October 27, 2008
With few days to 4th of November, it is becoming even clearer that Barack Obama, the son of an immigrant from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas will be sworn in as the President of the United States come the 20th of January 2009, unless something cataclysmic happens and takes control of the election that is headed Barack’s way.
His winning the election and thus becoming the first President with African blood should be considered as the most significant event that would signal the final transformation of the United States after the passage of the public accommodations and equal employment opportunities Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The passage of these Acts was momentous, and can truly be termed revolutionary in comparing them with the U.S. Supreme Court's interpretation of the post-Civil War civil rights act more than a century earlier. In the 1883 Civil Rights cases, the Supreme Court had approved segregation of the races in public accommodations on the grounds that "social" rights were involved and “to interfere with these was beyond the power of the courts” as in Plessy v. Ferguson. This was even after millions had shed their blood and twenty years after emancipation of millions of Africans from the cruelty of slavery in the antebellum Southern States. No one captured the conditions of the slaves better than Olaudah Equiano or “Oluda Ekwuno” as he had succinctly narrated his journey into slavery from his capture by slave traders from Aro in his little village of Isseke (Essaka) and his eventual freedom as he settled in England in his “The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano”. His narrative had inspired a host of the progenitors of anti-slave movements in England and the horrid tales of life of oppression had probably touched President Lincoln as he tinkered with letting Africans off the hook of bondage with his emancipation proclamation.
In 1964 President Lyndon Johnson went a step further from where Lincoln left off by helping to cleanse racism from U.S. laws. He coaxed Congress to do the right thing as against what happened in 1883. It the U.S Congress finally banned such segregation, couching it as an unconstitutional burden on Interstate commerce. The U.S 1965 voting rights act had such strong enforcement provisions that federal judges in Mississippi bitterly complained that in voting matters, the White South had again become a "conquered province." This was in reference to the civil war in which the Confederates were defeated by President Lincoln in 1865. The common belief then was that once the civil war ended, the country would seize to be dichotomized between slaves and slave-owners; that didn’t quite happen, to the chagrin of Africans who had begun to breathe the air of freedom.
The beginning of the end of segregation as it was known may correctly be marked, starting with the cracks in the system with the decision of Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka in 1954, where unequal access to educational facilities was declared unconstitutional; this signaled the death nail to the Supreme Court decision in Plessy vs. Ferguson. This was followed on its heels with Rosa Parks' (the beautiful lady “simply wanted to get home after a long day’s work”) defiance on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955. The moment seized by Lyndon Johnson had been prepared, of course, by Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King - and by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the NAACP and an army of lawyers who converged on Mississippi. This was also an era filled with the music of James Brown of blessed memory who made the African American feel good in recognizing finally their racial identity with Brown’s proclamation of “I am black and proud.”
By 1968, all racist laws in the U.S. had finally been abolished. A revolution that transformed the United States was thus achieved. In spite of that, strong racism would remain in the social and economic structures of the United States.
The victory was also accomplished by the dual assault on the status quo by people on the opposite sides of the method of its execution; some wanted non violence while one in particular proclaimed “by any means necessary.” Some were the people who even sought independence totally from the United States. Among these was a voice nearly as powerful as that of Martin Luther King's, from the late 1950s until February 1965 when he was assassinated. The voice was that of Malcolm X, the progenitor of “by any means necessary”. The X in his name stood for unknown, signifying his lost family roots in Africa. This is the family root that a name like Barrack Obama would finally be proud to place on the consciousness of Americans and the world at large.
So as we would be congratulating brother Obama on his ascendancy to the presidency of the world’s most powerful democracy come the 4th of November, it would be proper to be cautiously optimistic by not getting giddy and rosy in imagining a diffusion of American style democracy in Africa in general and Nigeria in particular.
For one, it would be a little more than two hundred years of paucity of a president of African descent, so no one knows how long it will take for another to come on the horizon, and for another there are just 12 % of people of African descent in the US, and in spite of the effects of racism in ensuring that no black person would occupy the white house, there are not that many Africans to sway the outcome of a Presidential election. A president Obama therefore would have commanded an overwhelming support from whites as well as an unparalleled turn out of blacks.
So if the United States Census Bureau says that 12% of the population is of African descent, it is a fact that was diligently collected and continuously updated; so American democracy more than anything else is sacrilegiously sustained by actual people who breathe the air of democracy as a right, and flock to polling booths on the 4th of November every four years and actually vote. The people also have confidence that their votes really do count. It is not the chicanery with numbers that is so pervasive in Nigeria’s brand of democracy.
The import of this is that American democracy cannot be packaged lock, stock and barrel and transplanted to Nigeria where a mere population census has never truly determined how many we really are. What then is democracy that is not defined “of the people, by the people, and for the people” when no one knows who “the people” are?
A more cogent argument to transform Nigeria must therefore take into account the variegated cultures that occupy its space; it must also curb the attitude of some people who “love” Nigeria more than their compatriots, by exuding unparalleled zeal of patriotism that bellies a more than altruistic intentions, when on close examination, the chauvinism is for the aggrandizement of power by using the same skewed population for undue advantage accruing there from. This discourse cannot therefore happen without first accepting the fact that no one is sure how many we really are, and attaching much premium to the bogus population claims in determining who rules Nigeria not only misses the point entirely but will be a recurring denominator as we continue to grapple for an elusive peace and development. The bottom line therefore is that what made a President out of Obama cannot realistically make anyone President in Nigeria as her foundation is not grounded on the basic tenets of democracy.
As a way out, rotational presidency as espoused by some Senators will lubricate this dialogue of a unique Nigerian democracy in the upcoming constitutional amendment. That is what this author calls “rotatocracy”; the idea that no one will pass on being a President to his or her descendants three hundred years from now.
Needless to repeat that there is no end in sight to all the ills bedeviling Nigeria until every section of the country sees the good, the bad, and the ugly from inside Aso Rock. An enshrined law that ensures that the six geopolitical zones will take turns in ruling will give us our own brand of democracy and also put to rest one of the most contentious issues of our life time; the recurring spurious population censuses from before Nigeria’s independence.
So it behooves Mark and Bankole to reflect on what they would want their children’s children to read on the next chapter of the political history of Nigeria; a choice to end up as footnotes or feature prominently on the pages of the eventual transformation of Nigeria as leaders of Nigeria’s Congress.
Ikechukwu Agbor resides in Dallas and is the author of the novel “Kisses from America”
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