The Obasanjo national dialogue has power behind it. But it is power without legitimacy – to the extent that the results of the 2003 presidential elections are still being vigorously contested.

The Anthony Enahoro-led PRONARCO has a measure of legitimacy behind it, to the extent that it is being supported by some non-governmental organizations in the country. But it is legitimacy without power because these groups are largely Lagos-based.

We are thus faced with a conundrum. To paraphrase W.B. Yeats, the worst are full of passionate intensity; the best lack real conviction. And yet the work of setting Nigeria to rights must continue, realizing, as Chinua Achebe pointed out, that the proper bringing up of an errant but beloved child – which truly is what Nigeria is – is not a day’s job.

Some have suggested that the Obasanjo dialogue be boycotted for the reason that it does not flow from the consent of the Nigerian people. For my part, I would rather see the show in Abuja as much needed comic relief before the real fireworks begin. Politics is all about dialogue to reconcile interests and values even as each side manouveres peacefully to achieve its own ends. The operative word here is ‘peacefully.’ For it is infinitely more preferable that Nigeria’s political figures assemble under one roof to swap jokes than retreat into ethnic enclaves and lob grenades at each other.

Chinua Achebe the novelist is the master of surprise. On encountering the all-powerful Ezeulu in the first pages of Arrow of God, who could have ever envisaged his terrible end in the novel’s climatic moment, reduced to a puny arrow in the bow of his awesome God? Or consider the grim portrait of the African country under the thumb of a megalomaniac military dictator in Anthills of the Savannah.

Mass arrests, slaughter of innocents, ordinary people subjected to economic hardship. And just when we are about to give up hope of any redemptive acts, of discovering larger meaning in the cacophony of greed and strangled heroines and heroes, the dazzling image of a newborn child, birthed to carry on the difficult work of freedom, leaves us smiling amidst our tears. Tears of joy at the sheer genius of the master craftsman at work here. But also tears of sheer relief that Achebe the political thinker has not given up on Nigeria, on the idea of Nigeria.

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Why Okonjo-Iweala Matters

Two days after Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala published a brilliant article in The Guardian of London on 31 January calling for the cancellation of Nigeria’s external debt, I received a call from a journalist from one of New York’s leading dailies. She was researching an article on Halliburton’s financial dealings in Nigeria and wanted a tie-in with corrupt Nigerian government officials who, according to her, ‘are really worse than Halliburton.’

I took the insult calmly, waiting for her to finish. Then she mentioned Okonjo-Iweala’s article in The Guardian. She was effusive with her praise. The article was beautifully written; the arguments were backed up with solid evidence; the logic unassailable. Clearly, she said, there was a powerful moral and economic case for the cancellation of Nigeria’s debt. Then she added: ‘But I’m beginning to wonder. It is an open secret that your finance minister is as corrupt as all the rest of Nigeria’s high officials. Will debt cancellation not simply enable him and his colleagues to siphon more of the oil wealth? I am not even sure he wrote the Guardian article. He probably paid a journalist in London to write it for him –‘

It was at this point that I finally lost my patience and cut her off. I asked her if she had done any background check on Nigeria’s finance minister. She hadn’t. I asked her if she knew that the finance minister was actually a young woman and PhD economist. She replied: ‘Really?’ I asked her if she had ever read a book on Nigeria’s history and political economy. She said she had meant to, but the pressure of work hadn’t allowed her to …yet.

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Death and the Governors Kinsmen

The cold-blooded murder of Nigerian citizens in Ugborodo, an Itsekiri town, last week, underlines my thesis that persecution does not respect ‘tribe’ or geography. Federal troops in the town opened fire on the citizens who marched on Chevron’s export terminal in quest of justice, not because they were Itsekiri or Ijaw or Urhobo but simply because they were courageous enough to challenge the regime of injustice President Obasanjo has been propping up in the Niger Delta since he took power in 1999.

The dead and the maimed decided to undertake the march, even when they knew that soldiers were guarding the oil firm’s premises. They had suffered a similar fate in July 2002 when, after their several entreaties to Chevron officials to give them jobs and social amenities in return for their oil were ignored, they launched a protest. An agreement, cemented in a Memorandum of Understanding, was reached between both parties. Chevron undertook to deliver a clearly specified number of jobs and amenities.

But it turned out to be an agreement honoured in the breach. It is important that the world is reminded that the decision by the citizens of Ugborodo to resume the protest was not taken lightly. The decision was underpinned by vigorous open debate. More crucially, the pressing fact of necessity, of rampaging hunger and death by disease and the depressing spectacle of educated young women and men without work, made it imperative that the ramparts of oppression be breached again. This would have been unnecessary, and the deaths avoided, had Jay Pryor, chief executive of Chevron Nigeria, done the right thing and kept his word.

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The foundation of the political and economic crisis Nigerians are grappling with today was laid by Frederick Lugard, Hugh Clifford and their successors in the first three decades of the 20th century. But it was a crisis also compounded by the failure of statesmanship on the part of Nigerians themselves, particularly the governing elites who inherited the state in 1960.

Lugard was an empire builder in the service of England. And so it was inconceivable that he would establish political structures that would benefit the local inhabitants of Nigeria at the expense of his employers. That much is to be understood. He did not establish proper parliamentary procedures and the rule of law in Nigeria, not because he was unaware that these were the foundations on which the prosperity of the people of his own native England was built, but simply because a people given the blessings of democracy and the rule of law are difficult to exploit.

And Lugard was in Nigeria to take the riches of the land for the benefit of England. I do not say this because I wish to diminish the man and his achievements. It is important that we understand the motive behind Lugard’s refusal to divide Nigeria into eight regions, as suggested by his lieutenant governor for the North, so the new country could begin life as a balanced federation.

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Ken Saro-Wiwa concluded On A Darkling Plain, his master-work, thus "Know I should know.  I can only hope and pray that the succeeding regime will be guided by the past into policies which will lessen our collective pain and steer our beautiful country through the realms of peace to that progress and unity of which we dream".

I committed these words to heart when I first encountered them as a young man, just fresh out of graduate school in 1989.  I was editing the literary pages of the Nigerian Observer in Benin City at the time.  Ken Saro-Wiwa had sauntered into my cubicle and slapped a copy of the book down on the desk.  "Read and review this book, Mr Literary Editor and Nigerians will be wiser for it" he said in his usual jocularly fashion.  Then he blew aromatic smoke from his ever smouldering pipe into my face and hurried away for a late lunch appointment.

I have over the course of the passing years, and more so after he was murdered in cold blood in November 1995, pondered the import of the book and the man who wrote it.  For the book, as was the man, is a study in paradox.  On A Darkling Plain makes a passionate case for Nigeria’s ethnic minority groups and their right to self-determination, but also celebrates the beauty that is Nigerian unity.

It holds up General Ojukwu and his commanders as the quintessence of perfidy yet eulogies Igbo industry and ingenuity.  it holds up officers of the Nigerian army as the epitome of virtue but also blames them for the culture of corruption that was eventually to overtake the nation.

Saro-Wiwa’s politics was complex - tested and burnished by bitter experience but always relying on a fine and critical intelligence to find the way to right action.  He was not so much an Ogoni nationalist as a defender of the just rights of people wherever they might be.   This is why today everybody wants to embrace the man and his legacy - Ogoni, Nigerians, Africans, and indeed the world.   His was a politics born of the love for the oppressed of humankind.

I return to the subject of Ken Saro-Wiwa now because our nation (Nigeria) is yet again on a darkling plain.   I have always called for a national conference, untrammelled by the designs of sitting governments.   To the undiscerning, I am an advocate of a new constitution order based on "ancient" tribal boundaries, the sort beloved by Obafemi Awolowo.  This is a wrong reading of my politics.   I am a dyed in the wool Nigerian.  I was born in the northern part of the country, came of age in the death camps of Biafra, and began my working life in Lagos in the West.   My present pre-occupation, politically and scholarly, is the great injustice that has been visited on the diverse peoples of the Niger Delta by successive Nigerian governments and the oil companies in the form of ecological ruin and economic exploitation.   I shall be focusing on the current malformed politics of the Middle Belt and the wider north in the coming years.

For me "resource control" and devolution of power is not the same thing as forming a government along tribal lines for the sole purpose of exploiting a wasting resource.   There cannot be "resource control" where there are no lasting resources to control.  Real sources are those you are able to create with a mixture of brawn and intellect, using  raw material available to you in your immediate vicinity.  Crude oil, left in its crude form is a wasting resource.  It is not real wealth.  Those who build solely on it build on sand.

In my scheme "resource control" entails equipping the minds of the young in order for them to be able to meet the challenges nature and humans throw their way.  It means quality schools and libraries, uncommonly dedicated teachers and a clement domestic milieu that encourages the child to be curious about its surroundings, and to love the fact that reading and learning are their own just reward.  Thus, the community is deprived that lacks these elements, whether it is in Bayelsa or Zamfara state.

When I argue for devolution of power, it is not power to sit down with the oil companies and continue sharing the oil loot.   It is simply that my study of political order down the ages reveal that people are prosperous and content when they have a real say in the way their social affairs are ordered.  Devolved government is efficient government.  Devolved government is also humane government, to the extent that there is little distance between the governors and the governed thus reducing the potential for harsh and predatory policy.

Truly, it is a fortunate community whose members can rule and be ruled.  This is the essence of citizenship; the core constituent element of the civic community.  Note that I did not use the words "tribal community".  The phrase "ancient nationalities" is now been ceaselessly branded about as the journey to the long sought for national conference has commenced.  On the reading of some of my friends and political associates, such social groupings as ‘Yoruba’,'Igbo’,'Hausa-Fulani’, ‘Ijo’, ‘Tiv’,  ‘Urhobo’,  ‘etc are ancient nation’s rooted in time out of mind. 

This is patently false.  Not a single one of these "ancient nations was in existence at the turn of the 20th century when the British imposed imperial rule on Nigeria’s various peoples.  True, there were peoples, distinct cultures, and languages.  But the overwhelming majority of them were aggregated in city-states, village republics emirates, kingdoms and empires.

Not a single one of them was based on the principle of tribe ie you belonged to the political community only on account of ancient tribal blood.   I was reading the second volume of Margery Perham’s magisterial account of Frederick Lugard’s work in Nigeria, and I was riveted by a picture.  It was of Kano city just before Lugard conquered it in the first years of the 20th century.  People that spoke Tiv, Yoruba, Nupe - all were happily accommodated within Kano’s capacious and generous bowels.   

This was some hundred years ago, long before certain politicians who unfortunately had not read their history diligently, began to assert vociferously that Nigeria was a ‘mere geographical expression’.  They were wrong.  What we call ‘tribes’ and nationalities today were forged on the anvil of colonial exploitation,  as peoples began to compete against each other for the new but scarce shilling.

As the debate for a new constitutional compact is joined, let us pause awhile and remember the words of that great African historian, J. Ade-Ajaji:  "colonialism is an episode in African history’.  To argue for narrow tribal units as the basis of the new Nigeria is to argue for continuing colonialism.  Over the next few weeks I Will outline and defend a new thesis, arguing the case for a civic Nigeria informed by the pre-colonial political culture of her various peoples.

Ike Okonta.