Being concluding part of text of the Gani Fawehinmi Memorial Lecture, delivered by Chidi Anselm Odinkalu, Chairman, National Human Rights Commission of Nigeria, Solicitor and Advocate of the Supreme Court of Nigeria, January 15, 2013. (The second part was published on Friday, February 22, 2013.)
AROUND our continent and country, these conditions have got worse since Independence. For many people around the Africa, including Nigeria, the directed and controlled violence of the colonial enterprise has been succeeded by an increasingly de-regulated and democratized violence of the post-colonial era. The post-colonial African State appears to have lost its claim to any monopoly of violence or function to ensure legal consequences for unlawful violence. In their compelling examination of the Challenges of Security Sector Governance in West Africa, Alan Bryden, Boubacar Ndiaye and Funmi Olonisakin point out that "in many African contexts, Max Weber's vision of the state holding the monopoly on the legitimacy of coercive violence has never existed and states have historically been unable or unwilling to provide security to their citizens."
The background to this is a long?running story of governance and institutional failure narrated above. Nigeria provides a riveting illustration of how this has come about. We are presently in the throes of an epidemic of violence and impunity much unlike anything the country has witnessed before. Violence in its multi-faceted forms – intrusive as well as political; wholesale and retail; domestic as well as state?implicated; militia violence as well as law enforcement violence – is by most understandings the biggest single law and order, public health and political problem in the country today. For the first time in our collective consciousness, such acts of violence now routinely include indiscriminate mass
killings of civilians caused by improvised explosive devices (IEDs), unlawful use of projectiles as well as sundry acts of domestic and intercourseual violence.
As disparate as these forms of violence seem, one thing unites them: our mechanisms of legal accountability seem inadequate to address them or to apprehend the perpetrators. Clothed with effective impunity, therefore, those who unleash this violence feel able not just to repeat it as often as they wish or expand their fields of operation and victimization at will; they also attract many followers into the enterprise of seeming to make violence worthwhile.
Around the country, groups that wield instruments of mass and indiscriminate violence now seem to attract the ready attention of government at the highest levels. Those who seek to bring about change through civic activism and advocacy now seem endangered to the point of irrelevance. 52 years after Independence, this crisis of violence is the principal measure of the state of evolution and dis?repair of our institutions of legal and judicial accountability. The verdict they encapsulate is an unhappy one.
So, what then is the relationship of violence to our subject matter? The answer in one word is everything. The ultimate measure of the effectiveness of any legal system or political economy is its ability to protect those that live within its territory. Only those who are alive can participate in government or trade. In the conclusion to his book, Defending My Enemy: American Nazis, the Skokie Case, and the Risks of Freedom (1979), Aryeh Neier explains that "the Weimar government perished in the same way that it began its life: unable to act against political violence ....."41 He adds that: the lesson of Germany in the 1920s is that a free society cannot be
established or maintained if it will not act vigorously an forcefully to punish political violence....Prosecutions of those who commit political violence are an essential part of the duty government owes its citizens to protect their freedom....
Put differently, an epidemic of violence is the opposite of a state of rule of law. It is at once evidence of an incapable state, of the mass failure of institutions of the rule of law, and of the absence of equal citizenship for all. This incapacity is more than merely speculative. As we meet here, on this Remembrance Day, the
Armed Forces are increasingly responsible for policing in the country, with deployments in pretty much every State in Nigeria. The Police is over?centralized, over-exposed, grossly under?funded and under?manned, with about one?third of
its personnel on private guard duties.43 With the Armed Forces so stretched by internal security operations, their primary mission of protecting the country against external threats is itself endangered. This opens up a huge new threat at a time of growing regional instability.
(c) A DANGEROUS NEIGHBOURHOOD
The stock Nigerian response to the immense threats we face has been mostly inward?looking, in a format characterized by immense inter?ethnic suspicion and prejudice. Sadly, this leads us habitually to miss the trans?national dimensions of contemporary challenges of national and human survival and violence afflicting Nigeria. These challenges are not just Nigeria's. In an increasingly inter?dependent world, they are also our neighbours' and our
neighbours' challenges have become ours too. In this sense, we live in a very dangerous neighbourhood indeed.
On a cursory look at the continent, it is not difficult to see transnational trends in violence and state incapacities that should compel deeper awareness from a responsible leadership. For instance the States of the Horn of Africa, including Eritrea, Ethiopia and Somalia which share common ethnicities have
seem transnational conflicts over the past half century. Similarly, the Great Lakes Region in Central Africa has been the site of cyclic mass atrocities over the past half century. In West Africa, the Mano River countries of Côte d'Ivoire, Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone have not been spared. The maritime territories of both the Gulf of Aden and the Gulf of Guinea have become bywords for piracy and sundry violence too. The latter is very much part of Nigeria's neighbourhood.
An emerging field of existential concern to Nigeria is the Sahel, the largely desert and semi?desert region that stretches from the Arab Maghreb in the north to Equatorial Africa, and from the Atlantic in the west to the Blue Nile in Sudan. It embraces Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Burkina Faso, Chad as well as territory in
southern Algeria and Libya, Cameroon, Côte d'Ivoire, Nigeria, Senegal, and Sudan. The Sahel now presents what may be Nigeria and Africa's most daunting challenge yet: how we respond to this will have a defining impact on our future. In adopting the enforcement resolution on Mali on 19 December 2012, the United Nations Security Council called attention to the: Insecurity and the significant ongoing humanitarian crisis in the Sahel region, which is further complicated by the presence of armed groups,
including separatist movements, terrorist and criminal networks, and their increased activities, as well as the continued proliferation of weapons from within and outside the region that threaten peace,security, and stability of States in this region.
Much of the recent attention to the Sahel so far has focused on Mali, which was - until the coup d'état of March 2012 - regarded as a model of democratic transition and consolidation in Africa. Mali has now been overtaken by unconstitutional rule and sectarian terror and faces the prospect that it could break up entirely. In the past few days, an international intervention has begun in Mali under the general cloak of a Security Council authorisation. Mali may prove to be only the first country to be felled by the Sahel's unique combination of challenges. But what is happening is part of a wider regional pattern, and many other countries face serious risk. In its broad outlines, the current pathology of the region is easy to summarize.
To Mali's south, the shrinking of the Lake Chad correlates with a rise in violence around the Lake Chad Basin. Nigeria's fragility is assailed by a combination of inter?ethnic, sectarian and governance crises. On Nigeria's northern borders around the Lake Chad, the Jama'atul Ahlus Sunna Lid Da'awatis Jihad (the Group of Al-Sunna for Preaching and Jihad), a.k.a. Boko Haram, stakes
murderous claim to parts of north-eastern Nigeria and undertakes operations across the territories of Cameroon and Chad as well.
Chad itself is host to many armed militias active in neighbouring countries, including Cameroon, Nigeria and western Sudan, as well as having a renegade military with a history of unpredictable and shifting allegiance to anyone with enough resources to buy their skills and loyalties. On Chad's eastern border and often also organised from around the Lake Chad or on the outskirts of Ndjamena, there is a horde of Sudanese militias in a perpetual state of rapid?fire atomization generating an alphabet soup of acronyms. Niger also harbours militias now asserting self?determination credentials and the combatants in Côte d'Ivoire's recent civil war, in which Burkina Faso was actively implicated, are yet to be fully disarmed.
All this takes place in a context of weak governance and competition for money, hardware and ordnance between diverse militias and a desperately disorganized community of migrant fighters from the still?confused situation in Libya. These territories are contiguous. Their borders are weak and porous. Across these borders there are multi-national communities joined by long-standing and historical bonds of ethnicity, faith, and commerce.
To add to a complex picture, there is the on?going involvement of
international justice institutions, including the International Criminal Court (ICC) seeking accountability for recent mass atrocities in several countries in the region, including Chad, Côte d'Ivoire, Libya, and western Sudan. The ICC is also currently in the last stages of weighing up the situation in northern Nigeria for possible intervention and has recently received a referral from Mali.
The international and regional response to all this has until recently been ponderous. The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) has focused its attention to restoring appearances of constitutional government in Mali. It has also threatened military action against nihilist militias. A regional tri- lateral Force comprising contingents from Nigeria, Chad and Niger active for over 20 years in the Lake Chad Basin is poorly manned with limited footprint. It also suffers from mission creep, does not receive full co?operation from all the neighbourhood's countries and is stretched beyond regional capabilities.
Neither ECOWAS on the southern Sahelian rim nor the Arab Maghreb Union (UMA) in the north can impose their will on the situation. Yet, the African Union (AU) waits for regional actors to take the lead while the Arab League and the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), to which some of the countries of the Sahel belong, can participate in a search for solutions but lack convening legitimacy. Distracted by problems in Syria and elsewhere, the United Nations is ponderously slow, unwilling to plunge into the Sahel's quicksands. In this context, the era in which we could think that what happens across the Confluence is of no concern to us is over.
IN LIEU OF CONCLUSION: WHITHER NIGERIA?
Our problems in Nigeria can sometimes seem too daunting. The usual response is lamentation, prayer, fasting, casting, binding, despondency or, these days, social media agonistes too. I cannot under?estimate the liberating potentials of new media technologies. But those are only a means and, we should not "agonize" through them when we can use them to "organize"! I want to mostly stray clear of substantive proposals. There is more than enough supply of those.
What we lack is sufficient commitment to mechanisms and processes to bring those ideas to inclusive realisation.
It is clear that we have over the years been beset by twin problems of a cynical leadership and indifferent civics. It is not only government that is captured; the search for solutions is also captured, both sides by beknighted elite who claim by themselves monopolies of thought, knowledge and opinion that no citizen of a Republic should claim on behalf of any besides themselves. We are only too happy to surrender to such people our individual agency and entitlement to curiousity. Bob Marley sang of such situations: "Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery; None but ourselves can free our minds."46 This mental slavery must end or there will be no beginning to our search for solutions.
One major reflex that we must address is the tendency to abandon our problems to "eminent citizens" or to return to clichéd mal?adapted concepts, such as "National Conference" as the quick fix to our problems. The latest of such remedies was offered only last week by "The Patriots."47 Individually, most in this hall would confess to the highest regards and admiration for each of the eminent members of The Patriots. Speaking for myself, I am prone to regard with suspicion any person or group in government or out of it who espouses a monopoly of patriotism.
In my view, the heart of the Nigerian problem is the replacement of the politics of participation with the politics of capture at both ends of the continuum of political economy from citizen to state. Yet, ideas in a Republic are only as important as the mobilisation and participation we bring behind realising them.
If participation matters in a Republic, deliberative process is the heartbeat of democracy. As appealing as proposals from groups such as The Patriots may be, there is something profoundly unsettling about a group of mostly men with an average age well beyond the Biblical three?score and ten, asserting a monopoly of answers for a country with a median age of 23, an average life expectancy not a lot higher than 45 and with a female population at just about 50% of its total. Just as troubling at this time in the 21st Century is sight of leaders of youth wings of political parties well in their 60s or party leaderships across the spectrum dominated by people who could easily have been conscripted into the armies that
fought the 2nd World War. When such people recommend the solution to our problem as "revolution", I often wonder why any person would wish violent death on the grand? or great?grand child that they have forgotten to invite into a discussion on the preferred obituary that would follow the violent termination of their youth. What this says is that we do not care about the country and the people who have run our country have – unlike Gani ? not bothered to replace themselves or mentor worthy successors.
The problem is not just the failure of any sense of inter-generational responsibility in our ideas or domination of our search for solutions by narrow politics of exclusion and capture, which we would wish to overturn; it is also the mal-adaptation of our proposals. Unquestionably, the issue, "whither Nigeria?" will need to be addressed by Nigerians and it is also essential for Nigerians to have some form of dialogue on the values that should underpin our future. The effort to do that in 1977?78 was arrested by the military that subsequently wrote up their own values in chapter II of the Constitution and turned around, in clear violation of both the spirit and letters of the same document, to say these values would be non-binding. Not having participated in formulating them, Nigerians lacked the confidence and memory to controvert them.
The idea that the National Conference holds the solution to all our problems reflects a fundamental mal?adaptation of the concept or etymology of the Conférence nationale. To be sure, English language has no translation for Conférence nationale.
Trying to transliterate this into "National Conference" bastardizes the idea and mis-characterizes it because the Conférence nationale is an institution uniquely founded in the egalitarian and syndicalist traditions of the French Revolution. It is a meeting of the country understood as atomized, representative and accountable collectives of working peoples. In a study of the Conférences nationales in Benin Republic and Togo at the end of the last century, Kathryn Nwajiaku who observed them closely concluded:
The comparison of the Conférences nationales in Benin and Togo shows that they cannot be interpreted as the new francophone mode par excellence of introducing transition from an 'authoritarian' régime to a 'liberal democratic' political system, or even as a way of achieving the less grandiose aspiration of just changing the leadership. These goals are dependent on a variety of preconditions, which need to be carefully investigated. Certainly, the whole question of 'quick?fix' democracy in Africa will continue to provoke the most impassioned debates...Before a thorough democratization of political life in Africa can stand a chance of survival, elite and ordinary people alike must appreciate the implications of what the process means in terms of more equitable access to socio?economic and political power... Given that support for the 'renouveau democratique' is directly linked to popular appetites for a share in the national cake, it is little wonder that dissatisfaction continues when a new political dispensation fails to deliver any notable improvements in the quality of everyday life in either the urban and/or rural areas. In fact, it is difficult to imagine that 'democracy will thrive in a context in which material benefits are so closely associated with access to political power.
Gani always left us with affirmative proposals. So, in ending, I want to put a proposal on the table for consideration. Given the needs for national dialogue and the realities of our politics of entrenched interests, we need some deep thinking on how to navigate locomotion inside our precariously balanced Chinaware. Time is important. The conversations over Nigeria's future cannot be an event. Rather we need a process. One possibility could be to consider the establishment of a standing, advisory, Constitutional Convention. The Convention will be a forum for dialogue amongst Nigeria's peoples and communities. Mechanisms of participation, representation, dialogue and distillation will be carefully worked out. The principal mandate of such a Convention will be to distil subjects and issues for political and administrative decision-making.
The appeal of a Constitutional Convention will not lie in its coercive instruments but in the force of political consensus behind its distillations such that politicians will know that failure to address issues that emerge from the Convention effectively could result in the destruction of their personal or political fortunes and careers. It could create at once a mechanism of national dialogue
accompanied by incentives for the diminution of predatory politics as well as offer us an opportunity to minimize the appeal of violence as the only substitute for political process.
The Guardian