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By Chidi Amuta
National history has a moral arc. It bends perennially in the direction of justice no matter how long it takes. This truism is my response to the three dominant positions on the desirable geopolitical location of the Nigerian presidency in 2023. The first is the repeated general political advisory by my friend Nasir El-Rufai, Governor of Kaduna State, that the next president should not come from the northern zones of the country.
The second is the ambiguous view of Mr. Mamman Daura, President Buhari’s nephew, that subsequent presidents after Mr. Buhari should be chosen on the basis of ‘merit’, whatever that means. The third is the entitlement preference of the South Eastern political and cultural elite that the next president should emanate from their zone.
Ordinarily, discourse on succession preferences in a democracy ought to be determined by two factors: pressing issues of national concern; or leading political figures in the contending parties and their stand in relation to important national issues. Succession should not be determined by either direction on a compass or some other primordial consideration. But this is Nigeria. It is a nation conceived in compromise, nurtured in aggressive geo ethnic competition and sustained by hegemonic blackmail and systemic injustices.
The agitation for a shift of the locus of presidential power to the South East is however rooted in the general history of nations. No nation is an immaculate conception. Nearly every national history is an undulating pageant of glorious moments and inevitable episodes of brutish savagery and intense sadness. Nations come into being and progress sometimes by willfully or inadvertently hurting sections of their populace. Communal clashes, ethnic conflicts, civil wars, slavery, genocide, pogroms, insurgency, foolish mass killings and reprisals thereof are part of national history. When the hour of sadness passes, a nation so afflicted incurs moral debts to those sections of the community that have been hurt.
Subsequent social peace and political order in a nation as a community of feelings is often dependent on how the moral arc bends in relation to healing the injuries of the past. The mere passage of time is never enough to heal the moral wounds that lie buried in the hearts of injured precincts of a nation. As a strategy of national survival, nations with past injuries have had to confront the moral consequences of their past through conscious management of the political process. Such managed political process implies a recalibration of the moral compass of the nation. It is politics in the service of the higher meaning of democracy when democratic outcomes redress injustices. This is the essence of the politics of moral consequence. Its ultimate aim is to avert the dire consequences of a nation sustained on systemic injustice.
Nigeria is neither the first nor the last nation to come face to face with the ugly face of its past. In 2008, the United States of America rose in democratic unison to right the systemic historic wrong of its racist past by electing Barak Hussein Obama as its first black president. Similarly, by the first half of 1994, the very survival of the Rwandan nation was threatened by the injustice of the genocide against the Tutsis minority. It was a Tutsi army officer that crossed the border from Uganda, leading the forces that ended the anarchy. By 2000, that gallant soldier, Paul Kagame, was elected President of a reconciled Rwanda. His subsequent re-elections have led to the reconciliation, peace and prosperity that have become the hallmarks of modern Rwanda.
The South African story is too familiar. Yet, it was the recognition by the white apartheid regime that only true majoritarian democracy would restore harmony, peace and order to end decades of violent revolt. That realization and the conscious political actions that followed led to the enthronement of a free and democratic South Africa. Nelson Mandela became the president of a multi racial South Africa. The rest is history.
Australia too has had to confront and assuage a ghost from its past. There was a prolonged unease about injustices against Australian Aborigines, especially the forced removal of indigenous children (‘the Stolen Generations’) as well as centuries of discrimination and neglect by the state. In 2008, then Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, summoned the moral courage to apologise to the injured. On 13th February, 2008, parliament passed a historic resolution mandating an open apology to the Aboriginal population. Hear the words: “We apologize for the laws and policies of successive…governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on these our fellow Australians…, (For all these), we say sorry”