By Obi Nawkanma
IT is a new year – the year 2010 after the Common Era. So, I welcome every Nigerian, and particularly all readers of the “Orbit” to the New Year, and wish you all the best of the New Year. Even as I utter this heartfelt wish, I also know, deep within me, that this is going to be an interesting and challenging year.

The symbolism and significance of this year should not escape any conscious Nigerian. This year will mark the Nigerian jubilee. It will give us an opportunity to reflect and possibly redirect the course of our national ship of state.

At the onset of the journey of independent nationhood on October 1, 1960, there were two points of departure: one was the path of skeptical nationhood and the other was the path of hope and elation. Two poems by two of Nigeria’s leading poets and cultural icons of that era – Wole Soyinka and John Pepper Clark – reflect these separate moods profoundly in their poems, both titled, “Abiku” and both published in the same issue of the leading literary journal of the era, the Black Orpheus.

In Soyinka’s “Abiku,” read as the parable of the new nation, we sense the skepticism also replayed in his enigmatic play, A Dance of the Forest, in which the reborn nation is incomplete and dares history to fix or complete it. The mocking and self-aware voice of the slippery child at the eternal crossroads proclaims the impossibility of its own survival.

Clark’s “Abiku” is a far more willing sense to nationness. As any sophisticated reader would note, and I read these poems suggestively in their parabolic contexts, in J.P. Clark, we see the dominant mood of the nation in 1960: a willingness to nurture the nation, even in all its contradictions to “stay” and be fully born.

These two poems confront us today, for indeed, in the last fifty years, Nigeria has proved to indeed be an “Abiku” or “Ogbanje” nation. But this is the year of the Jubilee, and if we must, it is imperative that we either heed the Levitical injunctions about the Jubilee, or turn inexorably and irretrievably towards the abyss.

One of the truly significant aspects of what we, as Nigerians, must come to terms with would be the meaning of citizenship and the responsibility of citizenship demanded both by law and by the privilege of consciousness.

A personal responsibility to a nation is the mark of conscious citizenship, and it does seem to me that there is a constitutional crisis afoot, replayed by the continued absence of the president of Nigeria from his job, and the unwillingness of the powerful interests currently at play to do right by the nation, and hand the authority to carry the functions of the state to the vice-president, Dr. Goodluck Jonathan and prevent further drift.

The prior right granted to Dr. Goodluck Ebele Jonathan, even as vice-president of the federation of Nigeria by the Nigerian constitution is the right to equal citizenship with everybody under the constitution and protection of the Nigerian state.

Two facts clearly indicate that the president of Nigeria is no longer in a fit position to carry out the function of the presidency: one is that the Christmas day attempt by a Nigerian child of the elite recruited by Al-Qaeda to carry out terrorist activity has elicited no presidential response, but the national security slip, as well as the clear discordance at the top of Nigeria’s national security administration indicate a clear lack of governance and leadership.

The nation is in some disarray because of a needless administrative gap. Apparently the vice-president, even if he receives security briefing, by the current quarantining of his powers, is in no position to give directions to the national security institutions both for the protection of the nation and against any potential emergencies.

Nigeria is thus in a deeply troubling vulnerable state. The second indicator is that it fell upon the vice-president, rather than the president, to make the traditional end of the year speech to Nigerians, in which he among others things, regrets the failings of the government, “for reasons beyond our control” to meet certain promises and obligations, including the 6,000 megawatt target for Nigeria’s national, domestic energy upgrade as was promised by this administration.

But while the Vice-President is saddled with that obligation, he is made incapable of assuming wider powers, including the power to swear-in the new chief justice of the Federation of Nigeria, Justice Aloysius Kastina-Alu. But it also seems to me that the cabal within the nation that seeks to prevent Dr. Goodluck from assuming authority in the face of a terribly incapacitated and weakened president is relying on abstraction rather than the mechanics of the constitution.

In point of fact, the constitution has already granted leave to the vice-president to act in the absence of the president, and requires no further note from the president, who slips in and out of consciousness, to assume, even if temporary but complete powers of state to prevent a catastrophic vacuum and further slippages.

Nigeria needs to be well governed. It is thus in my view that among the rights of the vice presidency is, besides the equality of his citizenship, also the power as the next in the administrative chain to assume leadership in the continued absence of the president.

Where he fails to do this, it must be taken to mean, a dereliction of duty and a failure of obligation. It is now up to the Vice-President to make full disclosure to Nigerians about the actual state of the president, and to take full responsibility of his oath to the nation.