THE FEDERAL QUEST

¹ The most massively centralised government in the history of the world finally imploded during the last decade. It had been held together by the union of violence and euphoria—the euphoria of its coming-in-being from the dead-end of a feudal order—held together by great visions of universal brotherhood, by the solidarity that comes from a people under external threat, by war and its emotive patriotism and the binding machinery of mobilisation, by crafted images of the internal ideal contrasted with the disorder and inhumanities of the external world, by spell- binding rhetoric that was often short on logic but long on mass psychology, by a succession of powerful personality cults, by savage repression, intolerance of dissent, by vast population shifts, involuntary mass deportations that ruptured organic, nationalist centres of resistance but reinforced the schematic tidiness of a centralised order, by the “us-or-them” paranoia of the Cold War, but again—let this be always conceded—by a seductively utopian, transcendental vision that held such hopes for humanity, until its betrayal from within.

As some of these factors receded into the obscurity of time, losing their immediacy, significance, terror or romance for new generations—in addition to gradual penetration of the once impregnable Iron Curtain by alternative social realities—the primacy of nationalities inserted itself into the vacated spaces of the ideological mortar of the supra-national edifice. In short, that edifice began to crack, even from within.

Mind you, the signs were never completely absent. The “nationalities question” engaged the attention of Lenin, Engels, Trosky and Stalin in numerous essays and lectures, sometimes objective and analytical, often simply vitriolic and intolerant. Even Josef Stalin himself found it necessary, from time to time, to adopt policies that conceded measures of autonomy to nationalities, both in economic and in cultural policies. But the foundation of the super-state carried inherent weaknesses, and could not stand the aggressive onslaught of world capitalism. Nothing underscores for us the structural deficiencies of the centralised system of the Soviet Union more than the astonishing pace of collapse of its internal economy. Without a doubt, one contributory factor to that collapse was that of a productive system that simply did not allow for a minimum level of productive and economic self-sufficiency among its member units. When the crunch came, a lack of productive and entrepreneurial initiative - even at state level - took its toll. Today, that vacuum appears to have been filled by nothing less than Mafia power, making the Soviet Union, within a short time, one of the most violent scenes of organised crime in the business world.

If we turn our faces inwards for a change of environment, that is, into Nigeria, we encounter disturbing parallels. No, Nigeria has not disintegrated, and certainly Nigeria has never even pretended to espouse any ideology, capitalist, socialist or liberal welfarist. But, since the first military coup of January 1966, that nation has attempted to make of centralised governance a “progressive” virtue. Never mind that it was principally this project - at least it has been thus prominently cited - it was this unitarist project that produced the second military coup, provoked gruesome massacres of a section of the nation, resulted in the secession of a violated people and - eventually - a civil war. Despite this reality, regime after regime has gone after the unitary option like some millennial gospel of salvation. The result? A blatant sectarianism of power masquerading as national, complemented by a dependency syndrome, and without even any accompanying centralised productive systems to complement - in this instance - the mono-industry of petroleum.

Initiative became either comatose or frustrated; government became the sole business of an idle, proliferating class where preferment and profit without labour were guaranteed by access or proximity to a single source of power. Initiative and enterprise, wherever they dared raise their heads were stifled by a centralised resource dispensation - operating through hi-faluting policies such as “import licence scheme”, “counter trade” and of course what we should dub the Nigerian version - and parody - of sovietised economy - military collectivism - where resource accumulation headed in only one direction - centrally - but little outward redistribution, not even in terms of public services or creation of public welfare - ever took place. The monetary policies of an imposed centralist system have ensured that genuinely needy and deserving enterprises are starved of basic funds for the procurement of machinery or other basic requirements. Even state governors have been reduced to traipsing - first to Dodan Barracks, and next - to Aso Rock to plead for what should be statutory allocations, in order to run their governments and service even government projects.

Or is it to Zaire that we turn for another shining example of centralism? Or Ethiopia under Mariam Mengistu? We see by these related failures that the issue is not strictly ideology but one of governance options, a choice between monolithic centralism and the federalist principle, a structured dispersal of both social and economic power bases that would guarantee both productive initiatives at all levels, and a sense of participation in the very decisions that affect daily existence. And let no one think that the unitary tendency has been limited only to our military experience. Permit me to recall the instance of that other centralist genius, President Shehu Shagari, whose government undertook a universal low-cost housing scheme in all the various states against all sense and well-argued protestations. Which administrative level, let us ask ourselves in all objectivity, is better positioned to assess and undertake the housing needs of its people - is it the centre, or is it the states in partnership with Local Governments? But land was forcibly acquired and houses - mostly uninhabitable - were built, or at least partially built - mostly without relation to urban demographic distribution or labour requirement in industrialised centres. What is left of those houses today are mostly tenanted by antelopes, snakes and rodents. I tend to roam in the bush for relaxation - that is where I made acqaintance with several units of the NPN ² populist charade called low-cost housing scheme. But of course Shagari was merely extending the lessons of private profitability from military precedents. We must not forget the grand spectacle we made of the nation through the massive cement armada that was supposed to provide the material for earlier vainglorious schemes, a prodigal venture that clogged up the harbours for years and ate up the national treasury in demurrage. Or the rice importation scheme, again centrally conceived and centrally manipulated . . . but why go on?

Suffice it to remind ourselves that that civilian regime, and others before it, including those that bore the qualification “Military,” insisted on flaunting the title of “Federal Government of Nigeria”. Even a new organisation on federalism, based in Canada, is still obliged to list Nigeria as one of the Contemporary Federations of the world, in company with Germany, India, South Africa, Switzerland, Russia, Comoros, Venezuela, the United States, Ethiopia, plus some other two dozen members of the United Nations. Well, in the process of this conference, I can only hope that we shall uncover just what Nigeria has in common, in that aspect, with South Africa or the Federation of Czechoslovakia. Of course we know that the understanding of some past dictators about the nature of federalism has been, very simplistically, the creation of more states. You increase the number of states within a nation, and you persuade yourself that you have thereby expanded the concept and practice of federalism, never mind if one state or two were created as a birthday present for your importuning spouse. Or as a bribe - the then going price of loyalty - to one constituency or another, and even - with diabolical calculation, to set one section of the nation against another through disputes over boundaries and assets. Non-viable state entities have been created which simply underline the contradictions inherent within a so-called federal system - they are kept alive only by sporadic blood infusions from the centre. Those states were never meant to be self-sufficient entities, and do not exist beyond the establishment of another bottomless pit of a parasitic bureaucracy.

The setting for this conference, Nigeria, serves therefore as a prime example of the failed federation, but perhaps failure is the wrong word, for it implies that an attempt has been made in the first place, one that unfortunately ended in failure. The truth is that beyond the first four years of Nigerian independence, the federal principle was simply thrown overboard. A deliberate subversion of the rational relations of the states to the centre was embarked upon, upsetting the balance between federal authority, the state, and even local government. We need to study the Nigerian cracked model very carefully in order to appreciate the distance between promise and performance, and the tragic choices that have been made. I use the word “tragic” deliberately, and not even because it took us through a civil war, though we must not be permitted to forget that. Following the massacres of 1966 and the atmosphere of deepened mutual distrust between the component nationalities within Nigeria, an effort was made to reestablish the federal principle and to go even further - I refer to the Aburi conference where a short-lived attempt was made to restructure the nation on a less claustrophobic basis. “Confederation” was a word that surfaced repeatedly, and indeed the Aburi agreements virtually enshrined the practicalities of such internal relations as the guarantee for the continuation of Nigeria as one entity. Thereafter, of course, there came second thoughts and before long, those agreements were repudiated and “confederation” even became a dirty word. To breathe it at all was to be regarded as reactionary, as a tribal jingoist and even possibly a CIA agent.

Today, fortunately, we have learnt that words do not even necessarily mean how they sound, much less what they say. We have learnt that “Federal” can survive for decades as the handle for a government without the nation it describes being anything but Federal in conduct. This conference has assembled experts who are thoroughly equipped to assist us in sifting the grain from the chaff, and they will roam the world, I am confident, in meticulous detail to present viable models that will enable us to forget the emotive connotations of mere categories and confront actualities, their positive and negative effects on the lives of peoples. For we must never forget that systems of governments do not exist in the abstract, but in their consequences on peoples both in the present and in succeeding generations. Let me offer you one speculative proposition: do we dare reject, with absolute confidence, the suggestion that if Nigeria had been faithful to its truly federal beginnings, had pursued the creation of states, not as administrative arteries and internal neo-colonies, but as genuine entities within a federated union, we could have avoided the Ogoni tragedy, and the Delta would not be in a state of conflagration? It is worth considering. But the oil- producing regions have been treated as vassals to a remote, indifferent and avaricious centre, and today we are looking at consequences that involve, not simply a confrontation between a region and that centre, but murderous confrontations along the length and breadth of the region, a rupture of former harmonious relationships, a desperation and intransigence beyond anything that has been witnessed in this nation since the Biafran civil war.

When we consider all these factors of our short history, it would appear that Nigeria does indeed offer a unique specimen for serious laboratory study in our quest for a system of equitable government. Well, our experts will obviously throw up other rivals. India has much to offer in this respect, a large post-colonial democracy where the principle of federalism has survived serious internal upheavals both from religious and secular causes, not to forget the excision of a part and the continuing border disputes that have placed that democracy virtually in a state of undeclared war. There are others too, whose vicissitudes and triumphs illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of a system under scrutiny, and its viability for a continent undergoing various degrees of convulsion. It does not require a prophet to predict however that Nigeria will preoccupy most minds at this conference, and this is only partially because of the political events of the past years that have created a timely and relevant backdrop to our gathering and the very nature of our concerns. What happens here, in this country, in the immediate future - that is, within the next one, two or three years - matters, and it matters not only to us, but to the West African sub-region. It matters ultimately to the entire continent, and to the so-called international community. It matters desperately even to the external kites that are already hovering over the pickings to be had from a luscious and productive slice of real estate that they have already determined as being probably ready to emerge from a prolonged period of drought. There will always be birds of prey hovering over this space - this we have learnt to live with. It is when the shadows that they cast become indistinguishable from those of crows and vultures that we shall acknowledge, once again, that a nation's nightmare has never absolutely departed its horizons.

I shall be honest with you - there are moments when I do wish that I had been born somewhere else on the continent, in one of those tiny or resource starved, desolate slabs of earth that no one wants, nobody cares about, offers no strategic prospect that any powers would covet. It becomes exhausting to belong to a nation from which, not only is so much expected, but from which, you objectively admit to yourself, even much more should be demanded. One of my most chastening encounters took place shortly after the annulment of the results of Nigeria's June 12 1993 presidential elections. I visited the Horn of Africa in fulfilment of a long-standing invitation to a conference, the theme of which was: “From Conflict to Concord: The Horn of Africa”. I have made various references to that meeting, which was attended by the political, intellectual and technocratic cream of Africa's leadership. It was non-governmental, even though it was attended by a handful of both past and serving ministers, including a former head of state or two. I am not too certain now that I have the exact wording of the conference theme correctly and perhaps, it is better thus. That title is one that now holds only an ironic, even mocking resonance for us all, and rebukes my recollections of that optimistic gathering.

Optimistic, yes, even euphoric, but not without an overcast of foreboding. And the reason for that pall was that the most looked-up-to nation on that continent, Nigeria, had just reversed what appeared to be a definitive step in the direction of its long-awaited goal - democratisation and, as a corollary, comparative stability through a structure of participation, accountability, and a foundation in human rights. My invitation had been sent long before our elections, and my participation should have been, for me, a triumphal presence. I had accepted that invitation confidently, convinced, as millions of Nigerians were, that we were about to link up with South Africa, and with the Horn of Africa in a sweeping resolve to embark on a new, progressive direction for the continent. I nourished the secretive pleasure of being an unaccredited emissary of good tidings.

I had planned to take with me a clutch of invitations to a conference with quite a similar orientation to this one - and what better assemblage than the meeting in Addis that from which to select participants - historians, pan-Africanists, economists, political scientists, liberation fighters etc. etc. whose contributions would be invaluable during the continent-wide Forum for Democracy that my association, the African Democratic League was then organising for January 1994, that is, after what should have been the successful conclusion of the Nigerian democratic election and the installation of a representative system of government. The timing and purpose of that meeting approximates, as you can see, to this one - following immediately after elections and concerned with the nature of democratic governance. This meeting at least has taken off, and within Nigeria, and the peculiar feeling that I have is one of being at a parallel conference that is taking place five years late.

Preparations for that other conference were already under full steam, scheduled for Cotonou in the Republic of Benin, with the full blessing and logistical support of her then President, Micephore Soglo. Our motivations were however somewhat different: once we had taken the first step towards democracy, we felt that the next step was to assist others in taking theirs and, in the process of course, consolidate our own. So, that projected conference was not altogether altruistic; we all know that no one democracy can stand alone and, after several years of subjection to military rule, it seemed only sensible to create vital links with existing democracies, with opposition groups whose nations were still undergoing the travails of dictatorship and of course with political activists whose democracies were only so in name. Our catchment area included the Caribbean - I recall that we paid special attention to the opposition groups in Haiti, to whose exiled President, Aristide, a special invitation was issued. It was, as you see, an ambitious project, but of course, haven't we all discovered at various times that more was annulled in June 1993 beyond our elections, and that those consequences reached beyond our national borders? Perhaps we should begin to think of resurrecting whatever is still viable from the many casualties of that annulment and the four-year reign of terror that it spawned.

After the annulment, needless to say, I did not really feel like travelling to Addis Ababa. I appeared to carry a stigma of personal disqualification, rather like one of those political contestants whom our former dictators derived so much pleasure in disqualifying for one reason or the other. But I truly felt disqualified. It seemed to me that I no longer belonged at a gathering that was clearly intended to celebrate, but also to critically examine - within the context of the continent and its other, ongoing problems - the lessons to be drawn from the resolution of the wasteful, destructive conflict that had resulted in the overthrow of the leftist butcher Mariam Mengistu and then, most crucially, set an example for others through the amicable dissolution of an uneasy empire. What did I now have to contribute? We had all been invited to learn from the example of the Horn but, again, at the time that I accepted the invitation, I had felt a certain sense of political advantage - I would be able to proffer Nigeria as an even more salutary example - because peaceful - of political transformation. After decades of sustaining itself on the life-blood of the Nigerian nation, military dictatorship was in its death-throes, but even though it was not quite stone dead, we felt obliged to plan for its then seemingly inevitable demise.

Then came June 12, and the crude annulment of the presidential elections. I arrived in Addis Ababa with my tail between my legs. And just as well. From the moment of my arrival, I was attacked by delegates from every corner of the continent and from every walk of life. “Why have you people done this to us? Do you know what you've done, what example you've set? Do you realise how much we had all looked to citing your example, holding you up as the model, instructing our own people how it should be done?

In vain I tried to extricate myself from guilt, to remind them that I was in fact embattled, with others, in the effort to reverse the hand of this backwards moving clock, to retrieve a nation's estimation in the eyes of her sister nations and set her feet back on the path of her potential greatness. In vain I reminded my inquisitors that all this was none of my personal doing; I mean, I was not the one who annulled the elections and in any case I had risked my life participating in the protest movements against this assault of the nation. A waste of time. No one was in the mood to grant me a personal exemption - I was a Nigerian and therefore - Guilty! I had let down the continent in my own person. We had no right to do this to our sister nations on the continent. We had no right to fall below their expectations and, in that regard, we were all guilty, each and every single Nigerian. Since I was available at the time, I was obliged to bear the full brunt of condemnation.

It is difficult for anyone not present at that conference, one that took place so soon after the June 12 annulment, to appreciate the full depth of pain, of the sense of betrayal that was expressed by our colleagues from everywhere on the continent. And, paradoxically, I found myself both uplifted and demoralised all the same time - uplifted because it was clear that so many fellow Africans were passionately involved in the fate of Nigeria, and that were motivated by nothing less than pride and conviction in our potential to move the continent in a progressive direction; and then of course I was simultaneously demoralised because I felt that we had let others down, and must be held morally responsible for that betrayal of just expectations.

Present at that conference were, needless to say, both Ethiopians and Eritreans, all basking in the rational resolve of their decades-old conflict under contrasting regimes - feudal, as well as Marxist. Eritreans and Ethiopians alike had undergone unspeakable agonies under both ideologies, the people had been repressed and enslaved by representatives of two totally irreconciliable social projects which - though the latter, the Marxist regime would have indignantly denied it - shared common grounds in which they luxuriated, those grounds being the self-proliferating space of alienated power. And so, in Addis Ababa, while internally I squirmed under the censure of my peers, I outwardly celebrated the end of a decades-old nightmare, the end of a senseless conflict by two sides that were enslaved to an elitism of power whose legitimation was based on notions and practices that were intolerant of the fundamental worth of the humanity that alone creates society.

In addition, let this be remembered: the leadership of the Horn, and of Ethiopia in particular, was then occupied with arbitrating in the problems of Somalia. I held discussions with Ethiopian leadership, including her Prime Minister, and was impressed by their commitment and realistic assessment of the demands of that disintegrating society. I learnt much. I left with enormous respect for the seriousness with which, so soon after their own baptism of fire, these men appeared to have accepted that they had nowhere to turn for solutions except inwards, utilising their intimate knowledge of that region's politics and history to arbitrate the tensions and rivalries that had sent the United States scuttling from that region, leaving the - natives - to fend for themselves.

Today, what lessons can we claim that the Horn is imparting to the African continent? “Like play, like play,” as we say in my part of West Africa, the Horn, from tiny spurts and negligible smouldering, has suddenly exploded. A region that we had seized upon as a redeeming contrast to the dismal example of Somalia and Sudan, and presented to the rest of the world as an example of African common sense and maturity, of her ability to resolve seemingly intractable issues, once left to themselves, has eventually elected to flaunt themselves to the entire world as being yet another zone of mindless belligerence. “Like play, like play”, what we considered as inconsequential “teething problems” have deepened into sceptic abscesses which now threaten erswhile conflict mediators with becoming - yet again - candidates for global medication.

Today, it is probably to Nigeria that the world is preparing to turn once again, in desperate hope, for such lost images of self-redemption and authoritative mediation. Nigeria remains, the worse luck for its nationals, not any other nation space. Willy-nilly, she has a strategic function that cannot be wished away, and it is this perception, this yet unfulfilled destiny that defines for outsiders, as well as for many thinking citizens of Nigeria, the full meaning of that frustrating nation space.

But not to all, alas! Do we need to contrast with the foregoing what Nigeria meant to Abacha and his accomplices, with the incorrigible among them who probably even now, are calculating how soon they can safely strike to take their turn at the roulette of power? For these, the definition of Nigeria is simply direct access to the Central Bank of the nation, to royalties accruing from oil exports, sometimes given the elegant name of Dedicated Accounts, but in reality vast sums that are self-dedicated, dispensed without the necessity of accounting through the Ministry of Finance or being permitted to complicate the fiscal routine of the Central Bank of Nigeria.

With the passage of such deviants of power and responsibility, does it mean that we have effectively eliminated this aberrant reading of the Nigerian nation? Alas, no! There exist allied readings that stem from the same fabric of alienation. The nation is also misread by a minority group of an atavistic order, for whom Nigeria simply represents, even right till this moment, power and domination. The elements that we speak of regard economics as consisting of neither more or less than - government business. That is, they do not understand a nation's economy as a dynamic process of productivity, of manufacturing, of mobilisation of productive forces, of investment of labour and other means of life enhancement. For them, Government means business, and whoever controls government controls business. Thus, they evince no interest in developmental pre- requisites such as education and training - no, it is enough that they control government. For this, they are prepared to go to inordinate lengths, including the infiltration and domination of the nation's military, so that when the civic route to power appears to be blocked, they resort to the military. Complacency therefore remains the gravest danger to the Nigerian polity - the snake may appear motionless from the buffeting of these past years, but - the head is not yet scotched. It is not yet time to lower our guard.

So here we are in Abuja, the seat and engine room of past horrors. I used to wonder from time to time when next I was likely to see this whited sepulchre, speculate about the route to its purification - for that day of reckoning was inevitable, sooner or later, and from whatever direction - so one was left to wonder if the only route to its salvation lay only in its being blasted out of existence, pulverised in entirety and sent back to the pristine undergrowth from where it had sprung in the flush of a unifying ideal turned tragic, a mockery of its original designs. Seeing that I am here however, and Abuja is still standing, let me use these very grounds of alienation to comment on its recent past, and to pass a message to our neighbours, both near and far. After all, it was from this very station that Sanni Abacha's killer squads operated, it was from the confidence of its seeming impregnability that they took off in the presidential jet, carried out their gory business, and returned to regale their boss with the results of their dastardly exploits.

Oh yes, let us never forget that it was on these very grounds that three hundred odd Nigerians gathered together to fashion out for Nigeria a new constitution that no one had requested, one third of them nominees of the incumbent tyrant but all of them knowing fully well that they had been brought together, not for any meaningful mission, but to bury beneath the deepest layers of concrete - like the nuclear time-bomb of the Chernobyl reactor - the expressed electoral will of the Nigerian people. It was among that same assembly that exceptions such as the late Shehu Yar'Adua committed the ultimate sin that guaranteed his eventual murder, that sin being his dare in activating his political machinery on behalf of a menaced democratic future so that, even before settling down to the alleged business that brought them together, the assembly voted a departure date for the ambitious dictator. It was of course from within that same assembly that its whinnying chairman grovelled before the dictator and rushed to engineer a reversal of that decision, declaring that the assembly had gone beyond its brief. Let me yield voice here to a perceptive commentator on that most abominable waste of Nigerian funds and the formal inauguration of Abacha's self- perpetuation machinery. Professor Eskor Toyo wrote in The Guardian:

Yes, it was indeed in this same Abuja that these men and women of destiny, having been alternately bribed and whipped into orderly conformity by their paranoid puppetmaster, operating through the headmasterly autocracy of the bowler-hatted ringmaster who was allegedly but unbelievably a former justice of the courts, here it was that they evolved their masterpiece of the presidential zoning principle, which, in that same article, was lucidly and exhaustively reduced to its infantile proportions by Eskor Toyo - as it has been by several commentators. But of course all but a handful of them knew, and had accepted that, even if they had produced the sublime constitutional model for any inhabited portion of this earth, the occupant of the top slot was already reserved for the devil. The handful who knew but did not accept such a diabolical attribution would later be subjected to intense physical and/or economic terrorism, often extended to their families and any recognisable associates. Others would land in Sanni Abacha's dungeons, framed on fabricated coup attempts and undergo horrendous torture. A number would not emerge alive.

And yes, this seemingly peaceful air that harbours our civilised exchanges once rang out with the cries of the tortured and the groans of the dying. We screamed out to the world that there were crimes being committed within this fortified hell that would make the devil himself cringe with fear! Every new revelation instructs us today that we have yet to fully fathom the depths of man's capacity for depravity. Let us never forget that it was from within this space that a decision was taken to hang Ken Saro-wiwa and his eight companions, and that even as we speak here today, their remains have yet to be returned to their kinfolk.

The guilt of the defenders and apologists of what happened here is however no less gross and unforgivable than the crimes of the actual perpetrators. I would ignore them, for theirs are names that should not be permitted to desecrate our lips, but some of them persist in aggravating our sensibilities, our extreme tolerance level by daring to open their loot-encrusted mouths and insisting that they have no apologies for the role they played during the assault on our nationhood. Some have even begun to ingratiate themselves into this hard-won democratic dispensation by declaring themselves sponsors or supporters of one contestant or the other. Their language is liberal with pledges - monetary and “delivery”. Which means, in plain language that they pledge their undiscriminating support for the likely top dog, no matter the means of his ascendancy or his conduct in power, and promise to “deliver” their constituency - but always into servitude. They attempt to rehabilitate their putrid careers by lavishly donating to campaign funds and pontificating on a process that they had spent years of shameless collaboration in frustrating, building up, in the process huge financial bases for their bootlicking, unprincipled existence. We must constantly remind ourselves of their careers in order to ensure that amnesia, that debilitating disease of mass will, does not encourage them to revise a history that has traumatised the majority of our people.

In this very Abuja it was, for instance, that the factories of lies were established, where Task Forces were set up for physical liquidation and sustained campaigns of calumny against democratic leaders, operated - it would sometimes appear - by black descendants of Josef Goebells. For some of these agents and mercenaries of the most obscene concoctions, this has become such a way of life that they seem unaware, even today, that their paymaster is dead. Or perhaps that is not strictly true, perhaps the satanic engine of that era is stilled manned, is still maintained in active service, which means of course that portions of that agenda are very much alive. Abacha suited a handful of causes in this nation, so let us not be complacent.

It was from this all-perceiving observatory that several of the opposition, including this speaker, were discovered sneaking into the country, planting bombs among the innocent and slipping out swiftly again, as repeatedly announced by one former village tailor, then designated Minister for Special Duties - “What a noise!” I believe, was the title that the press bestowed on him. It was from here, that that tailor with the all-penetrating eye - of a needle perhaps - spied on this very speaker as he held meetings with all the dissidents of the nation - students, workers, market women etc. - and planned how to overthrow his master's regime with violence. It was a sister hotel, a stone's throw from here that minstered to one Minister at all hours, servicing the famous thirst of the unctuous servitor as he gathered his retinue together for his next mission to some new corner of the world, there to present, contrary to his own conceited assessment of his performances, the worst side of the regime. He constituted himself in many instances into the best propaganda machine that the democratic movement could ever have invented. Heads of states, ministers, legislators, television interviewers took one look at, and listened to this permanently inebriated lump of lard, oozing with borrowed authority and the insolence of the uncouth, and they decided that the democratic opposition could not be all bad if such was the image of authority against which they had declared war. Don't take my word for it. Speak to diplomats and anyone with whom the Chief Tom-foolery of the nation ever came in contact during the days of his ministerial affliction, and you will find that they all come up with one single opinion - that never in their experience had they ever encountered a more noxious bag of flatulence that attempted to pass for a foreign spokesman.

Let us not forget also that this was the take-off spot for the Aerial Bank of Nigeria - same initials, by coincidence, as those of the moribund Association for Better Nigeria. The Aerial Bank of Nigeria flew our nation's largesse to other African heads of states, in return for Public Relations services at international gatherings. This was an activity that we proclaimed from the rooftops - it is all now being revealed in all its nauseating details, how African Heads of States were bought, as well as their foreign ministers. But there is the consolation, the obverse side of this high-placed venality. I must use this occasion, and this erstwhile seat of perfidy to proclaim and publicly applaud the nobility of others who withstood Abacha's bullying and blackmailing gambits. Malawi, several Caribbean nations, Canada, the Scandinavian countries, New Zealand, the European Union as a body, not however as individual sovereignties etc. etc. We must never forget all those leaders and peoples who stood by their brothers and sisters of this nation. And so, even as we have a responsibility to pursue the exposure of the venal collaborators of the Abacha regime during our darkest days, we must also compile an honour list of all those who placed humanity and justice before dollars, petroleum and technical aid, beyond royal receptions and all expenses paid tours of Nigeria's fleshpots, beyond business opportunities and corrupt deals - be they African, Asian or European, and irrespective of religious or ideological alibis. We must recall the Human Rights organisations, UNESCO, congressmen and women such as Maxime Waters, Donald Payne and others, activitists such as Randall Robinson, Flora MacDonald, the Congressional Black Caucus of the U.S. legislatures and a host of others. For it is only when we bleed, when we mourn and are confronted with the bleak immensity of a future that we remember that tyranny knows neither colour nor race. It is thanks to many, no matter in what modest measures, that we are assembled here today, of our own will, and resolved to seize our destiny by the throat.

This conference must therefore not be conceived of as taking place in a vacuum, but at a potential watershed in this nation's history - that much, but no more, we dare acknowledge - the potentiality of even this hugely flawed, improbable but recurrent Nigerian moment. The horizons of the initiators of our meeting are modest enough. We know that deliberations will not result in the philosopher stone that dissolves all internal contradictions of the continent. Nevertheless, a blueprint, or several, may emerge that answer one or more categories of the search for an equitable order within the multiple roads that confront the democratic quest. And that will be a lot more than the power custodians of this continent, with their record of expensive, abysmal and sanguinary failures will dare pretend is irrelevant and consign yet again to the musty shelves of utopian dreams.

It only remains for me to think the landlords of our meeting place for accommodating us within these precints especially as, as the world knows, this space known as Aso Rock, was recently put up for rent, and it has duly gone to - the highest bidder. Let us therefore acknowledge the real victors of the recent contest for occupancy: Candidates - CashFlow, Military Machine, and Pandemic Prostitution. The loser of course - as if you did not know - was - Democracy. Let us however take consolation in aYoruba proverb - B'a o ba r'adan, aa fi oode s'ebo - the translation, in this context would read - if we cannot yet speak democracy, let us at least address - federalism.

West Africa Review (1999)

ISSN: 1525-4488

THE FEDERAL QUEST