Nigeria is a praxis rather than a noun, a performative enactment of being a nation that has gone terribly wrong. Nigeria is a threnodic story, a tale that tingles the ears and shears the heart of every listener, and leaves ashes on the tongue of every storyteller. But the good news is that the story is not set in stone and can be rewritten. Every nation is hybridly (people/mythoi, multitude/stories, bios /narrative coding, history as movement, unfolding of being /political coding of being) collective. What it means to be an American or Nigerian and who and what the Nigerian or American is as a human being are narratively constructed: the particular form of humanity or citizenship in any given nation is always a result of human activities, an outcome of contingent processes that are articulated, interpreted, or written as (into) the “body” of the nation (what they experience themselves to be). To rewrite a nation, we must begin by entering its story, if only to recast it. Nigeria is a machine for making corrupt politicians who lead with divine impunity, developing underdevelopment, and undermining human flourishing. This is the overarching story of its citizens and, as a result, as a collective or assemblage they do not have the benefi t of a common story that binds and rallies them together as a nation. Under these circumstances, the performance of Nigeria as (to be) a nation has gone dreadfully awry, hence its identity has become that of a country that is ungovernable, unfocused, and morally decadent. This book takes us into the heart of this inhibitory, scatterbrained, emasculatory social identity, demonstrating how it is enacted, performed across various spheres of social existence and how it is sustained by the postcolonial political (juridical-economic) power architectures of domination. Our attention is then directed to a possibly different socio-ethical identity, to a socio-philosophical construction of an identity that is emancipatorily new. This is a turn to a new story that might liberate the country from the stranglehold of its current overarching story.

This book constructs a socio-ethical identity of Nigeria in the current age. My efforts are based on the rediscovery of the practices and principles of emancipatory politics and a retrieval of fundamental virtues and capabilities that go to the core of the functioning of pluralistic communities and human flourishing.