Confrontation Politics and Crisis Management: Nigerian University Students and Public Policy—a Social Commentary

A social scientist once described Nigerian political behavior and culture in terms of a continual ability to move dangerously closest to the edge of disaster before pulling back just in time to avoid falling into the deep.1 Nigerians in high and low places have a passion for insisting on the absolute rightness of their positions and claims sometimes with little regard to the consequences for others as well as for themselves. Sometimes groups in the nation act as if they will rather be dead right than heed the political necessity of mutual accommodation and prudent compromise. The Daily Times Opinion of April 29, recalls Thomas Hobbes, the English philosopher (1588-1679) when it declared that "Nigerians are brutish and nasty. They are contentious and cantankerous. They are irreverent. And they are ungovernable. .. . [They] are an intensely political people, the more so today, when the promise of a return to civilian government has understandably led to the flexing of muscles by all manner of interest groups."2 This is national high-wire politics at its best! But it is also dangerous politics at its worst. It reflects an ingrained political attitude about which more should be learned. In the last 18 years, various power groups and leaders have moved this country to the edges of multiple disasters, both social and political. Several times, this high-wire politics has failed; points of no return had been reached, and Nigeria had fallen into the deep. One potential chaos succeeds another, and most of the country's independent existence has been devoted to confrontation politics and successive crises management. On the whole the nation has preferred the politics of power and self-assertion over the politics of accommodation and self-restraint. In this high-wire politics, I draw no distinction between government and the governed, between those in power and those outside it. The difference to be drawn lies in the degrees of access groups have to the varying instruments of power and its exercise. This, I suggest, is the core of sociopolitical dynamics in Nigerian society. This kind of confrontation politics was played for its political dividends during the Sharia controversy in the Constituent Assembly.3 Between April 10 and 30, it was the turn of the Nigerian University students to play the same game with the National University Commission (NUC), the Police, the Army and the Federal Military Government. The National Union of Nigerian Students (NUNS), or its latest reincarnation, National Organization of Nigerian Students (NONS), has spearheaded a drive since January this year that has resulted in a national tragedy of great magnitude. The students and their leaders probably did not intend violence and death. The Government is dedicated to protecting lives and property. But the confrontation of all these elements in the nation produced great violence and death and an intolerable reign of terror in Lagos, a severe loss of property and a general abuse of individual rights in several places in the country. It is tempting to look at these periodic explosions as mere accidents with unintended and unanticipated consequences. But it is also possible to look at them as forms of organized chaos; an organized insanity that has a logic of its own, a logic that is embedded in a national disposition to power. In Nigeria, the disposition to responsible behavior or even respect for legitimate authority and rule of law is only skin deep. Beneath this national facade of sophistication lies a passionate propensity to lawlessness, to arbitrary and capricious behavior, impulses and raw passions, and, finally a propensity to a dreadful intolerance of criticism, or even of a legitimate challenge to authority. It is the persistence of these that I fear. The nation seems to have a very short fuse; when it breaks, raw passions are quickly let loose everywhere, mob rule surfaces, and the real possibility of an anomic society is made obvious. Now that the violence has subsided, now that the guns of death on the campuses are silent, now that mob rule in the streets of Lagos is under (temporary?) control, we can begin to sort out the factors that produced the latest eruptions in confrontation politics. The Military Government has made a wise beginning in setting up a Commission of Inquiry into this latest of national tragedies. But it is well to warn, that the results of such an inquiry will not provide complete explanations for the tragedy. It will answer many questions, but if I am right in supposing that the explanation lies in deeper waters, then a longer, more persistent soul-searching will be needed. My comments in this essay therefore cannot be more than suggestive in indicating where to search and in examining the range of complexity with which we may be dealing. A proper way to begin therefore is to state a terrible fact that no one should be allowed to forget or cover up. What we have witnessed is a profound national tragedy. It is a tragedy made more tragic by its pointlessness and its evitability. It should never have happened. It was absolutely preventable. But it happened. And it will probably happen again unless radical changes occur in national attitudes toward power claims, authority, and claims of inalienable rights and entitle-