Back to the Grand Treasonable Felony, as decreed by the state which, by its very nature rejects those constitutive questions that continue to preoccupy some of us, questions such as ‘ Why is the nation?’ ‘For whom does nation exist?’ ‘On whose behalf is the nation project pursued and sustained? The conveners and participants at the Berlin conference of 1881 were in no doubt as to the answers. They were at least honest. Nations – these new nations that they decreed into being, by divine fiat, with synthetic identities – were no more than spatial configurations designed to facilitate administrative control and resource exploitation. Far too many of the national leaders of our continent have pursued the same objectives as their answer, indifferent to the creative demands of the questions that surround the nation project. Nations do not exist as mere abstractions. A nation is a material implantation, and the building block of that growth is the human entity. The proof of this is both historic and scientific.
What, we may ask, is the difference between the Valley of Storms on the planetary surface of Mars and the nation space known as Burkina Faso or the Congo ? Why, on discovering some new heavenly body, do we not refer to it as the Jupiter or the Martian nation? Answer – none of these heavenly bodies is peopled. None consists of any social organization. None lays claim to any productive processes. And even if life were found on any – let us fantasize and say that a kind of Jurassic Park , filled with weird animal life were found on Jupiter – it still would not be designated ‘nation’ by our imaginary planetary explorers. No, a nation becomes one only when occupied, organised and worked by sentient beings. Maybe such requirements will change with discoveries of different forms of life, endowed with even more intelligence than the homo sapiens we know on terrestrial habitation. We cannot say. Maybe those who believe in Paradise, Hell or Purgatory, peopled by angels in one zone, by devils in another, and the Awaiting Trial in the third will propose that we add the nations of Paradise , Hell and Purgatory onto the school atlas – all of that is within the realms of projection. On this present earth however, in the here and now, the primary unit of the nation that exists is the human entity – and living ones, not ancestors or ghosts. Future is a constant on the minds of all but limited minds, but even the future depends on the viability of the present, and that present is right here, within these walls where the constancy of electric power, breathable air, and potable water is not guaranteed, despite which the quality air we breathe in this hall is the very ambrosia of existence compared to the air that millions of others breathe. Thus to the question, ‘for whom is the nation project pursued or sustained?’ there can be only one answer – the human entity.
The contest between state and nation is an ancient one, and for a simple reason – the interests of state and nation seldom coincide. On the contrary, we find that both are constantly at loggerheads with each other. Do not be fooled by appearances; even the legislatures that are voted in, in the most ideal circumstances, by popular mandate, cease thereby to be part of the nation. Once elected, they assume their functions as arms of State. That they come in conflict with the executive arm of state is nothing strange – there is always a tussle for supremacy even within the internal arrangements of robbery syndicates, each trying to bloody the nose of the other. Consider the Nigerian instance – if the legislatures were – exceptionally – a product of the nation, not part and parcel of the state, their first task would have been to throw the product of a self-perpetuating conspiracy of a militarized State – back to the people, and ascertain the true national voice and will. Other tests abound, all related to the role of self-interest that an anti-nation document had bestowed on them, including the preposterous chunk of the national budget that they swallow under different headings – hefty allowances for waking, belching, yawning and even breathing – for the honour of being an apparatus of state. The enemies of true nationhood are multiple and thus, the will to nation-being remains a constant challenge. It is the nature and consistency of that challenge that often narrates the true histories of peoples anywhere, and through the ages.
Dictatorships – and under that rubric I include all forms of authoritarianisms, both secular and theocratic – are of course the crudest form of State expression. The State looms larger than life under dictatorships, while nationhood diminishes progressively. Reluctant as I am to grant him credit, objectively however, this is one of the reasons why Colonel Qadaffi, the Libyan ruler, presents one such an enigmatic, but ultimately instructive case-study. Here is a dictator who, even while wielding unlimited power over the citizens of that nation space, remains troubled by the contradictions of his very political existence. He qualifies as someone who nurses a vision of the withering away of the state, constantly seeking ways to whittle away at that agency of nation usurpation and re-establish the nation as the ultimate destination of the modern community of peoples. He appears to recognize intuitively that the state is an aberration, not evidence of social progression. Of course he is more impetuous than methodical, more authoritarian than democratic. You could even add that he is more fumbling than methodological. It is one thing to create a Jamhariya – as expression of nation will as opposed to state dictation, but as long as the state is embodied in the person of an individual, the evident extract is a contradiction within contradiction.
Still, the gesture itself, giving more audible voice to the people, provides evidence of some troubled thinking along these lines, manifests a readiness to challenge the givens of orthodox governance. It is in that context that his most recent gesture – to distribute his nation’s oil wealth directly to the people – can be understood. The wealth is the nation’s – that is, the people’s – to begin with, and what Qadaffi has attempted to do is restore that wealth where it actually belongs. There are other methods, far more efficacious, and more scientific, as has been pointed out by some of his own people. Nonetheless, the lesson is there for all to read, the message that all resources and property within any nation space belong primarily, and indisputably to the people. The State appropriates those resources, ostensibly in order to manage them on behalf of the people. In reality however, it is primarily to sustain itself, a non-productive mutation of nationhood that is entirely parasitic and, to add insult to injury, deploys those very resources for the – often brutal – for the suppression of nation will.
From the self-arrogating claims of state, let us move to consider a more modest component, and possible begetter of nation, that more familiar entity that we know as – community. Unlike the State, and even nation, it is to be doubted that any placement of community in the recognition of social formation will attract any contentious reaction. Community is a word we all recognize, constantly use. It is one of those expressions that we cannot always precisely define, yet we all know what it means. It contrasts with nation in the fact that it is both abstract and palpable. While ‘nation’ is finite, bounded – even though it occasionally expands through conquest, fusion, or accident, community remains permanently fluid in the sense that it is not regulated by physical boundaries. Next to the discrete entity of the human persona, community is perhaps the next candidate in the hierarchy of the building blocks of nation. Yet, it remains a rather unstable quantity, since it is not subject to the mechanics of nation arrangement. If – as is extremely likely – a tiny population of Nigerians were found in Uzbekistan or at the very end of the south pole, they would be referred to as the Nigerian community, and validly. Community thus exists both within a nation entity as its natural home, or becomes embedded as a kind of parasitic growth, hopefully benign, within a foreign body. Such a community would manifest distinctive features that would be near identical with similar communities in other host bodies, however geographically separated. Within its natural home – that is, home as in ‘nation space’ – the Yoruba community, for example, would cognize itself as such, possibly linking up with other Yoruba in Benin, Ghana, Togo, Ivory Coast, all the way to Brazil, Cuba or Jamaica, to interact, in a non-structured fashion, as a larger Yoruba Community, interchangeable as an expression with a greater Yoruba nation. Awolowo would never describe community as a geographical expression. This fluidity, this trans-border capability of existence – do remember that the Berlin demarcated borders interrupted the possibility of such a homogenous nation emerging in the first place – emphasizes for us what an artificial construct, in guise of progression, the present ‘nations’ are, and thus, what an even greater impostor the ‘State’ is – a necessary evil, one might concede, but definitely an impostor. What is essential to note at this point is that community transcends national borders, making Nation a hybridized adulteration of Community.
The Soviet Union in its heydays could be described as a mega-nation. In global interaction, that geographical expanse merely offers us the world’s prime instance of the largest centrally controlled nation in the world – Georgia, Belarussia, Mongolia, Uzbekistan etc. etc. While the United Nations Organisation had no choice to accept them as independent nationalities, its members, both East and West recognized quite clearly that they were fictional nation entities, anything but independent nations. Even as unit states, they were little more than local governments. The Soviet Union commandeered their resources, needed in its drive to become a world power, then commandeered their votes at division time in the United Nations. It was a game everyone understood. The United States must have regretted that it hadn’t thought of it earlier or, in its eagerness be seen as one nation, had failed to recognize the disadvantages at voting time. The only solution was to cultivate its own ‘spheres of influence’, kept in line through threats, bribes or deals.
Perhaps the French understood the game, hence the French choice of elevating its designation of overseas holdings from ‘departments’ of France to national entities. After the de Gaulle referendum, the departments on the African continent – those who voted ‘Yes’ that is – were upgraded to the status of nations, conditionally independent. The grandiloquent gesture of offering them their independence meant that they were still, in effect, entitled to French citizenship, could send deputes to the Assemblee Nationale, and endure French troops permanently stationed on their territories. Could we truly call these nations at the time? No. They were not creations of nation will but a substitution of the francophone part of the Berlin Family of Nations with the French – the Communaute Francaise. The French Communaute provides us yet another twist to the definition of ‘community’ in this attempt to provide some ground rules for the emergence of nation from communities – or indeed the capital ‘N’ Nation from nations – as self-managing units of human groupings, beyond designation as mere geographical expressions. Did those spaces truly aspire to become nations in their time, or were the leaders simply content to subsume nation completely under state? The state is always easier to assert, that is, once the machinery of control and management is in place. So what we saw in the formula of the de Gaulle referendum was nothing more than the re-formulation of nation spaces within States that were not even internal, but exocentrically French.
