December 1, 2002
“The conformity of an action or thing to moral right or to reason, truth or fact; assignment of deserved reward or punishment; giving of just desserts; infliction of punishment on an offender; the administration of law or of legal processes” All of these define one absolute - Justice!
The absence of justice is an Evil with a name. It is called Injustice! It is the Devil that has shadowed the Nigerian experiment from its cradle. In its earliest form, it was both the cause and consequence of a regionally orchestrated bloodbath that boiled over to a 30-month genocidal war, a war that current events may eventually pale when paired against the landfall of the gathering storm. Biafra was this genocide! And Biafra was an unscripted reaction to this Evil. The blood spilled at this Devil’s temple appears to have only wetted his appetite.
Injustice multiplies the pain of any land that tolerates it! Today, this Evil shows up in many other guises or mutations. In some cases, it is a perpetration; in others, a reaction or a symptom. And in many others, it is both. In all the cases, the Nigerian State, the Centre, that is, has often abated this evil by both omission and commission. The Nigerian Centre has always been not only insensitive, but desensitized to the plight of Southerners, especially that of Ndigbo.
A sampler will amplify our thoughts here!
In the events leading up to Biafra, the anguish and loss from the Northern massacres could have somehow been assuaged, had the Gowon regime meted out decisive justice to the Mullah-masterminds of that mass orgy of violence. The State chose active silence! And that silence led to more violence, which led to a very bitter and costly war! The Centre rubbed this injustice in, with a contrived, disingenuous, double-dealing post-war policy of reconstruction that not only robbed Ndigbo of their pre-war bank assets in a forced barter of piddling Pounds, but also considered their landed properties abandoned.
As unjust as the State’s policy on the so-called Abandoned Property, is its continuing bent against meting justice to Nigeria’s war veterans. There is no Nigerian equivalent of the American or Canadian Remembrance Day, a special day of thanksgiving and remembrance of citizens, living or dead, for their sacrifice in war to the unity of their country. Contrasted from the sheltered privileges of Northern veterans and their ill fitted, miscast Southern acolytes, the lot of the Southern rank and file, the foot soldiers, has been penurious denigration by successive occupants of the Nigerian Centre. Most of these veterans and their heirs are poor and destitute. Abandoned and forgotten, would they be first to rally behind the flag in another time of test as appears inevitable? The injustice of the unresolved Abandoned Property issue boils and seethes up the momentum of the gathering storm.
Injustice is evil! And evil can be seductive, especially when it enriches! The most insidious, corrosive and pervasive mutation of injustice in contemporary times is corruption, both public and private. The Centre is foursquare condemnable for this corrosion of society’s moral fabric. The Centre has perverted service for public good into one for private gain. This social cancer is systemically endemic. The painful authoritarianism of the 1970s to the 1990s, dealt probity the nasty shove that enthroned the dishonesty from which recovery now seems far-fetched. This decline commenced with an assault on society’s most basic unit of morality - the family. Pauperized by public corruption, hitherto well-off parents lost the moral influence they once held over their children.
To reacquire lost authority, most either ventured pell-mell into corruption and other crimes or looked the other way as their children resorted to them so families could make ends meet. From the family, to the churches and on to traditional authorities, every lever of moral influence was suborned with bribes or coercion. And sometimes, with both. Corruption, spread from the Centre, has not robbed our people just material resources. It has stolen their dignity! When evil steals the future of a people, it drives them to desperation. This is the case with Nigeria today! The proof is evident in the criminal banditry that now savage and choke our land. This culture of impunity results directly from the baneful presence of injustice. Does it surprise anyone that as spiritual revivalism multiply across the country so does criminality? Nigeria has passed a generation playing dangerous games with the devil. And the whirlwind today foreshadows the storm.
The injustice of corruption arises from the Centre’s convenient paralysis of will to punish it! When a public functionary, elected or not, steals the patrimony of the people, he deserves jail time. The failure to punish promotes the injustice of the act! The Nigerian Centre sadly, is structured to support rather than stifle corruption. It is a culture, which “settles” evil rather attack and punish it. In an earlier incarnation as Dictator, Olusegun Obasanjo helped to erect this infrastructure of corruption. In his resurrection as “messiah” President, he pledged to combat it. But his first combat outing saw him “killing” a corrupt Speaker of a better-forgotten House of Representatives with an unconditional pardon from a corruption conviction. It has been downhill since. Now, we have elected crooks like Nzeribe openly admitting to corruption. We have others dropping boxes stuffed with millions of dollars before a perplexed Assembly in a probably contrived fit of uncommon probity. Nigeria is the world’s titleholder in nefarious sleaze - no thanks to those elected thieves in our National Assembly.
The same culture of “settlement” is driving the topsy-turvy negotiation between Obasanjo and the Abacha family. The President believes settlement will serve Nigeria’s national interest. He believes that part of the loot would be better than none of it. He believes that a fraction would be better than a whole! And yet he would rush off to the Paris Club to beg for debt condonation. The same governments you beg to forgive your debt manage the systems, which safeguard your stolen wealth. But you want to ‘settle” instead of pressing harder on these governments to restore the booty to the Nigerian people. This Obasanjo bent is injustice in itself. He wants to reward injustice with a second injustice against the people! A double dose of injustice is as abusive as it gets. Is this presidential dash for settlement actually a dive for more funds for a second presidential election campaign? Obasanjo’s anti-corruption Commission is a phantom! It is an ill-concealed smokescreen designed to cover up high corruption. The masses may be dazed but are not comatose. They are watching and waiting as the gathering storm approaches landfall.
Another mutation of injustice is the infamous, universally well-documented, made-in-Nigeria advance fee scam, a.k.a. 419. This out-of-control crime was invented by Nigeria’s dictatorships when they used the Central Bank of Nigeria to lure and dupe unsuspecting foreign investors. They popularized the scam so much that common criminals deprived of access to the nation’s oil, instead bunkered their way into the hallowed halls of the last bastion of Nigeria’s financial integrity. The crooks have become so brazen and carefree, they could now even send their letters to a writer surnamed Igbokwe, without a hoot their quarry may be Nigerian.
When you rob the World from inside your own Central Bank, you destroy more than your credibility. You destroy the credibility of every person who in any way is associated with your country. Today, every Nigerian, at home and in the Diaspora, is universally indicted as a crook by this scam! But for a few token prosecutions, no high-profile peddler of this crime has been brought to book. And no sustained crackdown has ever taken place. Destroying these syndicates would do justice to the honest efforts of honest compatriots to eke out honest living. With oil-generated resources going to the secret offshore accounts of dubious politicians, and with no investments from wary foreigners, the Nigerian Everyman trudges on with his basket worn and tattered from injustice.
The plight of the Ogoni people is yet another perpetration of injustice by the Nigerian Centre. The most richly endowed citizens are the most callously deprived. The richest parcel of land in the country is the poorest and worst degraded. And yet, we are all supposed to be one people! The Centre-supervised injustice to Ogoniland has succeeded in raising a generation of citizens in pain and deprivation. And there are pockets and pockets of Ogoniland all across the South. Until justice is done to Ogoniland and other similar pockets of the Nigerian landscape, the nation will never know peace!
Perhaps, the ugliest face of Nigeria’s injustice is seen in the continuing prejudicial massacre of Ndigbo and other Southern Christians, which occurs with apparently scheduled intermittence in the Northern parts. Elected bigots, like their forebears, have fashioned doubtful spirituality into mad religious zealotry, whipping up fanaticism and hysteria and unleashing death and destruction on innocent citizens, on a whim. The latest outbreak of directed mayhem against Southern Christians in Kaduna and other Northern parts fits neatly in the cold calculation of homespun bigotry aimed to push the South to the precipice.
The mob violence in Kaduna, much like those before it, is nothing but state-sponsored terrorism! It has very little to do with the Miss World pageant or the supposed offensive reference to Prophet Mohammed by journalist Isioma Daniel. How could the Deputy Governor be so exercised by the reference when his culture, if not his religion, tolerates the forcible marriage of under-aged girls, in clear violation, not only of Nigeria’s federal laws but important United Nations Conventions? The Deputy Governor incited to murder and must be brought to justice! The Centre has innocent blood on its hands for its historical bias against justice. And the Obasanjo administration, as the government of the day, is responsible for the latest Northern misadventures into wanton murder and destruction.
It is true President Obasanjo inherited a bad situation from the dictatorship, but never before has history given so much to one man and never before has so little been delivered in return. It is Obasanjo’s unchristian fatalism that omnipotent God will solve all his problems, which has enabled a bad case to deteriorate to perhaps irretrievable depths. By not challenging the imposition of the primitive Sharia legal system in Kaduna, Mr. Obasanjo hoped the problem would fade away. Read correctly by a North that was ever willing to call his bluff, the Sharia brushfire snowballed, snapping up more than ten other states in its sweep. The result has been Safiya and more injustice for everybody else, less the Mullah enforcers.
But something has changed since the First Wave in 1967. Southerners, especially Ndigbo, cannot afford fatalistic pacifism! Biafra has taught us bitterly. We have also learned from the experiences of newly emancipated states like South Africa, Eritrea and the formerly occupied states of the un-mourned Soviet Empire. Oh yes, we have learned that freedom doesn’t come in 30 months! We have learned that freedom comes to only those who fight for it. It can take more than a lifetime, but if your cause is just and you keep at it, victory will surely bless dedication. In the life of a resourceful people, a second chance cannot be a pipe dream, given the prevailing conditions of orchestrated injustice. We are not afraid to be Nigerians and we cannot be afraid to be Biafrans or whatever else we choose to be at the appointed time. So the mullahs and their Mujahedin better watch it!
The massacre of the innocent in the North persists, because the Centre turns a blind eye to punishing the perpetrators. Southern Christians most of whom are Igbo have historically borne the crude brunt of this injustice. The storm continues to gather. And when it hits land, only the prepared will escape its fury!
In the end, justice is what Nigeria lacks; but needs badly in order to become a nation! After forty-two years of experimentation, the country remains a most unjust society, incapable of shedding its stigma as the most unjust colonial contraption in mother Africa. Her history is a World record in injustice. Her present outdoes her past in calloused, unfeeling wickedness against the weakest of her weak. I have never seen a state so blessed and yet so pained! I have never seen a society so endowed and yet so deprived! I have never seen a people so gifted and yet so perverted! And I have never seen a country so kind and yet so cruel! Private and public conscience have deadened from injustice. And all because of injustice from a Centre that has refused to hold the body! It makes your heart bleed!
Yes, the problem started from the Centre. The way to the solution will also lead from the Centre. Any nation which cannot protect her weak, cannot give justice to her deprived, cannot provide the enabling environment for honesty and honest dealings to exuberate and thrive, enough to root out injustice, does not deserve to survive! Such a state is impotent.
And Nigeria today is the best and the worst case of the impotent state!
Guides
The Impotent State