Abstract
Political commentators are quick to comment on Nigeria’s capacities for survival. They are puzzled by how the barely cohesive country manages to stumble from one crisis to another without leading to dismemberment or the irreversible slide into genocidal conflict. This chapter is essentially a reflection on Nigeria’s fourth democratic experiment and the numerous and often disorienting paradoxes, contradictions, and conundrums an apparent context of civilian political (dis)order throws up in both concrete and theoretical terms within an archetypal postcolonial setting. It also attempts to evince the kinds of social disorder amplified by neoliberal conceptions of governance in a milieu where the private-public distinction is still blurred by the unresolved tensions between the colonial and the postcolonial, between the modern and the premodern, between vestiges of feudalism and late capitalism, and finally between residual militarism and unsystematic demilitarization.
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Notes
See Peter Ekeh,1 “Colonialism and the Two Publics in Africa: a Theoretical Statement,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 17 (1975)
Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of late Colonialism (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1996).
Jean-Pierre Oliver De Sardan, “African Corruption in the Context of Globalisation,” in Richard Fardon et al. (eds.), Modernity on a Shoestring: Dimensions of Globalisation, Consumption and Development in Africa and Beyond (Leiden and London: EIDOS, 1999).
Karl Maier, This House Has Fallen: Midnight in Nigeria (New York: Public Affairs, 2000).
Eghosa Osaghae, et al., eds., The Nigerian Civil War and Its Aftermath (Ibadan: John Archers Limited, 2002).
D. Newbury and C. Newbury, “Bringing the Peasants Back In: Agrarian Themes in the Construction and Corrosion of Statist Historiography in Rwanda,” The American Historical Review, Vol. 105, No. 3 (June, 2000).
On this point, see Wole Soyinka, The Open Sore of a Continent (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996) and the The Burden of Memory, The Muse of Forgiveness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). In a keynote address, Soyinka had stated that “ we are a nation that desperately needs to redefine itself,” see his essay “Constitution and Continuity,” in Path to People’s Constitution (Lagos: CDHR, 2000), p. 25. For an even earlier analysis of Nigeria’s problems with the nation-building project, read Obaro Ikime’s inaugural lecture delivered as president of the Historical Society of Nigeria in May 1985.
David Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (London: Abacus, 1998), p. 499. One is aware that Landes’s text in terms of ideological posturing is viewed as being conservative. As such it belongs to the same category of similar texts such as Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Avon Books, 1992) and
Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking (New York: Touchstone, 1996). Of course, there are several engaging critiques of their broad ideological stance. A recent ideological opponent is
John Pilger’s The New Rulers of the World (London and New York: Verso, 2003)
Mike Davis’ Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World (London and New York: Verso, 2001).
Even Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Morning and the New International (New York and London: Routledge, 1994) is a critique of the spectralization of capital and thus a counter-text to Fukuyama’s. However, in this essay, I would use Landes’s facts to advance other arguments.
Dana R. Villa, “Socrates, Lessing Thoreau: The Image of Alienated Citizenship in Hannah Arendt,” in A. Sarat and D. R. Villa (eds.), Liberal Modernism and Democratic Individuality (New York: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 47.
See J. Butler, E. Laclau, and S. Zizek, Contingency, Hegemony and Universality (London and New York: Verso, 2000).
R. Benjamin Barber, “Multiculturalism between Individuality and Community: Chasm or Bridge,” in A. Sarat and D. R. Villa (eds.), Liberal Modernism and Democratic Individuality (New York: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 141.
Ash Amin, ed., Post-Fordism: A Reader (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Limited, 1994).
David Howell, The Edge of Now: New Questions for Democracy in the Network Age (London: Macmillan, 2000), p. xx.
See Claude Ake, “Rethinking African Democracy,” Journal of Democracy, Vol. 2 (Winter 1991): 32–44 and his 2001 Democracy and Development in Africa (Ibadan: Spectrum Books).
Julius Ihonvbere, “Constitutionalism in Africa: Challenges and Opportunities,” in Segun Jegede et al. (eds.), State Reconstruction in Africa (Lagos: CDHR, 2001).
See Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jananovich Publishers, 1973).
Consult the following authors, Achille Mbembe, “At the Edge of the World: Boundaries, Territoriality, and Sovereignty in Africa,” Public Culture, Vol. 12, No. 1 (2000)
Achille Mbembe, “Ways of Seeing: Beyond the New Nativism,” Introduction in African Studies Review, Vol. 44, No. 2 (2001)
Achille Mbembe On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001)
Achille Mbembe, “The Power of the Archive and Its Limits,” in Carolyn Hamilton et al. (eds.) Refiguring the Archive (Cape Town: David Philip, 2002)
Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture, Vol. 15, No. 1 (2003)
Ike Okonta and Oronto Douglas, Where Vultures Feast: Shell, Human Rights, and Oil (London: Verso, 2001)
Sanya Osha, “Ethics and Revisionism in Nigerian Governance,” Special Issue, QUEST: An African Journal of Philosophy/Revue Africaine de Philosophie, “ Truth in Politics: Rhetorical Approaches to Democratic Deliberation in Africa and Beyond,” Philippe-Joseph Salazar, Sanya Osha, and Wim van Binsbergen (eds.), Vol. 16, Nos. 1 and 2 (2004)
Sanya Osha, “Nigeria’s Candlelight Globalism,” African Renaissance (January-February 2005)
Sanya Osha, “Nigeria’s Democratic Project: Lessons from the Abacha Regime,” African Renaissance, (September-October 2005)
Sanya Osha, “Birth of the Ogoni Protest Movement,” Journal of Asian and African Studies, Vol. 41, Nos. 1 and 2 (2006)
Sanya Osha, “Slow Death in the Niger Delta,” Africa Review of Books/Revue Africaine des Livres, Vol. 2, No. 1 (2006)
Sanya Osha, Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Shadow: Politics, Nationalism and the Ogoni Protest Movement (London: Adonis & Abbey, 2006).
Robert D. Kaplan, The Coming Anarchy (New York: Vintage Books, 2000).
The phenomenon concerning the acute housing problems being created in millennial Mumbai as described by Arjun Appadurai in his essay “ Spectral Housing and Cleansing: Notes on Millennial Mumbai” in Carol Breckenridge et al., (eds.), Cosmopolitanism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), is now beginning to manifest in parts of Nigeria particularly in the crowded cities of Lagos, Warri Port, Harcourt, and the federal capital territory, Abuja. Indeed, the concept of Lebensraum is assuming spectral dynamics within this kind of configuration. For an account of how this concept might play itself out see
Sven Lindqvist, “Exterminate All the Brutes, Joan Tate (trans.) (New York: The New Press, 1996). Brazil can be said to be undergoing similar processes of sociopolitical transformation in which the spread of favelas (slums) are creating new notions of space, belonging, and disempowerment.
Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), p. 85.
Jean-Francois Bayart, Stephen Ellis, and Beatrice Hibou’s The Criminalization of the State in Africa (Oxford and Indianapolis: James Currey, 1997) has many references to criminal practices in Nigeria. One of such passages states: “The US authorities have long been convinced, without ever being able to provide formal proof, that the armed forces, the political class and members of the government play a major role in Nigeria’s drug trade,” p. 29.
Political analysts in Nigeria haven’t quite reflected the protean nature of the postcolonial state. Oftentimes, their analyses are shortchanged by unreflexive metanarratives of political economy. See for instance, the volume edited by B. Caron et al., Democratic Transition in Africa (Ibadan: CREDU, 1992) or an even more recent one, features a lot of contemporary analysts working in Nigeria
Eghosa E. Osaghae, The Nigerian Civil War and its Aftermath (Ibadan: John Archers Limited, 2002). But the are other ways by which to view the postcolonial state. Within the Nigerian context, it would be inspiring to read studies where dialectics have given way to dialogics, “political economy to poetics, class conflict to consumption, the violence of the gun to the violence of the text, world-historical material processes to struggles over signs and styles, European domination to post-Hegelian hybridity,”
John L. Comaroff, “Reflections on the Colonial State, in South Africa and Elsewhere: Factions, Fragments, Facts and Fictions,” in Abebe Zegeye (ed.), Social Identities in the New South Africa (Cape Town: Kwela Books, 2001), p. 38.
See T. K. Biaya, “Crushing the Pistachio: Eroticism in Senegal and the Art of Ousmane Ndiaye Dago,” in Carol Breckenridge et al. (eds.), Cosmopolitanism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), on the question of bodily aesthetics in an Islamized context.
Michael Watts, “Islamic Modernities? Citizenship, Civil Society and Islam in a Nigerian City,” James Holston (ed.), Cities and Citizenship (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002).
See Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Touchstone, 1996).
For an idea of post-Fordist modes of social differentiation and how they differ from, and in some instances, resemble African forms of social stratification, see Ash Amin ed., Post-Fordism: A Reader (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1994).
Abubakar Momoh, “The History and Politics of Constitution Making in Nigeria (1922–1999),” Segun Jegede et al. (eds.), Path to People’s Constitution (Lagos: CDHR, 2000).
See Soyinka, The Open Sore of Continent.; Soyinka The Burden of Memory, The Muse of Forgiveness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Soyinka, “Constitution and Continuity.”
Arjun Appadurai, “Deep Democracy: Urban Governmentality and the Horizon of Politics,” Public Culture, Vol. 36 (2002).
Kwame A. Appiah, “Citizens of the World?” Biblio: A Review of Books, Special Issue, (March-April 2002): 7.
Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (New York and London: Verso, 2001).
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Osha, S. (2014). The Order/Other of Political Culture. In: African Postcolonial Modernity. African Histories and Modernities. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137446930_2
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