Blood is not thicker than Money

 

One of the prevalent myths and conventional wisdoms of contemporary public discourse in Nigeria is that the root causes of the country’s ingrained maladies are essentially ethno-cultural. 

And a corollary of this submission is that a structural disaggregation of the polity into its ethno-cultural and linguistic components, either through outright dismemberment of the country as it currently exists or its decentralization into regionally contiguous geo-political zones, is the key to rapid socio-economic and political transformation.

Underlying this thesis is the notion that blood ties, linguistic affinity and cultural affiliation should be the lowest common factors informing territorial delimitation in a restructured Nigeria. 

Within the context of such ‘ethnic federalism’, it is argued, the developmental potentials of the federating units will be liberated creating more conducive conditions for the accelerated achievement of national goals and aspirations.

Those who articulate this view often point to the commendable developmental strides made by the regions allegedly as a result of the competitive regionalism of the first republic as justification. 

While there is undoubtedly some validity to this argument, it overlooks or underestimates some critical intervening variables. 

First, it does not take sufficient account of visionary, dedicated and patriotic leadership as a key factor in the achievements of the regional governments of the first republic. 

Competitive regionalism did not on its own produce comparatively uniform levels of development across the regions. 

The uneven performance of the regions reflected the degree of qualitative vision of its political leaders and the competence and professionalism of its civil service.

 

Secondly, a prime mover of the thrust towards the break up of the regions that resulted in the progressive state-centric atomization of the polity was the struggle for political autonomy by regional ethnic minorities who felt marginalized and oppressed by relatively centralized regional structures.

 Thirdly, it is all too easy and convenient to romanticize the virtues of the first republic. 

The reality is that the same impunity and perverse values that undermine development in today’s Nigeria were already very much alive and well in the first six years of the country’s independence.

Corruption is not an exclusive product of Nigeria’s post-regional state structure. 

Anybody who doubts this should read the reports of the Coker Commission of Enquiry into the management of public corporations in Western Nigeria, the Foster Sutton Commission of Enquiry into the affairs of the African Continental Bank (ACB) in the Eastern Region or the reports of investigations into the affairs of public corporations in the Northern Region.

 The degree of politically driven and patently immoral privatization of public resources across the regions and at the centre in the first republic is well documented and quite honestly mind-boggling.

A key anchor of the theory of ‘ethnic federalism’ is that each ethnic group is a custodian of distinct and pristine core of culturally derived values that can serve as the building blocks of geo-ethnic developmental vitality and progress but for their suffocation within Nigeria’s current structural configuration.

 Among the Yoruba, for instance, the ethnic federalism theorists identify a body of ‘omuluabi’ values that can provide the basis for moral rejuvenation, cultural coherence and socio-economic progress.

The Intelligentsia of other ethnic and socio-cultural groups also make the same claims for their respective entities. 

The absence of such a nationally acceptable system of values in Nigeria is said to be at the root of the country’s protracted developmental impasse. 

 Thus, every ethno-cultural group absolves itself of blame for a national moral malaise that all are jointly responsible for to varying degrees. Of course, I find no credible empirical justification for these suppositions.

In a very interesting and stimulating paper presented recently at a conference in honor of Professor Akanmu G. Adebayo, at the University of  Ibadan, Dr Dapo  Thomas of the Department of History and International Relations, Lagos State University (LASU), applies his fecund theoretical imagination to the ethical quandary confronting Nigeria’s post-colonial state. Titled ‘Corrupt Politicians, Trial Carnivals and Molebi Theory’, Dr Thomas interrogates the phenomenon of fanatical, almost cultic and very public support for top public officials indicted and being tried for horrendous acts of corruption in President Muhammadu Buhari’s ongoing onslaught against graft.

As Thomas puts it “The carnivalisation of the trial of a rogue politician diminishes our values, insults our sensibilities, pollutes our cultural space, destroys the foundation of our polity and encourages communal scrambling for the endless gulping of our commonwealth”.

 In contradistinction to the Ebi concept or thesis propounded by Professor Akinjobi in 1961 to explain dominant socio-cultural traits, Thomas seeks to understand seeming popular indulgence of and support for corrupt behavior within the context of what he calls ‘Molebi theory’.

 In Akinjobi’s Ebi thesis, the Ebi is the smallest social unit among the Yoruba consisting of everyone across time and space related by blood. “What binds the people together is blood relationship which is believed to be stronger than any other connection”.

The Ebi thesis bears some theoretical affinity with the famous theory of the two publics formulated by the noted political sociologist, Professor Peter Ekeh, to explicate the relationship between the colonial legacy, state structure and political behavior in post colonial Africa.

 In Ekeh’s formulation, public officers in the modern, formal state sector of the polity routinely pillage the state offices where they operate to enrich and empower their primordial ethno-cultural communities to popular admiration of the latter. For Ekeh and Akinjobi, therefore, blood and cultural affinity or loyalty is the basis of communal support for what really ought to be perverse and deviant corrupt behavior that has unfortunately become the norm.

To Dr Thomas, however, his ‘Molebi theory” identifies money and other forms of material gratification as the cementing factor of essentially ‘patron-client’ relations.

 Money or pecuniary relations, contrary to the premise of the ‘ethnic federalism’ thesis is thicker than blood. In his words, “In Molebi theory, members of the Molebi don’t have to have blood relationship or share any cultural history.

 What binds them together is their loyalty, commitment, allegiance and belief in their political and economic godfathers…In most cases, these “Molebi” shamelessly ignore or discountenance the obvious evidence and proof of reckless looting of the public treasury by their benefactors…A benefactor’s “Molebi” are beneficiaries of his ill-gotten wealth and dubious hospitality” and these transcend ethnic, linguistic, cultural, religious, class among other boundaries.

 

It can thus be misleading and unhelpful to resort to crude forms of ethno-regional reductionism to explain or seek solutions to Nigeria’s multifarious problems including corruption.

 As the current exposure of massive corruption in the last administration reveals, those who perpetrated these acts cut across ethnic, cultural, regional or religious ties. No ‘omuluabi’ or other supposedly superior moral ethic prevented them from feasting gluttonously on our collective patrimony.

In the same vein, those who have continued to vociferously support even public officers that have admitted to their guilt by returning huge amounts of stolen money, including storming court sessions to solidarise with treasury looters, are not limited to any ethnic, cultural or religious group. 

We have on our hands a serious crisis of values from which no ethno-cultural group is excluded or innocent.

But how would Dr Thomas classify the allegedly sectional and nepotistic pattern of many of the APC administration’s appointments or the federal government’s inaction as regards some of its highly placed political functionaries accused of serious ethical infractions? Is this a combination of various manifestations of the Ebi (blood) and Molebi (prebendal) afflictions with serious negative implications for Buhari’s anti-corruption war?