Between ourselves and our institutions and between Marx and Rousseau: election eve reflections (1)

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances but under existing circumstances
Karl Marx
Man is born free but he is everywhere in chains. One man thinks himself the master of others, but he remains more of a slave than they are.
Jean Jacques Rousseau
The thing caught in Nte’s trap is much bigger than Nte.
Chinua Achebe
It is of course pure guesswork whether or not we are actually on the eve of the 2015 election cycle in our country. On December 24 every year – and after year – we know we are at the eve of Christmas. But there is no such natural certainty with the current election cycle in Nigeria. We were on the eve of the institutionally fixed presidential election on February 13, 2015. But ten days before that date, the elections were postponed for six weeks. Now as we move closer to the postponed dates of March 28 and April 11 for the presidential and governorship elections, the only certainty we know is that institutionally, the elections can be further postponed only at the risk of moving too dangerously close to open and blatant flouting of the Nigerian Constitution. This is because constitutionally, elections in our country MUST be held no less than 30 days before May 29 that is the date for the reinstatement of the incumbent government if it is returned to power or the inauguration of a new administration if the opposition candidate wins.

In a country in which the institutional foundations of governance and accountability are so weak as to be virtually non-existent and so dysfunctional as to be close to what we see in the failed states of the world, we cannot be certain that we are now finally on the eve of the 2015 elections. The question that arises from this tragic dilemma on which the future, indeed the very survival of our country depends is the classic one of whether the problem is with our institutions or with us as Nigerians and, more fundamentally, as human beings. Put differently, the question we might ask is this: Is it in ourselves as Nigerians in particular and human beings in general, or is it in our institutions that must look for the reason why, with all our wealth in human and natural resources, there is so much violence, insecurity and suffering in our country, especially for the majority of our peoples? If we improve our institutions, will Nigerians behave differently and be on the whole a happier people, or do we first have to change who and what we are before we can expect to see meaningful and beneficial changes in the functioning of our institutions?
It is very important to raise the discussion of this question to the level of the phenomenon of humanity itself because Nigerians are, for perfectly understandable reasons, quite often too predisposed to see all the things that are wrong with us as a people and with the functioning of our institutions in isolation from what has happened and is happening in the rest of the world. We may not be used to hearing this said or written about us, but we are part and parcel of some of the worst things in human beings all over the world and in the functioning of the institutions of society in modern history. Let me explain what I mean by this observation.
Although for a completely different set of reasons and with also very different ends in mind, I am for instance struck by just how similar Republican politicians in the United States are to Nigerian politicians in general in how far they were willing to go beyond and against their country’s political institutions when they recently brought the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to address the U.S. Congress in order to both embarrass Obama and weaken or even cripple the Presidency. As I write these words, I have in mind the last ditch battles that the Presidents of both Brazil and Argentina are waging to save their careers from the gargantuan political and moral corruption that has totally engulfed their administrations. It is true that that neither of these two ladies – yes, the incumbent Presidents of Brazil and Argentina are both female – has gone as far as Goodluck Jonathan in corruption, waste and squandermania, but the similarities in the weaknesses of both human and institutional foundations of governance and accountability are quite striking. And if it is the Nigerian military on which you wish to focus for the brazenness with which it has allowed itself to be used by thugs, charlatans and moral cretins in power, there are many countries around the world in which you will find fellow travelers with our corrupt generals, Pakistan, Yemen, the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan being examples that come readily to mind. And on perhaps the most important issue of all, this being the terrible and often unspeakable suffering that the great majority of the citizens of a country experience from the combination of human and institutional failings of a cynical and criminal nature, Nigeria is in an unholy league with other countries of Africa and the world as the Central African Republic, South Sudan, Libya, South Africa, Haiti, Syria, Pakistan and Iraq to name just a few countries which might be deemed to logically belong in this particular morally and institutionally maladjusted league of nations.

I make these comparisons for both pragmatic and philosophical reasons that actually happen to be closely linked. On the level of pragmatics, it is very important, I believe, to trim the likes of Ayo Fayose, Musiliu Obanikoro, Doyin Okupe and Chris Ubah to size. These are among the most arrant of the self-identified, maniacal kingpins of the nefarious PDP struggle to make our country’s 2015 election cycle either a non-event or a total failure. It is important, I believe, to let Nigerians know that such power-crazed people have surfaced in other countries of the past and the present throughout the world and have often been soundly defeated. When you tear off their masks of invincibility and reveal the mere human faces and failings of such unconscionable brokers of unjust, corrupt and brutish power, you raise the bar of their success far above their capabilities. Philosophically, it is important, I think, to realize that much has been said throughout modern history about the question that drives these reflections, the question of which do we change first, ourselves or our institutions. For this reason, we do not have to start from scratch; we do not have to reinvent the wheel. All we have to do is add to the inherited discourses. Permit me, then, to approach this topic through the three epigraphs of this essay from Marx, Rousseau and Achebe respectively. Since charity, as the saying goes, begins at home, let us begin with our own writer and thinker, Chinua Achebe, and his fascinating parable of Nte and the thing caught in his trap.
The symbolic brilliance of Achebe’s parable of Nte and the thing caught by his trap that is far bigger than himself is revealed by the fact that in the novelistic setting of this parable, the character in the tale sees things only or primarily through his or her own perspectives and interests – as we all do in life. This is why what starts as a potential good fortune – catching a very big quarry in his trap – turns into a nightmare for Nte because the trap is his and his alone. However, if Nte is willing to share the meat of the ensnared quarry with his neighbors, he can call them to his aid and the quarry is no longer frightening. Before the collective will, guile and wisdom of the entire community, the thing that is caught in Nte’s trap loses its terror. Projecting to a wider frame of reference from this particular reading of the parable, we can say that like Nte, nations and the human community as a whole will always catch something in our trap that is bigger than anyone among us. In the crises of the 2015 election cycle in Nigeria we seem to be deeply afflicted by this Nte conundrum in which the collective unity that could avert a potential catastrophe eludes us. This where Marx and Rousseau come into the discussion.
It used to be thought that Marx and Rousseau stand at two extreme polar opposites in the debates over which is more primary, human nature or the institutions of society, in how happy or unhappy we are. Marx, as may be seen from the quote from his famous monograph, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, placed the emphasis on objective circumstances: we do not make history, we do not achieve our happiness as political and historical subjects on the basis of our individual wills or desires. On the other hand, Rousseau in the famous opening sentences of The Social Contract emphasized an original freedom in our natural condition which, having been ensnared by social institutions, must be won back by a new social contract that places maximum value on this original freedom. We know now that things are far more complicated than the dichotomy between these two views indicates. We know now that we are both objects and subjects of history and politics. Furthermore, we know that being object and subject each entails both positive and negative things. For this reason, our opening or driving question turns out not to be a matter of “either or”. In other words, it is not a matter of you have to change from within before you can change social institutions or vice versa.
I hope I am wrong, but in my opinion, far many more Nigerians think that the change has to come first from within before we can get our rulers and our compatriots in their tens of millions to obey laws and act justly, decently and in the public good. I see the present moment as a uniquely auspicious moment in which to begin to change this unspoken but iron-clad predisposition of Nigerians. Thus, concretely, I pose the question of who among genuine, independent-minded patriots in our country today think that we first have to change a Fayose, a Chris Ubah or a Musiliu Obanikoro from within before we can make the constitutional and institutional arrangements that we have give us fair, clean and credible elections? This will be our starting point in next week’s concluding essay in the series.