By Yinka Odumakin
FROM May to mid-September 1991, American journalist Brian Hall went on tour of Yugoslavia  and caught a glimpse of the country from within, one that goes  behind journalistic narration  to present the intimate hatreds, prejudices, aspirations, and fears of its citizens.  He was traveling through Yugoslavia and the nation was  crumbling in his footsteps.  He arrived a week after the catalytic May 2 massacre at Borovo Selo, he watched as political solutions were jettisoned  with dizzying speed, and as Yugoslavia’s various ethnicities, which had managed to reach a point of tolerant co-existence, tipped into the arena  of civil war.

He was one of the last foreigners to travel unhindered through the region and captured the voices of both the prominent and the unknown, from Serbian demagogue Slobodan Milosevic and Bosnian leader Alija Izetbegovic to a wide variety of everyday Serbs, Croats, and Muslims: “real people, likeable people,” as he says, who have been pushed by rumour and propaganda into carrying out one of the most intense and brutal ethnic conflicts in world history.

Historical  trajectory

At the same time, he provides the indispensable historical trajectory showing how the country called Yugoslavia was cobbled together after World War I, tracing the “ethnic cleansing” practices that have marked the area for centuries, and explaining why every attempt at political compromise has met with such suspicion and resistance.

His book The Impossible Country : A Journey Through The Last Days of Yugoslavia offers an elegy of sorts for the promise of humanism and an eyewitness account of the balkanization of mind and action. “Even intellectuals in Yugoslavia tend to think the truth is not only knowable, but obvious.” Hall writes, and he unravels that in lively scenes and portraits, mostly of ordinary people but also of Serbian president Slobodan Miloevi and the wearied Bosnian leader, Alija Izetbegovi. He describes the weirdness of Sarajevo television news, the slant of the stories dependent on the reporter’s ethnicity. He traces the tortured rationalsiations behind Croatians’ defense of their not-so-unique language. He suggests that supportive audience members give a Serbian opposition press conference the feel of a revival meeting. Hall has a good grasp of the ironies of history (the Serbs claim the legacy of both the partisans and the Chetniks, who opposed each other in WW II) and of the present (Croatia’s leading anti-democrats aren’t home-grown- -they’re ÇmigrÇs from Australia and Canada). In multiethnic Bosnia, the microcosm of Yugoslavia, he drinks local-style coffee with Sarajevans yearning for reconciliation, their cosmopolitan “private dream” not shared by those in the divided countryside. In Kosovo, Hall finds a bearded Albanian passing as a Serb and maintaining an eight-year secret relationship with his girlfriend from home. Only in Kosovo, Hall observes, do old rural traditions remain intact despite the “self-vaunting” talk about Croat, Serb, or Muslim culture.

Hall’s book is a worthy aid to understanding Yugoslavia’s demise and can best be summed as a manual on a country that should not have been as there was no basis for its existence.

A hard look at events around us in Nigeria today shows that it is not impossible that a Hall might be taking a tour of another “impossible country ” as cascading events of a withering country are daily unfolding all around us.

But it did not start today .There has never been a meeting of minds amongst the various nationalities of Nigeria about this country outside the design of the evil British empire to couple a country for its economic exploitation. At amalgamation of the Southern and Northern protectorates in 1914, Lord Lugard spoke of finding “a northern suitor for the southern lady of means.”

As at the time, Britain had a surplus of £500,000 from the South and a deficit of £500,000 deficit from the North was that the South not Britain should subsidise  the North. It is that subsidy we still run till date with oil and gas of the  South-South plus the port receipts of Lagos and VAT.

Beyond exploitation and corruption, there has been no unity of vision and mission for Nigeria among the various elite of of different sections of the country. When Anthony Enahoro moved the motion for Nigeria to become independent in 1957, the North rioted and scores of people were killed. One of the best celebrated “progressives” from Kano coordinated the riots .

It was the manifestation of the shock that progressivism does to the mindset of a far North person that converted Comrade Ola Oni, one of the foremost leftists Nigeria ever known to become a self-determination activist in the last years of his life.The day before he died he said so many things to me which I will never forget. One of it was “Do not deceive yourself that the nationality question in Nigeria does not matter. I lived in that illusion until June 12 and I saw people like Bala Usman queueing behind the Fulani bourgeois to defend the annulment.That changed everything for me”. His warning prepared me for what would have shocked me with the recent  declaration by Dr.   Usman Bugaje who would have been naively classified as a northern progressive. He spoke at a recent northern conference where he foamed that the South-South people of Nigeria cannot lay claim to oil because it is because they share boundaries with the North which has 72% of Nigerian land mass that gave them access to the off-shore oil. He said it is actually the North that can lay claim to oil in the country. Before  him, his peers had come to the 2014 National Conference with a memo that they owned Nigeria because 80% of the land mass belongs to them.

In an uncanny coincidence with Yugoslavia’s  last days, the security agencies headed from a particular section of the country churn out information that could have no other intention than agent provocateurs design. It is only by the mercies of God that nations have not risen against each other from the deliberately provocative, inciting and propagandist content of the media relations of our key security outfits these days. It is a sad reminder of the better forgotten Abacha days.

Like in Yugoslavia,the possibility of political solutions being found to the crises in the land and save the Union is being frittered away daily with incendiary remarks by the likes of a gentleman whose name has not registered in my head one year after his appointment as Secretary to the Government of the Federation.Under that title he went about town recently pooh-poohing the resolutions of the 2014 National Conference which holds the prospect of a peaceful resolution to the terminal crisis Nigeria had found itself in. He maligned delegates to the conference as he reduced a conference which had many delegates of better background, exposure and accomplishment than himself as “boys”. Even for the lack of wisdom of his non-thought I quote him still:

“The government has not taken a decision on the 2014 National Conference. I understand that some Nigerians want it implemented but the government has been too busy with key areas of governance to talk about an exercise that we thought was essentially diversionary and a sort of, maybe, a “job for the boys.”

“If you remember, it was reported that almost everybody in the committee got N7 million and we consider it essentially as job for the boys. They probably produced a document that is good and commendable but I mean, this government is too busy with very more vital areas of governance and we are not intending to spend our time reading reports.

“The exercise of governance is not about reading reports. The reports are here, so many volumes that, for example, it would take me like seven days to go through and I wonder what happens to my work while I am reading it; while the economy needs attention, unemployment is there, insecurity is there, people are blowing up pipelines and so on.”

In the midst of such march of folly came reassurances  from the House of Representatives whose Ad-hoc Committee on the review of the constitution has adopted the conference as a working document.The Senate has sent feelers that it would  toe the same line. But Presidential spokesman, Mr. Femi Adesina says all that does not change the position of the President that the report of the conference should remain in the archives.

In an April 8 article in New York Times titled “Can Nigeria former dictator become a democrat?”, Max Siollun held that “Nigeria today needs a reconstructive surgeon, not a bulldozer.”

It seems no one read him and it may be difficult in that situation to avert the road to Yugoslavia in our descent.