By Adagbo Onoja
(1) – The World
Temporality has come down to us as a crucial measure of reality, both from the Kantian and African ontological lenses. To that extent, anticipating 2022 is vital. A central starting comment here is to warn against any illusions that things will change dramatically or would not. The dynamism of the social space itself warns us against such calculability. All we can do is to take the world by its spaces of the human experience.
Well known to each other but the nation state can be more complex than even the most powerful of presidents
In doing so, it makes the most sense to start with the global scene. In spite of the observable progress in subjectivity and emancipation, international security is still studied and measured in terms of what great powers do and/or refuse to do. United States – China relations is, therefore, one space to watch. None of the US and China is keen to escalate relations between them but the relationship is far too complex to assume that rationality is always at work and can guarantee anything. It would be too foolish to dismiss what some of the most important scholars of this relationship are saying. John Mearsheimer is, for instance, not just a Political Scientist of note, he has come to the discipline from WestPoint, military career and s strong sense of history. These probably explain his exceptional lucidity on the issue. And he maintains the position that a great power clash between the US and China is an inevitability. That is, China will expel the United States from Asia just as the United States expelled all other contending powers from the Americas which it regards as its backyard. That is Mearsheimer’s analysis which he puts as where the trouble will come from.
Joe Biden figures out how to relate with the man they all call the ‘Czar’
Nothing still excuses his argument from the ignominy that has befallen Realism and Realists in the case of US-USSR but so also that nothing makes his analysis stupid. After all, heads of Chinese think tanks with military experience are saying as recently as Christmas eve that “the risk of a collision between Chinese and US warships in the South China Sea was increasing in a dangerous way”. The point is that China is the ultimate bogeyman as far as the United States is concerned.
Unfortunately, US-China relations is not ‘their’ affair but concerns all of us because we in Africa provide the battleground for the twosome whether they are in a romantic embrace or engaging each other in fisticuffs.
When we take off our eyes from US-China axis, it goes to NATO-Russia axis. Russian nationalism driven by its border geography, Russia’s current military capability and the Putin persona combine to make that axis worth watching, if you are an African. Foreign Affairs is saying that Putin is not really about to invade Ukraine but keen on guarantee that NATO is not encroaching on what Putin considers as Russia’s backyard. Richard Haass and his team at the Council on Foreign Relations might be correct but that is if they are probably not forgetting that Ukraine can be said to be the defining spot in Halford Mackinder’s Geographical Pivot of History. Students of Putinism might, therefore, not concur, just yet!
(11) – Nigeria
As we move from one potential flashpoint to another across the world, we can see potentially involving moments that should worry all those of us who occupy the weakest link in the global chain. And that brings back-in the big puzzle in international security called Nigeria – the only elephant in the world that flies or aspires to fly. Nigeria ought not to have been the successor sick state of the world. Unfortunately, it is, instead of being a success story in “Responding to Nuclear Threats: The Role of Nigeria’s New Missile AF50”; “Retaining Nigeria’s Leadership in Car Manufacturing: Keeping the Japanese Behind”; “Sharing Nigeria’s Cure for Malaria with the World” or “Teaching the World How to Dance: Lessons from Nigeria’s Democratic Success”. Instead of anything in that class, it follows the Festus Iyayi conclusion in his 2010 speech, (“Assassins of Nation Building, 2011 Elections and Electoral Reforms in Nigeria: Chronicle of a Death Foretold”) where the above quotation comes from: Unfortunately, the story of Nigeria at 50 is such that not only can we not devote ourselves to such themes, we find that our individual lives have been diminished by the dismal failure of the country to realise its great potentials”.
As creative as they came!
Not only has the country been reduced to where no one is debating its prospects for industrialization, it is the perfect case study in the victory of mediocrity in a knowledge ruled world. Its processes and practices suffer from unbelievable lethargy and discomfort with any sense of urgency to its challenges. It is a country happy with the most delayed reaction time and nobody is punished for any infractions. Of course, as generalisations, these claims contain seeds of its repudiation because Nigeria is also a hotbed of exceptionalism EXCEPT that it is, as presently constituted, more comfortable with the beaten part. And this is not only in government, it is also in academia, the NGOs, industry, business and what have you.
The above generalisations must be how 2022 could be such a long, new year spent in the current scale of tension, actual suffering and the near complete absence of consensual signifiers waving banners of hope to a largely conquered populace. No situation could be more dangerous as one in which signifiers waving banners of hope is almost absent. Hope is the tonic that never fails.
The most shocking thing out of Nigeria now must be that there is still no binding national narrative about the way forward and without which progress of whatever kind would be impossible. A national narrative is not necessarily radical or progressive. It is nothing more than one narrative out of many which has temporarily emerged dominant via a combination of articulatory, material, institutional, agential and other such factors but serving as a basis for popularly accepted course of action. Other than that, a binding narrative has nothing inherently radical or progressive about it. It can even be coming from the most perceived backward quarters but no such narrative ever emerges dominant without hard work in articulating it to a hegemonic status by its protagonists. And it is in that process that we have the magic pill in a binding national narrative in every conflict situation as is the case in Nigeria today.
Traditionally, the ruling class is, for most times, the source of the most functional narratives. A great example is the ‘grass to grace’ narrativisation of social mobility in the United States. It is not the most brilliant but the one that, for a long time, has successfully emasculated competing, alternative narratives from school contents, the religious arena and the media to be able to remain hegemonic and binding. But as is the case with all hegemonic ideas, the rupture does come. And that is the ruin that the ‘grass to grace’ narrative faces today. Whether the American ruling class still exists in that coherent form in an era of fragmentation and whether they exist in a manner that is able to renew or develop and propagate a replacement of that narrative is the issue today. What has happened is that the truism of the notion that no law or military force can sustain a thoroughly challenged binding narrative has been demonstrated in the US today.
The bourgeoisie might have advantage in terms of control of human resources and the institutional facilities, (look at all the plenitude of established, statist minded scholars in Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Princeton, Yale, Chicago, UCLA, Cornel and so on and popular culture platforms with which to push a narrative to a hegemonic status) but even then, it can be beaten hands down to it. And Nigeria provides a very good example of that when, led by the Nigeria Labour Congress, (NLC) of yore, the Babangida regime which remains the best in inclusive class rule, was beaten to nothingness in 1986. The articulatory politics of the NLC was simply too much for what Chom Bagu has aptly called Babangida’s armed populism. The Academic Staff Union of Universities, (ASUU) was to further humiliate the same regime in articulatory politics in 1993.
Uhm!
The two examples above shows to us that a binding narrative can be constructed by any groups, depending on what is at stake, particularly the contradiction to be politicised. The more the life and death status of the contradiction, the easier it is to use language to construct image-schema that will produce the power relations, (winners versus losers) that will compel people to decide which side to join in a street struggle for power if it comes to that. That is the logic of Articulation in contemporary radical democratic politics but which some people take on the face of it by asking: how can mere words construct or change reality? Words or language in use change reality through discursive constitution of the reality to be changed in a manner that creates protagonists and antagonists, the clash between the two at ideational and structural level producing the change in question. There is no reality without its mediation, that being why an earthquake could be understood as either outcome of tectonic shifts or the wrath of the gods, to cite the most famous example.
This is why there is something dangerous in the inability of each of the active players in the Nigerian stalemate today to develop any of the competing narratives of the current crisis into hegemonic stature. For whatever reasons that such is the case, it can be worrisome. Although no one can be absolutely sure what type of outcome we might be heading, the precarious nature of most African countries is that the current situation in Nigeria can quickly degenerate to a condition of mass misery worse than what exists, typical of the continent. As anyone who has also studied big moments in history will testify, what could happen will NEITHER depends on one factor NOR even resemble what anyone might be thinking of. Those nursing secret desires for the country to break-up could find themselves much worse off than when the country is intact. Those hoping to keep the country as a theatre of primitive accumulation among the local bourgeoisie and their foreign patrons may find tomorrow to be a Nigeria that has jumbled its card and out of control for them. So, there is no basis for being sure of our image-schemas about the future of Nigeria and it is to that extent that a binding narrative is the categorical imperative in this case.
Straight into fragmentation after the maiden meeting of the NCS under Buhari. Still a power elite?
Ordinarily, the government ought to be the driver for a binding narrative. Somehow, the Buhari Government appears to be the anti-thesis of consensus. That it does not show keenness in consensus is intriguing. The government suspects those involved? The government wants to be seen to have provided the answer at last but when? The government is incapable of trusting others? President Buhari is still living in the shadows of August 1985 even in the face of gargantuan threats?
There is basis for berating presidential politics in consensus building as anti-thesis of the insecurity crisis. For one, there are no voices left to be heard. All those who have an idea or something to say on the insecurity crisis have said it. Some have done it openly in the best tradition of public sphere. Others have done so through their own back channels corresponding to their own age or status in society or relationship with the powers that be. Some others are too angry to talk while some more are too frightened to say anything. Regional platforms, radical individuals, religious and community leaders, NGOs, academics and the media and more have had their say.
The most notable voice heard after the bestial burning of travellers on Sokoto road, preceded by the siege on Kaduna- Abuja Federal Highway is that of the national notables involving Chief Obasanjo, General Abdulsalami Abubakar, the Sultan, Cardinal Onaiyekan and quite a number of people in that category. It was a symbolic gathering because it is sufficiently inclusive. It sits well with the assumption that no regime can ignore a consensus on what the problem is from such an audience. Secondly, it transcended little quarrels between some of its key players and their counterpart in government.
This assumption was punctured even before the gathering was concluded. In response to one statement or the other by Chief Obasanjo, for example, the government warned him against what it calls setting the country on fire. The exchange showed that the gathering was probably something the government of the day would have wished did not take place. But what sort of disagreement between two adults of Obasanjo and Buhari’s status in society will not subside even in the face of a palpably bad situation as currently exists in Nigeria?
Instead of subsiding, the president said in Maiduguri that he would continue to do his best. It could only mean: take my best or leave it, the choice is yours. What followed next was totally unexpected. The idea that you cannot afford becoming an activist if you have held a certain position in government was flattened out by strongman, Ameh Ebute, who issued a statement that was alleging complicity of big names and players in the insecurity crisis. As absolutely entitled to issue any statement on such an issue as the senior citizen, how did it come at a time when each and every member of the elite is supposed to be working towards consensus without which the nation cannot make a united move against the threatening situation? Ebute is by any standard a big name, being lawyer, former Senate president and an old breed politician. Is it possible he is so sure of the information he could not have restricted it to where people of his status were gathering in pursuit of peace?
To note in all these that Mister President has never mentioned anything about constituting a broader based government specifically to respond to the overwhelming advance of the bearers of insecurity has left many guessing what might be driving presidential management of the threat. Is it possible that the president has exhausted his capability and anyone expecting anything better is wasting his time flogging a dead horse as Chief Obasanjo put it? And why might the president have taken such an option in spite of the moral and strategic implications for him as an individual, for future leadership and for the nation?
It is certainly very tempting to buy the contention that the president is only worried by the prospects of being embarrassed out of power the second time but that is not wholly supported by some state actions. One of such is his apparent purchase of the outline by General Magoro in an audio that has been making the rounds, even as the audio raises the question of why it hadn’t come before now. After all, there has been a big debate about how Nigeria could be overrun by bandits with all the retired military men around.
