The Psychology of Secession
Lest I become liable to the charge of plagiarism, I hasten to state that the title of today’s essay is not original to me-that honour belongs to the honorary Nigerian of British extraction, the late frontline journalist Kaye Whiteman. I am unable to resist the cliché that he knew Nigeria more than Nigerians. The psychology of secession was the title of a chapter he contributed to a tentative reader on the Nigerian civil war-in which he described the predisposing mentality to the Biafra secessionist bid among the Igbos on the eve of the civil war.
Was the ultimate recourse to Biafra inevitable? This is a debatable point, what is not contestable is that there was sufficient justification for the secessionist option. Given the enormity of the cost in human and material devastation and the futility of the aspiration, it is compelling (in the aftermath of the monumental tragedy) to argue against its inevitability and that perhaps the chief Biafra protagonist, Emeka Ojukwu, should not have held on to the maximalist position. The characteristic flaw of this retrospection is the liability to the valid accusation of being wise after the event. Such wisdom was indeed a scarce commodity in the run up to the declaration of hostilities.
At the commencement of the war in 1967, the leading dramatis personae from both belligerents ( the Nigeria and Biafra sides), General Yakubu Gowon and General Ojukwu proved to be dramatically and embarrassingly wrong in their perception and projection of the war. Were they otherwise educated and prescient, it is a certainty that there would have been no war. Egged on by sheer ignorance, Gowon assured an anxious population that the subjugation of the secession would be nothing more demanding than a brief containment police action while the other braggart boasted that no power on the African continent could match the military might of Biafra. To the bargain the presumed police action transmogrified into the carnage that lasted all of 30 blood-soaked months, one million lives and still counting.
I have a very simple thesis on the war and the applicability of its lessons to contemporary Nigeria- the thesis is that the war essentially resulted from the violation of federalism and that it is the persistence of this violation that is at the root of the recurrence of fissiparous (separatist) tendencies within Nigeria; and that, in one form or another, this would remain the case until we go back to the original wisdom of the letter and spirit of federalism. The first and the absolute violation of federalism was the military coup termination of the first republic in January 1966. The associated lopsided bloodiness of the event was only a collateral damage.
It was not the military coup per se that provoked the Northern officers’ revolt (counter coup) of July the same year, it was the requirement of the military rule prescription of unitary rule that did. The prescription was encoded in Decree 34 to wit “THE FEDERAL MILITARY GOVERNMENT hereby decrees as follows: Subject to the provisions of this Decree, Nigeria shall on 24th May 1966 (in this decree referred to as ‘the appointed day’) cease to be a Federation and shall accordingly as from that day be a Republic, by the name of the Republic of Nigeria, consisting of the whole of the territory which immediately before that day was comprised in the Federation” The comprising regions- Northern, Western, Eastern and Mid-Western were re-designated groups of provinces and were thereby requested to divest and subsume their prior regional identities within the proposed United republic of Nigeria.
In general terms, the content of the decree was nothing more than the enunciation of the logic that military rule and federalism are a contradiction in terms. If it was possible for General JTU Aguiyi-Ironsi to accommodate the regions as they were, the chances were the anxiety fuelled counter coup of July 1966 might not have been. He was in fact advised against the decree by the Northern region leaders of thought-who feared most the consequences of unitary rule-centralisation of power
Prior to 1966 and the abrogation of Nigeria’s foundational federalism, there was little or no material significance and substance attached to the federal government to compel irresistible attraction from the regional political elite. As a matter of fact, a regional cabinet ministerial position tended to be of greater consequence than its federal counterpart. You would sooner found the regional political first 11 manning the regional government. The first Premier of the Northern region, the late Sir Ahmadu Bello, exemplified the point with his explicit preference to remain regional premier rather than assume the position of the Prime Minister to which his rank as leader of the majority party, the Northern Peoples’ Congress (NPC) entitled him.
After the 1966 political crisis (which culminated in the civil war), the next severe crisis that nearly tipped Nigeria over the edge was the annulment of the result of the 1993 presidential election crisis. The crisis assumed a Nigeria threatening dimensions, precisely on account of the unitary rule significance of the central government. Were the Nigerian constitutional order to have been a federalism compliant decentralisation and devolution of power type, the incumbent fraction of the Nigerian ruling elite (the Ibrahim Babangida government) would not have been so desperate to hold on to power. Neither would the victorious counter elite (the Moshood Abiola-led opposition) be so resolute in claiming the legitimately won political prize.
And it was in this regard that the view held by the opposition platform that a federalism oriented national restructuring of the polity was the superior strategic response to the crisis rather than the concession of the presidency to the South-west. The latter option, argued the opposition leaders, was akin to tending to the symptoms of a disease impervious to the root cause of the disease itself.
To the extent that the South-south and South-east zones attain to political preferment under the presidency of Dr Goodluck Jonathan, the ethno regional fragmentation pattern of voting in the last presidential elections followed the logic of this advantage. And so does the prevalent withdrawal syndrome that has manifested in the relegation of the zones to the bottom in the ladder of political priority. Further deepening of the syndrome by error of omission or commission may reawaken separatist tendencies (as it is apparently the case with the latest Biafra baiting).
Why is it the case that the hitherto eccentric fringe Biafra sentiments suddenly spiked after the defeat and exit of Jonathan from the presidency? Does the Boko Haram insurgency that ravaged the North-east have anything to do with the uncharacteristically prolonged absence of the Northern oligarchy from the seat of power? The most trumpeted underlying cause of the insurgency in the North-east has been the argument that, for a season, the zone has not received generous attention from the central government-an alleged attention deficit that has become the explanation for its relative mass poverty.
In the opinion of former central bank governor Sanusi Lamido Sanusi: “There is clearly a direct link between the very uneven nature of distribution of resources and the rising level of violence. When you look at the figures and look at the size of the population in the north you can see there is a structural imbalance of enormous proportions. Those states simply do not have enough money to meet basic needs while some states have too much money.” The key point to note in this exposition is that it has become an accepted notion that states and regions of Nigeria are dependencies of the central government without whose benevolence the so called coordinate constituency units can barely survive; that they are no longer accountable for the socioeconomic development of their constitutionally assigned jurisdiction. This is the extent to which federalism has been rendered nugatory in Nigeria.
Federalism inherently presupposes a considerable degree of self-containment and self-accountability among the component units-such that they bear responsibility for their inadequacies and failures rather than attribute such to the scant attention they receive from the federal government.
Following upon the recent abduction ordeal of Chief Olu Falae, Yoruba leaders gathered in Ibadan and issued the following observation on the state of the nation: “We are alarmed by the recent abduction of a foremost Yoruba nationalist and Nigerian patriot, Chief Olu Falae, by Fulani herdsmen on his farm the day he turned 77. His violent abduction during which machete cuts were inflicted on him was sequel to the running battles he has had with nomadic Fulani cattle rearers who at various times destroyed his crops thereby denying him the sweat of his labour…If we do not see meaningful steps at apprehending and bringing his abductors to justice and redress the Fulani nomads’ menace in Yorubaland, the Yoruba may reconsider their place in a union that cannot protect them and would not allow them to protect themselves and use all legitimate and peaceful means to attain self-determination.”
There is a sense in which this specific (degenerate security situation) instance speaks to the question of federalism in Nigeria. And this is with particular regards to the absence of local capacity to grapple with security issues. If Ondo State operates its own constitutionally guaranteed security organisation-state police, there would have been little basis for the Yoruba kith and kin of Falae to hold the central government responsible for a deepening sense of insecurity within their territory.
The fact that different zones of Nigeria seasonally found the need to cry political marginalisation is a major indication of the loss of the political equilibrium inherent in federalism and will remain a source of political instability for as long as it takes to make redress. Before the return of President Mohammadu Buhari, the cry of ‘injustice against the North’ was rife in the air-especially after the premature exit of President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua. The definition of this ‘injustice’ and ‘marginalisation’ is invariably a petition of not getting sufficient slice of the national cake. And this incessant whining will persist for the simple reason that whichever group controls the all-powerful central government would have the discretionary latitude to manipulate and manoeuvre the spread and distribution of development and patronage mostly to the advantage of his partisan supporters and the disadvantage of the opponents.