Jos - foregrounding a failed state

The concept “failed-state” carries an understandable melodramatic import! It refers to the inability or failure of a state to fulfil some of its key roles and responsibilities to its people(s) and others domiciled within its territory and consequently to its neighbours and the wider global community of states. According to the Funds for Peace think-tank, state failure materialises at three broad spheres of the lives of the people(s): social, political and economic. The following would feature among the key empirical determinants of this failure:
1. The state’s inability to provide security to its population. This situation may have arisen because the state no longer exercises control across part/parts or all of its territory. Factors such as catastrophic breakdowns in vital internal sociopolitical and economic relations, intra-regime fractionalism and rivalries, external invasion and occupation of territory, and unmanageable natural disasters would contribute to the failure. It could also be due to the state’s violation of the human rights of the people(s) including a deliberate state policy to embark on the destruction of one or more of its constituent nations/peoples/religious groups, etc., etc.
2. The state’s inability to provide essential social services
(communication infrastructure, health care, education, housing and recreation, development of culture) to its people(s) or the state’s deliberate policy to deny or partially offer such services to some of its constituent nations/peoples/religious groups… This failure could be the consequence of a state’s dwindling fiscal/material resources or just sheer incompetence in its management capacity. Alternatively, this inability points to the staggering nature of corruption and largely institutionalised norm of non-accountability in the access and control of public-owned finances by state officials and their agents.

There remains a lack of consensus among scholars studying the failed states of contemporary Africa on the terms of the evaluative parameters of this enterprise including the crucial constitutive timeframes of assessing and therefore concluding when this or that African state “began to fail” or/and when indeed it “failed”. There is a tendency by some experts to arbitrarily circumscribe the limit of the focus of interrogation to the so-called African post-conquest epoch (i.e., post-January 1956) with the underlying presumption that the state, as formulated and constituted on the eve of the “restoration of independence”, has a definitive and enduring internal logic to its being. In its annual 2009 “Failed States Index” publication, the Fund for Peace identifies the “worst 20 states”, 11 of which are in Africa. It is to one of these, Nigeria, that we should now turn.

For Nigeria, it was Jos, a city in its northcentral region, that the trajectory to its “failed state” status began. The year was 1945, 11 years before 1956 and 15 years before 1960 – the year of the presumed termination of the British occupation of the country. On 22 June 1945, Nigerian workers declared a countrywide strike to back their demands for a pay rise in response to their deteriorating social conditions, aggravated by the effects of the Second World War. Since the earlier strike in 1941, the cost of living in Nigeria had increased by 200 per cent. While European staff in the country had been paid a couple of “allowances” to cope with these skyrocketing costs, the occupation regime refused bluntly to make similar payments to Africans. The strike virtually paralysed Nigeria’s economic life. It went on for 44 days in the Lagos capital district, but even longer elsewhere in the country – up to 52 days in some places in the regions. The National Council for Nigeria and the Cameroons, the vanguard political party for Nigeria liberation and its press (particularly West African Pilot and Daily Comet newspapers) supported the strike, highlighting the increasingly evident cooperation between the trade unions and the emerging political leadership in the struggle to achieve the country’s restoration of independence. The British however had successfully persuaded the predominantly Hausa-Fulani muslim north region, which was opposed to termination of its occupation of the country, to boycott the strike.

Nonetheless, the strike was an outstanding success. It was the most far-reaching mobilisation of labour in 60 years of occupied Nigeria and its political implications were not lost on the British. They banned the Pilot and Comet and openly blamed prominent Igbo leaders (including Nnamdi Azikiwe, the pre-eminent leader of the freedom movement who also owned and edited these papers), their political and cultural organisations for leading the strike. Such was the vitriolic nature of the occupation regime’s anti-Igbo propaganda on the strike that by October 1945 it became the instigator prop to Hausa-Fulani leaders’ organised massacres of Igbo immigrants in Jos and the surrounding tin mining towns and villages. Hundreds of Igbo were murdered during the pogrom and tens of thousands of pounds’ sterling worth of their property looted or destroyed. No perpetrators of these murders were apprehended or punished by the regime. As a result, emboldened Hausa-Fulani leaders organised yet another pogrom of Igbo immigrants in the north, this time in Kano, in May 1953, which coincided with the heightened debates among Nigeria politicians on the possible date for the formal termination of British occupation and the restoration of independence. In contrast to the Igbo and other nations in the south who favoured the year 1956 for both historic events, the north, as was expected, was vehemently opposed to any such dates. Essentially, the north unleashed the Igbo pogrom in Kano to scuttle these debates – which it succeeded in doing, with evident British relief and satisfaction. As in Jos, the occupation regime did not apprehend or prosecute anyone for these massacres and destruction.

In the meantime, the regime would spend 15 and one-half long years (March 1945-September 1960) working assiduously to ensure that Igbo people, who spearheaded the liberation movement to terminate its occupation of Nigeria, did not assume a leadership position in a post-conquest/occupation Nigeria. Britain also spent 15 and one-half long years (March 1945-September 1960) fashioning the institutions and processes that, in effect, choked off the possibilities of the emergence of a coherently organic state that would serve the interests of most of the African constituent nations in a future independently-restored Nigeria state. In 1951, Britain helped to found the Northern People’s Congress (NPC), an exclusive north-based retrograde feudal political party that opposed the restoration of African independence but supported indefinite British occupation. As a reward to north Nigeria’s steadfast support for Britain, the occupation rigged both the 1952 census results and the defining 1959 elections to the central legislature in favour of its Hausa-Fulani north clients.

It was therefore to the NPC that the British handed over supreme political power in October 1960 with the expectation that this anti-African freedom party would safeguard their vast economic and strategic interests in this southwestcentral region of Africa in perpetuity. Six years later, beginning on 29 May 1966, the north region, true to type, and other key sectors of the Nigeria political establishment (military, police, emirs, intellectuals, muslim cleric, feudal overlords, businesspeople, civil servants, varied regional/constituent nations’ leaderships, other public officials and patrons) with full complicity of the Harold Wilson government in London, launched the Igbo genocide. Throughout the slaughter, the genocidists had the following gruesome anthem in Hausa, broadcast over the authoritative Kaduna radio and television stations (variations on this anthem have since been adapted and re-broadcast elsewhere in Africa by genocidist journalists supporting the genocides in Rwanda and Darfur) with spot advertisements and editorial comments on the theme regularly reproduced in the mass-circulating New Nigerian and Gaskiya Ta Fi Kwabo newspapers:

Mu je mu kashe nyamiri
Mu kashe maza su da yan maza su
Mu chi mata su da yan mata su
Mu kwashe kaya su
(translation: Let’s go kill the damned Igbo/Kill off their men and boys/Rape their wives and daughters/Cart off their property)

The Igbo genocide is the foundational and worst genocide in Africa of the 20th century. In response, the Igbo renounced their Nigerian citizenship forever. They created the state of Biafra in its place and tasked it to provide security to the Igbo and prevent Nigeria from accomplishing its dreadful mission. Between 29 May 1966 and 12 January 1970, 3.1 million Igbo people, a quarter of its population at the time, were murdered. The genocidists also sequestrated and pillaged the multibillion dollar-Igbo economy. Yet despite earning the gargantuan sum of US$700 billion in oil sales in the subsequent 40 years, a significant proportion of this from occupied Igboland in the Abia, Delta, Imo and Rivers administrative regions, Nigeria has cascaded into a degenerative slump politically, economically, intellectually, socially, morally and spiritually. For all intents and purposes, Nigeria collapsed as a state with any serious prospects in the wake of the Igbo genocide.

Just as in the antecedents established in the 1945 and 1953 Igbo pogroms, no person or institution in Nigeria or elsewhere has been apprehended or prosecuted for their role in the Igbo genocide. On the contrary, many operatives who worked as advisors, at varying layers of the genocidist command and control infrastructure, went to, or returned to universities and colleges as professors and researchers, some became university administrators, bureaucrats, media editors and executives, company chief executives and directors, ministers of state, ministers of religion, businesspeople; many of the commanders and commandants became generals and admirals and marshals, and state legislators, administrators and the like; some even sought the highest office of state – head of regime (Awolowo – genocide chief “theorist” and head of finance ministry – variously, without success; Gowon – chief commander – once, successful; Obasanjo – commander – three times, successful; Babangida – commander – once, successful; Buhari – commander – once, successful; Abubakar – commander – once, successful). Not surprisingly, the Nigeria state’s incessant murder of the Igbo has continued unabated despite the “formal” end of the genocide in 1970. The following years of additional murderous outrages illustrate the extent of this continuing tragedy: 1980…1982…1985…1991…1992…1993…1994…1999…2000…2002…2004…2005…2006…2007…2008…2009…2010…

Sixty years on, with the 2010 murders in Jos whose gory images have shocked the world, the wheel has indeed come full circle. Few now doubt that Nigeria is historically a cataclysmic failure. Presently, Nigeria is a grave danger to itself. It is a grave danger to its constituent peoples and nations, to its neighbours, to the west Africa region, to Africa and the wider world. The recent murders have exposed particularly the lethal fissures in a hitherto seemingly compact genocidist monolith. This fractionalisation cannot be contained.

The future for the nations and peoples of this region couldn’t be more reassuring on the morrow of that which was once genocidist Nigeria. Biafra and the other successor states, organically constituted, really have their work cut out. Their mission is not to begin to construct states that are merely post-genocide or post post-conquest/post post-“colonial” states (cancelling out that which was Nigeria here and there!) but a realisation, a reclamation of that which makes us humans and part of humanity. The new states have an opportunity to begin to build a new civilisation where human life, fundamentally, is sacrosanct. This is an inclusive state where women and men live as co-operators and co-creators in fundamentally transforming their society. This is a state that accepts and accords full rights to all minority groups, however defined. This is a state where people enjoy the rights to differ and to dream dreams and dream different sets of dreams as they choose. This is a state dedicated to furthering and nurturing the resilience of its people and to enabling them pursue their highest creative endeavours. This state continuously strives to remove all limitations in the paths of its people and committed to making life better and better and better. This is a state that primes its people to flourish. Finally, the long drawn out nightmare is over and truly we do stand poised on the eve of a new beginning.