STRIKER: The National Interest

FOR several decades, the “national interest” has been one of the most abused ideals used as cover for promoting sinister clique interests and the perpetration of legion of unpatriotic acts, at least in Nigeria. Then military President, Ibrahim Badamosi Babangida, in the name of overriding national interest, proclaimed in 1986 that “there is no alternative to Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP)” and went on, against national outcries and opposition, to implement it. Of course, it was a huge lie that there would be anything, much else an economic policy, to which there is no alternative. Indeed, the policy turned out to be a big nail into Nigeria’s economy coffin, from which it is still awaiting resurrection till date! Such are the maltreatments to which the nebulous national interest is subjected, time and again.

Nigeria had not articulated some uplifting and energising ‘Nigerian Dream’ at birth or along the way; but it certainly has “national interest,” at least, to stay the course of its ship as it sails turbulent national and international waters. If it has ended up copying the American political and governance system, it should be implied that it somehow aims to achieve certain spectacular objectives that the political and governance system achieved and is still achieving for America. The American Dream is clear, both from the rallying call of the Statue of Liberty captured in the words of Emma Lazarus’s 1883 sonnet “The New Colossus” and the final words of the American anthem: a “land of the free and the home of the brave.”

Although the first stanza of the Nigerian anthem contains only an appeal to its citizens, the second and final stanza, which is an appeal to God, closed with what is a glimpse of the kind of nation we desire: “a nation where peace and justice shall reign.” This is apt, as justice indeed is the mother of peace, and it can be taken that the two constitute the objects of our basic national interest; justice especially, since it is the harbinger of peace, which is a primal condition for development and prosperity.

How then can the desire to enthrone justice – equity – be the reason for smothering policies and actions, repeatedly fostered on the country under the guise of promoting and defending overriding “national interest?” What is the concept of Justice embraced by our ruling elites, if we have moved on for over 60 years to arrive at a station where some AK47-wielding herders will invade your cassava farm with several dozen cows to eat the plants up and all you must do is look on and keep shut unless you want to be slaughtered like a goat?

The trigger issues for the present tipping-point insecurity we are experiencing today is the convergence of herders-farmers crises and terror, both mismanaged for decades on account of clear abandonment of sense, modernity, technology and “national interest” – Justice; for all manners of sectional interests by the ruling elites across board. If it is not partisan political jobbing, it is ethnic deal; if it is not religious zeal, it is outright private pocket; whereas ordinary Nigerians across all tribes and religions not only do not have any problems of peaceful coexistence amongst themselves but are united in poverty and hardship, divided only as pushed by the inordinate interests of their bigoted elites who authored the poverty and hardship in the first instance.

If over sixty years of appeals to the elites will not make them change their ways and embrace the “national interest” clearly stated at least in our national anthem and canvassed through innumerable newspaper features, editorials, lectures, conferences and the like, perhaps, it is time to redirect the homilies to the people themselves. Incessantly manipulated and always miscued by prejudiced elites as they are, in a nation capable of producing a Nobel Laureate and a World Trade Organisation CEO, we should be able to aggregate citizens sensible enough, sufficient enough in number, patriotic enough, responsible and dutiful enough to change the present paradigm.

The “National Interest” is “a nation where peace and justice shall reign,” which is an adequate Nigerian Dream to start with. Building it is a collective duty that can no longer be left with a non-compliant and unchanging generations of elites. It appears that at no time is the opening cry of our national anthem more relevant than now: “Arise, O Compatriots, Nigeria’s Call Obey…”