The Impossible Necessity of Nigeria: A Struggle for Nationhood

"We have lost the twentieth century," lamented Chinua Achebe, one of Nigeria's brilliant literary sons, in 1983, "are we bent on seeing our children also lose the twenty-first?" The three towering figures of Nigeria's early years of independence -- Obafemi Awolowo, Nnamdi Azikiwe, and Sir Ahmadu Bello -- had all at some point in their careers expressed doubts about preserving Nigeria as one country. In 1947 Awolowo even commented that Nigeria was not a nation but "a mere geographic expression."

Now Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka rekindles the long-running debate about the possibility of Nigerian survival in his combative new political essay, The Running Sore of a Continent: A Personal Narrative of the Nigerian Crisis. For three decades a tireless foe of a succession of predatory regimes, Soyinka's contempt for the most recent military custodians of Nigerian nationhood echoes the sentiments of many of his fellow Nigerians. Is Nigeria a nation, and should it be?

Soyinka's powerful prose brilliantly sketches the dilemmas plaguing Africa's demographic giant and reveals the stark choices facing Nigeria, a nation brought to the edge of ruin by the misappropriation of its oil wealth. His own ambivalence about "the national question" bears witness to the broader uncertainties among many Nigerians. Except for those who benefit directly from the status quo, most view the exercise of authority and political practice in Nigeria as morally bankrupt. Does a state shamelessly plundered by a succession of rulers have any legitimate claim on the loyalty of its citizenry? Can the nation be reborn, redeemed, and resurrected from below? In Soyinka's view, the results of the June 1993 elections held the promise of just such a redemption, but their annulment plunged the country into the direst straits it has yet encountered. He still prefers a single Nigeria to any other immediately available outcome, but concedes that he "frankly could not advance any invulnerable reason for my preference for a solution that did not involve disintegration."

Soyinka's intellectual odyssey reflects the trajectory of Nigerian nationalism. Like many of his generation, he began with a devout commitment to a strongly united Nigeria of socialist orientation and pan-African bent. The disappointments of the First Republic (1963-66) compelled Soyinka to reconsider his political moorings. He became an early adversary of military rule and took an active part in some progressive intellectuals' efforts to avert civil war. He later opposed both the Biafra secession and its violent suppression. Soyinka's criticism of the use of military force to end the secession cost him a two-year sojourn in squalid dungeons, cementing his implacable opposition to military dictatorship; his eloquent 1972 memoir, The Man Died, provides a gripping account of his incarceration. Maintained at the price of prolonged periods of enforced exile, his personal courage and integrity command broad respect.

Soyinka's authority also springs from his literary stature. A playwright, poet, novelist, and author of a vivid autobiography of a Yoruba childhood, he received a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986. Soyinka's political writings have always combined polemical force with expository grace, and his stinging characterization of Nigeria as a failed state is no exception.

Nor could it be more timely. The brutal execution in November 1995 of Ogoni leader Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight of his associates highlighted once again the uncertain bonds between a would-be Nigerian "nation" and its subject ethnic communities. Ogoni discontent germinated in the deepening conviction that Ogoniland's ecosystem had been ravaged in pursuit of oil production, the revenues from which accrued entirely to the Nigerian state, with little benefit returned to the Ogoni community.

But the struggle between the Ogoni and General Sani Abacha's military dictatorship is not relevant for Nigeria alone. The stakes of Nigeria's survival are high for all of Africa. A further downward spiral of institutional decay could spark an implosion that would flood neighboring states with an unmanageable wave of refugees. Beneath the relative calm of Nigeria's surface lies a far-reaching crisis of legitimacy.

A CONSTRUCTED NATION

Nigeria is an artifact of the colonial partition. Even its name and original national anthem, as Soyinka reminds us, were the creations of British women. But if Nigeria began as an imagined community, it became real enough through shared subjugation and resistance to coerced consolidation, a process eloquently described in James Coleman's 1958 classic, Nigeria: Background to Nationalism. Conventional wisdom holds that stable governance requires the legitimating embrace of nationhood, spawning the often forced state discourse of "nation-building." Both the Nigerian rulers who succeeded to power in 1960 and their erstwhile British tutors saw the need for just such nation-building.

As they conceived it, Nigerian nationhood rested on three pillars: the state, as competent manager of the public realm; a "federal character," with equilibrated roles for the three large ethnic communities and the many smaller ethnic minorities; and the democratic process. The growing fear in Nigeria today that a Nigerian nation may be what Soyinka has called a mere "farcical illusion" is the result of manifest dereliction on all three fronts.