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Recently, in a lecture that was delivered by Prof. Wole Soyinka, he wondered why in our myriad of public holidays we do not celebrate or commemorate traditional African/Nigerian religions, in addition to those of the invaders that we now celebrate annually. The immediate answers a Nigerian would give you would revolve around the fact that traditional religious worships are fetish, ungodly and satanic. The origin of this belief is the indoctrination we received from the invaders who drummed and cajoled into us that we did not know about the One True God; never mind that we have Chukwu and Olodumare (The Big God), Chineke and Osanobua (The God of Creation), etc. The invaders told us that our religious rituals or traditional rites were satanic verses and we believed them. Yet their so-called pure religions also are riddled with religious rituals and rites. They condemned our smaller gods, deities and ancestors but kept their prophets, disciples and saints.
However, the indoctrination was much worse. As I said in the early part of this essay, it is crucial that we incorporate the historical transitions brought about by these invasions into our educational institutions, our civic lives and our daily lives, if we must achieve a more perfect union. This comprehensive education will aid in reclaiming our authentic identity, a prerequisite for achieving true independence and fostering genuine religious and political systems. We did not have to jettison our cultures, value systems, traditions, governance norms and justice systems that have for centuries made our societies humane, democratic and republican, or monarchical, prosperous and egalitarian. I am not saying here that there was nothing bad in our societies before the invaders arrived; no, there were. But my point is that, with the type of education that they gave to us, we ought to have integrated their knowledge into our value systems to build better institutions that will make this union of diverse nations a successful one. I will give examples in the course of this discussion.
Before the arrival of the invaders, it was the practice to kill off twins after birth in some communities east of Benin Empire. To our people then, the act of childbearing was mystifying enough. To then have two or more in the womb was nothing short of the devil at work; so, such babies could not be allowed to live. The invaders stopped this heinous act after successfully educating us on the process of such births. But just as our ancestors needed time to understand multiple births, we might have gotten there somehow, albeit at a much later stage in our history, for us too had scholars and educational institutions in Africa, which, regrettably, the invaders first destroyed.
I recall an incident that happened to me while building my first house in the village. A thief came to the site one night and stole a bag of cement. This was normally reported to the king who, together with his elders, unearthed the perpetrator. The thief was made to keep watch over my site until my subsequent home visit. On my arrival to the site, I found this man there who then told me his story himself. Finding it ridiculous that he would serve such a punishment for so long a time for stealing one bag of cement, I let him go. Unfortunately, my act of summary clemency did not go down well with the king’s council. An appropriate fine was extended to me for arbitrarily upending a traditional act of justice. In today’s Nigeria, a thief like that would be taken to the police station, he would be bailed, the two sides would engage lawyers for court action, the case might take years to resolve, and the one bag of cement held as exhibit would cake and become useless to the owner and the thief.
Similarly, we have as Africans viewed life as a sacred gift from our Big God. It was a heinous crime, simply unthinkable, to take a life except in a war. This sacrilege of murder was one good reason wars were not easily advocated in our primordial societies. We never had the death sentence in our traditional penal codes. A murderer was simply made to forfeit his birthplace and was banished for life, to the knowledge of all contiguous communities. Such criminals would end up lonely, passing away unheralded in strange lands, sometimes by their own hands. Back home, his family would live in shame and ignominy for generations.
The invaders introduced to us the police system and their jurisprudence. Unfortunately, due to the performance of the police force at the time of colonization, we saw the police as an instrument of oppression rather than a body charged to maintain law and order. To date we have been unable to effectively create a friendly police force that puts the peoples’ welfare and safety first.
The import of Prof. Soyinka’s rhetorical question, to me, lies in how we have elected to govern and build our nation. It appears that we are forever adopting other peoples’ ideologies and systems without infusing our own norms and values; call it adoption without adaptation if you will.
The strategic decision behind the creation of states during the civil war was to break the seeming unifying bonds within the then Biafran-Eastern Region. But subsequent state creations became hinged on the ideas of grassroots development and economic growth. Whether inadvertently or by design, it turned out to be an ingenious way of almost returning the people to their pre-colonial mini nations. But in doing this the government of the day denied the states the single most important resource they would need to survive and grow as viable socio-political entities: economic viability. In order to prosecute the civil war, Nigeria devolved from a federal system of governance that was operational at independence to a unitary system. That change would have been short-lived, with economic power returned to the states at the end of the civil war.
Not doing that was the harbinger of the failure of the Nigerian state that we have today. The Federal Government abrogated powers that it was ill equipped to wield effectively. Just look at it; the Federal Government must provide electricity, water, roads, railroads, seaports, airports, shipping line, airline carrier, education, healthcare and pilgrimage to the people whose population had grown from 55 million at Independence to 210 million today. In addition, the same Federal Government will need to build requisite industries to support the economy, mine solid minerals, drill for oil and gas, refine petroleum and distribute the products, maintain the refineries, fund the universities and provide employment and training for the workforce. While at these tasks, the Federal Government will also provide police to all the states, operate and maintain other relevant security agencies, provide watchdogs to check its own excesses, maintain a viable military that will protect the territorial integrity of the Nigerian nation from all enemies within and without, then, finally and above all, fund the 36 states. I pray, in what universe will this be possible?
Of course, such a structure cannot work. In business, the best managers are those who can delegate properly using good management techniques and identifying the right staff to implement them. This is truer of nation-building, where good governance is the key. In our present-day Nigeria, the states are not properly engaged. Except for Lagos State, the states are doing absolutely nothing. They do not provide any social amenities, water, power, good roads, schools, hospitals, none. Everything is in abject decay. If states cannot function, the nation cannot function either.
Stay tuned for the last part of this series, coming up next week, where we will summarize our main findings and insights
