The grave rhetoric of constitutional crisis that inevitably would attend the struggle between branches of government over the insurgency must be taken with a grain of salt. The 1999 constitution of the federal republic has always remained the last refuge of the politician.
Let us now consider Mr President remark with regards to the ongoing efforts to contain insurgency and terrorism. He was quoted to have said that the issue of security is very complex in nature, hence difficult for an average citizen to understand.
We agree that the principle of force forms the realm of its own with laws and nobody should know that better than the President Muhammadu Buhari himself, a retired Army General and a veteran of the Nigerian civil war. It presupposes that it is distinct and separate from the laws of moral life. The slaughter at Zabarmari in Borno State was explained by reference to the circumstances of the ongoing war on the insurgency.
Although this statement may be true, it does not answer to the political realities or help us to understand the position of Commander-in-Chief. It, therefore, behoves on to the government to acknowledge that once the debate began, all sorts of moral and strategic questions were likely to come up for answers. As for us the participants in the debate, the outcome may not be determined by the nature of the debate, but by the necessity of Presidential judgment.
The word ‘necessity’ doubles the parts of “indispensable’’ and “inevitable”. In the military briefings, the military high command seemed to suggest that defeating the insurgents is indispensable for the preservation of the unity of the federal republic. Some say this claim is rhetoric in two senses. First, it evades the moral question of whether the preservation of the country’s unity was itself necessary. There are some Nigerians who had doubts about that and more who doubted that the Federation had to be a uniform system of governance.
Secondly, it exaggerates the knowledge and foresight of the military high command. They are not saying with certainty that the unity of Nigeria is concomitant to the destruction of Boko Haram or all the other insurgent groups. Their argument has to do with probabilities and risks. And such arguments are always arguable. Would the destruction of BH and other insurgent groups really reduce the risk of separation? Are there alternative policies? What are the likely costs of this war on insurgencies?
While agreements were being sought with Bandits in Katsina, Zamfara and other contiguous Northern states in the North-West and North Central, and a general moderating of the security was expected to ensure, it is expected that any departure from the agreed principles shall be met with a firm attitude on the part of the state’s concerned and the Federal government. If, as we continue to witness, that the whole concept of security arrangement with the Bandits involved a misunderstanding of the nature and depth of basic state motivations, it seems equally true that they also involve a misunderstanding of the nature of democracy.
Political action depends very much on the power of public support, but when the public is told that the bandits are no longer to be regarded as truly hostile, but rather as partners, or prospective partners, in an amicable community that remain naturally confused and unprepared. The point here is not the literal applicability of thoughtless arrangements, as much as the general mood they reveal. It showed that major political forces were prepared to make important concessions to the bandits. It is possible that a firm political leadership would have produced, or would produce, a clearer stand among the electorate as a whole.
As the debate began, all sorts of moral and strategic question came up. For us the participants, the outcome is not going to be determined by the necessity of nature, but by the opinions held and decisions freely made. The general claim of say Governor Masari to enter into a negotiation with the Bandits was inevitable, and that presumably was what the President was made to believe. But the claim can only be made afterwards, for inevitability here is mediated by a process of political deliberation and that the Presidency could not know what is inevitable until that process is completed. Judgments of necessity in this respect are always retrospective in character. In other words, it is the work of historians, not historical actors.
What sort of people are we that we are willing to confer prestige and legitimacy on such monstrous mutation of the ideal of progress? The lessons of this narrative are that an open society of individualists and pressure groups will tend to magnify its internal problems, so long as it continues to be a living civilization. But, while there is no plausible worst-case scenario in which the Nigerian state would be extinguished by a domestic crisis, war by the insurgents, crime or recession, there may be imaginable conditions under which the unity could suffer serious setbacks. Even more likely are a number of scenarios in which her allies could be her greatest foes in times of crisis if there is a further deterioration in the strength and credibility of its institutions.
Dr Hakeem Baba Ahmed posited in his column in Daily Trust of Wednesday, January 20th 2021 titled “51 Years in A Thousand Words” that this is the time to ask the nation what it took to fight “a just war” and preserve a nation that deserved preserving? Indeed, when we make moral judgments, we try to recapture that perspective. We reiterate the decision-making process, or we rehearse our own future decisions, asking what we could have done or what we would do in similar circumstances. It is the same country, but if we must act in accordance with our interests, driven by our fears of one another, then talk about justice cannot possibly be anything more than talk. It refers to no purposes that we call our own and to no goals that we can share with others. I really sympathize with Dr Hakeem for being a participant to a virtual meeting whereas the name suggests was a woven fair pretence with words that have no clear references, no certain definitions and no logical entailments. They are as Hobbes writes in Leviathan, “ever used with relation to the person that uses them”. They express that person fears and nothing else. It is only most apparent but true for everyone that they hold for honourable that which pleases them and for just that which profits.
The thematic “Never Again” in a state of insurgency where organizations like IPOB and other insurgents reined the day, I would posit that “Never” is without qualification, because in that state by definition, no sovereign rules. It is generally true, but especially so in a time of violent conflict, that we can understand what other people are saying only if we see through their “fair pretences” and translate moral talk into the harder currency of interest talk.
Again, as I digress into the article, I discovered that the possibilities for manipulation are limited. Whether or not people speak in good faith, moral talk is coercive, one thing leads to another. A war called unjust is not, to paraphrase Hobbes, a war disliked. It is a war disliked for a particular reason and anyone making the charge is required to provide particular sorts of evidence. Similarly, if I claim that I am fighting justly, I must also claim that I was attacked, or threatened with attack, or I am coming to the aid of a victim of someone else’s attack. And each of these claims has its own entailments, leading deeper and deeper into the world of discourse where I am severely constraint because we do not have to translate moral talk into interest talk in order to understand it. Morality refers in its own way to the real world. Be as it may, I expect Dr Hakeem to believed that there was really a story to tell, but in its moral life, ignorance isn’t all that common, but dishonesty is far more so.
MK Ilyasu can be reached via kabirilyasu@yahoo.com.
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