In a sweeping speech that had his hosts mostly uncomfortable on their
seats, Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka, gave a powerful speech at the South
South Summit in Asaba. Watch! and read the full speech below:Prof. Wole
Soyinka’s Speech Speaking Truth To Powerful Gang Of Corrupt Nigerian
Governors In Delta State
FULL TEXT OF SPEECH:
I must begin by thanking you for the honour of this invitation to
address you. I am glad that I did not have to decline, pleading the
truthful excuse that I am, unfortunately, still saddled with a heavy
load of unfinished business elsewhere. In any case, I have come to
accept that it is a condition of human existence to be saddled with this
particular affliction - unfinished business – that sense of an
incomplete mission. The difference between one individual and the next
is perhaps that some know this, while others do not. With individuals,
this distinction does not matter a great deal. We go into retirement
with a sigh of mission accompli, convinced that one’s self-imposed,
fortuitous, or mysteriously transmitted mission in life has indeed been
fulfilled. Or perhaps we simply shrug our shoulders in resignation,
saying, ‘Enough is enough, let others take over from here.’ No matter
the variant, we are still buried with our own self-assessment, accurate
or misconceived.
A sense of mission, and the identification of such a
mission varies from individual to individual, from institution to
institution, from community to community, with or without relationship
to one’s social status or formal responsibilities. For instance, you
might read that the United Nations is sending a fact-finding mission to
the Sudan to check on al-Bashir’s compliance with its latest directives.
Or that Amnesty International has sent a fact-finding mission to Burma,
to see whether the Burmese military dictators were truly easing up on
their stranglehold on Burmese democracy, ensure that the mere concession
of an electoral exercise, or the release of the opposition leader Aung
Suu Kyi, is not mere cosmetic, an excuse to clamp others into detention
or retain despotic powers by other means. Peace missions, or peace
initiatives – sometimes known, in the latest Nigerian parlance as Peace
Advocacy - are also just as commonplace. A former head of state in this
nation went on what he considered a peace advocacy mission to a group of
rampaging psychopaths who had laid siege to the nation. We may argue
from here to eternity about the appropriateness of that motion,
especially its timing, but at least he had some credentials for his
undertaking, and it would appear that the proposal came from some of
those who thought – rationally or with pathetic naiivette – that he
might play a useful role in stemming the tide of blood. The former
Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, was sent on a
mission to Syria, in an attempt to stop the Butcher of Damascus using
his people for target practice, and endeavour to bring both sides to the
negotiating table. Peace missions - or advocacy - come in various
shapes and guises. Quite a number of them are self-ascribed. Many
successful ones, such as that undertaken by a little known Irish group,
worked quietly, unpublicized but effectively to bring an end to the
decades long civil war in Mozambique. By contrast there are others which
only end up afflicting their target areas with all the bristling
paraphernalia of war, appropriate to themselves a disproportionate
amount of the security resources of a nation to inflict peace on a
perfectly peaceful environment, and with maximum gaudiness and
ostentation. Variously also deflected as a thank-you mission, they move
from state to state with all the extravagant baggage and panoply of
feudal potentates visiting vassal states. They seize up traffic in
throbbing commercial capitals, bring all motion to a halt, insisting on a
gift of peace on a state which never evinced any indications of warfare
nor asked for peace evangelism. The places where the nation may be said
to have be at war are known all over the world, not just within
Nigeria, but they do not venture there. No, it is to states which are in
the throes of peace, which evince no need of peace healing, that the
ministrations of such peace physicians lead what end up memorably as
carnivalesque caravans of disruption.
Traffic is tied up. Security is tied up. Productive
motion is tied up. Commerce is tied up. Governance is tied up.
Individual, corporate, even leisure schedules are tied up - all to
pander to bristling head-ties tied up in a floating parade of gorgeous
fabric, sterile, provocative and contemptuous of the rights of others to
their own desperate mission, the mission of generating the
life-sustaining morsel for family and self. A vanity parade born perhaps
of boredom or a feeling of neglect, this banal extravaganza, which
attained obscene heights with the military, has transferred to our
supposedly democratic environment under various pretexts, guzzling funds
and guzzling the productive time of others. Productive motion is held
to a standstill and citizen rights are trampled upon. This disrespectful
misappropriation of public space that exists primarily for the movement
of goods and humanity, especially by the unelected, by mere appendages
to constitutional power, has become a culture of spousal aggression and
can only beget a response of disrespect and ridicule from those it most
affects. There are numerous, far more creatively effective ways of
bringing the train of peace evangelism to places in need, or not in
need, and these do not involve the usurpation of the daily mission of
millions by the mission of any one individual.
Where were we? Oh yes, we were embarking on the theme of
missions. Every individual does have, or is entitled to have his or
her own self-assessment of the level of achievement of a life mission –
it does not matter in the least what that mission might be. The sense of
satisfaction in the fulfillment of that mission, or regrets about its
non-fulfillment remains primarily an individual assessment, and one that
accompanies each individual to his or her grave. With nations however,
there is little room for such indifference, and the reason is simple:
individuals vanish but nations endure – at least in one form or another -
and nations impact on the quality of existence of each transient
occupant. Each occupant therefore has a stake in the fortunes of the
nation, a stake that, proportionately speaking, equates the eternity
that we have optimistically conceded to the life-span of the nation. The
unfinished business of nation being is thus not one to which we, as
individuals, can afford to remain indifferent. In many more ways than we
like to admit, the nation defines its citizen. This means that the
citizen remains unfinished, a creature in the limbo of identity, leading
an improvised, unsecured and uncertain existence, until the nation
itself can boast of a recognizable and functional identity.
I do not refer merely to unfinished business as in
governance business - policy making, planning, execution, and so on.
No, I refer to that far more fundamental, unobtrusive, but nonetheless
comprehensive seizure of nation being. Some nations are wise enough to
acknowledge their state of incompletion, and take steps - even while the
business of governance remains uninterrupted - to tackle this essential
business head on, addressing the very history that brought them into
being and examining the factors - both positive and negative - that have
shaped their existence since they began to recognise, and conduct
themselves as nations. Others muddle on, immured in an impenetrable
carapace of complacency. They list their achievements, both internal and
external - economic buoyancy, a prestigious foreign policy, low level
of unemployment, a highly literate society, eradication of diseases,
uninterrupted electric power, potable water and other indices of
enhanced civic life, even IMF and World Bank approbation etc. etc - as
proof of the claim that they have “arrived”, and can confidently assess
themselves as nations, beyond the mere naming. They refuse to recognise
that some at least - not necessarily all but some part - of a suppressed
social malaise or political fractiousness can be traced to the basic
issue of the unfinished aspect of their self-constitutive process. This
includes those who cannot boast of even these medals of achievement,
those who, long after any self-respecting nation should have been
weaned, continue to insist that their endemic negative symptoms are
merely “teething problems.” Such nations are clearly on a self-destruct
trajectory.
Permit me to cite as analogy the ordeal of one my
children who, one day, during a routine basket ball game, collapsed and
passed out. Until then, he had experienced intermittent breathing
problems – they were put down as mild attacks of asthma and allergy –
you know, increase in pollen counts with seasonal changes and so on.
Until then however, nothing as drastic as an actual faint had ever
occurred. Fortunately, one of the paramedics who were called to the
scene felt that this was more than a mere asthmatic attack, or equally
benign incident – and so began a series of tests which merely increased
the bafflement of the diagnostic clinics and their specialists. A
period of round-the-clock monitoring was prescribed. He was banned from
any further sporting activities and was strapped to a gadget that
communicated directly to an emergency centre for any sign of recurrence.
No matter where he was, a fully equipped ambulance was on call, ready
to rush him to a clinic in case of a life-threatening recurrence – all
this, while various images of his heart, lungs, full body and brain
scans were subjected to analysis. The trouble was that some of these
scans gave off contradictory images, which simply drove the doctors to
distraction.
In the end, the mystery was solved. His condition was a
heart tumour, but not just any tumour. It was that uncommon type which
has a habit of sinking back into the wall tissues of the heart, and then
pulsing outwards, so that sometimes the instruments showed only one,
but at other times, two or three growths. Evidently these extrusions
would sometimes impede the regular flow of blood, which had led to his
passing out in the first instance. In one of these sophisticated
machines, one could actually watch the tumour change shape and contours,
flattening back invisibly into the wall. The option had already been
decided upon - open-heart surgery – but it was necessary to do a
thorough study of the behaviour of this pulsating growth before
embarking on the drastic process.
That decision was only the beginning. The surgical team
had to go back to school – that is, they were compelled to look up prior
cases, consult surgeons who had carried out similar operations. Video
recordings were exchanged. Finally, D-day. It was, I must confess, an
unnerving experience to see your son’s heart taken out of his body while
he was attached to an artificial heart that kept the blood pumping to
his system. As if that was not enough, we learnt that, after the heart
was re-attached and resuscitated, it suddenly stopped beating.
Injections, administration of electric shocks – the surgeons did what
they were trained to do and he survived.
Now, why have I bothered to go into details? Simply to
ensure that you do not overlook the mission that has – I presume –
brought us here today. The realities that compelled you – again,
presumably – to demand of yourselves what is missing from the delivery
of responsible governance and thus, seek strategies for their
fulfillment. You know that if that youth had been in our part of the
world, he would be long dead. And that applies to many deficiencies that
your citizens face – not merely in terms of the quality of life they
lead, but even the very threats to survival in numerous fields of
routine activities.
That is Lesson One. Many here have at least one such
story of deliverance, of an extract from real life that barely escaped
tragedy. Others were not so lucky. The stories they have to tell did not
have such a happy ending. We must not however lose sight of the
analogy, which goes deeper than the incidental vagary of the health of
one individual, but concerns the corporate body. Even the greatest
pundits can be wrong about the health of any organism - human,
institutional, or national. I am speaking here of the deceptiveness of
appearances – those of you who are soccer addicts would have read
recently of the collapse and death of an Italian player – my eye caught
the news because the story reached backwards to refer to similar
tragedies, sudden deaths of other athletes who had evinced no sign
whatsoever of a weakness in their anatomy. It happens all the time.
This nation must surely recall the shocking case of Kanu. Institutions
are no different – just see how the banking system in the most advanced
countries suddenly collapsed, creating a domino effect that saw
seemingly robust economies collapse one after the other. But here again,
we are still speaking simply of parts of a functioning totality, not
the entirety. A deep malaise may defy the most astute diagnostic minds,
leading to a complacent reading of its state of health. If however,
there is a sound, fundamental structure that holds the totality
together, that totality will override flawed mechanisms of the parts –
this is what is pulling many European nations out of the rut. Lucky,
therefore, is that entity that is urged from time to time to examine and
re-examine the very walls, tissues and muscles of the heart that pump
blood into its system. That it is beating sturdily does not mean that
there are no tumours embedded within its very interstices, waiting its
moment to strike while bounding confidently from one field of
undertaking to the next, overriding one hidden trauma after another, but
progressively weakened by each trauma inducing experience.
Most mortals do need to be left alone to find their feet
after any traumatic experience. The nation is no different, the most
enfeebling traumatic experiences in the Nigerian instance being both the
civil war and years of military rule. There is also the affliction of
illegitimacy –the dubious legitimacy of a large percentage of
representatives of the people’s supposed political will at the centre,
at the federal and national assemblies and even in the lodges of
executive governors. The percentage of occupational illegitimacy did
admittedly decrease over the last elections but, we still do know, and
they know that we know, that even in a seventy-five percent perfect
election, properly conducted, a vast number of the present
‘honourables’, senators and governors, could never have caught the
sheerest whiff of the wood varnish on the seats they now occupy. Some of
these are the most vociferous, most assiduous in their denunciation,
indeeed demonisation of the very notion of a genuine convocation of
peoples, that is, a convocation outside the sanctuary, privilege and
self-interest of the homes of illegitimacy, the convocation of a people
who wish to examine their present and decide their future.
Let me declare here that I have taken a decision never
again to add my voice to that call, having joined with others - two of
whom are now dead – to let the judiciary pronounce, at the very least, a
symbolic judgment on whether what now passes for a ‘people’s
constitution’ is indeed any such product of a people’s will, or yet
another product of illegitimacy hung around the nation’s neck like a
noose. That I shall no longer add my voice to that call however does not
mean that I abandon the right to examine, even if only as a contextual
exercise, the antecedents of that call, its provocation, the distortions
it has endured, and continues to endure, the potential consequences of
its rejection, and perhaps the true motivations of its opposing or
evasive voices.
Northwards from this very spot where we are gathered, a
daily decimation of our humanity pronounces its diabolical judgment on
the structure that still struggles to deserve the name nation, calling
in question, through its fiery monologues, the very legitimacy of our
nation being. Let me take this opportunity however to stress to us all
within the nation that this ongoing catastrophe is not the burden of any
one part of the nation by itself, but a fight of survival for the
totality of its humanity. The antecedents of the present national crisis
may seem particularized, the carnage concentrated on a geographical
sector – at least for now - the solution nonetheless remains the
responsibility of the entirety of the constituent parts. There is an
immeasurable gulf between taking up arms against the state and declaring
war against humanity.
I recall a cry from a stricken heart – metaphorically
speaking this time – when the United States of America invaded Iraq
under the pretext of looking for weapons of mass destruction. The Arab
League happened to be holding its session at the time, and its
Secretary-General was reported to have exclaimed: “the inhabitants of
hell have been let loose”. Several members of that League thought he
was merely being alarmist. The US president, George Bush certainly
thought so too, especially once he had overrun the defences of the
deluded tyrant Saddam Hussein. Several years after, not merely the
Middle East, but the entire world is still attempting to cope with the
rampages of the successors of those fiends from hell, unleashed through
past global defaults admittedly, but also ministering to their own
innate demonism, determined to drag the rest of the world down into
their own private and collective hells.
What applied to Iraq is both pertinent to, and apparent
in Nigeria – evade it how we will. The rejects even of hell have indeed
been let loose, but many prefer to shy away from the question: who let
them loose. How long was the present scenario in preparation? For how
long was the mind-set of its direct perpetrators nurtured, for how long
were impressionable minds doctored, warped and then homicidally
re-focused? Was it through secular ideological indoctrination – let us
say, a Marxist revolutionary orientation? Or was it through the
theocratic, serving however the power obsession of a minority? This is a
basic enquiry that should precede all else. However, the nation has
elected, in the main, to climb aboard the conveyance of evasion, bound
for the bunker of denial. Those who unleashed the denizens of hell are
among us, they did not come from outer space, they are known, and they
know where their myrmidons retreat while they prepare their next outrage
on the populace. I invite you to take a hard look, for instance, at the
photos of those killers of the Italian and British hostages, finally
trapped in Kaduna. Do you seriously think that they – and hundreds like
them - are independent actors in the ongoing rampages? Does anyone still
believe that they sponsored themselves to training grounds, on this
continent or outside, in some infernal regions, for their deadly mastery
of weapons of human evisceration? Their sponsors are not phantoms. They
are real. They exist among us. But, phantoms or not, today, they are
afraid. Their own agents of destruction have turned upon them, demanding
evidence of preparations of the theocratic utopia that was dangled
before them, a utopia founded on theocratic myopia that nerved them to
acts of total disregard for fellow humanity and a passion for
self-immolation.
How do we disable such forces? Let me insist on the
negative – not by appeasement. Not by utterances or gestures of
appeasement. Those who seek to dominate others do not understand the
language of appeasement. To them it translates as endorsement,
multiplies their self-righteousness and urges them to even greater acts
of contempt for humanity. Dialogue is a cultured, always commendable
device – in principle. However, I must call attention to a fervent
contradiction – within this general field of dialogue - that appears to
have escaped certain among our pundits of dialogue at all costs. Here it
goes:
On the one hand, those very voices are on their knees
urging dialogue on the assailants. On the other, those whose call for
dialogue – but on a wider, national scale - holds out the possibility,
at the very least, of a holistic apprehension of the far-reaching causes
and prescriptions for remedial action for the guarantee of a future,
are told to go and have their heads examined. Therein lies the
contradiction. A force for blind violence comes to the fore, a force
that manifests utter contempt for that very civilized facilitator of
co-existence called Dialogue, yet, hardly has the first prickle of blood
been drawn before the chorus goes up - let’s invite them to sit down
and talk. Tell us what you want and we’ll see what can be done. And even
before that, there were already calls for Amnesty. The sequence is
important – let us keep this in mind. Now, what is this supposed to
indicate? That only through the language of terror can one make oneself
heard?
One side says, let us sit down peacefully, as free
peoples, and work out a new order of internal relationships and
overarching governance. The other says, I already have my own
unilaterally concluded order of internal relationships, divinely
ordered, beyond questioning by mere mortals, subject to no tests of
rationally, equity or experimentation. To the first, the response that
hits their ears is – nothing doing. To the other however – at least
from those responsible for the health and survival of the nation, the
response is, ‘please, come and talk to us.’ And for their pains, what
has been the constant reward? A few hundred souls in their daily routine
of scraping a living from the sales of basic, life sustaining products
of farm and manufacture, and yet a hundred more, gathered on their okada
motor-cycles, waiting to transport those market men and women to their
farmstead and homes, workers to their factories and homes, are
unconscionably blasted to eternity. Thus comes into being the ordination
of two competing sovereign states, one pleading for dialogue, the other
contemptuous of the very word.
Yes indeed, ‘sovereignty’. The sovereignty of the
nation, we are lectured, is non-negotiable, and that mystic possession –
sovereignty - would be imperiled if the constituent parts of the nation
do indeed embark on a dialogue of free peoples. It’s a very portly word
– sovereignty – mouth-filling, and chest expanding. It is designed to
stop all arguments. Merely pronounce that a form of action is a threat
to the illusionary banquet called sovereignty and the world is supposed
to go into seizure from sheer surfeit. One can only marvel at what
happened to this patrimony of ‘sovereignty’ when a Buhari, a Babangida
or a Sanni Abacha terminated preceding sovereign claims with a mere
radio announcement accompanied by a martial tune. Some of the more
hysterical among our current voices, opposed to a people’s dialogue, did
not wait for the military spittle to dry out on the air-waves before
they vanished into the obscurity of their villages. In this case
however, today, Dialogue as a voluntary undertaking, an operative stage
in nation-being, as an expression of collective will, increasingly
voiced even in hitherto unexpected sectors, is being derided.
Sadly, one can sometimes understand causes for the
vilification of this recourse. Only a few days ago, the clamour for
Dialogue – the genuine kind that is – was joined by one of the most
nauseous and obsequious, self-ingratiating servitors of the repellent
dictatorship of Sanni Abacha. Such incidental bed-fellows make one
despair but, as we say, this is a democracy, and even those who seek to
sanitize their past by a cynical revision of a history through which we
all lived and survived – thank goodness - must be given a hearing. The
message, not the messenger – that must be our meager consolation.
I merely play the devil’s advocate. I have lost all
interest in the call for a National Conference and, at the very end, my
prescriptions shall be made plain. For now let us also offer a material
solace to those who are morbidly afraid of a national dialogue. In the
highly unlikely event that such a mythical National Conference concludes
its work with a rational agenda that garners the approbation of an
overwhelming majority, leading to a clamour for instant implementation,
such demurrers would only be bowing to the clearly articulated will of
the people, as opposed to a bunch of adventurist individuals in uniform.
This, of course, is only an extreme speculation, designed to douse the
dismissive, unreflective, more sovereign-than-thou,
what-we-have-we-hold, what-exists-is-holy mentality that has corrupted
the reasoning of some of these opposing voices.
It is actually a liberating position, abandoning the
chimera of a National Dialogue. It leaves one free to confront one
prospect, the most challenging prospect of all – the future. Where else
does one look at this stage? The future naturally, leapfrogging the
chancy route of what a dialogue might bring, seizing the future by the
throat and demanding of ourselves – what can we make of that future,
with or without dialogue? But first, what do we see when we do turn to
that future? Yes, let us first direct our gaze at that future, which
means – let this present speak to the future. So, what does it say? I
urge that we address ourselves dispassionately, not fantasize, not
simply project the future of our escapist desperation. We shall let our
present interrogate that future, and what does it spell? Peril. An
imperiled future, and that means – an imperiled generation of a nation’s
humanity.
We obtain a preview of a future that is finally divested
of the surviving scraps of the opportunities that many of my generation
enjoyed when we were indeed pronounced as that future that is now our
present. In practical details, what the present projects objectinely as
its offspring, is a vista of brain wastage, thanks to unstable tumours
that peek and vanish, undetected, and when detected, are left
uncorrected. A future that is very much in doubt, a future tarnished and
devalued by a succession of incontinent, irresponsible leadership,
decked in both civilian and military outfits, but mostly of the
military. A future where the intangible yet reinforced pillar of
civilized society – such as justice - has become available on the open
market. I am making no new assertions and, do not take my word for it.
Revert to internal motions for reforms such as the Justice Eso
commission of enquiry into the judiciary and also call to mind various
pronouncements of the National Bar Association. Ask yourselves how it
comes about that one of your former members of this very governorship
consortium is currently basking in immunity, having succeeded in
obtaining a judicial injunction against prosecution for his crimes
against the future, perpetrated while in office. Do we need to point out
that as a nation we are covered with shame that it took an external
court of justice, of the former colonial masters, to finally put an end
to the costly shenanigans of another of your former brother governors,
one who held the forces of anti-corruption at bay, led them a merry
dance all the way to Dubai until he was plucked out of his imagined
sanctuary?
And what of that judge, the judge who freed him of over a
hundred and fifty criminal charges here, in this very nation,
pronounced him innocent of blasting the very future of the generations
under his watch by a career of systematic, unconscionable robbery? Why
are we surprised therefore to find ourselves faced with a future where
all sense of community has all but evaporated and only predators roam
the streets, making their own laws of survival as they proceed. Yes,
they make their own laws, for even these know that without law, written
or unwritten, there is no community, and without community, all talk of
nation is vain. Nations are built on the palpable operations of
community, otherwise they are empty, artificial and hollow. They
collapse with the tiniest pinpricks of unrest, they drift into oblivion
with the slightest winds of external pressure. So, that learned judge
held the strings of community in his hands, the judge who pronounced our
elusive governor free of all blemish, that custodian and administrator
of justice, our question today is - is he still passing judgment in
this nation, or has he proceeded on retirement leave to Dubai?
We must resume our path of enquiry into the two faces of dialogue
that confront us in the present. Let it be inserted in the memory of our
countrymen and women - some did anticipate this very present. Simply as
a general framework of deductive intelligence, projection and concern,
the democratic alliance that fought Sanni Abacha did call upon the
stop-gap regime of General Abdusallami Abubakar to set up an Interim
government, side by side with a Sovereign National Conference. That
conference would debate the future of this nation. Civil life had been
deliberately panel-beaten - to resort to familiar parlance - thoroughly
panel-beaten during the reign of Ibrahim Babangida, then the hobbling,
rickety vehicle was conclusively crashed under the tyranny of Sanni
Abacha. The nation, we insisted, required a recovery space, a period for
stock-taking, during which the ruptured interstices of civil life would
be stitched together. Then, and only then, should we commence a
systematic democratic resumption. We could not advocate a so-called
democratisation process that was built on a privatised constitution.
That succinctly argued recourse was not followed. It is still being
brushed aside as preposterous. Is it any wonder that a group of people
are writing their own constitution in the streets, in the markets, in
motor garages, in churches and mosques, a constitution that is being
scrawled in the blood of innocents? The writing on the wall is no longer
a mere biblical metaphor, it refers graphically today to the spattered
grafitti of blood on the walls of our homesteads, schools, offices,
sanctuaries of worship and children’s nurseries. That writing is the
universal language of nations, on the road to perdition.
Permit me to recall an exercise in a minor key in one’s
seeming obsession with the future which, of course, I continue to see as
the immutable responsibility of the present, otherwise, what is the
present all about? In the early years of the return of the nation to
civilian rule, I was invited to take part in a rather imaginative form
of mentoring, initiated by a Japanese Television station, loaded with
the grandiose name – Super Teachers. It involved having a selected
group of teachers – not necessarily teachers by profession – take a
group of school pupils under their wing for a number of weeks. Those
teachers were selected on the basis of having attained some prominence
in their disciplines. They were free to decide on a school, and from
that school extract a class, or a group of pupils across classes, then
expose them to aspects of their own calling. Science, technology,
architecture, the performing arts etc – virtually all disciplines were
represented, and the entire mentoring interaction was filmed. What I
privately relished in that project – this is just by the way - was that
it enables me till today to boast that, for a few weeks at least, I was
on the same payroll and salary as Bill Gates. I know that he would not
have touched his honorarium – if at all they dared offer him such
pittance. However, as a man whose field is virtual reality, he would be
the first to concede to me when I claim that, virtually speaking, we
were earning the same salary from a shared project! So much for
vicarious living. The programme, I was about to elaborate, allowed for
the pupils to be taken anywhere that related to, or could enhance the
imparting of knowledge – within the station’s budget of course.
Thus, in the process of selecting a school, that school
understood that it was obliged to release the pupils to accompany the
mentor wherever – I recall that the American pupils were flown to some
part of North Africa where the archeologist in the Super Teachers team
was working on an excavation site. In my own case, the producers agreed
that I would travel with my students to other parts of the country – it
was an opportunity to expose the pupils to the nation’s diversity -
religion, culture, history, the arts – whatever came under the rubric of
Humanities. Now, as It happened at the time, I had also received
invitations from two or three legislative houses to address them, and so
I seized the opportunity to induct my pupils into the work of law
makers. We began with Lagos where I off-loaded them on the public
gallery of the House of Assembly. Afterwards, they were free to ask
questions, make observations, and we would exchange views on their
experience. I want you to listen carefully to the following extract from
my address to the Lagos House of assembly:
“I invite you, honourable members, to look up at that
gallery. You will observe that you have some rather unusual visitors. I
have brought them here to observe how law is enacted, but more
importantly, to see how their future is being shaped.”
I proceeded to provide the house a brief summary of the
Super Teachers project, recommended it to the them as a possible model
for emulation on some level or the other, but then I went on to say,
and again I quote my very words on that occasion, words that placed my
mission in the context of the nation’s realities, the context of some
portentous events that came to dominate the news at that very time. I
said:
“Now imagine if we had gone, let us say, to Kaduna state
just about a month ago, during those days that are for ever branded on
the memory of this nation, days of horror when some of the desperate
politicians of this nation fomented an artificial upheaval in the name
of religion, a conspiracy that led to the loss of over a thousand souls
all over the nation, some in the most gruesome circumstances, both from
the initial execution of meticulously planned massacres, and in
retaliatory acts that took place in scattered places across the nation.
Among the victims were innumerable schoolchildren who were led out of
their schools and slaughtered like rams for the very guilt of innocence.
Imagine if I had led these innocents into such an inferno - tell me,
just what kind of explanation would I have made to their parents. What
treasure of the learning experience would I claim was worth such a
horrifying ending to promising lives?
“It was a period that brought out the worst, the worse
than bestial from our human landscape, but also the best - let us note
this carefully - it also brought out the best, thanks to a handful of
that same humanity, who risked their lives to protect their fellow
beings from the initial mayhem, and from the retaliatory rage that was
being exercised by their own kin and neighbours. Yes indeed, this did
happen - as is the case wherever the outbreak of the virus of insanity
is recorded - but how pitifully meagre is this consolation beside the
depravity that overwhelmed the entirety of the nation.”
It is twelve years since I uttered those words, and it
reads like a lament that anyone could have uttered yesterday or today –
only the choice words would have to come out far with greater rage, born
of the recurrent extrusion of that hidden tumour in the very walls of
the heart, a tumour that merely alters shape, contours and size but a
tumour nonetheless. And it is not merely religion that I have in mind.
My busload of schoolchildren clanged forcefully on the walls of my mind
only some weeks ago when I read of a similar busload, in my own state,
filled with the designated future of the nation, this time from a girls’
school. That bus was waylaid, its occupants robbed, assaulted and raped
– that is the level of depravity to which the nation has been brought.
On that road of the pupils’ matyrdom was re-enacted the continnum of
the history of this nation: Violation. Rape.
And who are have been the gang-bangers of the nation’s
future? We can bypass the military – we know them already. Those are
defined, not only by their uniform, but by their uniform arrogance,
their unbridled rapacity and their uninformed propensity for sterile
interventions. Are there no others? Of course there are, and because
they tend to lack open identification, they are especially dangerous.
But we do know them, and so do you. They are the ones who, even while
claiming to defend the rights and entitlements of their own
constituencies, do little more than defend the rights and entitlements
of their privileged existence. They are the generator contractors in
whose interest it is that the national electric system never works. They
are the minority who conspire to run down the health system of the
nation, since they can divert its allocation to their own, and their
families’ excursion to Wiesbaden for annual checks and fly to New York
to cure a toothache. They are the ones who systematically destroyed the
educational system which we took for granted throughout our own past
that has engendered this present. They are the petroleum moguls and
long-haulage monopolists who have ensured that this nation has never
enjoyed the cheapest form of transport ever invented by humanity - the
railways.
These agents are the ones who see government solely as
livelihood, and who engage in every dirty trick in the books to ensure
that government remains in their hands since they know of no other way
to survive, have never understood that a nation’s economy must be
generated, not printed at the Central Bank or simply diverted from the
oil wells and central handouts, These enemies were the inventors of the
Rice Importation Scheme, the Cement Importation Scheme, the Import
Licence Scheme, the Counter Trade and numerous other scam schemes that
were designed not to generate productivity and ensure employment for
generations, but to amass, in the hands of a few, the entire wealth of
the nation, from which they dole out pittances to a zombie followership.
But sooner or later, zombies turn, recognize that they are also
creatures of flesh and blood – then they demand their pound of flesh.
They call themselves leaders and claim to fight for
their people but, today, they are indeed afraid. They have sat long upon
the masses but today, they go about in fear. And such is the nature of
this fear – it is no longer those who were routinely denounced as
outsiders to, and hate filled critics of their way of life that they
fear, but their own restless masses who have seen through their
deception, their hypocrisy, their incontinence and their will to
dominate. For this minority, serving a constituency means, not the
elevation of the social condition of their people, but the enclosure of
such a constituency within the walls of dependency. The sense of
existence of such leaders is fulfilled only if, on sauntering out of
their homes, they are surrounded by a constituency of beggars. Their
self-fulfillment lies only in the non-fulfillment of their immediate,
impoverished community. But their lies have been exposed and they have
become frightened. And this exposure has taken place despite the pogroms
that they periodically launched against scapegoats and innocents – in
preliminary softening-up surges on their environment, based on
manufactured or distorted incidents - utilising their armies of zombies
whose horizons are firmly, deliberately limited from birth to a meagerly
space, horizons whose circumference was, quite simply, the rims of
their bowls of beggary.
The demand – and here come my last words on the subject,
a necessary summary of the past – the demands from multiple and varied
directions for a National Conference is as old as political
consciousness. Nor is it a demand that has been solely born out of a
crisis. It is a demand that is born out of the recognition of an
unfinished business, and that business is the business of
nation-becoming. Many people have acknowledged, in various forms, that
Nigeria is not yet a nation. It is therefore only intelligent to see the
demand for an encounter among peoples as a response to this awareness,
one that is shared by millions but is often conveniently camouflaged. A
crisis is merely the immediate triggering cause for the resurrection of
the idea, but a crisis is not the underlying motivation for such a
recourse. We do acknowledge however that after a civil war, after
military interventionism that has interrupted, and virtually subverted
the creative tempo of true national building, after the inordinate
consumption of a hegemonic but vastly tentacular minority – and I repeat
– a minority that has destroyed trust among the peoples of this nation,
it is time to resume our quest towards nationhood.
To all legislators, and indeed executive heads who are
so jealously protective of their so-called sovereignty, may I end this
reprise by reminding them that the call has always been: carry on the
task for which you were elected. Nothing in what was ever proposed
contradicted such functions. Simultaneously with such functions however,
the people demanded a forum for a mutual encounter among those who do
not have an eye to the next election, who are not fearful of losing a
luxury existence that bleeds the treasury of its life-blood, those who
are not constrained by horse-trading and back-room ‘settlement’ for the
passage of some bill upon which the functioning of the nation depends.
Let us bear in mind however that it has always been within the rights
and prerogatives of any group of people to engage in strategies for
facilitating such an assemblage of minds.
All that has been said, all that has been argued and, in
my view, there need be no further call for such a conference, only a
clear understanding of the multiple causes for its constant resurgence.
It is however time to stop barking up a wrong tree, and envisage instead
what motions would have characterised such a conference were it to have
taken place. In other words, it is time to act the national conference,
not summon it. And I believe that this is what we are participating in
today, a continuation of former initiatives, in the ongoing encounters
of regional groupings. There was the earlier one in Lagos a few months
ago and, hopefully, these will be followed by others, all the way
eastward and northward all the way towards Maiduguri and Kano when those
beleaguered sectors have ridden themselves of the horrors of the
mindless insurgency. My reading is then is as follows:
Central to these gatherings will be the very antithesis
of that word ‘central’ – decentralization. Engaging in policies and
strategies of development that progressively renders the centre reduced
in its ability to impede – for this is what has been the norm – impede
the pace and quality of development of the constituent parts of the
nation. The constitutional envelope that currently holds the parts
together should be pushed as far proves possible without it actually
bursting, leading to a vibrant competition – and collaboration - among
its constituent parts. It is then left to the courts of arbitration to
interpret those areas where it might appear that the envelope has been
pushed too far. And let no one imagine that this is still the aberrant
season of that Third Term Desperado and Denier who defied the courts in
their decision over the illegal seizure of the statutory revenues of
Lagos and some other states. The people now know what to do, and have
proved it. Lagos stood firm. Leadership is half the battle but
followership must also prove its mettle. Each regional grouping should,
by its policies, declare an uncompromising developmental autonomy – I
repeat, Autonomy - leaving the centre only with its competence
provenance – foreign policy, national security and inter-state affairs -
including peace subversive Peace Advocacy – but minus its propensity
for inflicting heart seizure on productive human concourse.
There need be no further calls for a national
conference. Let each regional grouping with compatible ideas of the
ultimate mission – the future of the humanity for which they are
responsible – begin to call the shots, and relegate the centre to its
rightful dimensions in any functioning federated democracy. Let each
state call its own conference of peoples to articulate in just what
direction they wish to direct their leaders and relate to the centre and
other states. Let each regional grouping and its member states
single-mindedly project and pursue their strategies for the enhancement
of the quality of life and the dignity of their peoples, quarry into
their resources to extract the material required for their very
existence, material that they can exchange among one another based on
their spatial developmental advantages - in short share among themselves
areas of specialization, substituting strength for the weakness of
their partners, expertise for deficiencies in one member or the other.
Such collaborating states need not even be contiguous,
what matters is a community of interests, no matter how physically
distanced from one another. Nigeria has proved too large and
inefficient for the centralized identification and management of such
human skills and material resources, the centre having become
self-aggrandizing, bloated, parasitic and alienated. Now is the time to
put into practice that ancient saying: Small is beautiful. We must
return to the earlier days of creative rivalry that pronounces that
vanishing past an interrupted project of promise, creativity and
productivity. Then, it may be possible for your generation to say
contentedly, even while the harvest is still distant but the soil is
cleanly prepared, the seeds implanted and germinating: Mission?
Accomplished!
Wole Soyinka
