State Violence and the Writer: Towards the Dialectics of Intellectual Militancy in Transcending Postcolonical Nigerian Contradictions‪.‬

--Wole Soyinka, A Shuttle in the Crypt, 1972 The Nigerian State as Epiphenomenon of Violence: A Prolegomenon Nigerian history since colonial incursion is awash with political violence, crude use of power and deepening socio-economic crises. The principal factors that shaped this tradition are couched in hegemony, capitalism and politics of exclusion (Nwosu 2006:24; Kukah 1999:16), which underpin the logic of imperialism. Fundamentally, this pattern has left an aftertaste of lingering State violence, which is an epiphenomenon of this culture clash. Simply put, imperial violence and its concomitants are replicated in Nigeria's postcolonial State violence and political culture. The tyrannical State violence replicated is a function of colonial administrative subterfuge, which was modelled upon administrative convenience--even when the colonialists have left the Nigerian political space. Accordingly, "... the processes of the establishment of Western hegemony were designed in such a way as to make their stranglehold survive well beyond the period of their stay" (Kukah 1999:15). Thus, the compliant system of administering the colonial amalgam, Nigeria, is what Ogundowole in his book, Colonial Amalgam, Federalism and the National Question dubs "denationalisation policy" (1994: viii). This phrase is correlative of the British "Indirect Rule" policy in colonial Nigeria, which is largely the bane of the Nigerian State; and arguably, Nigeria's postcolonial contradictions stem principally from this policy. Since colonial Nigeria was ground on the anvil of violence, its corollary, the postcolonial Nigerian State is not lacking in crude use of power and violence as well as "coercion and hegemony" (Dirks 1994:4) in the execution of its grisly political objectives.