Abstract
Since political independence in the late 1950s through 1970s, political developments in most African countries have been characterized mostly by chaos, social disorder, and economic anarchy. There is no place where this anarchy is so pronounced than Nigeria, the most populous and ethnically-diverse country in the continent. Indeed, Nigeria has witnessed recurring civil violence, including one civil war from 1966–70 and, more recently, religious-related mayhem. As a result, many analysts have been forced to label Nigeria as a failed state.
In the past 51 years of independence, the political landscape in the country has been dominated primarily by military authoritarian rule that lasted for more than 30 years of independence, and the intervening rule of corrupt and inept civilian elite, dominated by former military officers. This crisis of political instability and democratic transition in modern Nigeria has been documented in several books and journal articles, but none of these has captured the nuances of Nigerian politics and society than the recently-published book by Professor EC Ejiogu, appropriately titled The Roots of Political Instability in Nigeria: Political Evolution and Development in the Niger Basin. This brilliantly-written book is certainly a welcome addition to the growing body of work on the failed state in Nigeria. The multifaceted crisis in many African countries like the Sudan, Zimbabwe, Somalia and, indeed, the false transition to multi-racial democracy in South Africa, is symptomatic of Africa’s colonial past and the particular form of transition to independent nationhood in this largely-derided continent.
Unlike other existing bodies of work on the persisting crisis of the state and political transition in post-colonial Nigeria, Ejiogu employs the famous theory of Eckstein and Gurr (1975) of regimes classification to explain how the diversity, and the inherent contradictions amongst different ethnic-nationalities, account for the failure of state building, the persistence of political instability, and recurring ethnic conflicts in modern Nigeria. The book comprises 11 overlapping chapters covering various issues from colonialism, ethnicity, ethnic marginalization, and the Biafra civil war to a strong condemnation of the political process in Nigeria, a process that is currently dominated by corrupt individuals, poor and inept leadership, intra-ethnic conflicts, Islamic fundamentalism, and the burgeoning mayhem in the Niger Delta. The bulk of the author’s arguments are laid out brilliantly in the introductory chapter of the book.
What Ejiogu tries to do in this book is provide an explanation as to how different patterns of incorporation of the diverse ethnic nationalities in colonial Niger Basin influenced the future stability of the nation now called Nigeria. For Ejiogu, using Eckstein and Gurr’s (1975) theory of regime classification, the more autocratic structure an ethnic group manifests, the more likely that such a group would be easily incorporated into the colonial agenda of the invading outside power – in this case, the British. According to Ejiogu, the persisting crisis of political instability in today’s Nigeria is due largely to the autocratic Hausa-Fulani authority pattern which, over the years, has determined the direction of the development of the state and society in post colonial Nigeria and, by inference, the continuing instability of the post-colonial state. On the other hand, the relatively egalitarian social structure of groups like the Igbo of the Niger Basin made it difficult for their incorporation into the British colonial agenda. Because of this differential pattern of ethnic incorporation into the colonial project, colonial policies under British rule helped advance the political and economic power of the northern elite, or what Ejiogu refers to as the ‘Hausa-Fulani oligarchy’, that provide the least resistance to British colonial rule. Ejiogu puts his case forward more bluntly thus:
In the discourse presented in this current work, some aspects of the analysis have established that amongst the distinct inhabitants of the Niger Basin that were made by British colonialism to constitute Nigeria, in those of them that the practice of authority is normatively democratic, there was a consistent resistance to colonial rule particularly because of their perception that colonial rule itself as being autocratic, and of the authority that derived from it as being grossly illegitimate. This was the case in especially the ethnic nationalities in the south of the Niger basin. Whereas in the north, especially within the core Hausa-Fulani Caliphate, the opposite was the case. (p. 3)
The inference here is that the ethnic nationalities of the Niger Basin, namely the Igbo, Ogoni, Ijaw and other minor nationalities, were marginalized from the body politics both during the colonial and post-colonial eras because of their rejection and opposition to colonial rule, while at the same time those ethnic nationalities in the north, particularly the Hausa and the Fulani, that embraced colonial rule, were favored or rewarded, politically and economically, by colonial policies and ordinances that were decreed by British colonial officers. Unfortunately, Ejiogu failed to provide sufficient empirical evidence to support these assumptions or sentiments anywhere in the book. He does, however, cite the Biafra civil war of 1967–70 as the only evidence of the marginalization of the ethnic nationalities in the Niger Basin, particularly the Igbo. Earlier in the book, Ejiogu lamented bitterly about the exclusion of the peoples of the Niger basin by successive post-colonial governments in Nigeria:
The Nigeria-Biafra war of 1967–70, which represents a bold attempt by the Igbo to secede from Nigeria under the auspices of the Republic of Biafra, is one such event. Ever since the end of the war in 1970, the irregular systems of governance that Nigeria continues to experience, including the highly unstable military regimes that manifested immediately after the war, the bogus democracy experiments involving civilians epitomized by the shaky Second Republic (1979–83), the Third Republic (1999–present), and the new and bold agitations for autonomy by nationalities in the south, especially in the oil-rich Niger Delta from where much of the hydrocarbons that fund state revenue are extracted, are symptomatic of the instability of Nigeria’s existence and validity as a modern nation-state. (pp. 3–4)
Many observers of Nigeria politics, including this reviewer, would strongly disagree with this simplistic analysis of how Nigeria continues to experience political instability. In the first place, the decision of the Igbo nation to secede from Nigeria, a decision largely taken by Colonel Odumegu Ojukwu, was not based mainly on the idea that the Igbo of the Niger Basin were being excluded from participation in Nigeria body polity. The decision to break away from Nigeria was largely taken by Colonel Ojukwu himself for personal reasons. The first coup of 1966, which was led by an Igbo officer, Major Chuckwuemeka Kaduna Nzeogu, was a broad-based military coup. The major goal of Nzeogu’s coup was the removal of the decadent elite of the first republic, the majority of whom happened then to be northerners of Hausa-Fulani origin. The coup, in the end, eventually resulted in the installation of an Igbo Head of State, Brigadier Aguyi Ironsi (see Badru, 1996: 74–8).
The coup that followed six months later was plotted by a group of northern officers led by Majors Yakubu Gowon and Danjuma, who were dissatisfied with the disproportionate number of northern elite killed in the first January 1966 coup. Indeed, with the exception of Brigadier Aguyi Ironsi, the only senior Igbo officer killed during the Danjuma-led coup, the Igbo only lost a few of their leading elite because one of the original Majors, Major Ifeajuna, an Igbo officer, leaked the plans of the coup to the then-president, Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe, an Igbo elite, who fled the country a few hours before the coup took place. In both the first and the second coup, the number of Igbo military officers and civilian elite who were killed was very minimal compared to other ethnic groups in the south. In fact, it was the issue of seniority over Lt Colonel Yakubu Gowon that prompted Lt Colonel Ojukwu to declare Biafra as a separate state for Igbo-descended people.
The decision to break away from Nigeria was further reinforced by the carnage that Igbo traders suffered in the north immediately after the first coup. The declaration of the Biafra sovereign state by Ojukwu was not a reflection of Igbo’s ‘normative democratic’ authority pattern, as Ejiogu claims, but a clever attempt on the part of Ojukwu to avoid orders from a junior officer like Gowon. It was the same Ojukwu who cajoled Major Nzeogu, a fellow Igbo officer in the Nigerian army, to come to Lagos so that a government of National Unity, in which both Ojukwu and Nzeogu would play prominent roles, would be formed. Indeed, Nzeogu was arrested by Ojukwu at the airport in Lagos, and handed over to northern officers who sent him to the federal prison in Enugu. It was the same Ojukwu who ordered Biafran soldiers to kill Nzeogu during the Biafra war.
While there is no doubt that the Igbo had historically been excluded from political power in Nigeria, as Ejiogu claimed in his book, this exclusion, however, cannot simply be reduced to a ‘legacy of colonial rule’. Indeed, during the second civilian regime of Alhaji Shehu Shagari, a northerner, from 1979–83, the so-called northern oligarchy tried as much as possible to incorporate the Igbo elite into Nigeria’s post-war politics by making an Igbo man, Dr Alex Ekwueme, the Vice-President.
Second, in regards to the dubious process under which Nigeria was granted political independence, the case made by Ejiogu for the alienation of the Igbo elite from governance in Nigeria left out a lot of the historical facts. While the British preferred to see a figure-head successor to colonial rule led by incompetent northerners, in this case Sir Ahmadu Bello and Alhaji Tafawa Balewa, it was, indeed, Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe, a member of the Igbo elite, who reneged on a decision by southern delegation, at the London independence conference in 1959, to reject the post-independence constitution that gave exclusive rule or power to northern elite. The southern delegation, led by Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, and Chief Anthony Enahoro (representing the Delta minority groups), went into the conference with a determination to oppose the constitution that was being imposed on post-colonial Nigeria by the British, a constitution that gave exclusive political power to the northerners.
In fact, the independence talk deadlocked towards midnight, according to a reliable source, with the southern delegation strongly objecting to the constitution put forward by the British, but the following day Dr Azikiwe changed his mind after he had been offered the figure-head position of president with the powerful prime minister position given to Alhaji Tafawa Balewa, a northerner. It was the adoption of this constitution, in my opinion, that explains the persisting crisis and failure of state building in Nigeria more than the colonial heritage that privileged the ‘Hausa-Fulani’ elite of the north that Ejiogu insisted on. Indeed, if the constitution had been rejected outright, the British would have had no option but to resort to their alternative plan, which was to divide the country into two parts much the same way it did on the eve of independence in India in 1947, with predominantly Muslims being dragged away from India. If this had been the case in Nigeria in 1960, no one could tell what Nigeria would look like today. But it is clear that such a solution would have resulted in a different problem that no one could hardly contemplate; and judging by the expansionist policy of Biafra’s Head of State, Colonel Odumegu Ojukwu, towards its minority neighbors in the Niger Delta Basin, the alternative would have been unthinkable.
While Ejiogu deserves commendation for his bold, clear, and straight forward ‘in your face’ analysis throughout the 11 chapters of this book, and his choice of this particular research topic, he however left readers wondering what solutions he has for resolving the Nigeria crisis of transition to democratic governance beyond a single paragraph at the end of the book, and I quote:
The only viable solution for political instability in Nigeria and most other contemporary African states that share similarities with Nigeria is the resolution of the National Question on one hand, as well as the unresolved issue of uncompleted state building amongst the nationalities that constituted them. (p. 187)
This, in my opinion, is nihilistic at best since it adds very little to the efforts of seeking a solution to what many analysts believe is the problem of rescuing a ‘failed state’ that is Nigeria. Besides, Ejiogu focuses primarily in his analysis on ethnicity: there is very little said about class and class alliances in the book, which in my opinion would have exposed more of the contradictory nature of elite rule in Nigeria.