Then there came Nero [I]

“When there are issues that stoke tension and bring about friction, it makes perfect sense for the interested parties to come together to discuss.”Actually, when there are issues that raise tension, you don’t wait to convoke a national conference: you solve them. But instead of solving them, President Goodluck Jonathan decided to call for the […]

“When there are issues that stoke tension and bring about friction, it makes perfect sense for the interested parties to come together to discuss.”
Actually, when there are issues that raise tension, you don’t wait to convoke a national conference: you solve them. But instead of solving them, President Goodluck Jonathan decided to call for the conference that he had in the past dismissed.
And suddenly, the president surprised even himself. But why this sudden change of mind? Of course there is crisis in PDP, and many see it mainly as the handiwork of Northern governors, which Jonathan may have concluded, on behalf of the North. So, number one, why not pay them back with what, in his opinion, Northern leaders almost certainly don’t like? Two, after the opposition to him has managed to merger into one bigger political party, how about throwing a late spanner that may put a wedge between General Muhammadu Buhari and Asiwaju Bola Tinubu in the works? Three, the president expects his masterstroke will put an end to the blackmail and balkanisation of the PDP.
But there is perhaps an even more urgent reason. And it might be a memorandum that was said to have been submitted to President Goodluck Jonathan by a group of his political supporters from the South East and South-South zones that called on him to convoke a Sovereign National Conference, something he had in the past derided.
It is actually not that there is anything wrong with convening a sovereign national conference per se; it is that there is everything wrong in convening it and hijacking for an ethnic agenda using the powers of incumbency. The memorandum, which has been quoted in the media, didn’t hide its raison d’être: it was hatred for Hausa-Fulani Muslims and the immediate need to put a stop to the blackmail going on in the People’s Democratic Party, PDP, and create options for the president, and “shame his critics and stop the domination of presidential politics by any group or region.”
In the end, the memorandum advised that if convoying the sovereign national conference “makes it difficult for him to run for second term in 2015, he should work to hand over to a president from either the Middle Belt (North Central) or the South East geopolitical zone.
 “This makes sense because the South East has not produced a Nigerian president. They have always been denied this opportunity. Only recently, were they allowed to get the office of the Chief of Army Staff and leadership of key Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs). For the minorities of the Middle Belt, they have always succeeded in keeping Nigeria one. If the office of the president is aimed at satisfying the North, it should be to the Middle Belt minorities and not go to those who have only produced dictators and a civilian President.” And here, they are offering carrots on behalf of Jonathan to future pawns in his game, and in the process attempting to further divide the North.
Indeed, these people ought to thank General Yakubu Gowon for the magnanimity with which they were accepted back into Nigeria. In other places, they won’t be taken as equals, but here they are asking to be made president. It was not often that a people rebelled against national authority and they were accepted back within living memory. When the southern part of the United States rebelled against the Union that at that time hadn’t been fully formed, America went to war against itself; and it would be more than two hundred years before a Southerner could be elected president of the United States of America.
In our own war, the North gave a million lives to preserve the unity and territorial integrity of Nigeria; and another million or more Igbo lives were to be lost in the tragedy; but, though both sacrifices are today being stated in life-counts, no two sacrifices could have been more dissimilar. While the former was to preserve national unity and territorial integrity, the latter were offered to subvert both. And the civil war really did subvert every other thing and set the country back in every material particular much more than any subsequent event and more than even the cumulative effect of military misrule; it subverted and arrested the social, political and economic development of Nigeria like nothing before it or since.
Obviously, if three million people died and property beyond value was lost, someone must be responsible. The idea of ‘no victor, no vanquished’ adopted by General Gowon didn’t mean there was no guilty party in the war; it simply meant that for the sake of national reconciliation, the victor had forgone his right to extract the national pound of flesh. But whenever they looked for what had retarded the progress of this nation, they always overlooked it to settle on what they say is squarely the issue of leadership, as if leading the country to war is not the greatest failure of leadership.
And now comes the real test for the question of leadership. Indeed, if the government couldn’t succeed at ordinary governance, from where would it get the capacity to organise, manage and see through a sovereign national conference that promises to be fractious? But suppose it somehow does get this capacity, is it really capable of organising an inclusive dialogue without monopolising the initiative and without trying to predetermine its outcome? On the other hand, is it not likely that it may itself seek to torpedo it or deliberately fail to manage it well, in a way precipitating a crisis that will then naturally enough be allowed to lead to the dismembering of the country? Even this cannot be achieved on a roundtable.
This is the reason behind the caution often expressed by Northern leaders; because, perhaps with the exception of the breakup of the former Czechoslovakia, which was decided around a conference table, there has been no modern national disunion that was not in the end only decided finally in a bloody encounter on the battlefront. Reverberations from the more recent ones can still be heard in various flares-up, beginning with the breakup of the former Soviet Union, where the fires of Georgia, Chechnya, Dagestan and Armenia have remained unquenched; Yugoslavia, where the Croats and Bosnians fought the Serbs and then each other, and in Yemen, where a National Dialogue Conference became deadlocked two weeks ago, and, as is widely feared, will lead to a full-scale war between North and South Yemen.
And perhaps the National Question has been without answer for too long; but it is probably not that much-touted Sovereign Natio-nal Conference that will be the best answer to it in the given circumstance, not least because, amidst tension and contrived ethnic bitterness with minds muddled up and permanently set, the National Question has still not been properly asked.
In a polity where relations between sec-tions of the country lack basic trust, where decisions of national significance and impact lack consensus and the exercise of power lacks legitimacy, it is very difficult to initiate a far-reaching restructuring of the nation to make its component parts big enough, viable enough and more self-reliant; and be able to determine the degree of political autonomy and resource allocation required to make the federation itself more balanced and more stable.
And with so many unattended challenges of nation-building—undying appeal of regionalism, continuing effects of prolonged military rule and a failed federalism, the issue of poverty and widening inequality, the constitutional challenge and the challenge of institution-building, inability to handle worsening ethnic and religious ten-sions, it is unlikely that such a polity can rise to the challenge of planning and managing a stable political transition.
While these may be the issues that a con-ference of this nature is supposed to consider, thrash and take position, there is need for a leadership more purposeful and more in charge and in control of the nation’s affairs than Jonathan’s. For instance, what kind of conference with delegates from the North East attend when their zone is under occupation, which, as it appears to many in the zone, the government is reluctant to do what is required to bring to an end.
While the mood across the country and even in the North is for the conference to take place if only to stop this blackmail, it really won’t make any sense to allow a government to misuse the powers of incumbency to remake Nigeria in its own sectionalist image. If there will be a conference, it must be a proper one—properly constituted, free in its deliberations and with a government in place that can hold the country together, during the conference or if anything goes wrong, as it may.
And, in any case, how do they want the Hausa-Fulani Muslims of the Orkar-expelled states to look at the composition of the conference advisory committee when retired Colonel Tony Nyiam, a leading figure of—some say real brain behind—the Gideon Orkar coup, which didn’t just seek to change a government but expelled some of their states from the Nigerian Union, is a prominent member? Is that the theme of the impending conference?