Even the “humble” Musa Yar’Adua has wasted no time in claiming that his tainted victory was ordained by God, just as Obasanjo who installed him with bare fists, knuckles and guns said of his “victories.” Not to be outdone, Obasanjo, preparing for a degree course in the Bible, has likened himself to Jesus Christ and the Prophet Mohammed. You see, those deities, as his goodself, were persecuted in their lifetimes for the reformist ideas they espoused!

The question of the glaring absence in the Nigerian ruling elite of a patriotic spirit was the premise of my argument in a contribution to the 26 October 2007 special issue of the vibrant new magazine, Farafina, devoted to the issue of a vision for Nigeria. To save time, I will quote myself.  “To be sure,” I said, “the Nigerian ruling elite is not more rapacious than its American or European counterpart. Certainly not more than its variant in the USA, the country that holds itself up as the global beacon of democracy and of “Christian” and family values. The recent cases of Ken Lay and the collapsed energy giant, Enron; the well publicized no-bid Iraq war contracts awarded to Haliburton, vice president Dick Cheney’s  former company, and Bechtel; and the saga surrounding disgraced Washington lobbyist, Jack Abramoff, point unmistakably to the universal characteristic of ruling elites. But why does one ruling elite subsume its greed under the dream of national grandeur while another does not? I have neither the time nor space for that enquiry here, though it does serve to identify one crucial difference between the one and the other. While the one belongs to a country in which it is heavily invested, and from where it hopes to rule the world, the other does not, except in name, believe in its national space of being. In plainer terms, a member of the Nigerian ruling elite does not see his fate as linked in any fundamental sense to the nation. In short, the seven-letter word, N-I-G-E-R-I-A, remains just that to him: a word, a coinage donated to him, for good measure, by the consort of a colonial suzerain. In the memorable words of one of the founding fathers of that nation-to-be, it is no more than a mere geographical expression.”

There isn’t much to add to this, even by way of a gloss. We need only note the striking unwillingness of this ruling elite to commit itself to a struggle for the retrieval of the national patrimony now firmly in the hands of its most avaricious, and so most dangerous, section. All factions of this power clique treat Nigeria as a foreign country, a no-man’s land to be mercilessly exploited and abandoned once laid waste. For them, Nigeria is not an adored motherland that should rouse them to patriotic duty. This is why the marginalised section of this ruling elite has been content to make bland statements in which it merely calls on the very masses it holds in contempt and which it grinds into the dust everyday to be once again its foot soldiers. The currently out-schemed members of this clique unveil their treacherous hearts by abdicating their role or by maintaining dual or multiple residences in Europe and the US. They can afford to invest their hope of immediate return to power in election tribunals knowing that win or lose  —  and sure to lose  —  they will, sooner or later, regain the chance at being the exploiters-in-chief of the booty-land called Nigeria. It is definitely quite revealing that the most formidable opponent of Obasanjo’s Power Drunk Party within this group, General Muhammadu Buhari, speaks prophetically of the reversal of Yar’Adua’s mandate in spite of the bitter experience of fighting fruitlessly for 30 months to annul the 2003 elections. To his credit, he understands that “the poor masses could not actually champion” the resistance to an “evil” that his iron rule from December 1983 to August 1985 did nothing to abate. Still, Buhari speaks as if he is not a member of this elite, or when he betrays his confusion, as if he is not himself one of the Nigerians whom he charges with the duty of “mass action, including physical confrontation with the government and the ruling party to achieve the desired aim” of halting our march to “eternal slavery.”

Totally blind, it seems, to his role in setting our feet inexorably on that road to slavery, Buhari is transfixed by his newly minted but false image of patriot and stalwart of democracy. The times demand that I agree with him, however, when he waxes thus, “It will be a failure on the part of the Nigerian elite if they fail to lead Nigerians to reject the elections. They must come together to ensure that the election does not stand. The Nigerian elite have to come out to physically stop the results of the elections from being sustained.” To him and his cohorts I say, Start the street protests now! Patriotism, which alone can sponsor the sentiments he expresses so eloquently, implies the willingness to bear every kind of burden, up to death, for the fatherland. Obviously, Buhari and his clique are waiting for a re-enactment of the aftermath of the 12 June 1993 elections when the masses risked life and liberty only to vindicate the marginalised but equally mendacious camp of the power clique. If not, then now is the time for them to match their words with action. It is clear to the so-called opposition parties’ coalition waging its “struggle” by calls and press releases that the magnitude of the electoral fraud unleashed on the country in April goes far beyond the capacity of satisfactory redress by the electoral tribunals. Hence, its calls for mass action. Its unshakable faith in the tribunals is therefore totally misplaced and nothing more than a clear vote for the perpetration of the very evil it makes a show of lamenting.

Robot  Villager

# 1 var sbtitle5586=encodeURIComponent(Cry, the Un...Read the full article. Posted by Robot| 26.05.2007 23:17