Category: Saturday

In any theatre of life that he finds himself, the individual must possess an ideology that guides him on his mission through life and towards the accomplishment of purpose. This opening sentence is a paraphrase of an extract from one of the late Chief Obafemi Awolowo‘s numerous speeches and newspaper interviews. Ideology refers essentially to a systematically related set of ideas encompassing a value system , political inclination and a philosophical orientation geared towards the accomplishment of stated goals. Without an ideology which impels them to move swiftly through turbulent terrains of life to fulfill their destinies as individuals many persons glide through this side of eternity with neither a sense of purpose nor direction.

If ideology, whether it is consciously held or just an instinctual inclination, is so critical to the individual, it is even a greater necessity for a political party, which produces the government of the day with hundreds of elected officials at all levels. A country without a sense of focus, purpose and direction, which are elemental properties of an ideology, can only make niggardly progress if any. Several years back in the late 1970s, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, in his delivery of the Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Lectures, rigorously articulated the case for an ideological reorientation and reappraisal in Africa if the continent is to transcend its humiliating condition of debilitating underdevelopment.

Read Also: Gas’ll play primary role in the economic reconstruction of Nigeria – Tinubu

The necessity for a developmental offensive disciplined by ideological vision and guidance is particularly imperative in Nigeria. This is because it is widely agreed that the emancipation and restoration of the dignity of Africans and the black man in general will depend substantially on what Nigeria makes of her immense and incomparable endowment of human, material and natural resources. Unfortunately, Nigeria’s developmental exertions since independence have been largely characterized by ideological deficiency and philosophical malnutrition. With the adoption of the neoliberal Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) by the military President, General Ibrahim Babangida’s regime from the mid 1980s, the country abandoned its five-year cycle of development plans that had hitherto imposed a reasonable degree of discipline on the developmental process and abandoned the economy to the anarchy of market forces and the adventurous experiments of pragmatic neoliberal technocrats with predictable destructive outcomes.

The steady and continued deterioration and erosion of the value of the Naira, massive de-industrialization, systematically growing unemployment, decimation of the middle class and ever worsening inequality and immiseration of the vast majority of Nigerians despite the country’s immense resource-endowment dates from this period and continues apace till date.

The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in its 16 years in power between 1999 and 2015 understandably continued with its inherited conservative, even reactionary, economic development trajectory with an emphasis on superficial sectoral ‘reforms’ that did not tackle the root causes of Nigeria’s poverty and underdevelopment conundrum. Unfortunately, during the eight years of the President Muhammadu Buhari presidency on the platform of the All Progressives Congress (APC), the country made pretty negligible progress in the direction of concretely breaking out of the cocoon of underdevelopment and undergoing accelerated positive transformation.

That administration’s transfer of humongous sums of money, unprecedented in the country’s history, to the vulnerable and less privileged members of society through its expansive and extensive Social Investment Programmes, was severely undermined by continued colossal corruption that denied supposed targets of the transfers the desired benefits but also incapacitated service delivery, worsened debt peonage and immersed the country further into the cesspit of pervasive poverty.

It is thus obvious that corruption on an industrial scale is the defining essence of neoliberal casino capitalism in an underdeveloped country like Nigeria and the seriousness and meticulousness in tackling this pandemic must be a critical differentiating factor between self-proclaimed ‘progressive’ political parties and largely conservative, ideologically rudderless ones.

It is not for nothing that the founders of the APC utilized the word ‘Progressive’ in the nomenclature of their party. Progressiveness has been a distinct factor in the politics of Nigeria long before now. There were in this regard The Action Group (AG) in the First Republic and Aminu Kano’s Northern Elements Progressive Union (NEPU) in the same period as well as the Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN) and the Peoples Redemption Party (PRP) in the Second Republic. There was the military-created Social Democratic Party (SDP) of the Ill-fated Third Republic which made ideological pretensions of being ‘a little to the left’. Today, the country has come full swing and a ‘progressive’ All Progressives Congress (APC) is in power at the centre. Has the party maximally utilized the opportunity given to it for the first time that a ‘progressive’ party will be in power at the centre? From the preceding analysis, it is difficult to respond to this question in the affirmative.

President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s role was pivotal in the creation of the APC. Although his philosophical orientation has been significantly influenced by his life experiences in America, his training as an accountant in that country and the highly individualistic capitalism of America, he is within the ideological spectrum of Nigeria, left-of-centre, and thus ‘progressive’. He traces his political ancestry to Obafemi Awolowo and the less ideologically focused MKO Abiola and his ideological inclination fits the contemporary global tendency towards a dilution of rigid ideological fixation with former communist countries like Russia and China maximizing the huge productive potentials of the capitalist system to generate massive wealth and lifting unprecedented numbers of people out of poverty. Conversely, the unanticipated coronavirus pandemic, for instance, or the ever increasingly frequent cyclical crises of capitalism has seen the most extreme neoliberal capitalist societies resorting to massive injection of state funds either to succor the most vulnerable or save the deregulated market economy from systemic collapse.

In one of his dilations on ideology, Awolowo, utilizing the phrase ‘democratic socialism’, succinctly defined the goal of progressive ideology as including the attainment of “social Justice, equal opportunity for all, respect for human dignity, and the welfare and happiness of all, regardless of creed, parentage and station in life. In other words, under socialism, the nexus between man and man is wholly dominated by equality and fraternity and by the needs of the underprivileged”. The central motivating force of a progressive party and government would thus be to continuously and unceasingly increase the level of productivity and prosperity of society while more equitably distributing the fruits of this collective munificence with a clear and undisguised bias for the poor and underprivileged.

Many have argued that the removal of the fuel subsidy and the attendant inflationary spirals with negative implications for the vast majority of Nigerians especially, food and transportation costs, discredits the progressivism proclaimed by both the APC and President Tinubu. The situation is in my view more complex and nuanced and, while it is easy to be wise after the fact, no one can claim perfect understanding of the unfolding dynamics of fuel subsidy removal. By announcing the fuel subsidy removal on the day of his inauguration, the President made a decisive decision to announce a policy that sought to stem the massive looting of collective resources associated with fuel subsidy a thing of the past. Indeed his major opponents in the last election, Atiku Abubakar of the PDP and Peter Obi of the LP, had made the same commitment. Had he not taken that step immediately, Tinubu would have had to continue like his predecessors who kept on indefinitely postponing a decision on the matter. But is there then any contradiction between the progressive ideology of the APC and the intense suffering caused by the removal of fuel subsidy?

Many are reflexively opposed to fuel subsidy removal on rigid ideological grounds. I must confess that my instinctual inclination is against removal of the subsidy even though I had become largely persuaded that the subsidy benefitted a corrupt and thieving fuel importation cabal rather than the vast majority of Nigerians. It was on this ground that the IMF and the World Bank had unceasingly canvassed the removal of the subsidy and have lauded the Tinubu administration for its courage to do so. However, the reality in the aftermath of the subsidy’s removal is that vast numbers of Nigerians were beneficiaries of the subsidy than had been assumed. Thus, these large numbers of impoverished Nigerians are bearing the brunt of spiraling cross-sectoral inflation while those who have benefited from subsidy-related mass corruption over the years and other elements of Nigeria’s corrupt elite feeding fat on public resources are wholly unaffected by the hardship.

The irrepressible human rights lawyer and radical ideologue, Mr Femi Falana (SAN), had consistently argued that the corruption associated with fuel subsidy be removed while the subsidy itself be retained for the benefit of Nigerians. This is well meaning but it would appear that the corruption is intricately interwoven with the fuel importation mechanism and there could be no alternative to the removal of the subsidy. The argument is no less cogent that were local refineries working, and there is no concrete reason beyond corruption why they should not, there would be no need to export crude oil and import refined petroleum which necessitated the subsidy in the first place. But with the subsidy consuming over seven trillion Naira annually, virtually crippling productive governance and worsening debt dependency, its retention would have made it impossible to find the resources to fix local refineries or deliver other critical services to the citizenry.

Yes, there is considerable pain in the land and President Tinubu has admitted as much, empathized with the citizenry and announced far reaching policies and short term palliatives to relieve the distress of the people in the interim. But with the removal of the subsidy, over 1 trillion Naira has poured into the Federation Account within one month and is the highest amount shared by the three levels of government since 1999. In addition to the measures announced by the President in his recent national broadcast to boost productivity, profitability and thus the job retention and generating capacities of micro, small and medium businesses, enhance agricultural productivity and alleviate the hardship of suffering millions, the administration on Thursday announced a N180 billion combination of grants and loans to the 36 state governments and the FCT to cushion the pain of subsidy removal.

There are also the pending negotiations with the Labour unions to increase the minimum wage to reflect the rate of inflation. The personal concern of President Tinubu to lighten the plight of the people and the commitment of his administration to ease the burden of Nigerians in the short term while conceptualizing and implementing long term policies to address fundamental distortions of the economy are all too obvious. But it would appear to me that enduring solutions to the country’s economic problems lie less in technical micro and macro economic policy management, critical and important as these are, than in addressing critical non-economic sources of the multifaceted developmental crisis and the administration can learn pertinent lessons from Awolowo’s examples in this regard.

• Ayobolu is an Editor-at- Large with The Nation

Following the recent demise of highly revered novelist, playwright, columnist, literary critic, media persona, teacher and public intellectual among others, Professor Kole Omotosho, aged 80, there have been cascades of encomiums and tributes to a productive and fulfilled life that added tremendous value to society in Nigeria, Africa and the human community at large. I remember that as a secondary school student in Ilorin, Kwara State, in the late 1970s, I read a number of his novels including ‘The Combat’, ‘The Edifice’ and ‘ Memories of Our Recent Boom’ at the well stocked public library then located at the Sabo Oke area of the state capital. True, I cannot recall memorable characters in those novelistic narratives of Professor Omotosho in the same way that one can easily identify with now immortal, heroic, comic or tragic figures in the works of such renowned African writers as Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Ngugi Wa Thongo or Femi Osofisan to name a few.

Read Also: 18 things to know about Sports Minister John Enoh

It is thus understandable that most references in the various tributes to the cerebral scholar refer to his magnum opus, ‘Just Before Dawn’, the fascinating merger of facts and imagination to render a gripping account of Nigeria’s colonial and post-colonial history up till the collapse of the Second Republic in 1983. Incidentally, at the time of Professor Omotosho’s death, I had been rereading the epic and controversial book following Professor Niyi Akinoso’s column in this newspaper in celebration of Omotosho on his 80th birthday. ‘Just Before Dawn’ is a book that is almost impossible to put down once you begin reading. It is a compulsive rendition of Nigerian history which, I agree entirely with Professor Wole Soyinka, should be read by as many young Nigerians as possible. In this tribute to the great writer, Nigerian patriot and pan-Africanist, however, I will reflect briefly on his less cited but no less intriguing work of literary criticism, ‘Achebe or Soyinka: A Study in Contrasts’.

‘Just Before Dawn’ is a bold and daring book that showcases the courage of its author and this comparative study of diverse aspects of the lives and works of these two great Nigerian, African and globally consequential writers is also a profile in the author’s courage. He makes a comparative dissection of the writings, philosophical outlook, cultural orientations of both writers and does not refrain from making audacious pronouncements on both that some may consider provocative when he considers it necessary. As Omotosho himself writes, “Among critics of Nigerian literature, with the possible exception of Chinweizu, few comment on both writers together, most preferring to deal with aspects of their writings separately”. Omotosho chooses to undertake this task in this book and he does this in a way that a layman like this writer who is not a literary expert finds arresting and captivating.

First published in 1996 by Hans Zell Publishers and reissued in 2009 by BOOKCRAFT, the book runs across 224 pages and is subdivided into 12 chapters. These encompass such topics as ‘Living on the Seam of Two Worlds’, ‘The Nigerian Elite, Achebe and Soyinka and the Colonial Experience’, ‘Achebe, Soyinka and the Gods and Goddesses of their Ancestors’, ‘Achebe and Soyinka and the World Beyond Nigeria’ and ‘Achebe, Soyinka and the Languages of African Literatures’ among others. A critical factor that features prominently in Omotosho’s contrast of the two writers is their ethnic identities as he writes that “The most relevant fact in their lives is their ethnic origins: Igbo and Yoruba respectively. Moreover, consciously or unconsciously, the rivalries between the Igbo and Yoruba during the colonial period of the history of Nigeria have dogged the writings and the actions of these two writers”.

Omotosho dilates perceptively on diverse aspects of the lives and outlooks of the two writers not neglecting facts concerning them that some may consider trite and well known. He was obviously writing also with a global readership in mind which may not be necessarily as conversant as Nigerian or African readers with the details of their lives. Thus, he notes that both Achebe and Soyinka are not just Nigerians, they attended similar secondary schools, Government College, Umuahia, for Achebe and Government College, Ibadan, for Soyinka. Both writers also attended the then University College, Ibadan, and, as Omotosho put it, “both have followed the humanist tradition of Western Europe and North America in advocating the creation in Nigeria of a civil society”.

Furthermore, he notes that “Chinua Achebe was born in Ogidi on November 26, 1930 and brought up in the parsonage of the Church Missionary Society, Wole Soyinka was born on July 13, 1934, and he grew up partly in the parsonage at Ibara in Abeokuta”. As children of the emergent educated elite of the disruptive colonial era, they enjoyed certain privileges that predisposed them to the acquisition of western education which in turn had possibly alienating psychological, emotional and intellectual consequences for them. At the risk of oversimplification of the complex issues in cross-cultural as well as generational conflict that Omotosho deals with here, we can surmise that he submits that Achebe portrays as near-treachery his father’s generation’s “opening of the door to the white man” while Soyinka in his works is more appreciative and understanding of the fact that the generation of his father strived “to achieve the modern life of the white man while attempting to hold on, perhaps even salvage something of value from their existence prior to the coming of the British”.

Pointing out the closeness of Achebe and Soyinka to the oral traditions and cultures of the Igbo and Yoruba, respectively, he argues that they share similar attitudes both to their roles as writers and citizens of Nigeria as well as their attitudes to their ethnic nationalities. In his view, they see themselves not just as individuals within their ethnic nationalities but as speakers and griots stressing that “They often speak as if there were no alternative options and opinions within their ethnic nationalities, as if within the experiment of the Nigerian nation building their ethnic nationalities do not constitute problems for all”. I am not sure I get what Professor Omotosho means here for it would appear that at various times both Achebe and Soyinka have been critical of strands of the Igbo and Yoruba political elite respectively.

According to him, “Achebe and Soyinka have always acted and written in terms of purging the educated elite of bad leadership behavior. Neither of them has been as critical enough of their ethnic elite as they have been of the Nigerian, and of the African elite. Without being outright ethnic chauvinists, they have refused to express the historical fact that the political and the economic rivalries of the three major ethnic nationalities of Nigeria – the Hausa-Fulani, the Igbo and the Yoruba – have been the dynamo of the Nigerian political and social instability”. Yet, even in this work, he notes Achebe’s scathing criticism of the excesses of the emergent monarchical culture among the ordinarily republican Igbo in his slim volume, ‘The Trouble with Nigeria’ while, beyond the written word, Soyinka is well known to have even taken up arms, literarily, against the aberrations of a reactionary faction of the Yoruba political elite in the first republic.

Omotosho interrogates the popular and widespread notions that Achebe is simple and easy to read and comprehend while Soyinka is difficult to read, obscure and incomprehensible. He argues that Achebe’s perceived simplicity is not synonymous with a lack of profundity while the charge of obscurity against Soyinka might ultimately not stand because “What ultimately can be explained cannot be said to be obscure”. Analyzing their attitudes to politics, he notes that Achebe is considered to be conservative and Soyinka radical. In reality, however, both were members of the Peoples Redemption Party (PRP) in the second republic. However, when the PRP split into factions, Achebe emerged as one of the leaders of Aminu Kano’s conservative faction while Soyinka identified with the Balarabe Musa and Abubakar Rimi’s more radical faction.

Analyzing their positions during the civil war, he notes that both were on the side of Biafra but while Achebe worked for the actualization of the breakaway Biafra Republic, Soyinka was in support of the emergence of a third force that would overthrow both the Biafran and Nigerian federal governments and replace them with a radical government for a united Nigeria. Omotosho’s comparative study of Achebe and Soyinka is inevitably also an enriching study of the political history and sociology of Nigeria as the lives of these illustrious Nigerians are intricately interwoven with the evolutionary trajectory of their country.