Seared by the heat of insecurity, socio-economic uncertainty and mysterious dithering by the nation’s political leadership, allusions to Arab Spring-type rebellion and outright calls for a revolution to incept a new order have become something of a symphony with members of its orchestra traversing several important arenas: the academia, politics, business, religion and more. LOUIS ACHI examines the substance of this development.
?
About a fortnight ago, former President Olusegun Obasanjo, while speaking at a workshop – “Economic Diversification And Revenue Generation” held in Abeokuta, organised by the Ogun State Government in conjunction with the Revenue Mobilisation Allocation and Fiscal Commission (RMAFC) warned, “There is the possibility of having the Arab Spring in Nigeria if similar conditions, hardships and unemployment which gave birth to it are not addressed.” There is more. In early June this year, Obasanjo in his address to the 100th International Labour Conference, again warned that, “The situation in the Middle East may occur in some African countries including Nigeria, if leaders do not take urgent actions to check the unemployment situation.”
Has the former president become the local Nostradamus, the French seer that saw tomorrow? Hardly so. Instructively, before Obasanjo’s homily, some eminent and not-so-eminent Nigerians had expressed similar sentiments.
It will be recalled that at least three governments capitulated in the Arab world this year alone as a result of mounting discontent. Heading the list was the regime of Ben Ali was overthrown in January by irate Tunisians who demanded for a change in the political order. Egyptian’s Hosni Mubarak’s regime followed. After 18 days of massive protests by Egyptians who sought an end to the 30-year Mubarak presidency, that dictatorship collapsed. The third was that of the eccentric Libyan ‘strongman’ Muammar Ghadaffi, after being in power for 42 years.
As former President Obasanjo observed, the mass protests in the Arab world occurred because there was a ‘disconnect’ between ‘economic growth’ and ‘employment generation’. “It doesn’t matter which way you look at it today. People are now talking of Arab Spring. Some people will say, ‘Is Egypt not developing?’ On economic scale, after South Africa, it is Egypt in Africa. Has Libya not got resources? At one time with a population of about five million, Libya was producing as much oil as Nigeria was producing. But there was still discontent because, yes, in terms of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), it may be growing well, but in terms of employment generation, there is disconnect.”
Notes Ugochukwu Raymond Ogubuariri, a public issues analyst, “We need to remind ourselves that unemployment which we so often decry does not simply occur in a vacuum, neither does it emerge by sheer historical accident. Unemployment, when properly contextualized, is basically the logical result of governance failure. When such failure is so acute, deeply entrenched and consistently replicated by successive political regimes, unemployment ceases to become just a social problem but acquires the character of a festering, insidious pandemic. And that is precisely what has happened in the case of Nigeria.”
Argues Wilson Idahosa Aiwuyor in his book, “The Impending Democratic Revolution In Nigeria,” the “Signs of revolution are in the air in Nigeria, but not the kind of revolution that Prof. Ben Nwabueze recently argued for. During the launching of his book in Lagos, Prof. Nwabueze, member of President Goodluck Jonathan’s Presidential Advisory Council (PAC) asserted that only a bloody and violent revolution would reverse the pervasive decadence in governance in Nigeria. One could understand Prof. Nwabueze’s frustration over the looting spree and corruption among the ruling class who have neglected the welfare of the ordinary Nigerian.
“But if history remains a good teacher, there is no certainty that any bloody revolution would solve Nigeria’s problems. All the retrogressive military coups that have taken place in Nigeria as well as the country’s three year civil war (1967-1970) were executed in the name of bringing about revolutionary change. Yet, none could solve the country’s problems. Nigeria should and would have a revolution, it ought not to be violent.”
Aiwuyor, a Public Policy and International Affairs Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson School of Princeton University further observes: “If the necessary preconditions are fulfilled, Nigeria’s impending revolution could be through the ballot boxes at a crossroad – possibly by 2015 – where there would be a convergence between divine force (force majeure) and the determined efforts by Nigerians to make a break with politics as usual. This revolution need not conform to the old sense of revolution, which is often a violent and bloody change executed by self-proclaimed revolutionaries.”
To shore up his thesis, Aiwuyor appropriately enlists the insight of pan-Africanist Horace Campbell expressed in the later’s book, “Barack and 21st Century Politics: A Revolutionary Moment in the USA.” Here, Campbell deploys epistemology and ontology to slam the conventional notion of revolution, which suggests that it must be violent or bloody.
According to Aiwuyor, Campbell draws on contemporary realities to “relocate revolution within the context of fundamental transformation in the society, sustained by a consciousness of the challenges of the moment bound to a new form of thinking among the rank and file of the society.” Within this context, the Princeton Fellow holds that “The democratic revolution that could take place in Nigeria come 2015 would be characterized by a fundamental shift in the nation’s polity orchestrated by a change in the thinking and political consciousness of the rank and file of the Nigerian society as it relates to leadership and the obligations of elected officials.”
Significantly, much of the energy that has powered the Arab Spring came from the youths. Today, the youth revolts being witnessed in every part of the country appears a clear signal of incipient crisis on an unforeseen scale. It will recalled that in December last years, the princely sum of? N139 billion approved for jobs. The common question now is what happened? President Jonathan is being accused of paying lip service to the problem of youth unemployment.
Interestingly, the three countries swept by the ‘Arab Spring’ are superior to Nigeria in terms of many economic indices. The emerging consensus is that, if these countries could explode, what then is the guarantee that such an eruption is impossible, where unemployment is officially put at 23.9 per cent and one out of every two youths is unemployed?