Visioners, then, must be seen as persons with progressive ideas and dreams. I take it that these ideas and dreams shall have the quality of not only looking ahead but, more importantly, being able to grasp the truth that underlies the fact of our existence as a people, as a one nation. I don’t know quite how to express this, but in my search for a credible explanation, my mind keeps going back to the same worries I had about (late Gen.) Abacha’s Vision 2010.
The greatest problem confronting Nigeria today – the problem that most threatens our existence as one nation – is political. Abacha’s attempt at visioning ought to have been expressed as a sort of Magna Carta – a political document. Thereafter, this political document can be translated into economic platforms by various actors who come into or seek to come into government. Having rejected the option of a sovereign national conference, the Abacha regime compounded the problem by setting up a teleguided constitutional conference whose recommendations were further bastardised by a ruling cabal of military officers. It came as no surprise that the subsequent Vision 2010 document turned out to be an economic document that was anchored on the prior resolution of our national question. The Vision 2010 report mentioned, quite correctly, that we ought to settle our political differences before we can successfully implement it.
My worry is this: Can the Zamfara experiment, expressed as a vision of our future, help us settle our political differences?
A country’s vision of its future need not be several tomes of bound report, a la Abacha’s Vision 2010. It can be captured in one imaginative phrase that fires the waning spirit of a people. We have charismatic leaders and creative writers with the necessary skills to develop and encapsulate the Nigerian condition into a vision. If we say, as the Abacha report proclaims, that A Great Country is Ours to Build, we at once thrust an unwanted burden on the individual Nigerian. We must face the truth. No one wants to build a great country called Nigeria. At the same time, we all secretly love Nigeria because, compared to other civilized nations of the world, the possibilities here are quite astounding, seemingly limitless. The goal of the individual Nigerian tends to be to sacrifice something to build a great family, to sacrifice something to amass a personal fortune, to sacrifice something to build a formidable spirit of service to the Almighty.
If what is sacrificed were spiritual, honest and progressive, we would have long ago constructed the great country of our dream. Unfortunately, rather than sacrifice “sweat, blood and tears” to achieve our goals, most of those who knock at Nigeria’s many doors of opportunity come armed with guns, poison tongues and pens, and axes to grind with the nation.
Let me reach back into history. In 1835, the French liberal statesman and political writer, Alexis de Tocqueville, visited the fledgling democracy in the Unites States of America and came away with insightful observations about what made that country work, and would make it great in the future. What he saw was a society where every citizen began life on an equal footing. What he saw, as one American president later put it, was “a nation of people with fresh memories of old (oppressive) traditions who dared to explore new frontiers, people eager to build lives for themselves in a spacious society that did not restrict their freedom of choice and action.”
Now, these old (oppressive) traditions are worth emphasizing because they were inspired by religion. The first set of immigrants to the US consisted of people escaping religious persecution in the Continent, Catholics and Protestants alike. In other words, they were escaping societies that insisted on running nation states the way that rulers perceived the Almighty had instructed. As is the case with Zamfara State today, church and state were fused, and the state thereafter became a willing, coercive tool in the hands of religious fundamentalists. The New World provided a safe haven to begin a new life that the escapees swore to be governed by the same rights and freedoms that we appear to be using today to return us to the Zamfara vision.
And this is the point. We hear some people proclaim that our constitution guarantees each individual a right to freedom of religion. The operative world is individual; our constitution does not guarantee the state the right to freedom of religion. What I thought our founding fathers were saying is that no individual should be punished for choosing to subscribe to any one faith or religious ideology. Our constitution, in my view, is not trying to provide a platform for individuals to band together in order to use the powers of the state to enforce a religious tenet, because this action will directly challenge the rights of other individuals with different religious ideologies in the same state. There should be no state law to enforce a religious tenet, in a multi-religious state, and in a secular nation-state, for the sake of democracy, order and good government.
To return to Tocqueville and America. When the Frenchman wrote his famous “Democracy in America,” the Negro and the American-Indian questions had not been resolved. But among the immigrants who took over the land, this was the American idea, described imaginatively by Tocqueville himself as the Spirit of Equality. This spirit is captured in two ideals. One: It should be possible for all men and women who start life at the bottom to rise to the highest heights where their talents and energy can propel them. Two: in this journey to the top, “neither race, nor creed, nor place of birth (nor indeed place of domicile) should affect their chances.”
This Spirit of Equality bears further
explanation, since it is not possible for the condition of everyone in society
to be equal; the Almighty creates people with different capacities, skills,
attributes. Equality is, must be measured with the standards by which society
organizes itself for the purpose of enjoying its freedoms and its
opportunities. If society does not accord special privileges to some of its
members on account of tribe, religion, station, sex, or birth, society members
will have equal opportunity to succeed. But because of differences in individual
condition, skills, and capacity, some members of society are bound to do better
than others. But those who are not so well-performing will keep alive the hope
that tomorrow will be better, the certainty that there will be no legal,
institutional, or conventional barriers against their hope for a brighter
tomorrow. This certainty is assured by the state, which remains to maintain the
level playing field that protects the disadvantaged even as it encourages the
advantaged.
If we
assemble ten forthright Nigerians from as many ethnic groups, they would easily
agree on what to do about the Nigerian problem, and on what would constitute
our vision of the future.
To the
Zamfara state governor and legislators, I would say this: Our vision should
have been about two things; how to set the standard for conduct that would
release the energies of the people to hope and to dare; and how to ensure that
any individual or group does not, in future, appropriate the instruments of
power and use it to unleash a reign of arbitrariness on the system. The first
victim of arbitrary rule is usually the laws that ensure our spirit of equality,
the rules that govern civilized conduct. The military usurps power simply
because civilian politicians have so far been guilty of such arbitrariness
which, together with corruption, throws Nigeria repeatedly into the Hobbesian
state.
