IN THIS interview, Adagbo Onoja, journalist, former student union activist and, at the moment, scholar at the Department of Political Science and Diplomacy, Veritas University, Abuja, speaks to specific issues posed to him about Nigeria, post-coronavirus pandemic scenarios, ASUU conflict with the federal government and broad questions around Muhammadu Buhari as a candidate and as President.
Onoja, throughout the conversation, exercised some degree of restraint. He is neither exceedingly critical nor overly soft on President Buhari, obviously compelling himself to brief responses. Much as he tried to provide a balanced assessment and judgement, he is however not able to fully suppress the quirks and eccentricities of the student union activist, the journalist and scholar in him as can be seen in not only his resort to political literature and allusion to history but even more in his poise, passion and scepticism packaged in his rhetorical questions.
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National Record (NR): Going back to the early 1960s, shortly after independence, Nigeria can be described as a nation that has continued to be literally hanging on the precipice due to one crisis or the other. There is this feeling, which has somehow become permanent now; that soon, the country was going to disintegrate, yet we kept going on. As a veteran journalist who has covered many crises, a former student union activist, political scientist, and a peace and conflict expert, what do you think is responsible for this permanent state of crisis and what do think should be done to overcome the challenge?
Onoja: There is a former Chief Justice of Nigeria; I think it is Justice Atanda Fatai-Williams, I am not sure, but he wrote the preface to one of these books and if you read the preface, he was saying something very revealing.
My interpretation of what he wrote there is that, at the onset of independence, the power elite did not go beyond the surface of what K. C. Wheare was writing on federalism. In other words, they had the political sense to fight for independence but not the time to learn the skills, the practices for managing the multi-culturally complicated modern state.
The British who had a longer experience of that were not going to teach them because if they did, they would take independence to the logical conclusion. It is a very simple issue. What the British did is what power is all about. They had reached where they had to relinquish active political control but not subtle control.
It was not only in Nigeria. Everywhere else that the British superintended the transition, it left behind a divided elite that lacked the coherence to confront nation building. So, cultural pluralism became the crisis point in almost all the federal arrangements in the Commonwealth scattered across the globe. It has been terrible in Asia, starting from India, then Pakistan, then Bangladesh, Ceylon, Malaysia and so on and so forth.
So, when you look at all these, you would even commend the Nigerian elite that the country has not scattered by now although some people would say the price for that has been very costly. That is the amount of bloodshed in the civil war, the various resistance movements, electoral violence since the early 1960s and the violence of the past ten years.
The last point must be the external environment of nation building. The East-West ideological conflict from 1945 to 1991 undermined nation building in several dimensions. The idea of soldiers as modernisers was the powerful discourse which provoked military intervention across the ‘Third World’ throughout the sixties. It wasn’t a local discourse but part of the Cold War, and Nigeria had its own share of that virus.
However you view it, the Nigerian elite have tried in still keeping the nation as one. You may know that most of the monarchs in Northern Nigeria are connected to their European counterparts. And one of them told governors of the East, South-South, North-Central, and I think, North-West, who went to visit him during the controversy on whether Jonathan should contest in 2011 or not.
This is not a secret thing. It was an open event with journalists all over the place and he said the governors should make sure Nigeria does not break. He said their friends outside wonder aloud how and by what magic the Nigerian elite have been able to keep the country one. In other words, the fear even out there is that Nigeria cannot escape collapsing. So, people outside are surprised about how Nigerian leaders have kept the country going. And that sort of elite wizardry should not be allowed to waste. This is not to say that the Nigerian elite haven’t behaved very badly but I am just recognising the larger contexts of your question.
NR: Although you are not a financial member of ASUU by virtue of the university in which you lecture not being unionised, but as someone who has associated with key figures in the union and therefore conversant with ASUU’s struggles over the decades, why do you think it has been difficult for the union and government to agree on not just fundamental matters of national policy development, academic freedom or university autonomy, but even on pecuniary issues such as allowances and mode of salary payment (i.e. the IPPIS debate); all of which are taken for granted in societies from where we copied the university system?
Onoja: Our very unique underdevelopment has implications for everything we do. In other words, a very simple thing like negotiating a trade dispute can become a victim of presidential ego, the age of the minister, the idiosyncrasies of the guys at NUC and so on.
So, at the end of the day, nothing is possible and there is stalemate everywhere. There is nothing that ASUU is saying or doing that is outrageous, that cannot be handled. Put the issue in the open.
If ASUU is being stupid, it will be exposed. If it is being patriotic, the country would know from there. But, here, they won’t do that. They will say ASUU is disrupting the calendar, pretending that we have universities that should be doing well but for ASUU.
But, in truth, we are just burying our heads in the sand like the Ostrich, leaving the largest chunk of the body outside.
NR: If I may add, why wouldn’t ASUU and the federal government adopt the European or American or even a mix of these models of university administration, the core of which allows individual universities to freely and autonomously negotiate conditions with individual lecturers matters of salary and allowances?
Onoja: The problem has nothing to do with which model will serve better. Models can evolve. The problem is the hopelessly anti-intellectual orientation of the hierarchy of state power.
The leaders have come from the military and they came along with what someone [Prof Isawa Elaigwu] has called residual militarism and messianic arrogance to the exercise of power. It is a very destructive attitude that tolerates no argument or any kind of asserting individual or collective identity.
In all cases, you must beg them to get whatever you want or you risk conquest. That’s what unites Obasanjo and Buhari in terms of attitude to ASUU. IBB is not much different but he is more mellowed or smarter in terms of when to stop.
NR: President Buhari rode to power mainly on the back of what many describe as his integrity. Right now not many Nigerians are satisfied with his government on a number of policy fronts, especially his fight against corruption. Some even said that his government is as corrupt as that of his predecessors. What is your assessment of Buhari in the specific area of the fight against corruption in relation to his promises? How fair are those who believe that he is not really serious in the anti-corruption crusade in view of some of the high profile convictions and the volume of money seized by the EFCC?
Onoja: President Buhari is a prisoner of the type of puritanism that cannot take him and his group anywhere. It boils down to the lack of orientation to transparency I mentioned earlier.
He has this notion that he is a prefect; that Nigeria is a crisis of indiscipline and he is the prefect who will correct that. That’s fine but he doesn’t believe in mobilising consensus and he doesn’t have the skills either.
So, he can only be going down because you cannot establish hegemony by being insular. And because there is no time that the whole of Nigeria will have a same view of what the trouble with Nigeria is, he will keep finding himself on the downward slide because the middle class – in particular, these columnists, academics, professionals – they will resist any such disciplinarian standpoint. That’s the situation all over the world.
He can never amass the sort of totalitarian grip that will help him whip everyone into line and prevail. So, I would not be surprised if the consensus rates him as a failure, no matter how well he performs. This is the tragedy awaiting Buhari. He has worsened his case by the recruitment into government. He has offended the inherent sense of balance that defines Nigeria. I don’t know the information he has or whether it is true he is afraid of what happened to him in 1985 but it will haunt him in terms of legacy.
NR: What happened to him in 1985?
Onoja: Was he not overthrown in 1985?
NR: During his (Buhari’s) previous campaigns since 2003 when he entered into the presidential race, there were always reminders of his authoritarian record as military head of state, but his supporters had always argued that that record was the basis for Buhari being their preferred candidate. They posited that he was going to be a president that will not only be ruthless with corruption but also firmer in administering the country. What were your views of Buhari prior to 2015? Are those views the same now?
Onoja: I would claim that I have always known that Buhari could come back to power. I was located where this was clear to me because I was in the midst of politicians although the analysis then was not because he was a messiah but because a careful observer in our circuit was always telling us that the military fraction of the elite would always bring one of theirs. And it happened exactly as his analysis.
NR: Are you saying here that Buhari was installed as president by the military fraction of the elite?
Onoja: He could not become president if they were all united against him. Could he? People talk of America and all that. Would the Americans do anything here on their own? They will always have to align with their local agents, conscious and unconscious ideologues and all that.
NR: If you are, as a lecturer, to assess Buhari, as a student of power, on the use and management of power, not only on the basis of his campaign promises, but on the realities on ground in Nigeria today vis-à-vis what he inherited, how would you score him?
Onoja: My own training in politics of leadership teaches me that the starting point in such an assessment is to see if the person in question is a success story in framing the problem he or she is dealing with. In this case, Buhari is dealing with Nigeria but has he got a framework for healing Nigeria? I have not seen such a framework in any document or speech or argument!
Everything is in his head and much of it is this puritanical, disciplinarian’s anger. And I have told you the problem with that. Between 1985 after he was overthrown and 2015 when he returned to power is the time he would have developed such a document but there is none. The one that comes closest to it is a speech he gave in honour of Sir Ahmadu Bello at some point but it was not a critical intervention but a lamentation, his moral indignation about how things are so bad. And he was even accusing Nigerians of tolerating bad governments.
I don’t like to use the word ‘Kaduna Mafia’ anymore because you guys in the popular press have bastardised it from the conceptual innovation it is in Ali Yahya’s use of it or what Balarabe Musa calls a post-war tendency rather than the sinister, all-knowing collection of rogues that is spread about it.
Now, that tendency has what you can call a rule book, the most manifest of which is Dr Mahmud Tukur’s PhD thesis at the University of Pittsburgh in the US. It has now been revised and published. You can, interpretatively, reduce it to a statist ideology or the practice of state interventionism to control class rapaciousness. I think what happened is that Buhari’s own military orientation, and practical involvement in politics, are such that he is a poor practitioner of that world outlook.
In 2015, he isolated corruption, insecurity and the economy. That is a listing, not a discourse. How can anyone talk about coming to correct the crisis and there is no mention of the Nigerian State as a variable? There is no mention of institutional reform and there is no clear economic strategy. Everything is in his head and so much is anger against indiscipline, corruption, etcetera.
NR: Is it this lack of ‘framework for healing Nigeria’ which you talked about that seems to manifest in all sorts of violence in Nigeria, the Boko Haram insurgency, banditry, kidnaping, herdsmen-farmers clashes or the seeming lack of an ideological trajectory in the management of the economy?
Onoja: There is a saying that it is not performance in government that makes a nation but discourse. If you don’t have a discourse, then you are without discursive power. A leader without the discursive power in a country such as Nigeria where diversity is a problem rather than a solution has already lost everything. Under such a leader, anything can happen, especially the sort of things you mentioned in your question.
NR: Nigerians are divided in their opinion of some of Buhari’s policies such as the ban on importation of some goods, particularly rice, the closure of land borders with our West African neighbours, and devaluation of the naira, among others. What is your view?
Onoja: I do not have the empirical details to comment on those rather technical areas.
NR: What is your take on Buhari’s economic management capacity vis-à-vis the social and economic realities in the context of the management of information by his managers and the overall perception of his government at national and international platforms?
Onoja: In recent years, I have not seen something close to systematic management of presidential communication beyond what the late Remi Oyo did. Much of what we have come to see as information management have been shallow, hell-raising, enemy images of the other guy, not the contextualised or analytical type that responds to the issues.
The discursivity comes out so powerfully that the issue is lost but the tragedy is not really with the journalists hired to do the job. It is the principal’s because the mentality is how much of a hatchet man the media guy is, not how he represents power as a dialogic process that creates a hegemonic elbow room for a president to function more effectively.
NR: How would you describe Buhari as a ‘converted democrat’ in relation to the core features of democracy such as social justice, rule of law, free and fair electoral process and civil rights?
Onoja: One of the very important questions in Prof Isawa Elaigwu’s latest book on Nigerian politics, I can’t remember the name immediately but it was published in 2018, is whether Nigeria can get off riding the tiger. You know, civil-military relations, is one of his domains. The other main scholar there is Bayo Adekanye.
The country has been under military rule for years and there has arisen what Adekanye calls an elite of power, with tentacles everywhere in the society. Unique to them, no matter how good, personable and all that is what Elaigwu has also called residual militarism and messianic arrogance. Always keep that in mind. As Bolaji Akinyemi would say, these guys are products of the Nigerian system. It is that orientation he is referring to, one way or the other.
NR: There is this theory of domination of Africa that has continued to linger in which it is propounded that African (or third world) leaders are not only imposed by western powers but also that their social and economic policies are formulated to serve the interests of Western economies. Don’t you think that this theory now sounds stupid in contemporary times looking at Africa’s intellectual resources and in the context of historically bold responses represented in the late General Murtala Mohammed’s remark that Africa has come of age or the actions of progressive leaders symbolised in an activist leader like the late Thomas Sankara?
Onoja: It is as stupid as it is brilliant a thesis!
It is brilliant because there are forces at work in the world that would not take off its eyes from a country such as Nigeria. It is not in all cases sinister but advancing interests – a huge population that constitutes the most consolidated market in the entire African continent with heavy endowment. So, that reality is there.
But it is also stupid because if you insist on it, then you are questioning the agency of the Nigerian power elite. You are asking whether they have sense of shame. So, how do we reconcile the two? I am a scholar with poststructuralist inclinations and I would argue that nobody has any answer about how to reconcile it.
Something will happen beyond the control of the winners of the current international power configuration that will loosen their control on the agency of the Nigerian power elite to begin to have shame. Did you expect a coronavirus pandemic that has come from nowhere and is changing so many things before our very eyes?
So, there is that reality of Nigeria that is controlled. It is not the only country controlled. But the control will end somehow or succeeded by another type of control and it keeps going on.
The rupture can also come from collective internal response that can force the power elite to begin to have shame.
NR: Now that you have related the coronavirus to our governance realities, I would like to say that the on-going coronavirus pandemic more than any situation exposed the overarching need for social security in Nigeria and of course African economies, if you take into context the responses in the developed economies, which are even being harshly excoriated by their media. We can’t see our political leaders at both the executive and legislative levels attempting to act in the same manner as we are witnessing across the globe?
Onoja: They never had the sense of shame to build a nation. They spent so much time bickering along ethnic, religious and other fault lines.
Coronavirus pandemic came in a way that really embarrassed them unlike no other power elite in the world. As challenging as the pandemic, it has not caught some countries and regions off guard.
The Scandinavian countries are basically doing fine. The best examples of success stories are all coming from Asia – Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea and China. In the West, it is not that the infrastructure is not there. Rather, it is that they are for profit.
So, it is only in Africa that the infrastructure is not there at all. And even in Africa, Nigeria is the most hopeless out of South Africa and Egypt, the three power houses. I doubt that the people in the leadership of the executive and the legislature have the technical competence or world outlook to develop models of rapid social transformation. It is not part of their consciousness. The world they know does not have a place for such things.
NR: Apart from the political leadership, don’t you think that in view of these challenges, the pandemic should act as a springboard for trade unions to lead Nigerians to kick-start a campaign for universal medical insurance funded by government; in addition to a struggle for social protection for not just their members but for vulnerable Nigerians?
Onoja: I have no idea of what the trade union is like now as for me to say anything.
