‘Some People had an Agenda to Inflame Yoruba Passion with the Death of Mrs Olakunrin’
On the sideline of a recent Committee for Relevant Art event, Vanessa Obioha dialogued with Dele Farotimi, former students union activist and lawyer, who dissects the historical and political intrigues that shape Nigeria in his book, ‘Do Not Die in Their
What is the inspiration behind your book? I more or less just set out to x-ray the country into which I have been born, and the only one that I have held its citizenship, as defective as that might be, and the only one to which my children have been born, and to which citizenship they also hold. It is not really a function of what I may or may not want to do as much as a function of what I had to do. I just couldn’t continue to keep quiet, and by my silence, normalize the insanity that I see all around me on a day-to-day basis.
So, the inspiration, really, was just to find an outlet for my own everyday frustration with living in Nigeria, contemplating its future, x-raying its past, imagining where we might be headed given the trajectory on which we are travelling. So, the inability to continue to keep quiet was the major reason why I started writing; just to find an outlet for my own frustration per se. Then, after a while, it became a quest to diagnose the problems, and then to seek to find and proffer solutions to the problems that I am witnessing, that I have witnessed all my life as a Nigerian.
Could it also be as a result of your encounter with government agencies as an activist? Would it be right to say that your experiences actually prepared you for writing this book?
To be frank, none of what we had been or what we were could have prepared us for where we are now. It might have helped smoothen the transition to the point where one has gotten to today, but nothing prepared us for the madness that we are seeing all around us today. I left the university in 1997; that was right at the peak of Abacha madness. We thought we had seen it all; and when civilian rule came in 1999, imperfect as it was, we imagined that Nigeria was then on a path to greatness, to the achievement of our manifest destiny. There was so much hope invested in the capacity of Nigeria to find its destiny when there was that return to civilian rule. Someone like me, I wasn’t interested in politics. I simply faced the practice of law and the business of law. I have never believed that you should be in politics if you don’t have a means of livelihood. I was fresh out of law school at the dawn of the Fourth Republic, so my interest was not in politics; it was in finding economic independence for myself. So, we walked away, and we began to pursue our daily bread. Some of us got married, and started raising our families, and for several reasons we were not as attentive to the process of governance as we would have, perhaps, been if that would have made any difference. But what I believe finally brought home the failure of all the expectations would be the increasing disappearance of the lines that used to exist between the good guys and the bad guys. So, you then just add a division that identifies the thinking thieves and the unthinking thieves. One set did not bother to even imagine a project that they would tie to the stealing; then another was more imaginative in stealing. As things get worse and worse, it got to a point where one could no longer pretend that everything was going to be all right.
But the decision to get involved in it as one has become now did not come overnight; it was just a function of coming to the realisation that it just wasn’t possible to continue to pretend that everything was fine or begin to imagine that if some serious interventions are not undertaken, Nigeria would find some ways to correct itself. No, it has just gotten to that point where each and every Nigerian who truly believes or loves the idea of Nigeria, because Nigeria just remains an idea, and that idea of Nigeria is being daily impaired now and it is becoming almost impossible to even sell the idea of Nigeria to the coming generation; and yet, there is no easy or peaceful way out of our current union, we would all still at some point have to sit down and constructively engage each other to negotiate how to make Nigeria work because as it is right now it is just not working.
What are some of the issues raised in your book?
Annexed in the book I have written, is a proposed constitution. I used to think that Nigeria’s problem could be solved with personnel changes, that perhaps, if a good president came along, then by force of his character, he would perhaps make Nigeria great again. Embedded in that is the assumption that Nigeria was at a point where it has achieved greatness, and there was also the assumption as well that a person has the capacity to drive the country into the desired future. But it took the 2013/2014 formation of the All Progressives Congress (APC) to begin to consecrate my mind and to help me to begin to understand that it is not about person, it is the Nigerian system itself that is fundamentally defective. So, the constitution that we have on the table is not much different from what almost every constitutional conference in Nigeria has placed on the table in form of what it presents to the public. It is talking about a six-regional structure. It is talking about a complete restructuring of the way we govern ourselves right now to a performance-based, citizenship-based intervention between the government and the citizens. Let it not be that each time when there is an engagement between the Nigeria state and its citizen, it is always hallmarked with pain. This happens every time where a country is not citizenship-based, which means that the ruler becomes even more important than the ruled. And when you begin to talk about servant-leaders, it is just rhetoric, because the ruler is even very conversant with the fact that he is the one in power, not the people he purports to serve.
Once upon a time in this country, there was a negotiated agreement that culminated in a constitution; that was the Independence Constitution. The last time we negotiated our togetherness it produced the 1963 Constitution. That was the last time that Nigeria and Nigerians were governed on the basis of the content and agreement of the people trapped in the place called Nigeria. Since that time all that has happened is that we have moved away from the federalist basis of our coming together in 1960, which was the culmination of several constitutional conferences that spanned from 1948 with the very first consitutution. I know that there was a constitutional conference which preceded the 1948 constitution, and I know that each and every one of the subsequent constitutions up to 1963, even during the colonial era, were the product of negotiations between the rulers and the ruled.
But since 1963, we have not managed to have a single constitution, even the 1979 constitution wasn’t the product of the constituent assembly of 1977. It wasn’t. The military simply imposed what it wanted and called it the 1979 constitution; the same thing in 1999. So, up till date, Nigerians have not been ruled based on an agreement to which they have truly submitted. The military, and let us understand very clearly when we say the military, is not representative of the Nigerian people; it has always been the representative of the Nigerian interest. We can have the argument about what those interests might be, but it has never been about the Nigerian people. The military has foisted constitutions on Nigeria since 1966 when they came on to the scene, and each and every one of those constitutions has only sought to make Nigeria ever more unitary in structure, and evermore unjust because the judicial system has now evolved to the point where it is not in existence for the preservation of citizens’ right but the preservation of the system. When a judicial system is incapable of delivering justice because it has to preserve an existing order, it becomes impossible to expect justice from that judicial system. What you’ve had in Nigeria from 1966 till date, is not a situation where the people have come together and they have a common interest behind which they have united; it’s been people being kept together by sheer force of arms, in some cases you bribe them, in some cases kill them, in some cases you coerce them. But the people have not been able to express their free will because nobody has been given the opportunity to do that.
What I have done with the book is to show Nigerians a mirror. In the immortal word of Patrick Wilmot, I simply hold up a mirror, it is for us to look at what the images are, that you see reflected from that mirror. If you like it, hug it; if you don’t like it, it doesn’t change what I am showing you. You are the one who needs to take a second look at yourself. Almost every Nigerian agrees that where we are is not good, the one thing we have never seem capable of agreeing on is where we should go from where we are. We can blame the military all we want; we can blame the British for all we want; it doesn’t matter anymore. It is up to us to bring forward ideas, to suggest how to get out of the quagmire into which we appear to be driving on a daily basis, because with each passing day, I despair that Buhari might not just end being the last president of Nigeria.
Why do you feel so?
In the last 20 years of our political experiment with democracy, Nigeria has never been more divided than it is today; Nigerians have never been more divided than we are today. I dare say that in Nigeria today, we have more Liverpool supporters than Nigerians; there are more Barcelona supporters today in Nigeria than Nigerians. Certainly, we have more Biafrans in Nigeria today than Nigerians; there are more Yorubas in Nigeria than Nigerians. And it would even appear that the Fulanis in Nigeria are supermen, so there are more Fulanis in Nigeria than Nigerians. It would surprise you where you would even find more Fulanis than anywhere else. In the seat of power, there are more Fulanis than there are Nigerians. And this is the paradox of Nigeria because when you have a state where there are multiple levels of citizenship, you don’t have a nation; you can never have a nation in that kind of a state. Nigeria has been fragmented. It is not Buhari’s fault, he didn’t start it, but he has done more to exacerbate the situation than anybody who has ever held power in Nigeria. He, more than anyone else, has led to the rise of ethnic nationalism in Nigeria. So, we are at that point where it is not out of place to begin to worry about the corporate integrity of the space called Nigeria, because today some people are speaking and normalizing madness, and the government is completely silent. Just as Fulani extremists are talking, Yoruba extremists are talking; Igbo extremists are talking; and the Niger Delta extremists are talking. It is only the extremist voices in Nigeria that are being amplified. And the government itself, more than any other factor, is responsible for the breakdown of law and order in Nigeria because it selectively imposes justice. Pythons can dance in the East, but I am yet to see any cobra dancing in the forests of the South-west where people are being daily slaughtered. People come out of their kidnap den where they’ve been held, and they give detail accounts of well-organised camps in the forest. And we still have a state? Where is the Nigerian Army? The kind of sophisticated camps that are described by people who have been freed by people they call Fulani herdsmen, it shouldn’t matter whether it is Kanuri herdsmen or Ijesha herdsmen or Epe fishermen, criminality is criminality. To even distinguish between one level of criminality from the other suggests a systemic failure. It does not matter where the threat is coming from; the sworn duty of the state and her functionaries is the protection of the lives and property of the citizens.
Annexed in the book I have written, is a proposed constitution. I used to think that Nigeria’s problem could be solved with personnel changes, that perhaps, if a good president came along, then by force of his character, he would perhaps make Nigeria great again. Embedded in that is the assumption that Nigeria was at a point where it has achieved greatness, and there was also the assumption as well that a person has the capacity to drive the country into the desired future. But it took the 2013/2014 formation of the All Progressives Congress (APC) to begin to consecrate my mind and to help me to begin to understand that it is not about person, it is the Nigerian system itself that is fundamentally defective
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