[size=16pt]A nation and her discontents[/size]

By Obi Nwakanma

Last week from Abeokuta, former president Olusegun Obasanjo, expressed fears about imminent mass revolt as a consequence of the criminally high rate of youth unemployment in Nigeria. Obasanjo is afraid that this revolt might lead to Nigeria’s equivalent of the Arab Spring. T[b]he former president has good reasons to fear, and indeed, he should be very, very afraid.[/b]

As Nigeria enters the Harmattan of its own discontent, it is important to place in clear context the validity of the fear expressed by one of the vital actors on the Nigerian stage; one whose actions have also contributed substantially to the Nigerian condition and to its current levels of discontent.

Nigeria has the highest level of youth unemployment in the world according to the minister for Youth Development, Mr. Bolaji Abdullahi. The Obasanjo administration’s action or inaction had a lot to do with this terrible situation. Under him, Nigeria squandered its great wealth on figment.

To date, the Federal government has refused to release the audit of the NNPC – Nigeria’s cash cow – which ought to show the Satanic level of corruption in that Dantesque pit, as well as show Obasanjo’s own complicity in the impoverishment of Nigeria. Nigeria’s is impoverished when individuals seize public resources through privatization, fail to protect national wealth, or build the public infrastructure that would support the ease of civilized life for citizens.

Nigeria is impoverished when its highly skilled youth are wasted through intergenerational unemployment. Nigeria’s unemployed youth number stands at 20 million or about 45% of Nigerian youths. That, in fact, is a charitable number given the reality, but no less alarming given that the total number of unemployed across the spectrum, a figure which I’m not even sure is available to the Ministry of Labour, is more horrendous. There is no Directorate of Labour Statistics that I know of under the Labour Ministry. If it does exist, it is inactive. But unemployment and under-employment in Nigeria – that situation that produces a profound sense of listlessness from inertia – is immeasurable.

It is the greatest source of anxiety and depression among Nigerians. Depression leads not to mood jocose as we know – but first to a morose population who soon after become bellicose. Nigerians have crossed the mood morose and have slipped into that zone of the bellicose. The signs are all around us. Defiance campaigns are now steadily and openly mounted against the authority of the federal government.

There’s much careless talk now about the validity and even desirability of a Federal government of Nigeria. Revanchist movements are much bolder in their organized forms. Ethnic nationalists seeking the end of the Nigerian nation are staging, everywhere, acts that openly challenge the sovereign will of the Nigerian state. To put it simply, we are in the throes of an uprising, and the smell of Thunder already floats in the lavender mist of this noon of our discontent. There is now the problem of the Boko Haram. Two schools of thought have linked the emergence of this group to some cross-border attempts to destabilize Nigeria and render it incoherent and weak, particularly given the rise of the Sahel region as a key global epicenter for global energy security. The other school of thought squarely places it on the internal revolt by a disenchanted Muslim youth population who reject the idea of the nation as it is currently constituted because it is unjust and corrupt.

They associate the corruption of a modern Nigerian state with the values of the west.Wednesday’s bomb incidentin Kaduna highlights Boko Haram’s determination to achieve its objectives. Its persistent forays beyond the reach of Nigeria’s security services, is also quite clearly symbolic. Equally symbolic is that this latest bombing of Kaduna happened just at the end of the meeting of the Arewa Consultative Forum in that city. The North of Nigeria has basically become ungovernable following Religious and Ethnic violence, from the once recumbent city of Jos to the farther reaches of Maiduguri.

These developments in the north speak largely of discontent with the idea of Nigeria – one in which the North feels itself isolated and powerless. They are not alone. This past week, Niger Delta militants seized the bridge at Lokoja leading to Abuja;the OPC militia took over the streets of Lagos firing Dane guns in the air to register their dominance of the land. A spokesman of the Oodua Group, Dr. Akintide, backed the action with a statement calling for Yoruba secession by 2015. Such calls have become more frequent and less tongue-in-cheek.

At the risk of oversimplifying the Nigerian situation, it is just proper to place the destabilization of Nigeria squarely in the hands of a number of factors and people, including folk like Obasanjo, whose current warnings of a mass revolt surely speaks to his own nervousness. Nigeria was founded as a modern nation in 1914by British colonialists. For an increasing number of Nigerians the fusing of what they have seen as once disparate groups into one modern nation is contradictory and unworkable.

It is a fraudulent argument, of course, because within the construct of modernity, the nation is a complex category of affiliation. It is neither marked by ethnic nor linguistic boundaries.



According to one of the finest theorists of ‘Nation,’ Ernest Renan, the modern nation is“a historical result brought about by a series of convergent facts. Sometimes unity has been effected by a dynasty, as was the case of France; sometimes it has been brought about by the direct will of provinces, as was the case with Holland, Switzerland, and Belgium; sometimes it has been the work of general consciousness, belatedly victorious over the caprices of feudalism, as was the case in Italy and Germany.” In the case of Nigeria it is the result of the exertion of an external, colonial will to complete a historical process.

But a true Nigerian consciousness has yet to emerge, challenged by the internal fissures that have erupted especiallysince the civil war, heightened by an irresponsible political leadership which has failed to comprehend the relations between the spiritual and material conditions of nation and citizenship.

The Nigerian does not feel any part of Nigeria. He feels himself more part of his miracle-making church or his infidel-baiting mosque or his membership of an “ancient kingdom” of something or the other.There are two central affiliations now open to most Nigerians: the Religious and the Ethnic which de-emphasizes the Nation as a viable space of production. Even the discursive means of nationalism – the newspapers and other Media – have become sources of religious and ethnic fundamentalism.

Corrupt political leadership has vigorously exploited these and the easy sway of the Plebes. Political leaders steal and squirrel away so much of the commonwealth while young men and women languish in poverty – without jobs or in its absence, some form of unemployment benefit.

The gap between the rich and the people is so wide, and so far, the consequence is general discontent and individual desperation. The revolt is just a matter of time. No question about it.

http://www.vanguardngr.com/2011/12/a-nation-and-her-discontents/

I never believe that a revolution is ever possible in Nigeria, but in the face of these shocking levels of youth unemployment, and a complete absence of a social security or unemployment safe net, I could be wrong!

^^^I see that coming soon, OBJ has been clamouring over revolution and arab-like-uprising lately, could it be the old man is not having rest of mind anymore. He played a mjor role in impoverishing Nigerians

They know the problem yet they refuse to fix it.

A revolution heralded by those responsible for the morass is NO REVOLUTION AT ALL.

Take my word for it, OBJ is actually trying to nip the real revolution in the bud.

It is absurd in the same way it would be if Ghaddafi went about anouncing to the world that 42 years is too long for a single ruler, but yet refused to quit!!!!!!!!!!

High_Chief:

^^^I see that coming soon, OBJ has been clamouring over revolution and arab-like-uprising lately, could it be the old man is not having rest of mind anymore. He played a mjor role in impoverishing Nigerians