by Adeolu Ademoyo

There are two categories of defenders. They are the regular Aso Rock media crew-Messers Doyin Okupe, Reno Omokri etc. The second category is the non-Aso Rock defenders who in my reckoning have allowed themselves to be caught in a version of false cause and category mistake. This is because the two sets of defenders use the same defense.

Recently, some members of President Jonathan’s media team and others have attempted to defend President Jonathan’s national dialogue. I have argued that Mr. Jonathan called the dialogue as one of the political tactics in his party’s PDP-package to distract the public from the series of ethical violations his government is implicated in, and to give his administration-which is badly weighed down by his own complicit with series of ethical violations- a breathing space.

But I am interested in the aspect of the defense of President Jonathan’s media crew, which intersects questions of ethics in Africa’s public life and governance. I have decided to call this the ethical question in Africa’s public life and by extension Nigeria’s public life.

There are two categories of defenders. They are the regular Aso Rock media crew-Messers Doyin Okupe, Reno Omokri etc. The second category is the non-Aso Rock defenders who in my reckoning have allowed themselves to be caught in a version of false cause and category mistake. This is because the two sets of defenders use the same defense.

Beyond these presidency advocates the relevant questions are: does the national question resolve the ethical question in our lives? Or does the ethical question resolve the national question?

A false cause is an empiricist problem whereby an appearance is used to explain a problem. For example, Aso Rock media crew say “eh Nigeria is in this deep crisis because we have not dialogued.”  So? “The problem of corruption as part of the crisis is because we have not dialogued.” Therefore, the dialogue is prior to the ethical question!

A category mistake is an error in thought where things that belong to one group are mistakenly placed in another. In this regard, they believe wrongly that when they defend President Jonathan’s “dialogue”, they are defending the “national question” and its resolution. Hence, these defenders claim the “national dialogue” is prior to the ethical question in Nigeria! Nothing can be farther from reason.

For example, among the Aso Rock media crew, Mr. Reno Omokri came out recently to articulate and defend the view that President Jonathan’s national dialogue is prior to the ethical question facing the country.

Ordinarily one would have ignored the comments of presidential aides given the thinness in the substance of their defense of policies, the near zero quality and the slimness of reflection if any that goes into their often hurried defense of hastily packaged policies.  However, we engage them only because they speak on behalf of a presidency that is ethically challenged, and because of the historical need to put the records straight and leave the rest to history.

The usual hurried defense of a hurriedly packaged “national” dialogue shows in the conceptual flaw in the equivocation on national question and national dialogue such that the two are portrayed wrongly to mean the same. It is only in an African context driven by emotional appeal-rather than the rational- in public life that such wooliness in thought would happen.

Put simply a national question is a problem. National dialogue is not. Where it arises the national question is  an ethical challenge in multi-cultural, multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-national, multi-lingual, multi-religious societies. It is an ethical question precisely because solving its symptoms –national, moral and social questions- is about articulating moral terms of justice with which peoples and groups relate.  The national question   is therefore meaningless if framed in any other context, i.e. if framed outside the relational moral terms of justice, and need for a morally just society because the ethical is the very foundation of things, and of life.

But national conference or dialogue  is not a problem. How can it be?  National conference   is a tool with which to solve the national question, which is a serious moral problem in any country where it occurs. It is a  result of an ethical violation, and we shall talk about this shortly.

To raise a national dialogue/conference above the ethical question is to make a tool-national conference/dialogue- with which to solve the effect-national question- of a cause-ethical question prior to the cause itself!  Such explanation is a total collapse into a category mistake and into false cause. Such error is a combination of the fallacies of equivocation and a straw.

It is a straw precisely because media aides like Reno Omokri, and others –especially the NGOs and NGIs-who claim to be General Sani Abacha era defenders of “national conference” equivocate on national dialogue/national question while thinking that they are the same. They are not for the reasons we already adduced. So to claim like Omokri has done that national dialogue is important and is therefore prior to solving ethical questions that face us daily misses the point.  These defenders engage in a straw man’s fallacy and a false cause because they turn an effect into a cause.

I do not think that it should be difficult to see that a tool –national conference/dialogue-with which to solve the effect of a cause cannot be made prior to the cause without violating basic thinking.

But the media spin-doctors in the presidency have not shown that they are disposed to any serious engagement of our problems. So when Mr. Reno Omokri and other defenders- in familiar places – of President Jonathan’s national dialogue rely on the thoughts of Nigeria’s founding fathers and mothers on the national question to justify President Jonathan’s national dialogue they stray.

Nigeria’s founding fathers and mothers such as Obafemi Awolowo, Nnamdi Azikiwe, Aminu Kano, Ahmadu Bello, Margaret Ekpo, Olufunmilayo Ransome Kuti, Gambo Sawaba and others all have systematized and un-systematized thought and reflection on the national question. But that the founding mothers and fathers thought about the national question is one thing and that an irredeemably unethical regime such as President Jonathan called for a national dialogue is a different thing. Why? President Jonathan’s regime is deeply and negatively implicated by the ethical question, which is the cause of the national, moral, social questions in today’s Nigeria. Therefore how can a regime, which stands in serious violation of the ethical in our life and refuses to see this be able to solve a problem it did not see in the first place?

Look, Mr. Jonathan does not see that there is an ethical question in our contemporary crisis, so how can he solve it? And this radical failure on his part is seen and reproduced in the unreflective pieces media hand like Mr. Reno Omokri dishes out all the time on this issue which either he does not understand but must say something about given his job description or he is simply quibbling or playing games. It is shocking intellectually that in such pieces, Omokri will stand reason on its head and make a dialogue prior to the deepening ethical question in the country-now after Stella Oduahgate, we have another one from Oyo state-the N5.6b pension scheme scam by a team of corrupt officials led by Mrs. Kudirat Iyabo Adeleke former Oyo state head of service. And these are mere tips of the immoral iceberg of looting of public treasury by government officials, ministers and other politicians who an aide like Mr. Reno Omokri speaks for.

So, on the basis of the moral weight and the correct reading of the history of the reflections of Nigeria’s founding fathers, mothers and lives of those who in more contemporary times have genuinely (I am not talking about attention seekers) given their private and public lives to this country without seeking attention to themselves, I wish to put it on record (so that those who hold contrary view can controvert this publicly) that the ethical question is fundamental in the life of this country, in public life in Africa, and that President Jonathan’s national dialogue  is not synonymous with the national question. Therefore Mr. Jonathan’s dialogue can never be prior to the ethical question in the country for the ethical question is the basis of the near collapse of the country.

Hence, Mr. Jonathan and all other Nigerian politicians who engage in he looting of the country’s public treasury must be made to answer to the serial violation of the ethical in the country’s public life regardless of the dialogue, which Mr. Omokri has erroneously made prior to the ethical question in the country’s public life.

Let us conclude on very clear statements. There are three effects of the violation of the ethical in the public life of the country.  First, it has produced the political question, which is called the national question. Given the ethnic and religious configuration in the country, it is understandable how and why the political question called national or nationality question will loom large.

It did very stridently in the country when General Ibrahim Babangida annulled the June 12 election and when General Sani Abacha sustained that same annulment. The annulment of June 12 elections was an ethical violation because a state aggression (as done by General Babangida) against the vote and choice of voters is a major moral injury in any serious society. You just do not do it.  And that annulment produced the clamor for a national conference to address the “national question”. Also, in the past and now ethnic and religious conflagrations including the most visible Boko Haram are symptoms of such violation of the ethical in our public life.  And hence again, the call for same conference.

So, the national/nationality question results precisely because there are no relational morally just terms (ethical question) with which to resolve citizenship/residents rights and how nationalities co-exist if they wish and go their different ways if they think they cannot. Policies such as fiscal federalism, regionalism, clearly enunciated criteria of citizenship and residency, and if the relational moral terms fail, then the dissolution   of the state itself are mere policies and steps with which to address the nationality/national question. Then how can a dialogue be prior to the ethical violations that produced these problems?

Beside the “national question”, part of the political question which, the violation of the ethical produces is the weakening of state, governmental and non-governmental structures.  President Jonathan’s un-ethical intervention in the Nigeria’s Governors’ Forum for the purpose of his re-election where a loser-Governor Jang of Plateau state- was openly promoted the winner of the election by the Nigerian state under the watch of President Jonathan is a classic example of the serial ethical violations   that undermine from below and within the corporate existence of the country.

Additionally, nothing else shows the self inflicted weakening and subversion of the state and the corporate existence of the country than the lawless harassment of Governor Chubuike Amaechi of Rivers state by the awesome power of state under the watch of President Jonathan who again ironically has called for a “national dialogue.”

The second effect of the violation of the ethical in our lives is the unbridled corruption fueled by the state and state persons. This is called the moral question. Let us take just a tip of a the corrupt ice berg. It is only an irredeemably corrupt regime and one that fails radically to see an ethical problem in the life of the country that will be in bed with the aviation ministry under Mrs. Stella Oduah when she, the minister is being accused of serious moral problem in the N255m armored car scandal.

The President’s radical failure to see his violation of the ethical is so brazen that Mrs. Stella Oduah who is at the bottom and heart of a major corruption scandal in her ministry was still part of the president’s team to Israel on a so-called holy trip. On a serious and critical lighter note, a question my children asked when we saw the aviation minister in Israel as part of President Jonathan’s Israeli team is: what is our aviation minister who has moral questions to answer on corruption in her ministry doing with the president in Israel on a  state and holy trip?

Therefore, given the enormity of the ethical question, to spew right, left and center like Mr. Omokri has done that President Jonathan’s “dialogue” is prior to the ethical question in the country must alarm anyone who is deeply invested in the fate of Nigeria which currently hangs in the air.

The last symptom in my opinion of the violation of the ethical in our lives is the social question.  The massive poverty in the country in the midst of oases of ill-gotten “wealth” of politicians, government officials, and state persons in the country illustrates this.

The point therefore is that you do not use a major act -such as engaging frontally the national, moral and social questions- to save a government, which is deeply invested in the violation of the ethical in the country’s public life.

The tragedy is that you will never find us talk about the ethical question. The language and substance of the ethical is alien to us as a people.  So the ethical question is automatically lost in the so-called talk about “national” “conference”, “dialogue” which ordinarily ought to be a sober, highly reflective and introspective moral engagement of the fate of the country especially in the context of the fate of continent Africa and the black race.

This is why the failure of the ethical in Africa’s public life explains Africa’s contemporary crisis.  And Nigeria is not an exception. Therefore, President Jonathan’s “dialogue” cannot be prior to the ethical question, and neither can it be forced to be so without violating basic thinking and falsifying the historical and contemporary facts of our public life.

 

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Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija.