Achebe’s people.

“An author’s first duty is to let down his country.” Brendon Behan, 1960

 

This column last week was about Chinua Achebe, his works and his legacies. I knew that there will be a backlash, and had even attributed some of it to the legacies the late legend left behind. I had said, on the basis of experience and observation following release of his last book, There was a Country, “it will be interesting to know if Mr Achebe had been availed of even the tiniest peak into  conversations among younger Nigerians on cyberspace which followed the release of his last book. It will be uncharitable to say he had triggered a major setback in the unity of the country, but it will be fair to say he lit up the dark and frightening chasms which separate many younger Nigerians, and equip them with how they see each other.  If he did….. it is doubtful if he would not have felt some pain that his fellow citizens habor such sentiments and feelings towards each other…. Chinua Achebe left this world pretty much as he found it: troubled and troubling. But history will say of him, here is one who couldn’t live with it.”

 

The on-line reactions to the column in this newspaper were a sad vindication of my postulation. They make an amusing reading and I thought I should share them with readers today. There were quite a few, virtually all dripping with venom and hate. One or two attempted to allow reason to take control of emotions, but virtually everyone spoke as an injured Igbo fighting a Hausa man (popularly referred to, these days as awusa) who has damaged an untouchable Igbo heritage. Very few of the comments indicated that the respondents read or understood  what this “goat herder” wrote, so I missed a rare opportunity to learn from the race born with intelligence.

 

They were, in most cases, from people who obviously enjoy rights of reply and freedom of expression, but are reluctant to say who they are. The brief comments such as the one from 4t2 was profound in its summation: “About the most nonsensical piece I ever read.” “Imagine 2012” said to me: “A cow minder like you came here to mess Achebe, a literary genius that has brought glory to the entire black race; but deliberately forgot that no Hausa-Fulani of your low types has even exhibited as much as a mere quarter of Achebe’s globally acknowledged intelligence. And to your Almajiri fans who think, for boldly saying the truth, Prof Achebe did open old wounds that our past federal governments have refused to deal with, then the present and daily evil activities of your northern sponsored Boko Haram has openly justified the TRUTH Achebe wrote about.”

 

Garden City Boy took exception to my conclusion that Achebe left this world pretty much as he found it. He thinks it represents “the conclusion of one empty head struggling to be heard… The dumb head even attempted to gloat over the murder of his likes as usual wrought on innocent Igbos, by implying that majority of the victims of the Kano bombing at the bus station were of the stock of the bombers. A stock he is shamelessly a part of. It will be too much to expect a Nigerian quota writer, of the stock that only knows how to kill and maim human beings, to understand what making positive impact in the world entails. No one should have issues with this sorry member of the stock that has kept Nigeria in perpetual darkness…..”

 

Okorojnr agrees: “That is another awusa cow. They all argue the same bizarre game. The bums called awusa never engage in tasks that are intellectually challenging… He recognizes that Soyinka is Yoruba, and Achebe, Igbo. There is no Awusa worth the mention to complete the ‘TRIPOD’. He brings an obscure Usman Faruk, and perhaps his wife Uswoman Faruk…” Okorojnr knows me: “…. The miserable descendant of a devil incarnate himself has a compulsive, pathological grudge against the Igbo… … As intellectually barren as they are, awusa does not write book. What Usman Faruk wrote was a phamplet which is not worth the cheap stationary in which it is written. How can awusa man write a book when there are human beings to decapitate and public money to embezzle…” Okpala agree: “This guy is a compete douche bag. He does not even have the moral standing to write on Achebe...”

 

Chekwube thought I was funny. “Kai walahi your view is full of mediocrity and federal character…” He loves Achebe “Naturally as an Igbo”, but he loves him more because “he was not connected to the evil called Nigerian government”. It would have done little good to remind the nation that Achebe was a running mate to Malam Aminu Kano and a card carrying member of the People Redemption Party (PRP). According to Chekwube, there is nothing wrong in being a local champion. He says Achebe was a local champion (I did not), but I should “check out the profile of (your) greatest Ahmadu Bello, it is so full of iniquities, lacks fair play and very lilliputian. Achebe did not change the world, your Northern brothers made it worse than they met it. Nigeria shall bury Nigerians in slow painful manner. It is the way Northerners understand it.”

 

Kelvin99 says I am among the biggest fools, and should shut up. “What”, he asks, “have you and you likes achieved up till today in your sick country”? Okorie Kalu C agrees: “Mr Hakeem Baba-Ahmed is a typical example of those who have kept this nation in dark state. He obviously lives in denial, grossly ignorant, deeply jealous, lacks nationalistic mind but went achead to accuse Achebe of that. I will simply advise this young man to celebrate greatness… it is quite appalling how we judge what we envy… poor minds.”

 

There were a lot more comments from people who felt that history has not been fair to the Igbo cause. Kenuch asks: Alhaji Ahmad, …. why would any person objectively insinuate that Biafra fought against Nigeria? Considering that the Western region and lately, some voices from the North are now calling for a return of the country to a system similar to what was agreed in Aburi, is it not foolish for Alhaji Faruk and his gang of vandals that prosecuted the war of aggression against the East to call themselves patriots?” American Abroad thought “Achebe was a voice of conscience, not complicity, and not just for ethnic Igbos; I might have had a few reservations about this characterizations and conclusion, but a man, any man – even our own Achebe – is entitled to his own opinion. C’est pas?”

 

I have to say I was not disappointed by the venom which followed my column. But I am sad that one of the greatest literary assets mankind has just lost will leave behind this  type of champions. There must be millions of Nigerians who value the works of Achebe and who, like me, also recognize that he was human. The few people I quoted above do great disservice to him as a Nigerian and a literary genius. It is sad that he is leaving these ambassadors to speak for him. He  doesn't deserve them, and they certainly have no business defending a man like Achebe. It is even sadder that these defenders of the tribal watering holes are all over the nation, and they represent those Nigerians who can only communicate by insulting each other.

 

Reclaiming the North

“Mountains never unite” Latin Proverb

 

Not since the tragic killings of Northern and Western Regional leaders in 1966 has the North been so isolated from the rest of the nation. In those dark, uncertain days, the military administration under the then Major Hasan Usman Katsina had to fall back on strong cultural and traditional structures to govern a deeply hurt people. That ominous silence and distance was not entirely assuaged by the northern-inspired counter-coup, and the killings of thousands of Igbos and other southeasterners had two clear underlying motives to it: revenge, and a popular desire for secession. There were widespread sentiments for separation of the North from Nigeria, although many members of the Northern elite including northern military officers were reluctant to acknowledge this.

 

A resurgent North under the military took up the mantle of preserving an uncomfortable union, breaking the monolith which the Northern Region was, as well as other regions, and initially going it alone in the war to stop the Biafran adventure in the light of initial Yoruba leaders’ reluctance to join the fray. Having won the war, a Northern – dominated military moved quickly to win the peace as well. But it lost the most important battle in the war of the regions. It lost the battle for sustained economic growth and development in the North. Northern leaders held the trappings of power, but had no vision. Military leaders from the region spent much of their time looking over their shoulders or fighting attempts to unseat them. Massive resources being realized from a booming oil industry were being squandered or stolen, and corruption took center stage in governance at all levels in Nigeria. Successive non-military regimes strengthened patronage as the guiding principle of governance. The Northern economy became addicted to handouts from oil revenues, and agriculture and agro-allied industries, its backbone, shriveled.

 

As its population expanded and resources became cornered  by those who wielded political power, poverty among its people actually grew. Its 19 states’ massive bureaucracies and legislatures and hundreds of Local Government Council diverted resources away from investment in education, health and infrastructure. Corruption took away what was left. Politics became the only thriving industry, and its winner-takes-all nature created large numbers of bitter and dissullusioned citizenry. Its time-tested institutions and values which held together plural and complex communities showed signs of advanced decay. Faith and ethnicity became political currencies, and communities woke up to find that a long-standing neighbour is an enemy after all. The state became too weak to mediate relations between communities in conflict, or lost legitimacy altogether because it has become a part of the problem. Citizens took their pound of flesh, literary and immediately, because they had lost faith in the capacity of the state, or traditional institutions to protect them, or get them justice.

 

In this dangerous context where the state has no credibility and little legitimacy, and without mediating mechanisms between citizen and state, anything is possible. Groups(s) now challenge the legitimacy of the Nigerian state, and wage wars against it. Political and religious leaders in the region cannot stop rampaging insurgencies, and cannot prevail on the federal government to consider their opinions. Millions of poor, alienated and angry citizens cower from bullets and bombs, and look everywhere for relief, in vain. The Muslims among them try to distance their faith from an insurgency which kills them and Christians in equal measure. Some comfort themselves with the argument that these insurgents are not Muslims, but people bent on destroying Islam and the North. Christians are angry and frightened. They cannot understand being told by virtually all Muslims that being Christian does not make them natural targets of Muslims, when every once in a while they are murdered for being just so, by people who claim to do this in the name of Islam. The deteriorating relationship between Muslim and Christian communities in Kaduna, Plateau, Nassarawa, Taraba, Adamawa and many other parts of the North is being compounded by perceptions and suspicions that every local grievance has roots in Mali, Borno or Yobe. Northern Muslims and Africans from neighbouring countries in Lagos and other cities in the south now live in fear of being picked up, detained or deported on suspicions alone. The region is burning. Its poverty is rising. The rest of the nation is trying as much as possible to put some distance between itself and the troubles in the North.

 

The nation is moving rapidly in two opposite directions. The North is regressing dangerously into anarchy and decay. The South is building with massive resources, a political framework centred around parochial foundations, and a risky assumption that the Nigerian nation may not heal soon, or at all. What highlights the gulf between the North and the rest of the country is, however, the distance between critical and popular opinion in the North and the federal government. The issue is amnesty for insurgents, a matter, it should be said, which has not been adopted or used uniformly by all its champions. In general terms, it refers to the appeal to the federal government to offer not to arrest, prosecute, persecute or intimidate any insurgents who renounce hostility and are willing to discuss their grievances with the government. The idea is derived from the experience in the Niger Delta, and is remotely informed by the belief that the offer of amnesty will trigger some substantial defection from, or even collapse of the insurgency. It assumes that insurgents want peace, and their demands are likely to be the type which can be discussed and negotiated. Amnesty here is seen as a strategic foot-in-door towards a political settlement, an alternative to the current situation in which two parties involved in the conflict are losers: citizens and their communities, and the Nigeria state which shows little evidence that it can defeat this insurgency using its current strategies. There is a winner of sorts, so far: the insurgency which, at the very least, now appears to have pitched opinion leaders and popular perception in the North against Jonathan’s administration without necessarily supporting the insurgency.

 

Just about everyone with influence and a voice in the Muslim North and even some among its Christian community, such as Bishop Kukah, have appealed to President Jonathan to consider the amnesty option. But the Jonathan administration is adamant that the option is a non-starter. Since it is in the interest of the North that this conflict is brought to an end, Northern leaders now need to move and convene an All Leaders Conference. Elders, leaders of opinion, clergy, the numerous groups and associations which dot the northern landscape, traditional rulers who can get away with the anger of their governors, governors themselves who still feel the anger of their people, should all convene a forum which should create a fresh momentum and engineer a synergy to address the security situation and examine strategies for engaging the Jonathan administration on the issue. President Jonathan’s enlightened self-interest alone should also advise him to see how far he has drifted from mainstream northern political establishment and popular perception. If he has any hope of leaning on the North politically, he needs to begin to rebuild bridges towards it. Even if he does not, he should know that defeating this insurgency will be that much more difficult with his back turned entirely against all important opinions in the North.

The network is bad

“You can’t always get what you want

But if you try sometimes

You just might find

You get what you need”

Mick Jagger and Keith Richards

 

While opening an international conference on “Islam and the fundamentals of peaceful coexistence in Nigeria,” organized by the Sokoto State government and the Muslim World League in Sokoto, President Goodluck Jonathan assured Nigerians of his administration’s commitment to protecting their rights and ensuring a harmonious living. He told the conference that Nigerians have “no alternative to peaceful coexistence” and “must therefore do everything in our power to ensure religion is neither misused nor abused to justify violence.” He advised that dialogue and tolerance, rather than confrontation should be the principles that should inform collective and corporate existence of Nigerians. The Sultan also used the occasion to lament serious deviations from the true paths by Muslims and Christians as the cause of the nations problems.

 

The conference on peaceful coexistence between faiths coincided with the Easter period, ironically of late, a time of great tension and stress. Christian Association of Nigerian (CAN) and the Nigerian Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs (NSCIA) all made passionate appeals for peace between faithfuls. The NSCIA’s statement said in this “trying period of unnecessary strife, tension, mutual suspicious and wanton destruction of innocent lives… Muslims in Nigeria shall strive to strengthen the cooperation and collaboration between our two bodies – NSCIA and CAN – for our mutual benefits and to the glory of God and Nigeria.” The Kaduna State Chapter of CAN said Nigerians “must unite ourselves as one irrespective of religions, tribe and political affiliation”.

 

In spite of the assurances from the President and umbrella religious organizations, many Christians chose not to go to church in some cities in the North on Good Friday. There were reports of massive deployment of military and police personnel to ensure that the Easter period does not register unusual assaults. Patrols and checkpoints have been increased in some sensitive towns and cities, underlying the worry that exhortations and appeals by religious and political leaders are unlikely to get everyone to sheath swords, even for Easter. In villages in Barikin-Ladi LGA of Plateau State, blood continued to flow as it did in the last few days, in a conflict with almost pure ethno-religious undercurrents.

 

The disconnect between the political and religious leadership in the nation and reality is very worrying. At the Sokoto conference where the President’s message on the abuse of religion and the values of dialogue, understanding and tolerance was conveyed by the Vice President, the Sultan of Sokoto’s recent call for amnesty to insurgents who have shown an interest will sit rather uncomfortably. The same President’s spokesmen have recently gone to town on why calls for amnesty are misplaced or even outrightly mischievous. They demand those who make the calls to prevail on insurgents to show  faces first, and indicate a willingness to dialogue. Others have hinted that the insurgency is virtually finished militarily, and the mop-up operation is being disturbed by noise being made for amnesty.

 

The Sultan’s call for amnesty has been echoed many times, even as attacks by the insurgency escalate. Some of the calls appear to be informed by the thinking that escalation of attacks is informed by refusal of government to consider the amnesty option. Some of it is also informed by the belief that the granting of amnesty will weaken the insurgency, and strengthen the moral hand of government in dealing with it. There is also the belief that the refusal to act on the advise of leaders and elders diminishes their standing and capacity in their communities, and reduces them to a group which has neither the respect of government nor the insurgents.

 

So when the President sends a message to a forum with a heavy dose of foreign participation which is completely at variance with the established position of the administration, you have to wonder whether it is one of those speeches that are written and okayed by minions who have no regard for policy consistency or image of leaders. When the President says Nigerians have no alternative to peaceful coexistence, most participants will sit up in anticipation that he will say what he is doing to preserve the foundations of that coexistence. The World Muslim league is no stranger to the insurgency, and it knows that it represents in various forms, a repudiation of religious coexistence in Nigeria. The Sultan had taken a major gamble in joining the chorus for amnesty. Its rejection by the government means they are now on opposite sides as far as solutions to the problem are concerned. He is likely to hear Mr President’s words sounding rather hallow, particularly the parts that celebrate religious understanding and tolerance.

 

Participants at the conference will go through the motion of exposing the fundamentals of religious coexistence, but they will do this against a raging controversy and high tempters regarding killings by people who claim to be Muslims in the names of their faith. In spite of local Igbo leaders’ strenuous efforts to deny that the recent park bomb in Kano was targeted at Igbo people, there are still many whose anger cannot be assuaged. Many elements among the Christian Association of Nigeria are finding it very hard holding back the tide of anger that Christians are being killed by the insurgents just for being Christians; never mind the fact that Muslims die daily at the hands of the insurgents as well. Muslim leaders and clerics are losing ground because they can neither influence the insurgency, nor protect other Muslims from its bombs and bullets.

 

There are deep murmurings that there is more to these attacks than the pursuance of the goals of the Jamaatu Ahlil Sunnah Lid dawati Wal Jihad (JASLIWAJ) or even the newer group, Ansaru. The failure of the Nigerian state to defeat this insurgency, or, as some cynics now insist, its reluctance to do so makes the position of the federal government highly suspect, particularly when it is steadfast in rejecting the option seen as a foot in the door. Its lack of an alternative strategy to the one it is deploying makes the rejection all the more puzzling to those who are charitable; and outrightly suspicious to those who see sinister motives.

 

President Jonathan is being put on the defensive in terms of policies towards violent insurgencies. This is the worst possible position he needs to be in. He is not communicating very well with the communities which are the first line victims of this insurgency. He is also not communicating with those who support what appear to be his positions, but would like to see an end to this conflict. There are others who presume to speak for him but make his case worse. These appear to have the loudest voices, and they remind northern elders that they fished out militants from creeks who had grievances and guns and faces, and leaders from the north should do the same. They want the insurgency crushed if it will not remove its veil and discuss, and they want this done at all cost. They see a political solution as capitulation and reward for killing of particularly Christians and southerners. They speak for a sentiment that says the North deserves what it gets, between the insurgency and a rampaging JTF. There are many voices around this insurgency, and most of them make little sense. Government’s communication network on this issue is bad, and it can only make the problem worse.

 

Chinua Achebe

“Two men look out through the same bars;

One sees the mud, and one the stars.”

Fredrick Langbridge, 1849 – 1923

 The dust raised by his last controversial book There was a Country has not settled. A former Military Governor of North Western State during the Nigerian Civil War, Alhaji Usman Faruk has just published his own version of the war in which he casts the Northern leaders who executed the war as patriotic heroes. On the very day he died, alarming statements were being made by people who were not even born before the Nigerian civil war, most of them threatening mayhem, revenge and even another civil war following the bombing of buses in Kano which, as it turned out, mostly took the lives of people from the same stock as the presumed bombers. One or two prominent writers even hinted that the bombing in Kano may have hastened his death. Chinua Achebe’s Nigeria is falling apart at a rate no one could have imagined. The tragedy is that history will record him as a symbol of its cultural wealth, as well as a symptom of its failure to utilize its assets.

 The last book published by Achebe will not be the one best remembered by the world. But that book reminds us that we have fought many battles, and it unearthed feelings and sentiments which remind us that we are today very much still in the past. That past had produced the Achebes and Soyinkas and Abubakar Imams and Zungurs, heroes of the literary world, activists who dared authorities and broke down walls, yet unable to  live entirely above their social contexts. The world will mourn him for his classics such as Things Fall Apart, but Nigerians will always argue over whether he is an icon which the nation should cherish and honour, or an ethnic champion whose last hurrah was to open up old wounds in a nation desperate to move on. The world will mourn a great African writer, and many Nigerians will miss a man who had stirred nests with his defiance and courage to ruffle feathers.

 Achebe would appear to have been born with a complimentary set of gifts: the gift of expression, and the gift of using the expressed word to assess his social and political environment and attempt to change it. From Things Fall Apart, which captured the effect of major social upheavals and changes engendered by colonialism, to other works which parody post-colonial efforts to build a nation out of many conflicting value systems, to his last novel which was a personal history of the Nigerian Civil War, Achebe was at once participant observer with a keen eye on social change, as well as a historian who took liberties with a personal perspective on such changes. There are not many equals of Achebe in the use of a foreign language to speak to his society, and the contemporary and peer such as Soyinka who were elevated above him by an international award have been pilloried for being better at addressing foreign audiences than their fellow Africans, or taking away an honour Achebe deserved. Fewer writers have shown a more consistent disdain for the decline in values and the failure to utilize potentials in their nations as Mr Achebe. Even when he was comfortably esconsed in foreign lands, his heart was always with his people and his country. Twice he rejected being honoured by Nigerian governments he felt were not good enough to honour him, having partaken in the demolition of what could have been a great edifice for all Nigerians and the black race.

 The controversy generated by his last book will sadly be the most lasting memory among Nigerian of this great writer, particularly those too young to know or remember the tragic civil war. His take on key aspects of the conflict, and his successful exorcism of old ghosts on alleged genocide and role the of Chief Obafemi Awolowo resurrected some dormant sentiments and bitter quarrels from the past. Achebe must have known that his book will generate massive controversy, and while this is good for books because they get sold in larger quantities, a rendition of a painful history in a manner guaranteed to deepen the nation's faultlines is difficult to defend in terms of patriotism. It will certainly tap into an existing residue of sentiments and resonate with contemporary realities and conjectures; but by no stretch of imagination can Achebe’s last work be described as a heroic contribution to healing past wounds.

 It is possible that Achebe’s last work was never intended to heal wounds and move the nation forward. The major wounds of the civil war had been healed a long time ago by an enlightened leadership which made reconciliation possible, desirable and quick. There were also organic elements at play in the quick healing process: a popular realization of the fact that many mistakes had been made by the military since the January 1966 coup, for which millions paid massive penalties, including the loss of more than a million lives; a thriving economy which created possibilities for economic reintegration; and the realization that every section of the country was vital to the other. Since then, periodic agonies are triggered when the horrendous suffering by the civilian population is revisisted; or when it appears that the nation is forgetting that one million lives had to be sacrificed to keep it united.

 In spite of dozens of books on the genesis and execution of the war, controversies were sustained by arguments over who was right, what went wrong, and what lessons the nation should draw from the war. This in itself is not a problem. It becomes a problem when comments on a sad chapter in our history tend to shed light on contemporary realities, and reveal a tragic failure to move on from that tragic period. This was, going by the reactions of many Nigerians to There Was a Country, what Achebe did. His last comment on his country played into the hands of people who thought the Igbo should never forgive Awolowo; people who thought Awo has always been maligned by Igbo people who will not accept to pay a just price for their follies; people who thought that Igbo people have never recovered from an orchestrated genocide, and are still paying a price in political terms; and even people who think the dream of Biafra is not dead, and can and should be vigorously reactivated.

 It will be interesting to know if Mr Achebe had been availed of even the tiniest peak into conversations among younger Nigerians on cyberspace which followed the release of his last book. It will be uncharitable to say he had triggered a major setback in the unity of the country, but it will be fair to say he lit up the dark and frightening chasms which separate  many younger Nigerians and equip them the horrible stereotypes with which they see each other.  If he did have a glimpse at this level of our national psyche, it is doubtful if he would not have felt some pain that his fellow citizens harbor such sentiments and feelings towards each other. He may even have asked if he and his generation are justified in enjoying their smug comfort in the belief that they had discharged their obligations to their nation. Chinua Achebe left this world pretty much as he found it: troubled and troubling. But history will say of him, here is one who couldn't live with it.

Heat of the kitchen

“Enemies are not those who hate us, but those whom we hate.”

 P. Ustinov

Last week the Conference of Nigerian Political Parties (CNPP) a coalition of opposition political parties asked Alhaji Bamanaga Tukur Chairman of the PDP to stop beating the drums of war. The CNPP is angry that Alhaji Bamanga Tukur said that 2015 represents a “heavy” war the PDP has to fight, “because a group has come up and wants to sweep the mat off our feet.” The PDP, he is reported to have told a meeting in the south west, cannot allow that to happen.

The CNPP is outraged, it says, because it has not recovered from the effects of earlier drums of war which the PDP beat. In particular, it cannot forget Obasanjo’s declaration that the 2007 elections were a do-or-die affair. The PDP did the affair, and violence took many lives and limbs and mandates, the CNPP complains. The CNPP wants security agencies to query Alhaji Bamanga for his “unpatriotic, undemocratic and inciting statement.” It said many other things as well, including its belief that Nigerians want, and will vote for regime change in 2015.

Of course the security agencies will not query Alhaji Bamanaga Tukur. Some of their personnel have followed him around as he jetted around the nation to knock back a party in crisis into life. They would know that the words that the CNPP finds so offensive are the staple diet of PDP rhetorics. Veterans of electoral battles in the ranks of the CNPP will in fact be amused by the indignation expressed by Mr Okechuku, but they will not fail to note that Alhaji Bamanga’s comments were made in a region in which the PDP is facing virtual extinction, the southwest. Nigerians will neither tremble nor panic. They know already that 2015 will be a battle of sorts, and quite possibly one which will either usher in genuine regime change, or trigger massive upheavals. It could also do both, if much sweat and blood have to be shed to achieve regime change. But Nigerians have seen it all before. The difference now is that many more are unwilling to sit idly by and watch leaders emerge through questionable or outrightly fraudulent means.

The opposition parties are right to worry over what appear as threats from Alhaji Bamanga. But they may not be the target of his words, at least for now. The drums of war were beaten in a part of the country where the PDP is literary drowning. It was a good pitch from the chairman as well, in a context in which many prominent PDP people from the southwest are feeling the effects of being out of power. They will understand the language of war, having seen the obliterating campaign of the ACN in action, and the weakening of their ranks from massive quarrels and having too many generals in a tiny army.

The PDP is indeed fighting a war, but for now it is a war against its own members. The orchestrated campaign to reconcile members of the party has exposed the enormity of its internal problems. In fact, some senior members of the party must be regretting the high profile and open mature of the campaign to heal rifts, because all it did is to deepen rifts. Many governors, the real powerhouses of the party, largely boycotted public relations events targeted at showing unity, and then sent in apologies and excuses for their absences. Key members of the party in most zones made louder statements by being absent than they would have if they had joined the junketing. The reconciliation train lost more passengers than it picked, and by the time it stopped in Abuja, the party’s leadership would have been in no doubt that the opposition is unlikely to be its biggest problem.

All over the country, the ruling party has problems. In the north, few people are willing to even display their party membership cards in public. The region has suffered unprecedented regression in its fortunes, and most people hold the party and its governors responsible. Many people think President Jonathan is indifferent to the problems of the North because he thinks it was hostile to his 2011 ambitions. They do not hold him responsible for Boko Haram; but they blame him for refusing to look at options to his present strategies for dealing with them. Northern governors, 15 of them from PDP, are blamed for engineering the Jonathan presidency, and then retreating into their fortified residences and leaving the people with poverty and Boko Haram. The few prominent PDP leaders who benefit from its rule do not advertize their good fortune. Many of the party’s members are waiting in the wings to join the merging opposition.

In the southwest, the party is virtually non-existent for all practical purposes. The ACN is closing in for the total kill by aggressively pursuing the merger, and building fortresses in competence and performance which can be used as electoral currency in 2015. In the southeast, the party is fighting for space with APGA, and legions of star-gazers want to know if it is time for Igbo politicians to chart an entirely new course. The south-south is holding on to the PDP as a raft, and will do anything to stop it from sinking. It realizes, however, that the rest of the nation is drifting away from it, and is unsure over what it will take to regain the ground lost. President Jonathan’s record is not likely to be so dramatically transformed by 2015 that it will serve as a rallying point. Too much of his small circle has been taken up by his own people that other Nigerians have long relocated without the south-south managers even noticing.

On the whole, you could say that the PDP chairman’s war drums are not being beaten without just cause. But PDP does not just beat war drums. It prepares for war in all aspects. It will, for instance, watch how the opposition intends to wriggle out of the booby trap over its proposed name with INEC. It must be congratulating itself for the small victory over the time and energy being wasted on the name affair. The merger process is being hurt by the quarrels over a name, and playing perfectly into PDP’s hand. Chances are that they wont get the merged party registered as APC by INEC, but the parties are behaving like a child whose lolly has been lost, and is rejecting another one in its place. Every day it huffs and puffs over APC, PDP gains a strategic advantage. You would have thought a movement towards merger with some veteran casualties of the PDP will know some of its tricks by now, and would therefore know which battles to fight and which to avoid.

The real war drums that should alarm Nigerians will be those that may signal such danger to the PDP that it will have no option but to attempt to rig the 2015 elections, at all cost. If it cannot heal its massive wounds, or radically engineer an improvement in the performance of its elected officials, or damage the merger irredeemably, it may be tempted to tamper dangerously with the electoral process. It should not. Many people in the PDP find it difficult to image life outside the comfort of the PDP. But life will be infinitely more difficult for everyone if the PDP attempts to rig the 2015 elections because it cannot win them freely and fairly.

One noose, many necks

You may either win your peace or buy it – win it, by resistance to evil; buy it by compromise with evil. John Ruskin 1819 – 1900

For observers of developments in the North, the report of a confident Emir of Kano asking a Federal Government delegation on a sympathy visit to Kano to convey his advise to President Jonathan to implement the report and recommendations of the Northern Elders Forum on security, economy and related matters in the northern states will be a significant development. The delegation itself could not have missed a slight change in the body language of the Emir, something many prominent people who had visited to welcome him back from the United Kingdom where he travelled after the assassination attempt on his life would also have noticed. Suddenly the Emir of Kano is in full public glare, daily receiving very prominent politicians who demonstrate the highest forms of reverence to a man who was literally left for dead a few weeks ago by assassins on a street in his city.

Perhaps politicians and many leaders now recognize how close the nation came to losing a rare symbol of genuine authority and a cultural icon. Or perhaps they recognize that distances which grow daily between them and the sources and symbols of power in a community being torn to shreds will hurt them in the long run. In any case, prominent leaders such as the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Governors, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, a Presidential delegation made up of ministers and many others have all visited and bowed in reverence, contrived or real, before a man who barely a year ago shed tears in public at the mayhem visited on the ancient city of Kano by insurgents of Jamaatu Ahlil Sunnal Lid’daati Wal Jihad (JASLIWAJ).

And it appears the Emir himself now recognizes that his recent personal experience is an opportunity to reassert the full weight of his symbolic authority. Certainly, all these VIPs cannot line up to take full advantage of media coverage to visit the Emir without a strong political pull. Most of them would have had to pass numerous military and police checkpoints, or actually hear of blasts even as they visit the elderly Emir. So they also realize that Kano is an active frontline in an escalating war that has taken many of the northern communities as hostages.

The reference to the report of the Northern Elders Forum which its Secretary, Professor Ango Abdullahi says has been dumped by President Jonathan could not have been made casually by the Emir. Few people can request Ministers to remind the President to take up suggestions and observations made by a valuable segment of the political stock of the North today. That report, presented to the president amidst full publicity by people who had stepped forward in advanced ages, partly to atone for past sins, and partly to fill yawning gaps in the leadership assets of the North, had raised hopes that the presidency will be open to high quality inputs from people it will be foolhardy to ignore.

Well, apparently, the President appears to have ignored them and their report. Eight months since a blind and bowing Dammasanin Kano led a delegation of distinguished northern elders, not a word has been heard from the Villa. The northern governors have not received the elders to discuss their report either. And the elders are very, very angry. The Emir told the Presidential delegation that the Elders had complained that their report has not been acted upon, and they have not been communicated with. When the Emir of Kano lends his voice to the demand for a consideration of the Elders’ report which included, among others, a recommendation for a political, rather than a military solution to the insurgency destroying the North, the President can only ignore it at additional cost to his already poor standing and image in many parts of the North. Just about everyone else, from the Sultan, the JNI, ACF, Borno Elders and professional groups have joined in making demands for amnesty.

The noose which is the insurgency is closing in on many necks. It is a dangerous contraption on the neck of President Jonathan who is increasingly being perceived by a widening circle of northern opinion leaders as hostile to the idea that a political solution (or, as is more widely mentioned, amnesty for the insurgents) will make a genuine difference in its terms of cessation of hostilities and long-term resolution. More and more people in authority in the North (and people like Asiwaju Bola Tinubu) are now insisting that only the grant of amnesty will begin to roll back the widening and deepening conflicts with the many-headed insurgency.

This noose is being made tighter by the absence of a consensus around the value and justice of amnesty; as well as the utility and possibility of a political settlement with a group or groups that fundamentally repudiate the legality of the Nigerian state. Opinions which President Jonathan listens to also say amnesty will be worthless, and unjust to victims. It advises that the calls for amnesty from leaders and elders whose children kill them, their economy and society, as well as security agents of the state is an abdication of responsibility. It insists that elders or leaders must know who these killers are, and will, in the long run, either stand up to them or collaborate with the state to defeat them.

The noose is also around the neck of many northern elders. Basically, as Muslims, they recognize that their faith is hostile to concepts such as amnesty, if it is defined as unconditional pardon for mass murder and other atrocities and crimes. Yet they are comfortable with the concept of general pardon for these crimes, in part because they think it worked in the Niger Delta; and in part because they have no means of standing up to the insurgency. They are also worried that an intensification of this conflict and the possibility of its spreading will amount to a civil war in the north. So any solution is better than one which simply creates more of the enemy.

The amnesty noose hangs dangerously around more and more people who ask for it. The people on whose behalf it is pleaded have escalated the conflict. Since the President’s visit to Borno and Yobe State, the insurgency appears to be more active. Kano state in particular has witnessed one of the most violent series of attacks, with the motorpark bombing looking as if it was a plan to trigger anti-northern hostility in the south. Clearly, the current strategy of the government is not working. So the demands to grant amnesty are becoming louder, possibly because they are the easiest or only option presently available.

The President should not just ignore demands for a political resolution of this conflict, and leaders in the community must go beyond the shrill calls for amnesty for people who appear bent on fighting the Nigerian state. The indignation of Northern leaders and elders in various form should be channeled into more productive avenues. The North Elders Forum is already involved in engineering a wider and more cohesive and inclusive platform which should, among others, raise the quality of northern political leadership. The engagement of this insurgency at the political level is vital to the resolution of the issues it claims to fight for. There must be the political will and courage to engage the insurgency at all levels. This will require a political leadership with support, clout and vision to engage the foundations of this conflict, and chart a course for reconciliation and rehabilitation. Northern opinion leaders should recognize the reality that many other Nigerians sympathize with their positions, but are not northerners. They must build bridges to these important sympathies, and limit the damage from perceptions that this is basically a northern problem. On the other hand, it is important to keep in mind that there are also very strong views and interests against political solutions which involve matters such as amnesty, or even measures which involve huge expenditure to reverse the economic decline of the North.

Amnesty for insurgents represents only one possible element in a political solution to this problem. A lot needs to be done to give the political solution a shape and substance; which is why we need to more beyond the singular issue of amnesty. The most urgent need for now is to improve the political resource of the north so that it can engage both the insurgency and a reluctant presidency. At this stage all leaders do is beg. This wont work.