By Erasmus Ikhide
 Published
July 7th, 2009
Two Nigerian great
sons – Professor Wole Soyinka and Rev.Fr. Matthew Hassan
Kukah – who deal in words have both opened a much desired
but highly detested vista of discourse on issues we like to
shy away from, which in all earnestness have assumed virus
status; marred Nigeria from the outset, retarded its inward
growth, and threatened its continued existence while the
people set upon themselves for self-destruction. The
ensuring debate occurred in an event organized to mark,
honour and celebrate the late Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s
centennial birth anniversary on March 3, 2009. I will
concern myself only to just three misunderstood issues –
supremacy of Community over State; the challenge of
nation-building and the role of religion sects in
nation-building in Nigeria .
I shall engage the issues in utmost brevity; more so that my
current engagement had hardly warranted pontificating on
other issues outside one’s domain, however consequential,
except channeling all effort, concertedly towards one own
state good governance. The thematic of superimposition of
State over and above Community as argued by Fr. Kukah in his
response to Prof. Soyinka’s lecture that marked the late
sage’s 100 birth anniversary is, to me, our latest hard
sought efforts at repositioning a wobbly nation whose
visible claim to existence lies principally and precariously
in its self-deceit. It is only good that divergence opinions
are cropping up towards probable resolution of that
cancerous epiphyte that retards our nation-being.
I tried in vain to resist the temptation to keep mute over
gross distortions of historical facts; the vanishing of that
space, and the erosion of the genuineness of Community that
service as the bastion of human co-habitation and the
interaction between Community and nation towards a genial
Statehood as a sovereign political entity that never existed
in most cases.
The State is the octopus furnished with suckers that drains
the Community and nations of their being, subdue their
palpable benefit from the products of their efforts since it
is an unfettered entity which ignores the laws and sanction
jointly imposed by the Communities and nations for
harmonious co-habitation. That the state contented itself
with the trappings of moral force – a police state that it
is – in violations of extant laws made by it is the major
undoing of the state. If we may ask: can there be more
gruesome terror than the one the Nigeria state visited on
the Ekiti nation and Community through supervening powers
recently in the Ekiti re-run (s)election? We leave President
Yar’Adua to provide the answer as the incarnate of the state
now that more and more unsettled issues – ala amnesty in the
Niger Delta is added to the legion of unresolved, but
self-imposed maze.
Fr. Hassan Kukah didn’t quite appreciate Community as the
forebear of that State that almost always falls into the
hands of benevolent dictators who consider state power as an
end in itself, in protection of the sovereign mandate as one
big behemoth whose supremacy to Community viability in the
course of nation building surpasses every other ingredient
that makes up a nation, apart from human being. But the
Community or nation, said Professor Wole Soyinka died on
state arrival, or some form of mutation of total nihilism.
‘‘That the state is historically opposed to nation-becoming,
even while spouting nationalist fervour. It will always act
in its own interests, not in the interest of the nation
entity. A nation space may qualify for a police state,
including, increasingly, the theocratic kind, but it still
is not a nation., least of all when temporarily appropriated
by an individual whose credo of existence is - L’etat, c’est
moi’’. Hassan Kukah’s unintuitive summation that Awolowo’s
assertion – Nigeria is a mere ‘‘geographical expression’’ –
didn’t connote the totality of Nigerian formation as given
by British colony, even though British colonial masters
themselves could not explain that away; with supportive
books written by them that they did boggle the protocol of
association in Nigeria. This, certainly, should now purge
Hassan Kukah of that putative illusion that conscribing
Awolowo to the non-existent nationhood – just statehood – to
say the least, is reductionism at its height. ‘‘It has
always been my personal view, Hassan Kukah said, ‘‘that the
late sage used that expression to draw attention to the
urgency of the work at hand, meaning that he wanted us to
work hard because what we had then was not a nation, but
that with hard work, we could turn this mere geographical
expression into a great nation’’.
Awolowo’s description of Nigeria as a mere ‘‘geographical
expression’’ is unambiguous and should not be misconstrued
as meaning ‘drawing attention to the urgency of the work at
hand to building a great nation’ because nations are not
brought into being through mere naming or when it is shouted
at the rooftop. How do you build something on nothing? To
me, even now, we have not started the processes of attaining
nationhood; to start with, let alone re-branding a morbid
monstrosity that has gobbled Community, nation-being and
humanity it is established to serve.
That brings us to the concepts and challenge of
nation-building that is the heart of Nigeria failure towards
the attainment of nation-being. Again, we will seeking the
bird that has flown if we do not interrogate holistically
the efforts the state has made and still making to thwart
the emergence Nigerian nationhood since the status quo
favours, and has always favoured men of power. Do you
remember former President Olusegun Obasanjo? Do you remember
his efforts at plunging Nigeria into more odious scenario
than the Hell Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe offers his people
for over three decade? Do you also remember Fr Matthew
Hassan Kukah was one of the arrows of President Olusegun
Obasanjo Third Term Agenda TTA, and euphemism for live
presidency? Fr Hassan Kukah was the Secretary of that PDP
retreat, dubbed Constitutional Review Committee CRC,
programmed to usher in the self-created Messiah that was to
rule for live! Swinging the tide in ones favour because you
have the state apparatus at your beck and call as Olusegun
Obasanjo had done; subverting Nigeria constitution, using
the like of Hassan Kukah to actualize it is reductionist of
a mock in the monastery
So, how can nation-building or nation-being possibly emerge
from such dubiety, such despondency, despair and ashes that
ascribes the ownership of a nation; the people’s sovereign
mandate to one powerful and successful idiot just because of
his association with criminalities and power gone berserk
that he taunts like a trophy? I do have a problem with
Hassan Kukah stance on nation-building because the role he
played in Olusegun Obasanjo’s third term gambit as an
un-patriotic clergyman is anathema to nation-being. My
worries about his sincere contributions towards retrieving
the nation from the state have not been abated, but are
further reaffirm, given his paucity and liberalistic
ideology – no sense of urgency – towards any redeeming
graces in sight for a state in travail. How will Hassan
Kukah, an orthodox monsignor and preacher feel if Olusegun
Obasanjo had gone ahead to take the Nigerian dream beyond
the edge of precipice? Needless to ask since he collaborated
with OBJ to take the Nigerian State to the edge!
Hassan Kukah, in spite of his ecclesiastical background came
across as Olusegun Obasanjo’s incarnate whose poisoned heart
with abiding hatred of the Niger Delta people lies
dangerously in the swamping creeks of Niger Delta; right at
scoping petrol dollars, soiled with human blood, and then
subdue the vented anger of the freedom fighters who object
to the ruination of their ancestral space. Now, the
destruction of the region he has always craved has
materialized. Hssan Kukah posited thus, ‘‘In similar
fashion, the crisis in the Niger Delta has come full circle
because criminals who posed as harbingers of a new dawn for
their people have turned on their own people now’’. That he
deliberately refused to separate the freedom fighters from
the criminals who have hijacked the process is libelous of
the struggles and efforts of the eco warriors, Ken Saro-Wiwa
and the like who have drawn relentlessly the World attention
to criminal activities of the Nigerian State and oil
portfolios in that region.
It is even more appalling to read that Shell Petroleum, that
morbid slave driver of a company, ridding richly on the
destruction of the Niger Delta terrain saying that the
compensation it gave in the ensuring lawsuit to the Ogoni 9
is its charity gesture to the people of Ogoni! Charity? What
charity? A situation where an exploitative foreign company
as Shell in an active connivance with the Nigerian State
talked down on a deprived people of a vanished space as the
Ogonis, to me, is an example of a nation that had abdicated
her primary responsibility at best, and at worst a failed
state.
That takes us to the conclusion we have always drawn in
spite of our Christian faith that religion seems a mere
product of the weakness of the human heart which is besotted
by passions for majority to subcome to exploitation of the
few. My earlier discourse entitled: ‘‘RELIGION AND RACISM AS
TWIN EVIL’’ should suffice for Hassan Kukah’s eternal quest
for a revived religion comity he seeks in the hallowed
confine of his monastery. Hassan Kukah used other nations of
the world to ex-rayed the role of religion in human
civilization and political liberation without a single
mention of our religious contribution in his home country
Nigeria .
‘‘Surely, Hassan Kukah said, ‘‘Prof. Soyinka cannot in
honesty say that he is no witness to the constructive role
that religion has played in history. In the Reagan and
Thatcher eras, there was the wrong notion that somehow, the
end of history, to recast the Hegelian thesis advanced by
Fukuyama was triggered by the market economy and models of
western liberal democracy and freedom. What they did not
explain was why these revolutions started in the Churches
and not in the Parliaments and Stock exchanges in the former
Soviet Union . In almost all the former Soviet Union , it
was from the Churches that revolt against Communism erupted.
By rallying his people under the banner of Islam, Imam
Khomeni overthrew what had become the decadent regime in
Iran . By summoning religion, Archbishop Tutu and other
religious leaders brought apartheid to its knees. Atheists,
Labour leaders, men and women all fell in line only after
religion had blazed the trail in the struggles to give
apartheid the last push. The role and place of Liberation
theology in Latin America is known to Professor Soyinka’’.
We may never know, at least for now, why Fr. Hassan Kukah
thrives in falsehood. Is he aware that Nelson Mandela, the
arrow head of that antiapartheid struggle is not known with
any Church or Mosque, even now? We shall really revisit
these issues of religion paternity of liberation struggle in
due course, apart from isolated cases he mentioned.
Hassan Kukah however admitted that religion has been
hijacked – is it like the Niger Delta Struggle? – by
extremists. ‘‘Clearly, with the Crusades, other violent wars
over religion, September 11, 2001, the emergence of Al
Qaeda, and our own share of local savagery here, only a fool
can try to refute the frankness of these claims’’. This is
however heartwarming that Fr Hassan Kukah has admitted guilt
for and on behalf of religious sects and used other
countries’ Political Theology to justify his construct of
the possibility of a viable religion conscious contribution
towards nation-building in the foreseeable future in Nigeria
. That too, is also heartwarming.
Hassan Kukah’s admission is far reaching; and more than
justifies that exploitative virus which religion has
descended and, potential nation plunderer, draining
excitedly at the very altar of the stomach god! No matter
how you deodorize horses the stench remains. At any rate, we
look forward to that auspicious time as Fr Matthew Hassan
Kukah assures that religion would, all of a sudden seize its
bellicose stance and turn around to savage the nation
together with the rights groups and her people in a
foreseeable future.
Erasmus Ikhide is the Senior
Special Assistant on Media Affairs
to Edo State Governor, Comrade
Adams Aliyu Oshiomhole.
Contact: ikhide4edogovthouse@yahoo.com
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