Three hundred years ago, the archetypal ‘social activist’ was already present in the land. Abd al-Rahman al-Khatib ibn Bint al-hajj al-Barnawi, a cleric, condemned the social elite of the Kanem-Bornu Empire for their tyranny and corruption. He railed against rich merchants who hoarded food during famines, judges who collected bribes and the masses who gambled their little earnings on horse races.
Nigerians between the ages of 18 and 40 spend N730 billion annually on sports betting, according to a study by Saheed Owonikoko of the Modibbo Adama University of Technology, Yola. This is the demographic where underemployment and unemployment are concentrated. Were he alive today, Abd al-Rahman would be spared the stress of repetition. His critique of 16th-century Kanem-Bornu applies just as well to supposedly modern Nigeria.
Countries, unlike the individuals within them, cannot celebrate a new year. Instead, they bear silent witness to the passage of eras. The country that we now call Nigeria has witnessed the passage of three different eras. It has seen humans take up stone in place of wood, replace stone tools with iron and the minerals seized from its bowels are a testament to the arrival of the industrial age. Yet, if the trees, mountains and valleys could speak, they would testify that the lives of the masses remain as they ever were: nasty, brutish and prone to predation from above and below.
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‘The peasant is grass, fodder for the horses. To your hoeing, peasant, so that we can eat’. That excerpt from a nobleman’s song, in the Nigerian past, expresses very well the ethos of those with power, then and now.
It is easy to think of poverty and societal oppression in terms of good and evil; I prefer to think of them as expressions of a societal ethos. They are the political philosophy that informs a society’s self-conception, aspirations and consequently, its actions.
That attitude derives from my view of political philosophy as essentially a societal arms race. The best-organised societies are also the most successful. Societal success and organisation derive from a theoretical view of the world which when transmitted to action leads to consistent and replicable success.
The place where the worldview described above emerged was in an isolated part of an isolated continent. Unlike its western neighbours in present-day Mali and Ghana, it lacked the minerals to attract North African merchants. That pushed its elites to exploit people, the only available resource. In the north, the rise of the Kanem-Bornu Empire and the Hausa city-states, and in the south, the rise to hegemony of Oyo, the Aro confederacy, Bonny, Old and New Calabar all had one commodity in common: slaves.
The export of slaves allowed its elites access to the global market in weapons and luxuries. For example, Mai Idriss Alooma of Kanem-Bornu used Ottoman slave-soldiers as his elite musketeers. The merchant-princes of Bonny ordered ready-made upstairs houses from England. Those were knocked down, transported and reconstructed for them by English builders.
Robbed of our hindsight, the elites who rode the upward crest of their political philosophy would have felt vindicated. They were rich. They were respected by all with whom they dealt. Most importantly, they were not victims. However, we know that this lost manpower was being put to more productive use elsewhere. In the western hemisphere, their labour carved a new world out of the jungle for the Europeans. Centuries later, when those very same Europeans returned with a different, less respectful face, perhaps it was karma that they were richer and more powerful, in part, due to the efforts of those sold willingly by the ancestors of those whom the Europeans would now thoroughly humiliate.
Their political philosophy, the fruit of a society and economic structure much different from that constructed by our ancestors also proved superior. In their countries, economic revolution had fuelled a political revolution from below. It shifted power from those who best wielded instruments of violence or had access to the supernatural to an abstract notion of an equal people embodied in a nation.
Nigeria is yet to manage a similar revolution, nor has it been able to construct a superior alternative. Instead, it seems that we are content to drift along in the wake of the British and Americans.
In the New Year, Nigerians must aim higher and be better. The political philosophy of the Americans is not that of the British. That of the British is not similar to those constructed by the Ancient Greeks or Romans. Why should Nigeria be different? All successful societies must develop a political philosophy that is reflective of their time and place. In that, if we want to thrive, Nigeria cannot be different. In the year 2021, with its society, economy, neighbours, present politics and the global picture, we must find the right path for Nigeria.
We need wisdom and most importantly, we need lovers of wisdom. In their contentions over the right path forward, we shall find the answers we seek.
Emmanuel-Francis Nwaolisa Ogomegbunam is a Nigerian by conviction
