Following my analysis of the roots of our national division on this page two weeks ago, I received messages from two colleague-friends for whom I have a lot of respect. While they did not disagree with the fundamentals of my position, they raised some interesting points about what they thought I should not have left out of consideration. It is worthy of note that while they wrote me separate messages, they raised similar if not identical issues. I would like to address their concern today.
I should start with a brief summary of my position from last week. We have a divided nation. But there is more to our division than ethnicity and religion, which have often been our focus of attention on this matter. Of course, we have ethnic and religious differences. But if these are well-managed with policies that prioritize equitable access to national resources so that, as the founding fathers had hoped, no one is oppressed or marginalized, we would have little or no division now. We are a nation divided because, in national policy and in elite leadership calculations, we abandoned the core values of brotherhood/sisterhood.
The abandonment of the philosophy of brotherhood/sisterhood has created divisions between haves and have-nots, educated and non-educated, employed and unemployed, well-fed and hungry, privileged and marginalized. We find each of these pairs in every nook and cranny of the country and across every ethnic and religious differences. And while we have often generally focused on these differences as the problem, the marginalized are beginning to see things differently and are asking for their due as a just basis for national unity.
Take just one statistic. Three years ago, there were 1.7 million undergraduates and about 230,000 graduate students studying in 170 federal, state, and private universities in Nigeria. Yet the ratio of admitted to unadmitted applicants is 1:4. In other words, 75% of applicants don’t receive admission. Some of these may get admitted to other higher institutions including polytechnics, nursing schools, technical colleges, etc. Majority, however, will roam the streets and many of them end up frustrated and give up on their dreams.
But here is an even grimmer statistic. According to a World Bank study, 33.4% of the national labor force is unemployed this year. 38% of these are graduates of higher institutions. Of course, there are various reasons for this, but policy matters have something to do with many, if not all of them. I should note, however, that this is not all on the watch of the current administration as it is a cumulative effect of years of erratic government policies regarding this matter.
Parents and grandparents of today’s millennials graduated in the early and mid-70s with two or three job offers waiting for them. There was no discrimination based on ethnicity or religion. The then University of Ife had a career office that mentored students about the interview process. It was easy for those graduates to see themselves as proud citizens of a nation that cared for them. In turn, they represented the nation well to the outside world.
Dating back to the early and mid-80’s structural adjustment policies, however, private companies were forced to lock their shops and thus a major source of graduate employment was closed. With only federal and state governments and a few private companies, including banks, superstores, and the oil industry now open to hiring graduates, the competition is heart-wrenching. While more than 500,000 undergraduates and graduates graduate from higher institutions yearly, less than half of these can expect to have jobs. Jobs are just not growing at a rate as fast as the rate of the growth of labor force. And unfortunately, many youths who made sacrifices to do what the adults asked them to do aren’t just a happy lot now. Their unhappiness and frustration with the system is playing out on the streets.
Now, my friends agree with the analysis thus far. They also agree that this is a fruitful way of understanding our division. But they are worried that I have left out of my analysis what they regard as two of the main sources of division, namely ideology and partisanship.
Here’s how one of them puts it: It may not appear to you that we are an ideologically divided nation. But we really are. There is a section of our population that would rather conserve the values of the past, while another section would like to move us in progressive steps. It has always been so since the beginning of the republic. The radicalism of the South against colonialism and its aggressive demand for independence wasn’t appreciated by the North. On his part, my second friend brings up the issue of partisan divide as an offshoot of the ideological divide. Surprisingly to me, he sees the apparent tension in the struggle for political power especially by the strongest political parties as a reflection of a fundamental division.
To be honest, while I had expected objections to my analysis, I did not expect that these two—ideology and partisanship—would be the basis for any serious objection. I had expected to be criticized by readers who might seriously believe that I had downplayed the role of ethnicity and religion. After all, most of us have grown up experiencing the harm caused by an overbearing influence of ethnic and religious jingoism on national politics.
Furthermore, these differences still appear to be in the forefront of our thoughts. However, my point is simply that those differences by themselves are not at the root of our division as they play out in the public arena. Rather it is our mismanagement of those differences that create divisions which turn out to be very difficult to bridge. Needless to add that a large part of that mismanagement includes using political power to inordinately and unjustifiably prioritize the interests of one’s own ethnic or religious group while frustrating those of others.
Now, the matter of ideology is easy to dismiss. I have yet to see any form of ideological division in our national politics that is strong enough to cause fundamental division. The reference to the colonial era and the nationalist struggle seems to be a misconception of what happened then as ideology. That the North was reluctant to move at the same fast pace as the South wanted in the struggle for independence was less of an ideological issue than it was of a pragmatic understanding of the reality of her status vis-à-vis the South.
The North wasn’t ready, not because she wanted to conserve values, but simply because she didn’t want to be a junior partner in the Nigerian enterprise. You cannot begrudge that political calculation. The South would also be as hesitant if she was in the position the North found herself. The culprit was the colonizer who shielded the North from the educational advancement it allowed in the South.
Assume, however, that with a stretch, we may identify some ideological difference between the Action Group’s Democratic Socialism and the Northern People’s Congress’ One North, One Destiny, it is hard to identify any ideological division between our present national political parties. APC and PDP are both center-right political parties with similar manifestos. They both claim to be for the people. In the time that each party has controlled the center, they have worked on constitutional amendment. However, neither of them has done anything about the fundamental structure of the constitution.
Most importantly, the fact that members of the leadership cadre of each party have found it easy to ditch their parties and to move effortlessly between parties should tell us something about the (lack of) ideological difference between them. On this point, consider, how unappealing American political leaders have found changing their political parties even when they have differences of opinion with the way their party is being run. Lincoln Project members who worked against Donald Trump in the November presidential election still retain their membership of the Republican Party. Their hope is to reclaim the party and reposition it as a Conservative party post-Trump. Obviously, that’s not the way we operate here.
