At a time of great need for conceptual innovation in relation to the project of remaking Nigeria, it is intriguing that a Chom Bagu, aka ‘General’ is missing from the situation rooms. Typical of that generation who were undergraduates in the early eighties, Chom has amassed diverse capabilities that he should have been on the radar of the Nigerian system in terms of those who must be found and inserted into the system if that system were intelligent and functional. Unlike the Chinese system and its stress on merit wherever and in whomever it is found, irrespective of whether the bearer is good at sycophancy or not, the Nigerian system works in a different direction.
Chom, first from left and the unacknowledged Philosopher and another lost activist, Barr Titus Mann, 3rd from left
It may not be that General Chom is less happy wherever he is now. It is that a nation experiencing the turmoil Nigeria is experiencing now needs people with clarity and certain technical competencies beyond ideological critique. Chom would not be the only one but he is the one in focus here because Intervention cannot see him where where he ought to be in the re-imagination of Nigeria: a state owned think thank or Party School or one of the organised NGOs or a media house. In one of these spaces, he will be shaping the debates from his combined experience across the students’ movement, the Nigeria Labour Congress, (NLC), USAID, Search for Common Ground and an overarching ideological cum organisational clarity that is uncommon as each and every of these domains implied different tooling and models, regimes and practices. His decentering or even mutation would be comparable to training a military officer to the full but only to retire him or her just before s/he is set to hit the ground at a higher altitude, notwithstanding whatever is Chom’s age now. It must be within the aggregate of that generation.
A ‘General’s new troops, but this time for peace making
There is the hint that Chom has been articulating unsettling positions recently. The possibility of tendency waywardness stalks anyone in the absence of a strong organisational culture. There would, therefore, be nothing new or strange were this to be true. The point, however, is that Chom had a clarity and capacity to domesticate the stuff that everyone else was engaging with. Against that background, could the said embrace of backward positions actually be a manifestation of discomfort with a culture of problematising the everyday? That is not what everyone finds easy to do as more people are too comfortable with the world they know and are happy with. But, as Shakespeare reminds us, certitude is the chiefest enemy of security. It is dangerous to be too sure and emulating Rene Descartes in the culture of ‘radical doubt’ is very important. In other words, could Chom only be demonstrating that awareness that the ground for unshakeable knowledge does not exist and that security comes from asking questions and stretching the horizon of understanding all the time? Or, is he being different and his Others are then being hostile to difference?
An outcome of the Bege Initiative in harmonising diversity and which could make a contribution to the international political theory of hospitality but, even then, would that justify the mutation of a General?
How the Community Action for Popular Participation, (CAPP) collapsed under Chom’s watch can be difficult to understand but the CAPP story seems to have too many angles to warrant suspending judgment even on that vis-a-vis the decentering/mutation of General Chom to the countryside from Abuja where it is happening.
Personal choice and self-rediscovery in the middle of the journey of life cannot be ruled out in the General’s choice of community involvement. But, all such choices do have their contextual roots. Has this been established in this case? Return to the roots from where schooling de-rooted most urban dwellers in Nigeria today can be inviting. The rural idyllic retains that allure but it is also about concentrating resource persons on where they can make the most impacts. Except if General is locked into that rural idyllic of Ganawuri cultural space and his Bege Initiative of harmonising diversity, this cannot be wished away.
Of course, his Bege Initiative could make an original contribution to national and global hospitality regime but, even then, it has to be networked into similar initiatives or enjoy a publicity profile to be so recognised. Otherwise, it risks being the mythical tree that fell in the forest where no one was witness to its fall. That such a tree fell is, indeed, real but that no one talks about it in relation to its significance or insignificance makes the fall unreal.
To cut a long story short, the desire to overcome the current disarticulation in Nigeria will become too heavy a task if an uncommon resource person in strategic thinking and even more so in radical democratic politics as Chom is granted his own free will to cut off from the hub. It doesn’t matter what great stuff he might be unpacking back in Ganawuri or wherever else. Not even a hamlet in Nigeria can be safe if the Nigerian State and larger society are themselves unsafe, arising partly from its peopling with relatively run off the mill resource persons. In any case, Nigeria at the moment has no better pool of practitioners of nationhood than the generation of undergraduates throughout the decades of the 1980s up to very early 1990s before the current rot in the university system took the most firm root, catching the attention of the mischievous World Bank as for it to declare graduates of the system unemployable. Interestingly, this is also the position of the Nigerian media and the Nigerian State.
The great thing is how, whether it is decentering or mere mutation of a General, Chom will remain indelible to the Babangida junta on which he put the tag of ‘armed populism’ at a time no one had thought of the regime in that term yet because IBB regime was still enjoying its self-representation as a human rights regime.
