Nigeria is not a failed state

On December 22, 2020, the Financial Times, a leading British broadsheet, warned that ‘Nigeria is at risk of becoming a failed state’. It was subsequently broadcasted by leading Nigerian dailies, in a manner akin to a papal encyclical. The editorial of a respected foreign publication gave an imprimatur to something that many Nigerians think. Some might even clamour that they ought to have gone a step further and called Nigeria a failed state, period. Both sides are wrong. The Nigerian state is neither failed nor failing; it merely functions within the limits of its false claims.

Understanding contemporary Nigeria always requires that we place events in a proper historical context. The absence of historical nous robs us of the mental state necessary for the creation of a polity whose leaders are capable of statesmanship—best defined as the prevention of necessary evils. We must first understand what is meant by that foreign word, the state. Second, we must decide if that concept applies, lest we make the mistake of the Financial Times, and other observers—foreign and local—of confusing an elephant for its trunk. Finally, we ought to delineate the historical path of our polity.

In 1951, as David Ben-Gurion, the first Prime Minister of Israel, pondered how to turn his country of diverse refugees and settlers into a nation, he intoned: ‘I see…the shaping of a nation for the state because there is a State but not a nation’. As a man informed by the Western tradition of political thought, when he thought of the state, he perhaps had in mind the formulation of Max Weber, the German sociologist.

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To intermix Max Weber and the British political philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, the state is a human construct that successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate exercise of physical force within a given territory. The importance of my tweak of Weber’s original words is that as Ben-Gurion, and Charles Tilly, an American political scientist, remind us, nations are shaped, but the state is made. Therefore, until the monopoly of the legitimate exercise of physical force has been imposed, a state does not exist. Attempts do not count, only a successful total imposition.

In that case, there has never been a Nigerian state. The British came close, but their greater preponderance of physical force was never seen as legitimate, hence the violent crackdowns throughout their rule. They also tacitly acknowledged that fact by ruling through local authorities everywhere but in Lagos where there was a state.

Attempts to create a Nigerian State have always floundered because of the absence of an overarching idea of ‘Nigerianness’ to which the State could be attached. In comparison, a definite England had emerged by at least 927 AD under King Athelstan of the House of Wessex. The English and the Scots were united, into the Kingdom of Great Britain, in 1707. They were both united with the English empire in Ireland in 1800. In contrast, 1,020 years after the England from which the Financial Times opines emerged, Obafemi Awolowo declared—borrowing Prince Metternich’s description of Italy—that Nigeria was a ‘mere geographical expression’.

Unlike the English, Scots and Anglo-Irish, the leaders within Nigeria failed to unite. Hence, their attempts to create a state have always floundered because it has been seen as an illegitimate imposition. It might seem subtle, but there is a difference between the creation of something new and the reformation of a nonexistent entity. The Nigerian conundrum is that as long as government actions are judged and carried out through the prism of ethnic and religious difference, it cannot have a state. Without a state, it cannot claim and enforce a monopoly of violence.

I see three paths ahead.

The first, the easiest, the most seductive and the likeliest to end in chaos, is that the country’s constituent proto-nationalities attempt to forge states of their own. However, the solidity of those ‘imagined communities’ has never been tested outside of their unifying stance against each other and the Nigerian project. A former Senate President, Anyim Pius Anyim, has recently made headlines for making regional distinctions between the Igbos. Obafemi Awolowo was stymied in his attempts to forge a broader Yoruba nation by the historical suspicions of the Ibadan towards an Ijebu man. The violence in northern Nigeria has shown the limitations of the ‘One North’ political programme.

The second path is a state that shapes a nation. Contrary to some ideas in vogue, a state rests on its quality, not its quantity; its effectiveness, not its representativeness. The state wins by force of ideas and plain force: the scales of justice coequal to the sword of punishment. The emergence of the Nigerian State has been prevented by nepotism and ethnic bias. Its weakness is why it cannot exist. If instead, it flung its institutions open to careers where admission and rise into a selective class depended on strict performance alone, it would carry all before it. The rise of the state has been hand-in-glove with the rise of impersonal institutions. If you want a state, then you must create one that is blind and powerful. It must be organised and cooperative. It must have the faculty to give orders and the expectation, forged by vigour and competence, that they will be obeyed.

The third path is an incontrovertible fact of life. If Nigeria does not do what is necessary to survive, someone or something else will decide on her behalf. Perhaps many of its competitors for legitimacy will forge a state or, perhaps, states from abroad will come knocking again. What then?

Emmanuel-Francis Nwaolisa Ogomegbunam is a Nigerian by conviction