One thing I shall say for those who passed through these portals – that is, Kings College past and present – they do not lack for courage. It takes real guts, inviting an alumnus of a historic rival, a universally acknowledged superior sister institution, the Government College, Ibadan, to come and address them on their hundredth anniversary. That courage, I suppose, may come of the fact that in that idle, so-called gentlemanly game of monumental boredom, known as cricket, this very presumptuous King’s College Lagos used to defeat us, not merely defeat but wipe out our team with a sickening regularity.
It was particularly traumatizing for me, since I had very sensibly manipulated myself, quite early, into the position of a scorer – for the initiated, this means keeping scores, nothing to do with making the runs or taking wickets. It guaranteed that I got to do all the traveling with the team – Lagos, Warri, Umuahia etc. – without having to undergo the rigours of practice, or observing the discipline that the actual players underwent – such as remaining within school premises after hours while on tour.
Nonetheless, it was painful. I had to write down the fall of each of our wickets, the Zeros – the humiliating expression was ‘out for a duck’ - of our batting side as they fell like ninepins, while the KC side fired boundaries and sixes off our bowlers with effortless strokes. Unlike the political game, it is simply not possible to rig cricket results. The scorers – one from each team – sit side by side and write down the scores, which are then displayed progressively on a board with outsize figures, visible to both players and spectators. It is a lesson which the self-righteous, self-adulating chairman of our Electoral Commission might like to take to heart. The rules are clear, the scoring process transparent. There are possible adaptations of the principles of cricket scoring for the electoral process, adaptations that can enshrine that spirit of, commitment to, and actualization of fair play, sportsmanship and transparency, as inculcated in us in those colleges of training for life.
And yet, and yet…. Can one but wonder if it is of any significance that the elections, twice, of someone who must be accounted - to put it extremely mildly - one of the most self-destructive rulers that this nation has ever known, were presided over by two products of our sister institutions – King’s College Lagos, and Government College, Ibadan. One of them is dead, which makes any comment rather problematic. I am not quite sure what to make of this coincidence, indeed, I am perplexed to a near superstitious degree, and will reserve further comment until I’ve had time to digest this statistic, which came up only as I was preparing this address. It’s enough to cast a pall on today’s festive mood and I do not wish to do that. Very troubling, very troubling indeed….I wonder if Justice Akpata has been turning in his grave….wondering what he may have overlooked, maybe lamenting his inability to see into the future, given what nature of a human and national calamity his stint as umpire inflicted upon us. As for my old schoolmate Abel Guobadia, I do hope, whenever he writes his Memoirs, that they will prove more illuminating than those of his predecessor, Henry Nwosu.
So let me move on to another, and perhaps even more significant event that may be attributable to this excruciating game of cricket - the famous 1944 strike episode, a historic factor in the making of King’s College character and, more profoundly, the formation of this nation’s anti-colonial spirit. What were the issues involved? First, as narrated in timely fashion by Chief Tayo Akpata in The Guardian of 13th September, some of these students had become victims of sexual abuse by some of their teachers – in my view, one of the most monstrous crimes that can be committed against vulnerable youth of either sex, and most especially by those into whose care they have been entrusted. The teacher-pupil relationship is one of the most solemn responsibilities on which society is founded. In addition to the crime of physical violation, the critical essence of human dignity is involved. I would like note taken of that latter aspect – we shall return to it in a moment.
The second cause of the strike, again to be measured against the norms of justice and human dignity, was the expulsion of those students from their school premises, and their transfer to a non-conducive environment, non-conducive not from a lack of luxury assets but simply because they had to be marched, under all kinds of weather, from their dormitories to their classes at Onikan for daily instruction. We must see that situation from the eyes of those school pupils. They were admitted as boarders, and they found their status not merely changed, but deprived of instructional facilities. On their way to their makeshift classes under sun and rain, they could see these colonial usurpers cavorting on their premises, while their classrooms and laboratories were locked up, empty. It is to the credit of the intellectual leaders of society that they took up the pupils’ cause against colonial imperiousness and also defended the pupils in court when they arraigned on charges of disturbing the colonial peace. In the end they were – extra-judicially - expelled for their strike action and indeed, a number of them forcibly conscripted into the army. One died at the Burma front. It is of interest that one of those brought under this heavy-handed colonial sledge-hammer was indeed one of the victims who initially raised hell over his abuse at the hands of his teachers. So much for colonial justice. Looking back at the growth of Nigerian nationalism and the formation of political movements that are traceable to that King’s college youthful insurrection, it is easily seen how a cause and an environment may impact on a larger, with consequences that transcend the scope of the originating event.
There are any numerous vectors of human development, needless to say – quite apart from the main business of schools, which is imparting knowledge – vectors that inculcate in the mind the unassailable logic of equitable dealing, or justice. One such vector is - respect for difference. Like other Government secondary schools, student intake in those days was from virtually every corner of the nation, without discrimination. Speaking from the experience of my sister institution, Government College, or indeed of yet another secondary school that I first attended for two years, Abeokuta Grammar School, a member of what was known as the AIONIAN group of schools, the word ‘discrimination’ could not be found in the school vocabulary. Enthroned in its place was – tolerance. Tolerance and respect for differences, including the religious. In later years, I was present at an anniversary event of that same AIONIAN school, when the late Ambassador Ejiwere lauded his alma mater, Abeokuta Grammar School and her principal, the Rev. I.O. Ransome-Kuti to the skies. I forget all the details now but he revealed how, despite the fact that he was not an indigene of Abeokuta, nor indeed a Yoruba, he gained admission, how he later ran into difficulties over his fees but the Rev. Ransome-Kuti ensured that he completed his education – and even as a border. Ejiwere eventually rose to become the School prefect of the AGS. I recall that he flew in specially from his posting abroad to ensure that his testament was not lacking during that anniversary event of the school.
The ethos of equitable dealing was near uniformly applied across the secondary schools system of that period. Applicants were admitted on merit, with or without scholarships - which were also decided on merit. There was no seeing the Admissions Officer outside office hours, no invocation of shared ancestry. The most educative aspect of the ethical cement of equity, for us today, trapped as we are within the no-man’s land of ambiguous nationhood, a repudiation of which has contributed to the debilitation of that very aspiration – nationhood - was the enthronement of absolute religious tolerance, an accommodation of different faiths and even of the schismatic tendencies within each faith. The spine of that umbrella of religious tolerance, its operative mechanism remains the doctrine of secularism, a binding foundation for existential harmony. Nobody denies for one moment that KC, Igbobi, AGS, Igbobi, and a number of pioneer educational institutions, not only in Nigeria, but in West Africa of colonial times - were founded by christian enthusiasts, or that the majority of the early intake were indeed christian in practice and orientation. What no one who has passed through such institutions can deny however was the meticulous adherence to, and inculcation of that ethic of truly liberal education: tolerance. It is this that constitutes the main burden of my contribution to this occasion of celebration.
We need to ask what has become of that article of faith, and to use our own formative experiences, right from school, to aspire towards its restoration. It is difficult to credit but, it is only too true, that in this very country, and at the nation’s pioneer University of Ibadan, a Minister of Education who, incidentally was a product of that very institution, once summoned its Vice-Chancellor and ordered him to remove a cross that had sat on a rising since the establishment of the university. And the reason? Some members of the Moslem faith, who in the intervening time, had also built their mosque in the area dedicated to religious worship, not far from the christian chapel, had complained that the cross offended their eyes when they turned east to pray. That Vice-Chancellor was summoned by the Minister and ordered to take it down. To the credit of that don, his response was: “Mr. Minister, it would be much easier to remove me as Vice-Chancellor of the university, than to have me remove that cross”. Today of course when you visit that university, you will see both the christian cross, and the Islamic Star and Crescent harmoniously occupying the consecrated space. There has been no earthquake reported, no convulsions of the firmament above that space, no blight traceable to the co-habitation of that spot by christian and moslem symbols.
I have already dealt with that episode in one of my published essays: THE CREDO OF BEING AND NOTHINGNESS, and it may appear ungenerous to refer to it once again. Alas, as I have had cause to remark again and again, this nation confuses a generosity of spirit that shuts the door on the past with a hermetic mentality that totally compartmentalizes events, even when events in the past provide pointers to the present and are clear harbingers of the future. That is when the ascribed generosity of spirit becomes a culpable accessory of the cycle of impunity. History, and especially contemporary, unfinished history, is not content to be a purely academic dry-as-dust discipline but a window that not only opens into the past but mirrors the future. Is it really possible to deny that the mentality of that western-educated Minister of Education, and his kind, must count as a precursor of Boko Haram? If only the leader of that sect, the late Yusuf, had been aware of this not so distant example, he would not blame western education for the ills of society. For in that minister, you have a clear instance where it was the very acquisition of western education that catapulted him into a position of responsibility where he could, ironically, promote the interests of his own faith over and above the rules of equitable conduct. His behaviour constituted the real sacrilege, since those grounds of worship were dedicated to an ecumenical co-existence and thus, a respect for differences, an avowal of the ethos of Peace and Harmony as preached in all Scriptures. Indeed, here was a clear case of a follower of the Faith who, though trained in a western institution, was obviously not corrupted by western ideas.
Although that Minister did not exhort a recourse to violence, we must state factually – just to complete the record - that his action very nearly triggered off a religious war on that campus. Violence, social destabilisation, massacres, the random disposition of innocents in furtherance of an exclusionist creed, the creed of ‘you or me’ in opposition of ‘you and me’ – this, may I remind us, is what is at issue here. I expressed this disposition in my BBC Reith lectures as the deadly retrogression even from a dogmatic blindness of ‘I am right, you are wrong’ to the terminal ‘I am right; you are dead’. Indeed, only this morning, I encountered an article in a newspaper that captured this even more succinctly in the headline, ‘Killing is Believing’! The basic instruction is clear: extrusive violence is merely the physical actualization of hierarchical mind-sets that have been carefully inseminated, and tended, gradually, insidiously, even unintentionally, or else with a purposeful and malignant vision. If, when such outbreaks occur, we do not, at the very least , drill a hole through those reinforced concrete doors erected in the generous spirit of amnesia, and let through the enabling propositions of the past, we are doomed to confront a repeat of those past events in the future, again, again, and again!
Boko Haram has been here and gone, or – has it? Boko Haram has been here, obviously, but it is anything but gone. To understand why, and before we proceed further let us clarify in our minds exactly what is the essence of Boko Haram? What does it represent? How does it originate? Is it a genuine reflection of society or an aberration? What are the immediate triggers to the eruption of such phenomena, and what the long-receded causes? Confronting such questions, even within the context of the ritual, often sterile ‘commissions of enquiries’ requires self-caution against an easy and cosseting pre-disposition to fashionable theories. Text-book theories are especially attractive to intellectuals, they are our meat and drink, nonetheless, they often constitute a real and present danger in the form of willful blindness to material life as we experience it. This is where it is necessary to decry a misplacement of emphasis by those who attempt to submerge the violence of religious movements under class incantations. The class implication is only a fraction, admittedly a significant fraction of the totality of causative factors, and it is extremely dangerous for society to consider it anything more. I refer specifically to propositions that the root cause of any social eruption, wherever it involves the group that we generally identify as the under-privileged, will be found solely in social inequality. It sounds nicely radical, but how do we reconcile this with – to take one blatant feature - a supposedly socially corrective manifesto against an exploitative order, that nonetheless relegates half of its humanity, its womenfolk, to a subservient, socially invisible role, turns them into mere pliant vessels for the dictation of the other half? This, going by the history of the world, simply does not constitute a radical, or revolutionary manifesto, but a reactionary immersion in the pool of retrogression. To order two hundred buses in order to enforce the segregation of men and women, as the governor of Zamfara has just done, is Boko Haramism in creed and deed – let us state this with brutal frankness.
Only a year ago, at the Nobel Breakfast Symposium that took place right here, in Lagos, I asked the question:
“what manner of education is it that makes it possible for a group of secondary school pupils – such as the products of this very institution - to consider it their right, their duty, indeed their solemn obligation to set upon their Teacher while invigilating their examination, put her to flight, pursue her into the home of the school principal where she has sought sanctuary, drag her out, strip her naked, beat her near senseless, place a tyre around her neck and set her on fire still breathing? I asked that question a year before the phenomenon of Boko Haram, and I shall continue to ask it until I receive a clear-cut answer from sociologists, ideologues, psychiatrists, religious leaders, and the supposed agencies of Law.”
It is clearly untenable to suggest that these assailants were victims of social deprivation, that they were imbued with the consciousness of social inequality that needed to be expressed by infliction of the most degrading kind of violence on a teacher, and one engaged on the duties of her profession. These were not ragged, malnourished schoolchildren - on the contrary, they were extremely well nourished, and the question is, what kind of nourishment had they been fed? We speak now not of the stomach, but of the mind.
I am compelled to ask that question because of the educational, as well as environmental upbringing that the majority of us in this hall have shared. It was in this same Lagos that a certain Muslim preacher, Apalara, was murdered by a group of cultic fanatics. He had been preaching against what he considered the evil practices of that cult. Well, those cultists proved him right by plotting and carrying out his murder. Several of the conspirators were caught and placed on trial. They were found guilty, sentenced to be hanged, and were indeed duly hanged. This took place in my schooldays. Let us avoid the ideological distraction of capital punishment as an instrument of social restitution, especially where it will only take us to territories such as stoning a woman to death for alleged adultery, a pastime that has resurfaced recently in Somalia. The issue, plainly, is that there was an existing social order that guaranteed freedom of expression. However provocative, however disrespectful or blasphemous, society frowned upon, and harshly punished those who infringed upon that freedom, those who usurped the role of the Law, especially in a homicidal way. The law responded appropriately for its time.
The questions we must ask therefore are obvious: what has happened to that principle of equity under the Law since our formative years? Has the tolerance level for the abnormal in the intervening years been lowered to such an extent that this nation is sometimes mistaken for Rwanda? For the benefit of those who forget these things, or are insulated from them – I am referring here to attested scenes, where gangs of butchers have invaded schools – primary and infant schools - in the name of one religious affront or the other, led out the schoolchildren one by one, separated the children of one Faith from those designated infidels, and methodically slit the throats of the latter, over religious incantations. This has happened again and again in this nation of a presumed common belonging – and the question we must continue to ask is – just what sort of a nation has evolved in which these horrors are taken in its stride? And finally, logically, having luxuriated in the sump of tolerance of this serial violation so often, why is any sense of shock expressed by the phenomenon of Boko Haram?
These are questions from which the nation attempts to shy, from the very apex of government to, sad to say, even civil and religious organizations. Those who ask them at all ask them timidly, almost apologetically, as if afraid to give offence to those from whom the most egregious violation has sprung. In short, the questions when asked at all, appear designed to appease the butchers in our midst, the mind-butchers and the body butchers. Mostly, it has been silence, or deliberate muting. Inevitably, a wake-up call is eventually administered – but at what cost? Then we see belated motions in the redressing of a long culture of homicidal impunity, whereas the signs have been with us, openly, and arrogantly. Those who believe that the kind of education – more accurately described as brainwashing – that has created the mind-set that we speak of is conducted secretly in schools of extreme fundamentalist thinking – the furtive, near-cultic enclaves of instruction – are tragically wrong. The foundations of intolerance, of fanaticism of the most murderous kind are constantly laid openly, and with impunity. If you do not accept this, if you believe that the pathways of hate inculcation, of bigotry, are shrouded in secrecy, permit me to remind you of a certain declaration:
‘Like Salman Rushdie, the blood of Isioma Daniel can be shed. It is binding on all muslims, wherever they are, to consider the killing of the writer as a religious duty”
Does this ring a bell? The date was November 16, 2002, and the name of that speaker is Mamuda Aliyu Shinkafi, then Deputy governor of a newly created state called Zamfara. We do not know in what capacity he was speaking. The point is that one individual, just like you and me, openly incited the citizens of this nation to murder. His immediate superior was away at the time. When he returned, did he rebuke his deputy? Not in the least. On the contrary, he backed him to the hilt with the full weight of his position, anxious not to be left behind in the blood-lust stakes on offer. Today, that same governor sits in Senate as a law-giver. Neither of these two was ever called to account for an act that would be criminalized in any decent society. Even the President of the nation was silent. Silent, but not inactive – his appeasement had a purpose, for he had already begun to cultivate allies for an agenda of self-perpetuation.
My valuation of criminality is that the crime of incitement to murder, especially by a highly placed individual in society ranks as heinous, if not worse, than making away with millions from the national treasury. Money can be recovered, its waste pipes staunched, and the robbers prosecuted. But the ramifications set loose by the arrogation of supreme authority over life and death, by an individual who happens to occupy an exalted position are unquantifiable, and the ripples continue long after they appear to have subsided. The journalist in question fled the nation. My organization for the relief of such endangered species immediately offered her one of our sanctuaries, but she found an even more congenial one, I am happy to say. Yes, that lady did escape the wrath of the holy murderer, but was turned into a permanent exile, forced to acquire a new identity while her would-be assassin occupies a hallowed place as a law-giver in the nation. His victim escaped, but what of that other woman to whom I made earlier reference, Mrs. Oluwatoyin Oluwaseesin?
No, she did not escape. She perished miserably at the hands of her students in one of the very sister institutions of King’s College - the Government Day Secondary School Gandu, in Gombe State, and her fate, I insist, was the direct actualization of that credo of ‘Killing is Believing’ that was belted out from the throats of both Mamuda Shinkafi and Senator Yerima. Conduct such as theirs must be held responsible for a culture of impunity killings that have destabilized and depopulated Kano, Bauchi, Abuja, Kaduna, Jos, Maiduguri etc, and most recently - with an escalated ferocity that finally shook governance out of its complacency - Bauchi. Those individuals did not directly inaugurate such killings, but they placed the stamp of validation on the past and blessed any future homicidal propensity in the name of religion. It is such individuals that must be regarded as the true precursssors of Boko Haram. Boko Haram is not really about a detestation of Western or other forms of education, but the expression of a malignant outcrop of fanaticism, intolerance. It is, above all, the will to dominate, to control, to enforce conformity – in this instance, conformity of the most sterile, uncreative kind.
Even here, right here in this throbbing cosmopolitan city of Lagos, there are, in all probability, what are known as ‘sleepers’ waiting for the word to be given. If that word were given this moment, those sleepers would swarm over the walls of this compound and inundate us as primary targets, for we are gathered in celebration of a structure of education that they detest – a philosophy of education that says the mind must be open, not closed, a philosophy that subjects all claims of human discovery or certitudes to empirical enquiry and establishes in the mind of the young the foundation of equity under one law as the sine qua non of civilized society and the ennoblement of social man.
Now, let us look beyond our walls, even while, as it happens, we can remain among our own kith and kin, so let us take a peek at what was happening elsewhere in the world, what was being thought and taught during the gestation of this very institution, now celebrating its 100 years of existence? Among the resolutions adopted by our own flesh and blood deported to the Americas, during ‘The Mass Meeting of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People , Carnegie Hall’ on January 6, 1919, was the following:
“No particular religion shall be imposed and no particular form of human culture. There shall be liberty of conscience.”
How sad and chastening that, towards the close of that same century, an opportunistic politician would attempt to establish a theocracy within the secular entirety! Check the statistics, whoever will - the incidence of religious riots, plus the scale of destruction and fatalities will be found to be at least four times the accustomed frequency, since the declaration of Zamfara - soon followed by enthusiastic or reluctant emulators - as an enclave of theocratic rule. Any linkage? Any lessons? Must this be accounted progress or retrogression? A cause for combative pro-activism or the coma of complacency? How has one government after another addressed its responsibilities, ordered its priorities, given a now predictable, sickening recurrence of Boko Haramism at the slightest, or indeed absence of an excuse? Has the constitution any role to play in the national dilemma?
Time compels us to go straight to that last, fundamental interrogatory on constitutional responsibility in the realm of governance. We shall illustrate this by a study in contrasts. It is fortuitous but fortunate that the current Aso Rock incumbent, whom I have had cause to describe variously as being on permanent sabbatical, or else a somnolent spider at the centre of an elaborate web, suddenly resolved to put paid to such gross misrepresentation by evoking his constitutional responsibilities to the nation. In a short, sudden burst of activity, he launched a scorching missive from the rock, blistering in language and promise, calling upon the governor of this Lagos state to correct an allegedly unconstitutional act of his, or else! Now, I am not a lawyer, and I leave the legalities to the Lagos governor, who is one, as well as his learned brother – whom, I suppose, we must still recognise technically as another, since he not only claims to be a SAN but acutally mans the post of Attorney-General of the nation and thus, is the legal arbiter of the nation. I leave them to sort out the niceties of what Fela would describe as – roforofo fight. What I do know, as an analyst of language, is that the president’s letter was one of the most indecorous and belligerent is has been my lot to encounter between a civilian president and a state governor in what is supposed to be a federal dispensation. My more important concern here however is articulation of a do-or-die allegiance to the constitution. Suddenly, halfway through his tenure of office, and of all the constitutional responsibilities that his position piles upon his absentee desk, this president remembers one arguable infringement of that document. He does not exchange notes with the alleged malefactor, does not go to court for an interpretation of the infringement, no, he threatens that state with sanctions if its governor does not immediately comply with his interpretations.
Let us contrast this with the Spider’s predecessor, the Born-Again President Militrician. This was a man of the golden opportunity, a former head of the nation. Under his watch, a state declared that it would henceforth be governed by a set of theocratic laws. Yes indeed, sharia is a legal system recognized and privileged under the constitution, but the scope of its application is clearly defined by that same document. What the Zamfara governor did of course was to push the envelope, push it beyond the accepted, and nationally understood limitations, give it a virtually limitless elasticity. That incumbent president had a choice – he could make a declaration along the same lines as his current successor – announce a robust commitment to the defence of the constitution, set a deadline for reversion to the status quo, until all challenges were decided by the Supreme Court. We need only compare the weight of interventional imperative for, on the one hand, the creation of a number of local governments, an exercise that did not in any way endanger the security of the state or the nation, did not deprive any one individual of his or her constitutional rights with, on the other, the insertion of a theocratic wedge into the body politic of millions of various faiths. Yes, that ex-president had the option of going to the base formulation of citizen rights, as upheld – in many views - by the Nigerian constitution. His oath of office was to uphold the constitution but, in that instance, suddenly the constitution - as well as the Human Rights Charter of the Africa Union - went missing. They were no longer on the Reference List of Aso Rock.
We only need to weigh the potential – and eventually proven - consequences of either act: the creation of local councils under whatever name, and the introduction of a theocratic order in one state – in effect, the introduction of a parallel operational constitution within the same national entity. Boko Haram is thus clearly a case of ‘the chickens coming home to roost’, the harvest of surrender born of political cowardice, and the cumulative derelictions of duty at the very apex of governance.
I must, however, use this same occasion to deplore the extra-judicial killings that have been carried out by the police in the name of riding the nation of an evident plague. Worse, there are increasing reports of the harassment, arbitrary imprisonment of and extortions from bearded individuals on mere suspicion of being members of the Boko Haram. We cannot afford the substitution of one form of lawlessness for another, even if one appears, for now, to assuage our immediate anxieties. Such conduct is every bit as reprehensible as one of the acts of the aforesaid governor of Zamfara state who decreed at one stage – of course you may have forgotten - that all males above the beard growing age must be bearded, or else incur the sanctions of the state. Now the pendulum is swinging in the opposite direction and, comparatively speaking there is, once again silence. These are symptoms of fascism, both of the Talibanic, and the anti-Talibanic type. To beard, or not to beard, is the privilege of the individual chin, and not even barbers whose economic well-being is therefore enhanced or jeopardised, have any choice in the matter.
And so, back to the effort at fathoming what lay behind the seeming surge of strength from a long familiar bed of presidential inertia - we must seek out what that constitutional frenzy did, and one thing I suspect we shall all be agreed upon: its feature of a mammoth distraction. A distraction takes us away from something else – either something that is happening or is being contemplated, or then again, something that is supposed to happen but is not happening. The latter consideration forces us to enquire into what has been left undone, responsibilities – such as, for instance, electoral reforms, a screaming urgency if ever there was one. There are – to name just a few more - educational decay. Security. Infrastructure. Social services. Above all, there is the fundamental issue of the constitution itself, the document that supposedly binds us together. Clearly, the choice of either addressing these minor issues or neglecting them - is all tied up with the issue of power. If you wish to put the lid on the clamour of millions, you create diversions, and in the process, guarantee the retention of power by any means, and the consolidation of the status quo. Thus we come right back to where we began, the centrality of a constitutional debate at this juncture of our existence and of course, its ancillary, the means to power – the electoral process. Less than two years to an election that is projected under a constitution that is itself under severe challenge, not merely in words but in the act, as witness the dual, triple, quadruple orders of protocols of association that are currently implemented by one part the nation or the other, as we have narrated above – all we witness is total inertia from our recumbent spider at the centre of the Nigerian web, jerked into spasmodic activity of a sectional, divisive, irrational and potentially incendiary constitutional championing from impulses that remain mysterious to the world of reason, but are probably clear to an unseen forces.
It is my view that governors should no longer wait to be threatened. As long as a number of constitutional issues remain unsettled, they should proceed along the dictates of their own intelligence and conscience, and from the basis of ideological conviction. My exhortation goes even in the direction of those governors whose very claim to governorship is fraudulent and corrupt. Ultimately, every provocation, including their own illegitimacy, contributes towards the inevitable moment of people’s self-assertion. For now, it is incumbent on elected governors to push the envelope of federalism as far as it will go. In the absence of a national dialogue, the monopoly of unilateral interpretation – no, not even interpretation but imposition – needs to be, and must be broken. If Zamfara buys 200 buses in pursuit of her own theocratic agenda, those who feel diminished by such constitutional unilateralism must demand to know whose funds are being used for such self-arrogation and take action accordingly. Are these funds from the common purse, such as allocation from the national oil revenue? Do they derive from the VAT payments from other states, such as Lagos, which contributes close to 65% of the nation’s aggregate? Or are they internally generated from Zamfara state. Questions such as these have contributed to the obvious necessity for a far-reaching constitutional review and remain clamant on the desperately evaded imperatives of a National conference.
We are gathered here today – as I earlier reminded us - on the grounds of a remarkable and brutal slice of colonial history where our youths were callously drafted to the war front for protesting the arbitrary and unjust conduct of a colonial power. Theirs was the status of the colonized; as colonial subjects they could be seized and carted off to the war front in conformity to the will of rulers. My position today is that today’s average citizen has also been designated an eternal conscript. The Nigerian is a conscript, forced to fight not just one, but several wars. The citizen is conscripted to fight the war of darkness, the deprivation of elementary electric power that is crucial to development and basic existence in a modern society. He or she is conscripted to fight the wars of disease, while the new imperators jet off to Europe and Saudi Arabia for their own treatment. He is conscripted to fight the wars of exposure for lack of affordable shelter, to battle ignorance for lack of functional educational facilities, facilities that have been run aground, deliberately by one neo-colonial fascist after another, be he in uniform or mufti. He is compelled to fight the war of starvation, conscripted to fight the war on corruption. He is conscripted to fight the war of personal and collective security, one that has moved from random killings through armed robbery to kidnapping for ransom, not forgetting the rounds of religious slaughter. Every citizen has been conscripted into a private, often one-household, one neighbourhood vigilante squad for bare survival. Most humiliatingly, he has been conscripted into fighting, all over again, the war of liberation, the war of dignity, the struggle to have a voice in the direction of his society, how it should be run, towards what destination and in pursuit of what ideals.
It is time to embrace this status of our conscription. Do we have any other option? It is difficult to sexually abuse an entire nation but, abused, this nation most certainly is. I took pains to stress the nature of sexual abuse: physical and mental violation, human degradation, and the erosion of dignity. A nation where the president of a nation proudly declares a self-pronounced thug his political father, and makes him the gift of a state through the blatant corruption of electoral processes, is not a nation. It is a slave encampment. A nation where one individual can offer a 15 million dollar bribe, yet remain solvent, enjoy close political association of the president of a nation is not a nation, but a global abscess. This nation space has been physically violated, it is steadily dehumanized, robbed of her collective dignity. Thus, where indeed the imposition of overt conscription has not yet been felt, self-preservation demands that self-conscription be volunteered. Let us begin to identify ourselves as an army of conscripts. Time is short. The reprobates are gathering their forces for the next onslaught, their weapons – Procrastination, Coercion, Distraction, and Impunity. If they do not disarm and choose the path of equitable discourse, then there is only one response – to take the battle to them. It is not the Delta militants who are enjoying the proclamation of some figure of speech called ‘Amnesty’ – it is governance that has been wallowing in its torpor, and it is time to set a date for the expiration of this unnatural, over-generous and unreciprocated Amnesty extended to governance by people for so long. The terminal date of that Amnesty must be set within a feasible determination of new protocols of association, as well as established rules of equity for the coming elections. The report is out, the demands of the electorate are clear. We know where the battlefront is – the seat of governance.
My conviction – once again - is that a people’s gathering is long overdue. It should take place right on that battlefront, that space where anti-people conspiracies are hatched and executed. Like those youths of King’s College who, nearly a century ago, banded together with the cry ‘Enough is enough’, those early protagonists of liberation, let us muster our feet together and – march on that citadel of corruption. Personally, I declare that I have had enough. Enough of talking. Enough of listening. Enough of rhetoric. Enough of sterile analysis. Enough of mind-numbing, self-surmounting revelations of national shame, enough of stomach-churning disclosures. I call on the Labour Movement, the professional bodies, the civil organizations, clerics of all shades to take the lead. We shall be beside you. Let history bear witness to the choice of response by our new colonial masters – the way of the erstwhile white imperators whose alienated mentality they have embraced or, the way of the truly chastened, of a new awakened conscience. Let us begin to conscientize, organize, and mobilize, towards the now inevitable march on Aso Rock and its collaborative agencies of self-serving legislatures. Again and again, they demonstrate that they represent no one but themselves. It is time to send in the conscripts – you and I.
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