We need to start rebuilding from the bottom all over again. The battle is rural, as I have argued in another intervention. Important as it is to set up forest guards, we need to do much more, starting with reclaiming ourselves, finding ways to lift up those we have left behind, and the communities we long abandoned that have now become ungoverned spaces.
We have obviously now found ourselves in that difficult place in which we are not only faced with multiple and interconnected crises, but an ever-evolving violent extremism that has been metastasising and changing in form as it grows.
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We are faced with what suggests itself as a polycrisis – a term coined by Edgar Morin and Anne Brigitte Kern over two decades ago, and defined by Cambridge Dictionary as a state of “confusion, or suffering that is caused by many different problems happening at the same time so that they together have a very big effect.”
I have been thinking about this for a while, and my sad and sober conclusion is that at the root of what we are faced is the canopy of ungoverned spaces over and all around us.
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It is that simple. But again, it is not that simple. Whether we track it back to the Libyan tragedy and the battle for/from the Sahel, we will still come to the inevitable realisation that, but for the ungoverned spaces around our porous borders, the supply of criminals and arms from external sources as fuel for the internal fires would be curtailed, if not eliminated.
But increasingly, as I have thought about the issue of ungoverned spaces, I have come to realise even though I have, before now, like many others, looked at ungoverned spaces through the limited lens of the physical – a large swathe of out-of-control spaces over which the government does not have a full grip of – the bigger fight is not physical.
The major challenge is that of ungoverned spaces, stretching across all sectors of our lives, even inclusive of our minds – the ungoverned spaces in our minds. It is a polycrisis. Concentric circles of crises, one linked to the other by the collapse of the things that hold the centre together.
Ungoverned border spaces open doors for the importation of fake drugs. Weeks back, NAFDAC intercepted 277 cartons of counterfeit and unregistered Malamal Forte malaria drugs, valued at over ₦1.2 billion. Another one in the long list of such seizures of billions of naira worth of fake drugs. Just about four weeks ago, fake drugs worth about ₦20 billion were destroyed by NAFDAC in Ibadan.
A week back, the NDLEA announced the recovery around the country of over 7.6 million pills of tramadol and a total of 76,273.4 kilograms of different strains of cannabis, including Colorado, Loud and Skunk. On Monday, a bus going to Mubi in Adamawa State, with what was said to be a total of 1,577,112 capsules of tramadol and exol-5 tablets, was intercepted by NDLEA officers.
Now, there is a clear link between the terror groups and hard drugs, as it has been generously reported that the terrorists are usually high on drugs. This reveal the link between drug abuse, the trade in hard drugs, and the terror being visited on our people in the name of terror attacks, banditry, kidnapping, etc.
Yet, these are only a few elements of a polycrisis with manifestations across all sectors of governance – education, policing, soldiering, judiciary, correctional centres, data management, health, sports, and the different sub-sectors of the economic sector – public and private sectors.
An aerial view of Nigeria’s oil fields, with pipelines used for oil theft running riot across the place (I hear things are better now) will sober anyone and forcefully drive home the reality of what it truly means to have ungoverned spaces.
They all link up. Ungoverned spaces all over, when people no longer feel obliged to hold on to values that were once held sacrosanct, allowing non-state actors to roam around freely, wreaking havoc over our lands.
Eight years ago, I wrote, asking what has become of our Town Unions. I reproduce this below:
“Do we still have Town/Village Unions?
I think I must have written about this once. Perhaps never got to. But Professor Pius Adesanmi’s mention today of Isanlu Progressive Union brought memories of Town Unions rushing back.
Back in the day, we had these Town Unions that brought together indigenes of different communities as agents of social responsibility towards their communities.
The Town Unions had branches spread around different parts of the country, with people from a particular community finding a means to come together occasionally – largely for good.
I remember my dad hosting some of those meetings. They were held on a rotational basis among members. They will come from neighbouring towns for the meetings. There was plenty to eat. A lot to talk about. They would come in their 504s, 404s, Beetles, etc. Some came by other means. They came for the sake of their communities.
They were mostly called Progressive Unions. They came together, pooled resources for the betterment of their hometowns and villages. Town Unions gave out scholarships to indigent students. Some even sent brilliant students abroad through communal effort.
They raised funds to set up schools, which were later handed over to the government. They funded repairs in schools and employed teachers for government-owned schools. They raised funds to set up health centres. They employed health workers. They funded rural electrification projects. They served as lobby/pressure groups influencing the government to provide infrastructure, site schools, factories, etc., in their communities to hasten development there.
Now, these men were not affluent. They simply cared. The times were different, though. They were mostly regular civil servants – teachers, etc
They didn’t have that much. But they cared. In between taking care of their own children, many had loads of relatives they catered for and saw through schools. They never forgot where they came from.
The times are different now. No doubt. The pressure of life can be suffocating. Many of us are only able to afford the occasional visits back home, mostly for funeral ceremonies. City people only go back now to deposit the dead. Those stuck in the villages know it. They wait in great anticipation of those visits. What happened to us? What happened to the progressive unions? Have we stopped caring? What happened to us?”
That was eight years ago, but the need for a revitalisation of such unions is even more urgent than ever. I see a few here and there. But we must aggressively embrace it now. To reclaim our ungoverned spaces in the physical, we will need to start by reclaiming the ungoverned spaces in our minds as individuals, as families, as a people at different levels, starting at the level of the community.
We need to start rebuilding from the bottom all over again. The battle is rural, as I have argued in another intervention. Important as it is to set up forest guards, we need to do much more, starting with reclaiming ourselves, finding ways to lift up those we have left behind, and the communities we long abandoned that have now become ungoverned spaces. If we do not move swiftly to embrace those communities and reclaim the ungoverned spaces around them, we will soon realise, if we have not already done that, the spaces assumed to be governed and secured now will no longer be safe.
Simbo Olorunfemi is a specialist on Nigeria’s foreign policy, a communications consultant, and managing editor of Africa Enterprise. Email: [email protected]
