CONFLICT management, not in a restricted sense of separating two people fighting, but in the wider sense of healing fissures in the society, has been the greatest disaster of post-colonial Africa.
In fact, many African leaders of his generation went along with the late Houphet Boigny, former Ivorian leader, who said that order is more important than justice.
According to him, one can die from disorder, but not from injustice. Believing that injustice is not as destructive as lack of order, they invested so much in the instruments of order- secret police, armed forces and other para-military instruments.
They reduced their societies into giant graveyards because every one was afraid to talk for fear of midnight arrests. There were only few exceptions among that generation that were not following this trajectory, people like Patrice Lumumba, Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, Ben Bella, Ahmed Sekou Toure and who again?
After many decades of one-man ruthless rule across Africa, almost the entire continent exploded into orgies of violence in which the humanity of man found expression in deep-seated hatred for fellow country men and women along tribal/ethnic religious and other fault lines.
It has been a life of ordeal and misery for the African in the reality captured by Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Somalia, Angola, Mozambique, Sudan, Ethiopia, Uganda, Chad, Liberia, Algeria, Rwanda, Burundi, Sierra Leone, Cote d?lvoire, Cameroun, Togo, Senegal, Ghana, Mali, Niger and many more.
Of the 32 peacekeeping operations launched since 1989, said Kofi Annan in 1998, 13 were in Africa and this is more than anywhere else in the world. This says a lot about Africa?s unfair quota of world ethnic crises.
The conflict situation was such that people were wondering what had befallen Africa. This mood was well captured in an edition of the South African Journal of International Affairs, where the Nigerian political scientist, Prof Eghosa Osaghae, wrote a paper, titled, ?The Persistence of Conflicts in Africa: Management Failure or Endemic Catastrophe?
Before Africa had the luxury to contemplate this title, the genocide in Rwanda broke out.
When the Rwandan genocide was on, some media outlets in the West published articles that framed the crisis in terms of ?tribal violence,? specifically ?uncontrollable spasm of lawlessness and terror, based on centuries-old history of tribal warfare and deep distrust of outside intervention.?
In other words, for some people, the conflict epidemic is an endemic catastrophe, a product of a genetic disinclination to civility in the African.
For others, the African crisis is a product of conflict management failure, not endemic catastrophe, because ethnic or religious conflicts abound everywhere in the world, never peculiar to Africa.
This is where Jigawa State Governor Sule Lamido comes in, when he told Speakers of the state Houses of Assembly in the North recently to take up, in unison with others, the restoration of the North.
According to him, there is problem in the North that has to do with the overthrow of the ideals of fairness, justice and equity, the outcome of which is the return to ethnic and localist tents.
But the return to and fighting from ethno-racial and religious holes is an attack on the concept of the original North, which he said, was founded on the credo that one has to be a human being before s/he can be a Christian or a Muslim. And that it is because we do not take note of this that the North has become a virtual battleground.
There is an achievement in this pronouncement, in the sense that very few people are thinking along this line, many of us having turned our back on progressive politics in favour of counter cultural political attitude.
There is a sense in which the situation in Nigeria since 1984 excuses this, but that then means we should take note of the few who still retain a modicum of progressive thinking.
The second achievement is providing a formula for conflict management. It is one thing to preach peace, but another thing to put forward a formula for bringing about peace.
It is the Lamido formula for conflict management, with particular reference to the North, that is the subject of this piece.
In the late 1970s, Prof Claude Ake warned that we were marching towards the point we are now when he wrote as follows: ?The third historic possibility, which lies before Africa is a march to fascism. This could come about in a situation where there was protracted economic stagnation, but not yet revolution.
?During such a period, the contradictions of underdevelopment would be acted out and indeed made all the more dramatic, precisely because of the long drawn-out economic stagnation.
?As the economic stagnation persist, the masses would become more wretched and desperate. Wretchedness and desperation would lead peasants to subversion, workers to industrial action, and the lumpen-proletariat to robbery and violence?
?So, we have a vicious circle, promising ever more blood and sweat. It would appear that the choice for Africa is not between capitalism and socialism after all but between socialism and barbarism. Which will it be??
Today, the answer to ?which will it be? is clear. It is barbarism, given the unbelievable bestiality we have visited on one another in each of the violent conflicts we have had since 1987 in Nigeria.
There have been violent conflicts across Nigeria, but everyone would agree it has been concentrated in the North, which also happens to be the zone of the least material development in the country. Could this be a coincidence?
Instead of understanding this crisis, in terms of a peculiar underdevelopment, more attention has been paid to ethnicity, religion and the other fault lines.
Of course, there is no denying that ethno-cultural and religious identities have been deployed as instruments of political competition in the North. But this goes on everywhere else.
Why has it not been manageable in the North? After all, there will be no time when there will be no tension between identities. Even if the old tensions between the Christians and Muslims, and those bordering on cultural zones and groups, linguistic, gender and class divisions are resolved today, say by a revolution, new ones will emerge tomorrow.
Which means the problem is less of ethno-cultural, religious, class and other divisions and more of the mechanism for managing tensions.
Ordinarily, the Nigerian state is that mechanism, but like most African states, it is itself crippled. Instead of being a conflict management machine, most African states are conflict generating, having very little to offer the citizens beyond the rhetoric of law and order.
Why, for instance, has Jos remained in crisis since 1995, almost two decades now? It is partly because law and order discourse has been privileged over and above justice. And nothing brings out this more than this example.
From what is on the ground today, it would be a miracle if the (Plateau) Jos crises are resolved before 2015. There would be no problem if the pains of Jos were democratised, but that is not the case, as only the poor masses are bearing much of the pain, not the rich and powerful.
It brings to mind what Lamido told a group of journalists in late 2002, after one of those supposedly religious riots within the North.
He said: ?You call it ethnic cum religious conflict, but no ethnic leader has been killed; no imam or pastor killed, no emir or chief is leading the fight. Yet, you call it religious war. It is the elite, my friend.?
What sort of elite would resort to this strategy? The answer lies squarely in the political psychology of the post-colonial elite, essentially in their difficulties in ?reconciling with the historical development of the Nigerian peoples in forging a modern nation-state.?
In the North, this is compounded by the identity configuration. Jibrin Ibrahim has done what I consider the most serious rendition of the forces at work. There is the Hausa-Fulani and their association, with hegemonistic intentions, the Bornu elite and their consciousness against incorporation and subordination to the Caliphate and the Middle Belt, marked by a testy relationship with the Hausa-Fulani against marginalisation and subordination.
What this scenario has translated to is a state of permanent tensions, which are being badly and hopelessly managed.
Since, by common consensus, the elites are the problem, it presupposes that elite leadership is at the core of the crisis. That is elite leadership, in terms of that member of that echelon who most satisfies Alison Ayida fundamental criterion for the New Nigeria: ?As a nation, Nigeria has not been blessed with charismatic leadership universally acclaimed or generally acceptable to all. Neither has Nigerians been fortunate enough to have such a great leadership imposed.?
He added: ?A charismatic leader must fire the imagination of the people and reflect their collective ego with pride. There is no historical necessity for this to happen in a heterogeneous society, such as Nigeria, but if it did, it will assist the process of restoring national self-confidence and arresting further decline of the nation.?
It ought to be clear that the Northern elites should be ready to play the second fiddle, should they fail to deliver the region from its present implosion.
The North here is not defined in terms of opposition to the South, but in terms of service to the people, thereby precipitating what Ake feared above and achieving late Ibrahim Tahir?s idea of transformation from a state of anguish, ill-feeling and self-hate, involving all against all, to something better.
Before now, the elites could afford not to bother about perennial outbreak of conflicts. The ascendancy of asymmetrical warfare should suggest the end of smug feelings about conflict situations, because we would be creating conditions for the emergence of all manner of squads- heartland guards, local militias and so on- from which no one would be safe.
-Onoja is of Government House, Dutse, Jigawa State
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