Nigeria at Fifty

The Nation in Narration

Ebenezer Obadare, Wale Adebanwi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317985525
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Nigeria, Africa's most populous and biggest democracy, celebrates her fiftieth year as an independent nation in October 2010. As the cliché states, 'As Nigeria goes, so goes Africa'. This book frames the socio-historical and political trajectory of Nigeria while examining the many dimensions of the critical choices that she has made as an independent nation. How does the social composition of interest and power illuminate the actualities and narratives of the Nigerian crisis? How have the choices made by Nigerian leaders structured, and/or have been structured by, the character of the Nigerian state and state-society relations? In what ways is Nigeria's mono-product, debt-ridden, dependent economy fed by 'the politics of plunder'? And what are the implications of these questions for the structural relationships of production, reproduction and consumption?

This book confronts these questions by making state-centric approaches to understanding African countries speak to relevant social theories that pluralize and complicate our understanding of the specific challenges of a prototypical postcolonial state.

This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Contemporary African Studies.

Introducing Nigeria at fifty: the nation in narration

Wale Adebanwi^a and Ebenezer Obadare^b

^aDepartment of African-American and African Studies, University of California, Davis, USA;

^bDepartment of Sociology, University of Kansas, Lawrence, USA

Nigeria, Africa’s most populous democracy, celebrates her 50th year as an independent nation in October 2010. As the cliché states, ‘As Nigeria goes, so goes Africa’. This volume frames the socio-historical and political trajectory of Nigeria while examining the many dimensions of the critical choices that she has made as an independent nation. How does the social composition of interest and power illuminate the actualities and narratives of the Nigerian crisis? How have the choices made by Nigerian leaders structured, and/or been structured by, the character of the Nigerian state and state-society relations? In what ways is Nigeria’s mono-product, debt-ridden, dependent economy fed by ‘the politics of plunder’? And what are the implications of these questions for the structural relationships of production, reproduction and consumption? This collection confronts these questions by making state-centric approaches to understanding African countries speak to relevant social theories that pluralise and complicate our understanding of the specific challenges of a prototypical postcolonial state.

The giant as Lilliput

Nigeria offers a magnificent template for examining the chronic schizophrenia that characterises the African postcolonial state and the resulting social (de)formations that (re)compose, and are, in turn, (re)composed by, the state. Although rigged against reason and rhythm from its very conception and inception, Nigeria ironically, contains perhaps the greatest combination and concentration of human and natural resources that can be (re)mobilised in creating an African power state with a capacity to stand at the vortex, if not the centre, of continental revival and racial renewal. This paradox raises a fundamental question: Why have the socio-economic and political actualities of, and in, Nigeria, been historically (permanently?) subversive of her potentialities?

The momentous occasion of the country’s 50th anniversary as an independent nation-state on 1 October 2010 is an interesting historic juncture to confront this question.¹ The anniversary calls for rethinking Nigeria in a way that is reflective of, yet challenges, the general and generalised pathologies of contemporary prototypical postcolonial formations. As Africa’s most populous and biggest democracy –and one of its most fractious – understanding Nigeria continues to recommend itself as an important process of understanding the entire African postcolonial enterprise (Obadare 2008; Obadare and Adebanwi.2010).

A cliché states, ‘As Nigeria goes, so goes Africa’. Three months after Nigeria’s independence in 1960, the 17th African colonial creation to gain independence, America’s Time. magazine (5 December 1960, 20) predicted: ‘In the long run, the most important and enduring face of Africa might well prove to be that presented by Nigeria’. It was a part-condescending and part-exoticising narrative of the ‘ragged rectangle [country] the size of Texas and Oklahoma combined’ (complete with a new Prime Minister, Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, dressed in ‘native’ regalia on the magazine’s cover) and one perforated by the (il)logics of Cold War politics within which the magazine placed the ‘moderating’ role of Nigeria in Africa and the world under Balewa. This was apparently in contradistinction to the ‘imperialistic elbowing’ of Ghana under Kwame Nkrumah and the ‘heedless plunge into Marxism’ of Guinea under Sékou Touré (ibid). The then newly-independent country was presented as having ‘entered the world community without the noisy birth-pangs of ominous warnings of its determination to avenge ancient wrongs (ibid). Four decades later, as Karl Maier attests (2000), the basis of this prism and optimism, while understood, could be queried:

When the British lowered the Union Jack and freed a land they had ruled for less than a century, Nigeria was the focus of great optimism as a powerful emerging nation that would be a showcase for democratic government. Seen through the Cold War prism through which the West and particularly the United States viewed the emerging nations, Nigeria was a good guy – moderate, capitalist and democratic.

In what may seem like an ironic combination of the country’s actual potential with the specific role designed and wished for her by the Western powers, Time, while acknowledging that Nigeria, at independence, ‘stands [as] a giant among Lilliputians’, affirmed that ‘Nigeria’s sober voice urging the steady, cautious way to prosperity and national greatness seems destined to exert ever-rising influence in emergent Africa’ (ibid, 201). Yet, the magazine conceded that despite Nigeria’s ‘favourable omens’, her ‘burdens are awesome’.

After five decades of turbulent nationhood, the exaltations, lamentations, limitations, simplifications, exaggerations and the contradictions of Time’s 1960 prognosis can be read as representative of what was to become of one of Africa’s most significant states–both in internal and external contexts. What Nigeria is, what she has (or should have) become, and what she (or should) represent(s) are important nodal points in the total consideration of a scholarly review of Nigeria as she celebrates half a century of postcolonial existence. As a nation space, we attempt to (re)examine Nigeria in this volume, in the context of how–to use Wole Soyinka’s words (Soyinka 1996, 109, emphasis added)–‘it provides for or deprives [her] inmates of the means to life, self-worth, and productive existence’.

This volume attempts to confront some of the key questions and analyse some of the important nodes in the overall attempt to comprehend a country which, though still standing, is generally assumed as having fallen (Maier 2000). Nigeria is the predicted ‘Giant’ that has become a disappointing, even aggravating ‘Lilliput’–or, what Eghosa Osaghae (1998) calls a ‘crippled giant’. Undeniably, at independence, there was as much evidence of the potentials of Nigeria to be an African success story as there was of her becoming a grand failure. While it is true that ‘When Africa discarded the bonds of colonial rule, few could have imagined the depths to which Nigeria … would sink a generation later’, … ‘(w)ith the benefits of hindsight, it is clear that such optimism [as indicated by Time magazine] was naive’ (Maier 2000). In retrospect, it was perhaps nigh impossible for Nigeria, ‘the bastard child of imperialism’ (ibid), like many other African nation-states, to succeed. As Lord Frederick Lugard, the first British Governor-General of ‘united’ Nigeria, stated, ‘when we are discussing the past of Britain, I always tell [my African friends]: yes, but it was all done in the interest of Britain, not of Africa’² (Perham 1960, 48).

Claims, contentions, considerations

A fractious and contentious politics, even in peace times, defined the colonial project which resulted in the creation of Nigeria–between the ‘natives’ and ‘subjects’, on the one hand, and between them and the metropolitan power (Britain) and its agents, on the other. The amalgamation of the Southern and Northern Protectorates, both peopled by more than 200 disparate ethnic groups,³ to form a united Nigeria in 1914, which was choreographed by Lugard, was described by one of the nationalist leaders, Sir Ahmadu Bello, the first premier of the Northern Region and Sardauna of Sokoto, as the ‘Mistake of 1914’. Chief Obafemi Awolowo, first premier of the Western Region, for his part, concluded that Nigeria was ‘a mere geographical expression’ (Awolowo 1947). Many have since concluded that Awolowo’s observation ‘remain[s] true, but [even] more so’ (Watts 2003, 26). As revealed in John Paden’s classic work, in the 1960s, as Nigerians and the leaders of the fractious groups and emergent political parties struggled not only for independence but also to gain leverage over and above one another, two leading definers of Nigeria’s political future, one from the north (Bello) and the other from the south, Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, the first premier of the Eastern Region (and later the first ceremonial president of Nigeria), also traded barbs on whether the differences among Nigeria’s many regional/ethnic/ religious groups should be forgotten or understood. Azikiwe, the pan-Africanist nationalist and perhaps the finest orator in Nigeria’s political history who helped to galvanise a critical generation towards a dialectical (dis)engagement from and with (global and racial) imperial politics, had insisted that, as ‘subjects’ of a newly emerging modern nation-state, Nigerians must ‘forget’ (perhaps, efface) the differences rooted in past and continuing ethnic, ethno-regional, religious and cultural subjecthood, while evolving into a new form of ‘higher’, collective, modern, and national citizenship. Ahmadu Bello had countered in an (in)famous exchange between the two reportedly after a forum for negotiating the bases and structures of post-independent Nigeria–that, rather, what Nigerians must do was not to forget or transcend, but to ‘understand’ (and perhaps permanently honour) these differences.

What impact have the variant approaches of Azikiwe and Bello regarding the differences among Nigeria’s composite groups had on the practical political life of Nigerians after five decades? The contentions and conclusions, which are reflected in the historic battles fought at different times for the Nigerian state, under different guises, with different weapons and on different platforms–ethnic, ethno-regional, religious, democratic, class, etc.–have, in the last 50 years, produced interesting dynamics in the continuous formation of what we know today as Nigeria. It is interesting that a country seen at independence as one with a ‘sober voice urging the steady, cautious way to prosperity and national greatness’ (Time., 5 December 1960, 21) now struggles at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century with what is perceived by some critics as the ‘end of [her] history’ (Soyinka 1997).

Michael Watts (2003, 26), in a frontal analysis of the Nigerian crisis from the perspective of governmentality, argues that ‘any construction of a robust, meaningful, national identity requires’ a ‘rigorous survey of the social body’ (Clifford 2001, 114), so as ‘to determine its makeup and nature’. But because Nigeria has consistently avoided a fundamental and politically honest ‘rigorous survey’–whether at the level of census, through elections, the many constitutional conferences, or the much-trumpeted controversial ‘sovereign national conference’–Watts concludes that ‘What we have, in other words, is not nation building … but perhaps its reverse; the ‘unimagining’ (contra Benedict Anderson, that is) or deconstruction of a particular sense of national community’ (ibid). As an ‘unimagined community’, Nigeria reminds us of Nicos Poulantzas’s (1978) important postulation that forging Unity or common national destiny from history and territory requires ‘a historicity of a territory and a territorialisation of a history’ (ibid). While the ‘historical authenticity’ of any given territory would include both negative and positive histories, the positive must overwhelm the negative–both in the ways the territory is generally historicised and the specific ways in which it is encountered as what Ernest Renan (1882) famously called a ‘daily plebiscite’; otherwise, a territory remains a ‘mere geographical expression’, while a history would be largely composed of glorified narratives of infamies.

In the struggle to create a more just, more equitable and more democratic polity than was inherited from the British, Nigeria has experimented with all sorts of political systems, ideologies, economic policies and even cultural paradigms. Under a leadership and political elite that is deficient in many respects, Nigeria has fought a civil war to save and transcend ‘the mistake of 1914’, survived serial bloodletting in the attempts to understand religious, ethnic and regional differences, and emerged from several years of brutal, even homicidal, military rule (Table 1).

Table 1. Chronology of regimes in Nigeria since 1 October 1960

Name of Head of Government	Period	Regime Type
Abubakar Tafawa Balewa	1 October 1960–15 January 1966	Elected Civilian
General Aguiyi J.T. Ironsi	15 January 1966–29 July 1966	Military
General Yakubu Jack Gowon	29 July 1966–29 July 1975	Military
General Murtala Muhammed	July 1975–13 February 1976	Military
General Olusegun Obasanjo	13 February 1976–1October 1979	Military
Shehu Usman Aliyu Shagari	1 October 1979–31 December 1983	Elected Civilian
General Muhammadu Buhari	31 December 1983–27August 1985	Military
General Ibrahim Babangida	27August 1985–27 August 1993	Military
Ernest Oladeinde Shonekan	27 August 1993–17 November 1993	Unelected Civilian
General Sani Abacha	17 November 1993–8 June 1998	Military
General Abdulsalam Abubakar	8 June 1998–29 May 1999	Military
Olusegun Obasanjo	29 May 1999–29 May 2007	Elected Civilian
Umaru Musa Yar’Adua	29 May 2007–5 May 2010	Elected Civilian
Goodluck Ebele Jonathan	5 May 2010–	Elected Civilian

It has also mobilised national democratic hope and aspirations–even racial glory–and simultaneously dashed them cruelly many times over. Yet, as an important political formation, Nigeria remains a national, even if fractured, aspiration towards the formation of a commonwealth that makes important global statements. Thus, the aspiration–or critical need–to ensure a Jacobin (absolute, total, or uncomplicated) coincidence between state and people to mobilise the national sentiments (soul), without which, Renan argues, a ‘community of interest’ can only be a ‘body’ (-politic), but not a nation, pervades Nigeria’s colonial and postcolonial history.

It is, therefore, important to understand why and how the current challenges of Nigeria and the hopes and aspirations that continue to hold her together, despite the darkest political astrologies, are historically rooted. The work in this collection represents the most recent thinking from a distinguished group of scholars on how the past, present and future of Nigeria mix and mesh in the (re)production of a particular instance of postcolonial mess. The contributors frame historical, structural and agential trajectories that make the examined current practices and realities understandable. On this basis, they have projected into the future of a country whose common future as a united polity has been dismissed as much by the American security community, as well as by many of its frustrated citizens. Why does such a stupendously rich country, a potential ‘Giant of Africa’ as Nigerians have since grown tired of describing their country, invite such dark prognoses and invidious conclusions?

The idea of hope in the context of hopelessness is one of the defining sketches of Nigeria’s history. Some Nigerians–never suffering humility even in the middle of humbling historical realities that have humiliated them and turned their country into a simultaneous tragedy and joke–boast that the British, primarily, and other European powers and, and ultimately, the United States, saw the country’s great potential early, and, therefore decided, through a combination and coordination of measures, to ensure that Nigeria was (is?) never able to realise it. They would press further that the realisation of the full potential of a putative African power state would obstruct, if not subvert, the strategic interests ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introducing Nigeria at fifty: the nation in narration
• 2. The limits of charismatic authority and the challenges of leadership in Nigeria
• 3. Between elite protectionism and popular resistance: The political economy of Nigeria’s fractured state since juridical independence
• 4. The petroleum industry: A paradox or (sp)oiler of development?
• 5. The Nigerian federal system: Performance, problems and prospects
• 6. How God became a Nigerian: Religious impulse and the unfolding of a nation
• 7. Nigerian elections and the neopatrimonial paradox: In search of the social contract
• Epilogue Nigeria: Unity in Diversity at Fifty
• Index