A new meaning

By Huzaifa Jega   Starting from about the early 50s, nativist populist politics has, in three odd waves, spread from the fringes to the right, left and center of mainstream politics. This has led to a new kind of nationalism being invented and festering in a distinct fashion that is worlds apart from that of […]

By Huzaifa Jega

 

Starting from about the early 50s, nativist populist politics has, in three odd waves, spread from the fringes to the right, left and center of mainstream politics. This has led to a new kind of nationalism being invented and festering in a distinct fashion that is worlds apart from that of the classical past – emerging into a separate Neo-Nationalism of the postmodern era. These waves are, at least in part, responsible for the political liberation of Africa from the colonial stranglehold of Europe.  

The first nativist populist parties to find significant success in Nigeria emerged in Yorubaland in the 40s. However, earlier populists had already found initial support and success both in the South and North. Right-wing populism then travelled north in the late 50s, when a promise of prosperity accompanying new-found liberal democracy was failing to materialise in Northern Nigeria. In the face of Nigeria’s imminent independence from Britain, populism snowballed south, often taking a more leftist form. On the canopy of the renewed Biafra agitation, it appears that sectional and far-right populism is finding a wider foothold across the length and breadth of the country especially in Igboland where such sentiments had been suppressed after the devastations of Nigeria’s Civil War.  

Since the 2015 presidential elections, Neo-nationalists have come to dictate a good proportion of the political agenda in Nigeria. The year 2016 brought a double whammy with the economy in full recession, which was worsened by acute security crises such as the menace of rural banditry in the North and militant secessionists in the South. By the end of the decade, the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), had graduated to a violent entity carrying out lethal attacks against both hard and soft targets in the South East. And then on the heels of IPOB’s open rebellion, the Yoruba Nation ideologues and their own fixers also emerged.  

These movements have progressed in varying ways in their different strongholds, and they have taken different forms from South East to South West. Many of their leaders, most notably Nnamdi Kanu and Sunday Igboho are fully far-right nativist populists. Needless to say, none of their movements is rooted in any discernible intellectual ideologies even though they sometimes flirted with technocratic ideas.  

The Neo-nationalist order of our time culminated when three torrents coincided at a common confluence, fusing into a single channel of much greater velocity: the surge of populist politics, the spread of conspiracy theories and the avalanche of misinformation boosted by changes in the media. Nativist populist leaders were in the new digital media environment able to spread conspiracy theories and misinformation much further than before, crafting an especially successful recipe for undermining the political establishment.  

In this new media environment, the populists were able to bypass the former gatekeepers of the mainstream media and take their appeal directly to the people. By playing on controversies, the populist attracts attention. The scandalous message prompts pushback from the establishment, which the populist can then use to spread their agenda even further. As is obvious, the mainstream media can then easily be baited to pick up the bogus tale, distributing it much further than was possible on social media alone.  

The surge of nativist populism has usually arisen directly in opposition to the political ascension of an element from a mutually antagonistic section of the population, especially in the third wave. The most powerful conspiracy theories fueling the extremist versions of nativist populism are those of Islamisation and Fulanisation. In their essence, they are the claim that the Fulani overlords ruling Nigeria are bent on fulfilling the jihadi march to the Atlantic that was interrupted by the arrival of the Europeans, and then the invasion of predominantly Christian territories by killer herdsmen for the precise purpose of rendering the native population a minority within their own land, or even causing their extinction.  

Fear of subversion is only the first part of the full theory. In its complete form, the domestic elite is simultaneously accused of betraying the good ordinary people into the hands of external evil. The full versions of the conspiracy theories are more commonly upheld on the fringes. However, many prominent contemporary nativist populists have also alluded to it. Oftentimes, they would rather hint to it, in a style of dog-whistling, than fully spelling it out.  

Nigeria is a country of inhered tensions. It has for long been torn between ideas of openness and liberal democracy on the one hand and conservatism and authoritarian nationalism on the other with no side admitting culpability but nonetheless, these are the facts on ground. For comprehending its political culture, it is important to understand that it is a product of both trends – a new meaning essentially.  

After the devastations of the Civil War, nationalism was not only discredited but should also widely and firmly be held in contempt. Nationalism has to be equated with racism. However, after having been completely condemned for most of the post-war era, another form of racism was – over the progression of the three waves of nativist populism identified – becoming a new normal in Nigeria and Africa as a whole. This new racism was not based on biology as in previous eras, but rather on culture. This is a culturally-based ethno-pluralist doctrine of ‘equal but separate’ where biological racism was replaced with cultural xenophobia.  

Although contemporary nativist populism is fundamentally different from the fascisms of the past, many of the populist movements still do tap into similar notions of nationalism, ethnocentrism and ideas of cultural separatism. Like the fascists before, contemporary nativist populists also uphold a Manichean worldview when incessantly dividing between good and evil. In doing so, they tend to position themselves as outsiders fighting alongside the common man against the malignant elite.  

The success of the contemporary nativist populists is indeed based on dressing their scandalous message in more benign clothing than the fascists of Europe. This is the process of normalising previously condemned views, such as racism, by way of code rather than explicit xenophobia.  

Jega resides in Abuja