Emmanuel Onwubiko
Reading through the front pages and major news pages of some mainstream newspapers today such as The Guardian and Daily Sun brought tears to my eyes and reminded me that indeed existential philosophers were right to conclude with the founding fathers of Scholarly philosophy that in life the only permanent phenomenon is change.
You may want to know the source or cause of this upsurge in the emotional upsets I experienced. If in the affirmative, permit me to let your know that it was the photograph of hundreds of children, women and young persons in Plateau State that stood on the queue for their turns to receive plates of foods from the emergency relief services. These were persons hitherto happily doing their farm works in their different villages in Plateau state prior to the sudden invasion by well-armed herdsmen who slaughtered over 200 persons and drove them forcefully out of the ancestral homelands and indeed the invaders had the temerity to settle down in those ‘conquered’ territories and have begun to rename them as it suits them and yet there are both the State and Federal Governments that are silent as these unpardonable crime against humanity go on.
As soon I took a contemplative look at these front page photographs showing fellow citizens with plates waiting to be served food as internally displaced persons, some thought flashed through my sub-consciousness. One of those sub-conscious thoughts was to ask what the essence of government is if the ordinary people are slaughtered in their prime and in their great numbers by some other citizens who are armed and to have some high level supports within the top echelons of government.
Another thought was to interrogate the import of government borrowing from the profound leadership philosophies of fathers of philosophy of politics such as Aristotle (384 -322BC); Thomas Hobbes (1588 -1679); Thomas Aquinas (1225 -1274); John Locke (1632 -1704) amongst others. These great men were of the opinion that the primary purpose of government is the protection of life and property of the citizenry. Thus, the framers of the Nigerian Constitution also adopted this locus classicus into the frameworks of our supreme body of law. What this therefore means is that the written and unwritten social contract existing between the people and those officials elected into offices for specific tenure is that we the people of Nigeria have agreed to donate to you the legitimacy to exercise governmental authority provided that you will abide by the primary tenet of this social contract which is the protection at all times of the lives and property of all citizens. The consequence of a willful or negligible breach is the resignation from such offices and prosecution of the officials if found to have conspired with mass killers. We will look at what some of these philosophers affirmed as the central reason for the formation of governments in human societies.
For John Locke, the essence of government boils down to the unbiased enforcement of the rule of law which to him was the basis for man to have transited from his original state of nature whereby he had unbridled freedom to do as it pleases him.
He stated that the best way to understand political power aright, and derive it from its original, is to as a point of origin to compulsorily and compulsively consider what state all men are naturally in, and that is a state of perfect freedom to order their actions and dispose of their possessions and persons as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of nature without asking leave, or depending upon the will of any other man.
John Locke states thus: “A state also of equality, wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another; there being nothing more evident than that creatures of the same species and rank, promiscuously born to all the same advantages of nature, and the use of the same faculties, should also be equal to one amongst another without subordination or subjection, unless the Lord and Master of them all should by any manifest declaration of His will set one above another, and confer on him by an evident and clear appointment an undoubted right to dominion and sovereignty.”
He then proffered fundamental opinion to explain the whyness of enthronement of government in human societies thus: “But because no political society can be nor subsist without having in itself the power to preserve the property, and, in order thereunto, punish the offences of all those of that society, there, and there only, is political society, where every one of the members hath quitted this natural power, resigned it up into the hands of the community in all cases that exclude him not from appealing for protection to the law established by it”.
John further explained when there is a willful transition away from a state of nature it is because all private judgment of every particular member being excluded, the community comes to be umpire; and by understanding indifferent rules and men authorized by the community for their execution, decides all the differences that may happen between any members of that society concerning any matter of right, and punishes those offences which any member hath committed against the society with such penalties as the law has established.
The grand norm of a human society he argued is to ensure equality before the law and to practice equity as the hallmark of exercising governmental authority over the citizens. Thomas Hobbes puts it in a much more profound way by asserting that in a state of nature only the strong survives. He argued that in a state of nature life is short, brutish, uninteresting and in fact survival is by the fittest and the strongest. Also other contemporary philosophers say that one distinction that marks out the State of nature is that ‘Might is always right and that injustice and inequity are elevated as statecraft.”
Sadly, what the serial violent and blood cuddling terror attacks by armed herdsmen against farmers in the North represents is that Nigeria is gradually returning to a state of nature and the nation is being turned into one huge internally displaced people’s camp. That the world refuses to intervene to save Nigerians from these state supported attacks by armed Fulani herdsmen makes it the more ludicrous and indeed questions the essence of such bodies as the United Nations. Reading through a piece posted to www.eldis.org we were told that basically Nigeria has indeed turned to a monumental internally displaced person’s camp and this supports my affirmation that the Federal Government is actively working to return Nigeria to a state of nature. The researchers explained that in Nigeria with a history of ethno-religious conflicts, the past year(s) has (have) witnessed an alarming upsurge in the level of violence and its impact on civilians.
Onwubiko heads the Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria (HURIWA)