Nation-branding in nation-building: Celebrating a nation at 100

On January 01, 2014, Nigeria will be 100 years old as a nation but the pervasive question remains: who are we and where are we heading? Granted, the celebrations may have different meanings to different people; what with some saying there is no cause for celebration while others are saying that the celebration is not about accomplishments but the enactment of a ritual.

The first school opines that the celebration is a waste of scarce resources, or at best a way of siphoning money. This school of thought is of the opinion that Nigeria still totters among the comity of nations and being a toddler at 100, the milestone should be spent taking stock and bemoaning the failed leadership that got us to this sorry-state.

The second school sees the anniversary celebration more as an opportunity to celebrate our existence as a nation given all the rough paths we have travelled in the last 100 years. This school cites the two coup-d-tats of 1966, the Nigerian Civil War and the periods of Military interregnums and failed attempts at democracy that dogged the last 100 years while concluding that despite these great socio-political tremors, it is a miracle that we are still together as a nation. This school enthuses that nations that went through less of these trauma have disintegrated or are still at war. They cite Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, USSR, and Myanmar. Nearer home in Africa, they cite Somalia, Liberia, Sierra-Leone, Congo, Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda and a host of others.

The first school, which I call the school of reflection, takes a birds-eye view of what obtains in other nations and the path nations have taken to greatness – sacrifice, knowledge, imagination, the will to act in the interest of the greater majority, the building of strong systems rather than strong individuals and god-fathers, the prevalence of justice, equity and fair-play – and sees very few good examples in Nigeria. Borrowing from man’s existential quest at conquering his environment, this school enthuses that Nigeria is off the mark as electricity is about individual generators here and not about a process that works, water is plenty here but none good enough to drink; land is abundant here but not enough is cultivated to guarantee food security; and the roads are available but not good enough for safe passage. This school therefore concludes that celebration should be about accomplishments and not survival.

The second school, which I nick-named the ritualistic school, sees more a need to decree our greatness through role-playing as opposed to reality. Taking a cue from the early man’s penchant for rituals which seeks to conjure reality through stylised plays, as seasons and cycles come and go, while little or no explanation is given as to the reason for the difference  in seasons and cycles, and the celestial rather than the existential is appeased and faith become more about inertia than action.  To this group, everything falls or rises without human intervention but by a divine unction, akin to the big bang theory.  This group concludes that the path to greatness is in celebration.

While the school of reflection and the school of rituals are at each other’s throat regarding Nigeria’s 100th anniversary, the nation Nigeria must yet prepare for the future and in preparing for the future use the opportunity of the 100th anniversary to begin to reposition our nation by rising up to the challenges of building a modern nation state, one which is audacious in its quest at greatness and competitive within the comity of nations.

The second question then is what path are we taking in our second attempt at nation building? Because in 100 years of our existence, the world has moved on from the agrarian age that precipitated the exportation of slaves from Africa to the New World, the industrial age which led to the signing of treaties which ceded authorities of our erstwhile traditional institutions to the British Colonial powers, to the age of Crude Oil which came just before our independence, to the information age which came in the wake of globalisation.

I am asking this question against the background of a constantly changing global order. What this implies is that our strategy must change in alignment with what is happening around us. This is where knowledge comes in. We need to observe global trends and ask questions as to our place in it. We need to develop our educational system and make it more oriented to our development needs as opposed to being just about certification. This is where imagination comes in, as without conception, there can be no accomplishments. This reminds me of the space-race. Starting with the United States and Soviet Union, with each acquiring the knowledge required at conquering the space and putting their imagination to work, it did not take long for success to come. Today, every ambitious nation has caught the space bug with each either sending men into the orbit or launching a satellite. Today, the world is different because of this out-of-the-world knowledge and imagination. So where does this leave our own dear Nigeria?

Indeed, I have heard people say it will take centuries for us to catch up with the developed world, but my response is always that it does not take time, it takes will; the will to get on the road, the will to get our hands dirty, the will to act! But what defines will, if not imagination, what defines imagination, if not knowledge?

Let’s look at the Asian Tigers, Taiwan, Korea, Singapore and the others in comparison with Nigeria. In 1960, we were all classified as Third World nations but by the 1980’s the tide had started to turn what with the designation changing to emerging nations for the Asian Tigers and Nigeria still keeping the tag “Third World”. By the 1990’s the Asian nations had taken the path of sustainable growth and were in fact, almost at par with the developed world on the prosperity index and today, the talk is no more about the Asian Tigers but about Brazil, Russia, India and China – what has been rightly termed the BRIC states. Even with the current global recession, these states are still recording quarter-on-quarter growth and are fast catching up with the so-called developed world. What these examples point to is that it does not take centuries to catch-up, it takes a virile strategy based on knowledge and imagination and above all it takes collective will.

 

The Path to Nation Building

A friend once said to me that the path to greatness is arduous when a nation emerges outside of the consent of its constituent societies. The friend goes further to reveal that before 1776 there was an American society with affinity and engagements although under British rule unlike the Nigerian situation where a nation was decreed based on British administrative convenience rather than the agreement of the constituent societies. He enthuses that it was the collective agreement of the American society acting under the leadership of George Washington that led to the defeat of the British overlords and the adoption of a collectively created constitution in the quest at having an immutable union. In the Nigerian situation, there was first a Nigerian nation before attempts at forging a Nigerian society, hence the constant bickering about federal character and  fights over the sharing of the national cake as opposed to a collective agreement at baking a bigger and better cake as was the case in the American context.

Although critics are quick to point out that despite the collective resolve at forging a nation in the American context, there was a near succession by the agrarian South from the Union leading to the war with the industrial North in what was known as the American Civil war from 1861 to 1865. Critics went further to assert that if this can happen about a 100 years after agreeing to come together, then Nigeria may be on the right path to nationhood. The risk at taking this standpoint is that it is always easy to cite the wrong examples. Back to my friends point, nations rise to greatness on the platform of a collective agreement. Again critics will point to diversity of cultures and religion, in the Nigerian context, as being the bane behind the failure of a collective agreement citing more homogeneous settings like China where a collective agreement was easy and national cohesion and development had moved apace. Again this appears    a wrong thesis as culturally heterogeneous communities too had also forged a collective agreement which has survived the test of time. America being a good example, the United Kingdom being another and under the current world order we see a further boost for diversity as a platform for progress in the coming together of disparate states to form the European Union with a single monetary union in mainland Europe. Back to my friend’s assertion that for progress to happen, societies in coming together to forge a nation, must have a collective agreement and this collective agreement can happen under a homogeneous or heterogeneous cultural and religious setting. All it takes is sincerity of purpose, a good sense of history and the will to agree to work together for the common good. What this essentially means is that in the Nigerian situation, development and progress can come through despite the heterogeneity but the constituent societies must, outside the whims and caprice of Lord Lugard, Sarah Shaw and their British masters, forge a collective agreement which will chart a way forward for a bigger and a better union.

• Okusaga, a company executive writes from Lagos

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