National purpose and destiny

In the late 1970s, the brilliant military scientist Mallam Ayuba Kadzai, in a seminal lecture at the Nigerian Institute for International Affairs, ‘Nigeria’s Global Strategy’ (N.I.I.A. Lecture Series No.4,1976), sought to make the case for a grand strategy that would restructure our national system and enable us reposition ourselves for regional and world power status. This humble lecturer from Ahmadu Bello University was writing in the context of the Cold War, in which the liberation movements were intensifying in Southern Africa; when Nigeria’s star shone for once with the brilliance and rarity of Harley’s Comet.

At a time when we are reassessing our political institutions and our place in the world, it is vital to address this question of national purpose. For decades Nigeria has been adrift, with no clearly defined national purpose. Our leaders have behaved like drunken sailors — as if being in government is akin to winning the Spanish lottery. 

A major issue missing in current national discourse is this question of national purpose. Nigeria is the most populous black nation on earth. We are condemned by destiny to be the leaders of Africa. If Nigeria fails, the black race is doomed. 

Articulating a national purpose requires designing a grand strategy for our country. According to Professor Sir Michael Howard, Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, grand strategy embraces the deployment of all of a nation’s capabilities, human as well as material, in war as well as in peace. 

Because power derives from a variety of sources — from military capability to science and technology, finance, national morale, trade and ideology and cultural factors — a grand strategy anchored on enhancing national power must of necessity embrace a broad spectrum of variables and geometrical constants such as geography, climate, natural resources and population. Being able to bring all these factors together in a coherent, decisive and effective manner is the critical challenge facing grand strategy. Success in this endeavour requires deployment of intellects and creative talents of the highest order. It is ultimately about reconciling ends and means; being clear about objectives and reconciling those objectives to the constraints and limits of available resources and capabilities.

There was indeed a brief period in the history of this country when our voice meant something in the comity of nations. That brief interregnum coincided with the Murtala Mohammed years, when his famous 1975 speech at the OAU Summit turned the tide of fortunes in the liberation movement in southern Africa. The world stood in awe at our decisiveness, vision and purposeful leadership. But that period was only too brief. In the locust years that followed, we became a pariah nation; a people without credibility and without honour — when the state itself became an organ of criminality and lawlessness. 

Nigeria as a moral entity died on the day that the General Orders which had safeguarded public finance since the time of Lord Lugard were set aside with ignominy under General Ibrahim Babangida in August 1985. Our rulers were largely given a carte blanche to empty the treasury. Poverty and degradation became the lot of the vast majority of our citizens. The best among us voted with their feet in droves, taking their talents with them to second-rate jobs in Europe, North America and the Arabian Peninsula. 

By the time of General Sani Abacha, the process of political decay had already reached an advanced stage. Samuel Huntington, the distinguished American political scientist, defines political decay in terms of the inability of the state to deal effectively with the demands of social groups within a legitimate constitutional framework of governance, resulting in the breakdown of the political process and the retreat into antediluvian solidarities for succour and meaning. The deteriorating pathology of the state meant that government could no longer guarantee the security of citizens. Communities therefore sought refuge in ethnic militias and tribally-based ‘environmental’ movements. 

The irony is that so-called Nigerian films are now the rage throughout West Africa and indeed throughout the wide expanse of our great continent. Most Africans are awed by the big cars and the sickly opulence exhibited in those films, but we cannot escape the other reality which they portray. Most of these films — nearly all of them being churned out from one small community — serve to reinforce our image as a violent, superstitious and heartless society.  

During much of the nineties, our image was so bad that anyone who had the misfortune to be carrying our green passport was often subjected to invasive body searches at most international airports. Our great people became subject to daily ritual humiliation, regardless of whether they were doctors of divinity or neurosurgeons. In spite of the stupendous profits that foreign airlines have been making from our shores, their staffers continued to treat Nigerians with exceptional discourtesy. 

Nigeria’s image was at its bleakest, thanks to military regimes that behaved with singular lawlessness and brutality. As they systematically destroyed our national economy, our influence continued to dwindle in world affairs and whatever remained of our national prestige was in tatters, in spite of our massive financial and material contributions to ECOMOG and global humanitarian efforts.

Today, with Boko Haram, Nigeria is going through something that is probably more murderous than what obtained during our bitter civil war. We have managed to acquire the image of a dangerous behemoth of no consequence in world affairs.

Crucial to articulating a new national purpose is the critical factor of leadership. In a report on global governance prepared for the Club of Rome, the Israeli policy scientist Yehezkel Dror observed that “contemporary governance is obsolete and unable to deal fittingly with rapidly mutating problems and opportunities”. For Professor Dror, the ultimate solution lies in a ‘new order of leadership’ at the heart of government, a new mindset anchored on transformational leadership that is rigorous intellectually and politically savvy and entrepreneurial. We must reinvent Nigeria as a responsible nation based on positive science, the Rule of Law and justice 

OBADIAH MAILAFIA