By Hakeem Baba-Ahmad
If you think you have it tough, read history books—- Bill Maher, Comedian.
AT the heat of the national resistance against President Jonathan’s decision to abruptly implement the decision to remove the subsidy on petroleum, a number of events took place which had the combined effect of raising the oldest question about the Nigerian state; as well as further damaging President Jonathan’s already limited capacity to offer an all-inclusive and purposeful leadership.

The events were apparently aimed at providing some much-needed relief and space for Jonathan at a time when the entire nation was aroused in anger and indignation at his action. In the context of the highly charged atmosphere generated by Jonathan’s decision which was interpreted by Nigerians as contempt for their opinions and welfare, the events raised the levels of tension and reminded the nation that it still has basic issues to sort out over its unity and future.

The Ijaw hysterics: It began with a hysterical claim by an Ijaw group that there were plans afoot to assassinate President Jonathan and some other leaders, including Senate President David Mark. Then a deluge of advertorials and rallies were released on the nation to remind us that President Jonathan is an Ijaw man from the South South. We were told that his kith and kin resented the manner Nigerians were reacting to his decision to remove the subsidy.

His decision over the subsidy matter was painful, but correct, and acceptable to the people who produce and own the petroleum resources in the first place. If other Nigerians were unhappy with Jonathan, Ijaw people wanted to remind us that they are happy with their son. A bit like the Nigerian saying that “monkey no fine, but im mama like am.”

Environmental and sundry abuse

They reminded the rest of Nigeria that it was a parasite feeding off their resources. They were tired of sharing their resources, paying all the price for environmental and sundry abuse, and then having to tolerate insult on their son. They were convinced that the entire national resistance against the subsidy removal was being orchestrated and hijacked by people who had never wanted their son to be President in the first place. Well, enough was enough.

If Jonathan and the higher price for petroleum were not welcome by other Nigerians, the South South people wanted him and all its petroleum resources. Nigerians could go their own ways, while the Ijaw nation and the South South kept their son, Jonathan, and their oil.

If the hysterical and the treasonable utterances being made by leaders such as Chief Edwin Clark, Pastor Ayo Oritsejafor, the President of the Christian Association of Nigeria, CAN; Alhaji Asari Dokubo among others were noted by President Jonathan or the Attorney-General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, they gave no indication that it mattered.

Certainly, the communiqué signed by the cream of the Ijaw people, and a sprinkling of other South South elite which pointedly said that some people (read: northerners and the Yoruba) were involved in attempts to highjack the anti-subsidy removal protests to achieve a regime change cannot be dismissed as the usual facile outbursts from self-appointed Ijaw leaders the nation had become used to.

The signatories were people who knew the weight of their words; and should therefore be taken seriously. You do not make weighty allegations about attempts to achieve regime change through other means in a democratic setting unless you are assured of your facts, or your immunity from being asked to produce them.

It is safe to assume that they had no facts to back up their dangerous allegation, if all they saw was the exercise of the right of Nigerians to protest an unpopular decision. They were certainly confident that they will not be challenged to substantiate their allegations.

Outbursts of regime change: What these outbursts did were to remind Nigerians that the age-old, we-want-out game is still being played in Nigeria. Many of the elderly Nigerians who signed Chief Clark’s communiqué will be thoroughly familiar with the game.

Briefly, it is about elite from ethnic groups or regions demanding to be let out of the Nigerian state or parts of it whenever they perceive a major threat to their own interests. It is played to wrest major concessions from other elite, or retain advantages. Virtually everyone has played this game since the amalgamation of the two Protectorates into Nigeria in 1914. The very idea of creating a federal Nigeria was itself fundamentally an admission of its defining character of pluralism.

The  massive political engineering (much of it crudely undertaken by the military which created more problems than it solved) it went through since 1914 showed clearly that this cultural pluralism has been its biggest challenge. Similarly, the history of seeking for regime change whenever the power equation did not favour groups is as old as independent Nigeria itself. Obafemi Awolowo was convicted of attempting to effect regime change in 1962. The Isaac Boro misadventure also represents an early reference point for political restiveness in and around the Niger Delta.

The military perfected the art of regime change until it threatened to consume everyone involved in it, and the remnants of the political elite got tired of its shenanigans. The North wanted to opt out in early 1966, but stayed back in the country only because its young officers took power back from military officers from the East who had effected their own regime change. The East actually attempted to go out, and was only forced back into the federation after a bloody civil war.

The West wanted out when Abiola was denied the Presidency, and subsequently bombarded the nation with NADECO, OPC, Afenifere and shrill demands for justice until they had a Yoruba president in 1999. Even then it was only comfortable with him after he had rid himself of all vestiges of a northern lackey. Even as we speak, Boko Haram spokesmen say they will only accept a Nigeria which has no constitution and no leader unless they are rooted in an Islamic system.

There are very interesting debates going on in informed circles in the Southwest on the prospects of going it alone, in the event that the Nigerian idea becomes a liability for progress-loving Yoruba people. The East is basking in its new-found unity on the fence, and is rebuilding its primordial foundations with a political platform and an eye on the considerable benefits derivable from an alliance with the South South.

An emerging think tank in the South South imagines that there is the feasibility of the creation and survival of a South South nation, possibly with US support. They are wrong, as all others before them were wrong.

Structure and future of Nigeria: So the Ijaw community and South South elite are in good company in the long history of using local grievance to re-evaluate a place in the Nigerian nation. The calls for a critical re-evaluation of the Nigerian nation, including its structure, goals, viability or even desirability are being heard again.

President Jonathan’s tepid reaction to it in setting up the Belgore Committee to compile a list of “settled” issues around which some amendments to the constitution may be proposed has been dismissed by proponents of a thorough-going and substantive reassessment of the Nigerian state on the basis of its building blocks, which they say is its ethnic and cultural groups. Even some members of the northern elite, long perceived as the bulwark of the resistance to restructuring the Nigerian state, now want a part of the action.

The only opponent to the idea of a genuine discussion on the structure and future of Nigeria is the government. And at its head is an Ijaw man.

Antics of Ijaw leaders

So while the antics of Ijaw leaders who threatened Nigerians with withdrawal of their son and petroleum and gas resources from the rest of Nigeria will not impress many who had seen others play the same game, the damage done to President Jonathan’s standing and image is immense.

The last thing a President, who already has a well-cultivated record of running an administration substantially with South South people and their support needs, is another tribal endorsement. The Ijaw leaders have reduced Jonathan’s capacity to lead a Nigerian nation, and have shrunk his image even more. They have reminded Northern Governors from the PDP, the entire South West, most northern Christians, many muslims northerners who did not vote for Buhari as President, southeasterners who hope they can tap into South South affluence, and just about every Nigerian that their votes and support had merely produced an Ijaw President in April last year.

If or when Jonathan finally weathers the storm around the subsidy fiasco, and then attempts to lead the nation through the difficult phase of living with consequences of the subsidy removal and the other difficult choices he and the nation may have to make, he is likely to look back and find that very few people who are not Ijaw are behind him.

He will find the southwest further alienated from him, and Yoruba politics is likely to be more overtly hostile to him than it had been. He will find it more and more necessary to rely on the use or threat of force to keep many parts of the nation under some form of control. The occupation of Lagos West will be a major irritant, and Yoruba people’s historic hostility to occupation is legendary.

Mandela’s caution

The President will do well to learn from Abacha’s experience, and to remember Nelson Mandela’s caution: “All government violence does is breed counter violence.” The East is likely to have a long shopping list of compensation for its near-solid loyalty to Jonathan during his recent trials.

He won’t have much to give, especially since he runs his administration with a large dose of Igbo people and interests. He will find that the relationship with the East, as he gives more and it asks for more, will raise the historic levels of hostility against them from the South South.

He will not find an enthusiastic support from Christian north which is likely to revel in its recent discovery that it can act in unison with muslim north without mutual fear, and which, being among the most impoverished community in the country, will resent him for transforming their lives in such a manner that everything costs a lot more than it did under Yar’Adua and Obasanjo.

Nigerians will continue to question the basis of their unity and the utility and value of continuing as one nation. This is not, in itself, a harmful exercise. The third US President, Thomas Jefferson (1743 – 1826) once observed: “I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.” The questions will be raised at every turn by elite who lose out in the short-term to others, and some of the intra-elite quarrels will raise serious tension.

The Ijaw flag raised in defence of President Jonathan during the subsidy removal fiasco will not intimidate or alarm most Nigerians.

But it will have a negative effect on the President who was unable or unwilling to prevail on his tribesmen to tone down their rhetoric. Worse, it will expose the limited capacities and political base of President Jonathan even more dangerously, at a time when he needs to act and be seen as a leader poised for historic achievements in a nation which badly needs them.

His job is being made more difficult by those who create for him a much narrower political base, and as he tries to rally all Nigerians around him, he may find, in the words of Napoleon Bonaparte, that “A throne is only a bench covered in velvet.”