By Is’haq Modibbo Kawu
NEXT Monday, the National Conference will be inaugurated in Abuja. From that date, at least 490 Nigerians (looks like the opposition APC is determined to push a boycott of the process) will begin what will certainly be one of the most controversial gatherings in recent Nigerian history.

Not many ideas have divided Nigeria, stoking conflicting passions as much as the call for such a conference since the days of military dictatorship. I have written about the idea severally in the past, vehemently opposing the effort by sections of the community to impose on us, an ethnic based conference (some even demanded a conclave of “tribes” in a Twenty-First Century world, with its demands, challenges and opportunities.

I have always argued that Nigeria is not a sum total of ethnicities or “tribes”; and that we have a multiplicity of identities, which have kept shifting.

Nevertheless, there are influential elite circles who have remained fixated in the swampy time warp of “ethnicities”, as preferred category of appreciation of Nigeria’s challenges in the contemporary world. That is a platform which we have vigorously challenged and mercilessly interrogated over the past couple of years in the public space.

But many of these influential circles have successfully boxed the country into the corner of acceptance of the need to have a conference. It is indicative of the Nigerian condition today, that some of the most gung-ho advocates of a National Conference are Nigerians in their late 70s and 80s, who took a lot from Nigeria in its hey days of service to the Nigerian people.

They are close to the end of their lives, but have remained locked into a ‘tribal warfare’ mode in the types of demands they make on Nigeria, at a time when the overwhelming majority of the Nigerian people today, about seventy-five percent really, are under the age of thirty.

They do not share the excessive obsession with “tribal or ethnic” frames of understanding the fast-paced world they are living through today. On the one hand, their main demands are education, skills and jobs, in a national economy that is touted as rapidly growing and is soon expected to outstrip South Africa, as Africa’s largest economy, but which has stubbornly been unable to create the jobs that its teeming millions of young people need.

On the other hand, there are some of those old people of yesterday, whose obsession is to win the right to secession or even an outright dismemberment of our country, just as they are perched at the edges of their graves and are confronting mortality!

It is these eclectic collection of reactionary and backwards ideas, that have conspired along with several other choices in the political economy; in the inability to create a pan-Nigerian elite consensus for development; and the monumental processes of corrupt, neo-colonial capitalist processes of primitive accumulation, that have stunted Nigeria’s development.

Yet, it is the generation of elite who somehow made good for themselves, within the processes we are discussing, that remained the arrowheads of demand for conference, which they had insisted for a long time, must be a Sovereign National Conference. It has been the platform they had hoped to use to achieve a “restructuring” of Nigeria in tune with concantenations of their minds; but in the long run, a stepping stone to that ultimate ambition of secessionist circles of national dismemberment.

Rejection of ethnicist platform

My personal rejection of the ‘ethnicist’ platform and the category of appreciation of the contradictions of our national life, did not mean that I did not see the usefulness of a platform for Nigerians to have a grand gathering of discourse. No. But I have felt that there are many more social platforms which are more representative of what makes us Nigerians today: class; gender; demography; professional; along with those of ethnicities and religion, which have also been the most manipulated for reactionary purposes! It is the fact that these categories have now been brought into reckoning, which has made me more receptive of the National Conference idea.

Let me illustrate. I am a Muslim and Fullo, but these are only two of my identities. Over the past four decades, I have grown within a professional ambience of learning, training, performance and development, as a journalist and broadcaster, which allowed me to build relationships with colleagues from all over Nigeria, and from around the world. Similarly, I made conscious choices, to be part of a national political project as a cadre of the Nigerian Marxist-Leninist Movement, during some of the most productive years of my growth as a young Nigerian, organising with comrades of various backgrounds, from every corner of Nigeria, and because we had internationalist understanding of the nature of the struggles of the working people, we were also part of an internationalist consciousness.

So it is unacceptable that what will be prioritised for me, is my “ethnicity”, in the Nigerian scheme of things and within the world of the Twenty-First Century. Those are issues that we must still find ways to challenge and the National Conference offers the opportunity to face off with the forces of “ethnic” and “tribal” perspective to the problems of nation building.

The Nigerian Guild of Editors named me one of its two delegates to the conference. It is that type of pan-Nigerian professional platform, which I feel very obliged to. It is a platform of labour and it organises my professional peers, who come from various ethnicities and religious backgrounds. We have been united by our professional dedication as media practitioners, who carry a unique obligation to the Nigerian society.

Section 22 of Nigeria’s Constitution stated clearly, that: “The press, radio, television and other agencies of the mass media shall at all times be free…and uphold the responsibility and accountability of the Government to the people”. That is a very unique obligation and as a delegate to the National Conference, I will be dedicated to the best interest of the Nigerian people, collaborating with patriots of all backgrounds, to make a serious endeavour for change. Our country has always possessed the capacity for change and development; but the class forces of its parasitic elite groups have conspired to hold it down.

We have to create the ambience for freedom to spread its wings like a bird in the struggle for national liberation. Indeed, the locomotive of the National Conference has arrived at the station! The next three months will be super charged in our country. Let’s get it on!

Thought of home away from home

I AM writing these lines in a hotel room in Dubai. It is past midnight here, but still nighttime back home. I am part of a delegation of consultants working on the actualisation of Jigawa State Television. We are attending the 20th edition of CABSAT, the Middle East and Africa’s largest broadcast, content, digital media and satellite event. It is truly an event that allows the sharing of knowledge of the cutting edge developments which impact the modern world of broadcasting, a field to which I have dedicated the best part of my professional life, since I was sixteen years old.

Today, I run a multimedia company which works to assist clients solve problems which media posits in the world of the Twenty-First Century. So attendance of CABSAT is an important platform of education for my work too. And every time I visit this city, I marvel at how much success has been built here as a result of the incredible vision and determination of its people and leadership. The Dubai World Trade Centre is the venue of CABSAT and it is not only an architectural masterpiece, but also a reflection of the vision for Dubai to be a destination the world is obliged to visit and do business in.

Such a dedicated pursuit of vision and a dogged pursuit of its actualisation is the hallmark of leadership and those are missing ingredients of the Nigerian political landscape. It marvels me all the time, that one hundred years down the line, sections of the Nigerian political elite are still scheming plans to dismember their country, instead of building the elite consensus to construct one of the most important countries of the 21Century.

Ruling class inability

The inability of the ruling class to assume a historical responsibility for the modernity that can lift the mass of the Nigerian people out of stupor and a dehumanising poverty, goes hand in hand, with the perverse “creativeness”, which that ruling class exhibits, in the gradual evolution of Nigeria into one of the most unjust and most unequal societies on earth today! A conspiratorial and incestuous alliance of the political and business elite has built a country of extreme wealth for a tiny minority of elite today.

First, they sold the country to themselves; and are now drinking more champagne than the Russians; they have conspired to spend over $6billion to purchase private jets and those who hold the reigns of political power are not only looting the country to stupor but have perfected the manipulation of the fault lines of ethno-religious differences to keep the oppressed divided and increasingly unable to organise collectively, to put an end to the mess that the nation has been turned into.

Those whose remit it is to provide leadership for national development do not appreciate the urgency of action, clarity of vision and the commitment which the challenges we face today demand of them. They prefer to walk with a leisurely stride, finding a sense of urgency only in the scheming to corner opportunities for themselves.

The state itself has become “privatised” as organs of personal advantage and is completely sapped by corruption to the point of crippling incompetence. Even a modicum of self-interest to keep state survival central to society’s health seems to have been lost on the Nigerian ruling elite.

They endanger the society in their reckless irresponsibility and as the military response to the Boko Haram insurgency has shown in recent weeks, there is no institution of state that they have not maximally ruined. It is clear that what goes on in the Nigerian national scene, politically, economically and even socially, is not sustainable. Something just has to give.

The Nigerian people face uneasy choices as we move forward. The talk shop of a National Conference was presented by a section of the elite as the panacea to exorcise the pains of Nigerian nation building. That is where we have now arrived. It will be most interesting to see how the cacophony of voices; the disparate agendas and the different, often viciously conflicting mindsets will find the consensus to rebuild our country. Patriots have to work a way through the thickset, because there is no other way.