The Nation Newspaper

Category: Biodun Jeyifo

  • Erratum: “Ire” and “esunsun”, the cricket and the winged termite

    I admit it: in last week’s column in the midst of talking playfully about the author’s passion for consuming roasted crickets in his secondary schooldays, I added a quite unnecessary elaboration on the entomological identity of the cricket by saying “the winged, flying cousin of the grasshopper”. This was of course not only a needless elaboration it was also wrong. Neither the grasshopper nor the cricket is winged and neither can fly. Obviously but without knowing it at the time, my mind had switched to my own passion during my childhood for consuming roasted or fried esunsun, the winged and flying termite that usually came out in nighttime after a rainfall. And that was how, in writing teasingly about my teacher’s one quant culinary delicacy in his youth, I inadvertently revealed mine! Here I am reminded of the adage which says that the youth who boasts that his wardrobe is richer than an elder’s must remember that he does not have as many rags as the elder!

     

    Biodun Jeyifo                                                                                                                                                       bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Merit without a meritocracy, can you have one without the other?

    I cannot remember a book that I have read in the last decade with more excitement, speed and, paradoxically, concentration, than this recently published autobiographical memoir of Professor Emeritus Ayo Banjo, one of the two or three of my favorite teachers throughout my education from primary school to postgraduate level. Indeed, I was so thrilled to get a copy of the book that I finished reading it in about half a day with only two breaks between when I started and when I completed my reading of the book. The reason for this is uncomplicated: I and my classmates in the Honours English set of 1967 at UI, all 65 of us, always felt endlessly curious about this teacher of ours whose charisma was deliberately non-charismatic, whose star power or appeal was absolutely without exhibitionist stardom. He was/is always impeccable in the solid good taste of his dressing, whether of Western or Nigerian/Yoruba clothing; but “loud” or “psychedelic” he never was/is in his sartorial culture. He was far from being aloof or distant in both person-to-person and group settings and was, as a matter of fact, welcoming and outgoing in a quiet, slightly reserved way. But to us his students, it did seem as if nothing could perturb his composure, nothing could erase or decrease his infinite reserves of equanimity.

    These thoughts were in my mind as I started reading his new book, together with questions for which I hoped the book would provide valuable answers: What was Ayo Banjo as a primary school pupil, a secondary school student and a university undergraduate? Did he ever get in trouble with parents, teachers, older sibling, cousins and other relatives? What sort of pranks did he get away with, or at least tried to pull off but did not quite succeed? Did he ever break school regulations about class attendance, punctuality, submission of homework or assigned essays? Well, if he himself did none of these things, what were his attitudes and relationships to school or classmates who did such things? Surely, he didn’t always have all the attributes of the revered, omoluabi educator for which  he is now justly famous?

    It is both remarkable and at the same time strangely unremarkable that Morning by Morning provides no answers, indeed no clues to answers to any of these questions. Going by the contents of the book, it seems that our teacher did not play any of the pranks in which most of us, indeed most pupils and students at all times and in all places, love to gratify our/their baser instincts. True enough, with many of his schoolmates, our teacher did, at one stage, develop a craving for roasted “ire”, known in the English language as crickets. Yes, the winged, flying field grass creature that is a cousin to grasshoppers, with his schoolmates, our teacher loved to eat it roasted, salted and downed with gari soaked in water and sweetened with sugar. He loved ballroom dancing and lawn tennis. And he apparently loved being part of the school musical band as both a drummer and a singer. In the church choir, he went through all the vocal registers successfully until finally settling on bass. And most notable of all, he was the soccer goalkeeper of his secondary school, the famous Igbobi College, and seemed to have shown some wizardry in his ability to keep goals scored by opposing teams to a minimum, a feat matched by his reputation as wicket-keeper in the school’s cricket team. That is all that conformed with universal norms and practices of schoolboy and youth culture in the experience of our teacher and you must admit that it is a lot. Still, I looked and looked for something more “impressive” in tolerable deviancy than a passion for consuming roasted crickets in our teacher’s school days; alas, I found nothing close to it, not suspension and most certainly not expulsion! Which is why by the time that I got through the first five chapters of the ten-chapter book and the narrative had moved beyond the early years, I finally realized, with disappointment and some frustration, that Morning by Morning would not supply any answers, any clues to whether or not our beloved teacher did any of the risky things and experienced any of the encounters with danger that many pupils and young people at one time or another did.

    At that stage in my reading of the book, I paused to reflect on my initial expectations from the book and my apparent concentration, not on what the book was saying, but aspects of life and experience it had left out. My reflection led me to a startling discovery: the book is not the usual autobiography of the life and times, the triumphs and the disappointments, the expected and the unexpected developments in the experience of the first-person writer; it is a moral and spiritual odyssey of a man who seemed destined, right from birth, to be  a great figure in the intellectual life of his country on the condition that his focus on the important, positive aspects of life must never waver. In the event, he did go on to become one of the great educators in our country’s intellectual history. On this basis, I discovered that the book is remarkable not for what it doesn’t say or leaves out but how it narrates fateful, traumatizing or unpleasant events both in the life of the author and the larger or epic scale of the collective experience of Nigeria and, indeed, of Africa.

    I made this discovery of the book’s inner, motive force halfway through my reading. Permit me to express this discovery as simply as possible: all the negative or unhappy things that the author experienced in his personal life and in the collective existence of his nation and continent are encountered with an uncommon stoicism; and they are narrated with equally uncommon understatement. Here is a selected list of such events and experiences: the early loss of his mother; the loss of his beloved wife just as the couple was looking forward to a well-deserved enjoyment of their retirement; the collective traumas of the crises that led to the Nigeria-Biafra war, just as the author was returning to the country after his sojourn abroad in pursuit of his educational goals.

    Here is another amazing expression of this unwavering stoicism in the face of great loss and reversal: throughout the book, the author impresses the reader with the sustaining closeness between himself and his elder brother, the renowned medical practitioner, Dr. Bayo Banjo; yet, no account is ever given in the book of what had to have been the emotional blow that the death of this cherished sibling must have caused the author. At some point in the narrative we are simply told that he had passed away. In this manner, what we take away from the book is the author’s celebration of the life that he shared with his brother, not the eventual and inevitable loss caused by his brother’s death. This point is generalized to a basic character trait in the author’s personality as eloquently expressed in Professor Dan Izevbaye’s brilliant Foreword to the book in the following words:

    “Given Banjo’s warm memories of his childhood, including the excellence of his primary and secondary school education, the reader is left to infer that the goodness of the narrator in Morning by Morning is inbred, and that his beholder’s eye bathes new places and people in goodness and integrity, and leaves things that way until experience directs differently; that his candour is as present at these encounters as his courtesy.

    This defining aspect that Professor Izevbaye is expressing here about what we can call Ayo Banjo’s credo can be put in a morally and spiritually neutral formulation: until anyone shows that he or she is not what they claim to be or that things are not what they are claimed to be, give individuals, people and even institutions the benefit of the doubt. More assertively and positively, this is what it means: goodness, decency, beauty, truth and integrity exist in this world, in its peoples and their institutions; we must do everything to preserve and extend the operation and benefits of these virtues. Ordinarily, this is quite a daunting proposition to sell; it becomes even more challenging when what you are trying to “sell” is an unapologetically meritocratic tradition of thought about higher education that is so old that it seems to be doomed in the modern world. I will come to this issue at the end of this review; for now, I wish to discuss perhaps the most astonishing, perhaps even bizarre occurrence in the book and the way the author deals with it as an indication of the moral and psychological stakes involved in Professor Emeritus Banjo’s conception of his authorial subjectivity and identity in Morning by Morning.

    For what he considered a simple and harmless lark, a white principal of the author\s famous secondary school, Igbobi College, arranged a performance to welcome another white, missionary educator who was arriving to replace him as principal. The performance was based on one of the most racist and colonialist myths of unalterable African savagery. What exactly did this entail? Simply this: the Igbobi College students were costumed as “savages” stoking the fire underneath a boiling cauldron into which they would mime the act  of throwing their newly arrived replacement principal.as soon as he stepped into the school compound, their intention being as clear as daylight. All in play, of course.

    Except that a bitter, raging controversy erupted over this enactment. Now, the absolutely remarkable thing about the author’s narration of this controversy is the undoubted scrupulousness of his effort to be fair to the two sides in the controversy: the outraged African nationalists on one side and, on the other side, the defenders of the harmless intention of the principal who was behind the enactment. In other words, the author recognized and identified with the outraged Nigerian/African nationalists; on the other hand and on the basis of the inspirational, indeed visionary work of the two white missionary educators at Igbobi College, he was willing to accommodate their fundamental good intentions as custodians of the excellence of Igbobi College’s reputation as one of the best schools in Nigeria, comparable to the best schools in their own country.

    I would suggest that this reading provides us with a key to understanding the challenge faced by the author in his vigorous defense of merit and meritocracy in this book. As I see the matter, in the first half of the book, the author’s celebration of meritocratic values and achievements is so robust, so compelling that he finds it relatively easy to deploy the celebration in defense of the cultural and ethical faux pas like his principal’s staging of the racist and colonialist spectacle. But in the second half of the book, meritocracy becomes not only fragile, it seems constantly on the verge of being totally wiped out of the country’s cultural and intellectual present and posterity. Permit me to put this proposition, this reading in another formulation: in the first three chapters of the book including parts of the fourth chapter, the author’s evocation of the excellent education that he received at Igbobi College, together with invocation of famous Nigerians who also attended elite schools like Igbobi is so relentless and convincing that one is simply swept along. I kid you not: I have never encountered in any other book the scale of the author’s parade of professors, lawyers, doctors, scientists, diplomats, bankers, venture capitalists, insurance brokers and others in the elite professions who went to these best schools in Nigeria.

    But by the time that we get to the second half of the book, this parade has all but ended and both excellence in the schools and universities and their meritocratic extensions into society have almost disappeared as a measurable quality and quantity. To his credit, the author rises to the challenge of justifying and sustaining merit and meritocracy in the face of this enormously changed historical context. This why, this second half of the book has, in my opinion, some of the sharpest and most eloquent thoughts and insights concerning the case for both individual and institutional reforms for education in our country – minus meritocracy, of course.

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu       

  • So far, so good!; Or, the scope and the limits of doomsday parables and metaphors

    I must confess that I was surprised by the number of readers who wrote to me about the parable of the man who fell from a skyscraper with which I concluded the piece that I wrote in this column last week. More precisely, I was surprised about the number of people who felt that it was too gloomy, indeed too dispiriting. Of course, there were a few people who felt, correctly in my opinion, that it was a cautionary parable, that even though it narrated the tale of a man who seemed doomed to a messy end at the end of his freefall, in essence the story was using what is known as graveyard humour to teach very important lessons about life in general and life in Nigeria at this moment in time. More on this reaction to the tale later in this piece. Meanwhile, I wish to first explore the reaction of the readers who felt that the tale was a “doomsday parable” that a columnist like me that claims to be working for change from the present dire state of affairs in our country should keep at an arm’s length, if not indeed stay away from completely.

    I agree: a doomsday parable or metaphor like the one with which I ended the column last week, gives great emphasis to possibility or closeness of the destruction of life or existence itself, or life and existence in life or existence as we know it and find peace, happiness and hope in it. On this basis, the motto that one might encounter when one confronts a doomsday metaphor is the old, grim one from antiquity: abandon hope all who enter herein! If that is the case, why should a messenger, a “herald’ of change and hope deal with or recycle doomsday parables and metaphors? Is such a herald, such a columnist not giving in to despair and despondency? Or does the columnist feel or sense that things are so bad, so hopeless in the world and in our country that the most appropriate tales and parables to tell are the ones speaking out of and to the terrible times in which we live?

    The answer to these questions is not as difficult or unclear as it may seem to be. And what is this answer? It is this: there are many, many Nigerians out there who feel that things are very bad, very frightening and if doomsday parables become common or even dominant among the stories that Nigerians feel and tell about themselves, so be it! But on the other hand, there also millions upon millions of Nigerians who do not think that things are as bad as that, that doomsday tales speak to or for them. It is also the case that there are an untold number of Nigerians who swing from one to the other: tales and parables of doom or despair side by side with parables and jokes about getting rich and making it in life against the odds posed by even the most deprived and seemingly hopeless of life circumstances. Indeed, deep down, most Nigerians, in my view, belong in this category of in-betweenness: great despair mixed with unalloyed optimism. This is why, again in my opinion, Pentecostal evangelism is such a phenomenal social and spiritual phenomenon in Nigeria at the present time since it is compounded of, on the one hand, a tragic sense of life and an acute sense of the power of evil and, on the other hand, a triumphant and epiphanic joy in the possibility of restitution in this world and salvation in the Hereafter.

    This leads to our consideration of the readers who saw a cautionary tale that I intended in the parable of the man who fell from the skyscraper hurtling to what appears to be his inevitable destruction. The first thing to acknowledge here is the nature and purpose of both parables in general and cautionary tales in particular. The most commonplace definition of parables speaks of it as a tale that speaks of one thing, one order of existence in terms of another thing or order of existence. In the most typical of such tales, animals think, speak and act like humans. And in another type of the parable, human beings think, speak and act like animals. In yet another form or mode of the parable, human beings think, speak or act like human beings but in situations that defy literal or factual logic. This is the order of parables to which the tale of the man who fell from the skyscraper belongs: in real life, in literal terms, a man who falls from a skyscraper  would never have enough time to answer a single question as he is hurtling through  space, let alone answer a question each at floors 100, 80 and 60 as he zooms downward. We accept that he can answer the same question three times because we accept that in a parable, you do not, you must not apply the test of literal or factual logic to what happens or does not happen in the tale.

    I was particularly pleased and gratified by one reader’s reading of the implications of my tale of this falling man precisely by projecting beyond what happens in the tale as told by me to things that do not happen, that even cannot happen in the tale. Here’s what he wrote, presented as a summary: going by my narration of the same question and answer every 20 floors, the man can only have a maximum of five times to respond to the question; by the time that the sixth question is put to him, he would be so close to ground zero that no time would be left for him to answer the question as he had done on the previous five times. On the basis of this reading of the parable, we confront one of its many sobering insights into life in general and the Nigeria of the present moment in time: you can only be terribly, terribly complacent in the face of looming disaster up to a limit beyond which your complacency cannot and will not take you.

    It is perhaps necessary for me to add two other readings or interpretations of the tale before coming to some concluding remarks that I will weave around yet (another) doomsday parable. One: if it seems so shocking, so unbelievable that a man that is hurtling to certain death can be so cheerful in this moment and drama of existential proportions, all we have to do is think carefully and imaginatively about life and circumstances that we have either known ourselves or heard or read about how people, the great as well as the ordinary, can be so joyously carefree and irresponsible in the face of ongoing or looming disasters about which others cannot stop talking. This was the historic condition that inspired Charles Dickens to write one of the most celebrated opening sentences in the history of the novel: It was the best of times; it was the worst of times…”

    Two: In the general scheme of things, in the context of the combined lives of past, present and future generations of humanity in general and a national community in particular, a whole lifetime is but a very brief instant that we wrongly perceive as seventy years, two centuries or even a millennium. That is why a man hurtling to his end which, logically or temporally, would take only one minute, thinks, speaks and acts as if he has time on his side, that as far as things are “so far, so good”, he can be cheerful, perhaps even hopeful, even if, unknown to him, that cheerfulness or hope is an illusion. And indeed, illusory cheerfulness and hope are things that virtually all our rulers, all our ruling class political parties exploit cynically and shamelessly. Buhari and the APC come in a long line of this moral and political exploitation of the illusions of hope and cheerfulness off most Nigerians in otherwise terribly dispiriting circumstances. Basing myself on a deflation of this tradition, here is another doomsday parable with which I will conclude this piece. I give it the title, “Which turbulence?” I have used it once before in this column, but since that was about ten years ago when this column was written under a slightly different name for The Guardian, I would like to retell it for my current media context and readership.

    A man making a first visit to one country that shall remain nameless chose to make his flight to the country in the national airline of the country. Unhappily for the man, his flight was so marred by air turbulence for the whole duration of the flight that his enthusiasm, his excitement were soon completely overcome by the fear and terror generated by the violent and unceasing turbulence and disturbance. What made things worse was the man’s observation that among all the passengers on the flight, he alone was the only one who seemed to notice let alone worry about the air disturbance and the erratic flight of the plane. This was doubly disconcerting because all the other passengers with the sole exception of this man were nationals of the airline carrier which owned and operated the flight. At one point, the man became so concerned about the indifference of these nationals that he asked one of them: Why are you people so indifferent to the air turbulence, to the erratic flight of the plane? To this, the man got the answer that gave us the title of the tale: Which turbulence?

    Going by the rules, the conventions of construction and reception that govern the telling an the consumption of parables, we must discountenance the implausibility of any passengers on international air travel that would be completely indifferent to violent air turbulences, let alone those which last for the entirety of a transcontinental flight. We must also discountenance the implausibility of any national group of passengers on an international flight that knows nothing of the existence of air turbulence: anyone who travels constantly will sooner rather than later encounter one of them. But then, here comes the problem with discountenancing all these crucial aspects of the tale: we have more or less “killed” the parable. To revive it, we must not only restore these crucial aspects of the tale, we must expand on it. We must say that the frightened foreigner was so scared, so terrified that he fainted three times. And we must add that each time that he fainted, the other passengers were totally baffled as to why he fainted, that in place of pity, they were full of derision for the man. Finally, we must add that the country shall not be nameless, that it is our own dear native land, Nigeria.

    About two decades ago, only foreigners in our midst saw Nigeria in the semblance of the flight of the plane in our parable. And these foreigners would ask themselves or sometimes ask some of us: can you people not see that a terrible crash, a terrible shipwreck is coming? These days, Nigerians too are asking such questions of themselves and their fellow countrywomen and men. And remember, compatriots, Nigerian Airways went bust, it “crashed”. May what happened to the national airline never happen to the nation itself. We need these doomsday parables, compatriots. After all, I write one only once in a while.

    • Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • It took Buhari five, not two months to form his new cabinet? Okay, what does it matter?

    I am counting from the day of the president’s reelection, February 26, 2019, not the day he was sworn in for his last term of four years in office, May 29, 2019. In most of the democracies of the world, whether bourgeois or people’s democracies, an elected president or prime minister begins to form his ministerial cabinet right after his or her election, sometimes within hours or days, not weeks and most certainly not months. That Buhari and his handlers have been able to shift the calculation from the day of reelection to the day of swearing in is a mark of how relentless the lowering of expectations has been on almost every front by this president since the whirlwind of his second coming in 2015. At any rate, since we are fixated now on two months instead of the five months that it actually took Buhari to announce the nominees to his new cabinet, what does it matter anyway? Two months o, five months o, which one of the two fit to bring employment to the millions of the young people wey dey look for work or which one go bring peace and security to the unhappy homeland?

    There is a background to both this question and the appropriate response to it. This can be found in the near universal disappointment that has been expressed about the quality of the men and women in the new cabinet by most commentators with the exception of uncritical, diehard APC supporters and fanatical Buhari loyalists. It has been said by these critical commentators, and quite correctly, that personal loyalty to Buhari and/or to the ruling party, the APC, not quality, not solid technocratic qualification, was apparently the main or indeed the only criterion used by Buhari in forming the cabinet. To this has been added other factors like the recycling of members of his previous cabinet whether they performed or did not perform and straightforward application of the federal character provision of the Nigerian constitution. For all these critical commentators, what was particularly galling was the fact that Buhari and his handlers had kept the nation waiting for the announcement of his new cabinet with the promise that he was looking for the best men and women for the jobs, men and women he knew very well for their qualification, their worth.

    As a commentator, I am of course on the side of my critical colleagues who have expressed great disappointment in the caliber of the members of the new cabinet, especially seen in the light of the great expectations that had been generated by the long delay in the formation of the cabinet. Indeed, with others, I am struck by the ordinariness, the completely “unknown” quality of many of the new cabinet members. I mean, where, o where did Buhari pluck these men and women from? Has Buhari and his handlers seen them record achievements that the nation somehow missed and knows nothing about? Speaking only for myself, there is only ONE exception in the indifferent to mediocre standing of the new arrivals to the existing members of the cabinet and that is Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola. And of the “recycled” cabinet members, only Babatunde Fashola and Rotimi Amaechi and of course the brilliant and enormously energetic Vice President, Yemi Osinbajo, only they stand out in the new cabinet as men of quality and dedication, though it seems to be taking Fashola forever to deliver on his much-touted electrification projects in many parts of the country. And while I am on this point, it is pertinent to ask with other commentators: Dr. Ibe Kachikwu and Audu Ogbeh, other members of the previous cabinet who garnered considerable respect for their competence and dedication, why were they dropped by the president and his handlers?

    Contrastively, there is the case of the “recycling” of Abubakar Malami, Minister of Justice and Attorney General of the Federation (AGF) in the new cabinet. Arguably, he was the worst pick by Buhari in the cabinet of his first term as civilian president. Why so? Well, as everybody knows, Buhari made the war on corruption the centerpiece of what he hoped to achieve in office and he let this be known, not only in Nigeria but worldwide, looking for and getting promises of support from the international community in the “war”. But to the bafflement of nearly everyone at home and abroad, when Malami very quickly revealed by his actions and utterances how utterly clueless he was about what it would take to fight corruption, Buhari kept him in office at the expense of derailing the anti-corruption crusade.

    To make matters worse, Malami did not only have no clue about how to fight corruption, especially in the judiciary, he actually gave open cover to the hideouts of corruption in government and the judiciary. In the most notorious of these instances, that of the so-called “Mainagate”, Malami admitted to the Senate that he knew about Maina’s return to the country in plain sight, even though Maina was a fugitive from the law wanted in Nigeria and under the watch of Interpol for embezzling billions of naira from the country’s pension funds.  And there was also this: Malami created a unit in the Justice Ministry and gave it the power to withdraw or stall any criminal cases being prosecuted in the law courts of the country. With Malami’s supervision, the unit has gone to work with zeal and hundreds of cases have been arbitrarily withdrawn – with no explanations being offered for their withdrawal. This is not a work of fiction based on “facts” that I am inventing. Please, compatriots, check these allegations for yourselves. But meanwhile, know that “Mainagate” or no “Mainagate”, Abubakar Malami is being recycled into the new cabinet: long live Nigeria! But why is Malami being recycled ? For what purpose?

    Ultimately, such questions are completely beside the essential point that I am making in this piece, the point about why it matters that we ought to remember that it took Buhari five months, not two months, to form his new cabinet. Remember, compatriots, that it took the president six months after his swearing in, not his election, to form his cabinet in 2015. That is a record for the federal government of the country that will probably never be broken – unless of course things grow worse in governance and the unrelenting lowering of expectations and standards. Sometimes in nature, you get to the bottom of a pond or a lake and you discover that the bottom is not really the bottom because its muddy surface hides another bottom, hides a depth that you didn’t know existed. That was what we discovered, my playmates and I, in Alalubosa, the dried up and long forgotten lake in Ibadan where the best moments of my youthful idylls took place. Hah, may there be no false bottoms to Buhari’s colossal lowering of standards of expectations in governance in our country and may his be the rock bottom below which we shall never sink!

    Compatriots, we should worry, really worry that taking two months, five months, or six months to form a cabinet when in most of the relatively healthy and working democracies of the world it takes only days or at most a few weeks, is not the bottom of Buhari’s lowering of expectations. In other words, we should worry that things are already far worse than taking six months to form a cabinet, compatriots. What if the president and his handlers actually have little or no expectations at all from his own cabinet? What if, to the president and his handlers, governance really lies beyond and above the ministerial cabinet, whether in the formulation and/or execution of policies that really matter? If that is the case, why should the president and his handlers care what we think and say about how long it took for him to form his cabinet? At this point in the discussion, let me remind the reader of something about which I wrote in this column a few weeks ago: as a percentage of GDP, public expenditure in Nigeria is one of the lowest in the world. The current figure is about 15% of our GDP and at that figure, it works out to about N70K per annum for each Nigerian. That is all that governments at all levels spend on each Nigerian per year as public expenditure on all services, utilities and infrastructures. We are worrying that it took Buhari so long to form his cabinet and we should. But how much will these ministers spend on each Nigerian and all of us together to meet our basic needs as citizens?

    Please remember, compatriots, that in our country, most of what governments all over the world provide or do for their citizens Nigerians provide and do for themselves. I give my own personal testimony here: for myself, my household and my dependents at Oke-Bola, Ibadan, I provide water, education, health, part of the supply of electricity through generators and inverters, waste disposal, and public or neighborhood sanitation. Thirty years ago, most of these services and utilities were provided by the combination of the local and state governments. Not anymore, compatriots, not anymore! In these conditions, what does it matter to me and my neighbours who the officials of the Southwest local government and the state commissioner are and for that matter, who the ministers of the federal cabinet are?

    But of course, I write with a little bit of deliberate or ironic facetiousness here because no man or woman and his or her household could or should be a municipality to himself or herself. If, objectively, I can buy or pay for water availability through functioning boreholes, electricity supply through generators and inverters, waste disposal through private garbage collection companies and education for my grandnieces and grandnephews through expensive primary and secondary schools, 90% of my neighbors don’t have the financial means to pay for all of such services. And concerning security, which Nigerian, no matter how well-to-do, can pay for all the security of life, limbs, travel, liberty and property that he or she will need in the course of a lifetime?

    And so, yes, Nigerians may be providing for themselves most of the things that governments throughout the world routinely provide or ought to provide for their citizens, but the truth is that we still need functioning governments in which we can place our trust to serve the country and fellow countrywomen and men conscientiously. I wish to let it be known that whatever I have said and will still say in this piece cannot negate this fact. Which is why, though he seems never, never to listen to our complaints let alone respond to them as any caring and responsible ruler should, we must let Buhari and his handlers know that it is completely unacceptable, first, that he should take months upon months to form his ministerial cabinets and, two, that he should claim an unquestionable divine right to foist second-rate or even mediocre ministers on us.

    So far in this discussion, I have been using the phrase “Buhari and his handers” without explaining what I mean by it. No more, as I am close to the end of the discussion. Normally, the phrase connotes a ruler, a head of state or government who is so powerful that only a few people stand between him or her and the people, the citizenry. Such leaders are usually aloof, unpredictable, quixotic and self-distancing – like Muhammadu Buhari. How exactly does this apply to the president? Well, the country has come to recognize those who stand between Buhari and we, the people, as the “cabal”, the kitchen cabinet. I call them Buhari’s handlers because no head of state and government in our country’s political history has had to be approached by all Nigerians including high public officeholders like cabinet ministers through powerful surrogates as has this particular president. These surrogates are the real “ministers” and it is thanks to their existence that Buhari can take all the time in the world to form the shadow ministers that we, in our understandable earnestness, take for the real ones.

    Have we reached the bottom, the ground level of the relentless narrowing of expectations under Muhammadu Buhari? Frankly, I do not know. Certainly, I hope that we have. This reminds me of the macabre tale of the man who fell from the 120th floor of a skyscraper. As he was hurtling downwards, he was asked the following question by people observing his fall from the 100th, 80th and 60th floors: how is it going? To which the man gave the same answer: so far, so good!

     

    • Biodun Jeyifo bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

     

     

  • For the Records, 2 documents

    1. Muhammadu Buhari and the power not to act when you should act, when heaven and earth, human compassion and common decency demand that you act.

    You never know that a tool, an institution or an entire system is not working or is no good at all until when it fails you when you desperately need it to work for you, especially in a matter of life and death. Muhammadu Buhari refuses to act expeditiously and effectively to halt and reverse the loss of thousands of lives due to the great state of insecurity spreading throughout the country. As I write these words, the likelihood is high that scores of other Nigerians are being killed, kidnapped and physically and/or sexually violated; or, they are about to be killed, maimed, violated, their dwellings and means of livelihood wantonly destroyed.

    Most Nigerians are saying that unless and until Buhari acts to bring all this mayhem and tragedy to an end we are lost. Is that true, that if Buhari does nothing or does too little to matter, then all is lost? Deep, deep down, most Nigerians feel that this is true, that in our system of government, the president and the presidency together constitute the only location of power, authority and legitimacy that could save Nigeria from our present dire prospects. It is generally agreed that the concentration of power and authority in the Nigerian presidency, regardless of whoever is the incumbent, is one of the highest in the world. Are we seeing in Muhammadu Buhari the first (and last) negative dialectic of this over-concentration of power with regard to this case of the power not to act when one should act? What greater exercise of power can there be than the power not to act when your action is deemed to be the only thing keeping disaster and tragedy on a monumental scale at bay? Thus, this power not to act when it is of utmost necessity to act, when the very existence of the country depends on acting  – perhaps this will be Buhari’s unique but extremely dubious contribution to the study of contemporary African political institutions.

    The document that follows is an excerpt from the Hansard, which is the official name for the records and archives of debates in the British legislatures. The document speaks for itself. But it also prompts the question: why is the Nigerian legislature, the members of the Senate and/or the House, not holding the feet of the Buhari administration to fire as their British counterparts are doing to Her Majesty’s government as we can see in this excerpt? If and when they do so, we can only hope that they will be inspired by the carefulness of some of the British legislators, as revealed in the following document, not to over-simplify but to respect the complexities of our security crisis in all its dimensions. Or is our legislature too, like the presidency of Muhammadu Buhari, also useless and ineffectual in the face of looming disaster?

    Baroness Cox, Crossbench,   11:22 am, 9th May 2019

    To ask Her Majesty’s Government what is their assessment of recent developments in Nigeria?

    Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon, Minister of State

    My Lords, we remain deeply concerned by the escalation in intercommunal violence across Nigeria, which has a devastating impact on lives and communities and is a barrier to Nigeria’s development. While religion is a factor, the root causes remain complex and include access to resources, population growth and displacement due to climate change and desertification. We are working closely with international partners and the Nigerian Government to develop measures to address the causes of the conflict, including the national livestock transformation plan.

    Baroness Cox, Crossbench

    My Lords, I thank the Minister for his reply. Is he aware that since the Fulani insurgency began, thousands of Christians have been killed in the Middle Belt region? That includes about 300 killed in Kaduna between February and April this year. Also, on 14 April, Fulani militia invaded Nasarawa, killing 17 people, including a 100 year-old man, and a girl whom they raped to death, and on Good Friday, another dozen were killed in Benue.

    Given that the Government’s interim independent review into the global persecution of Christians has found that religious hatred plays a key part in these killings, does the Minister agree that while other factors may be involved, the asymmetry and huge scale of attacks by well-armed Fulani upon the predominantly Christian communities has a significant ideological base that must be acknowledged if the issues and the suffering are to be addressed appropriately—such as the Nigerian Government’s responsibly to ensure that it will be safe for thousands of displaced Christians to return to their homes?

    Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon, Minister of State

    My Lords, I agree with the noble Baroness. It is exactly why the Foreign Secretary and I were intrinsically involved in that decision, and initiated the independent review of Christian persecution around the world. The interim report is not just sobering, it is actually pretty horrific in terms of the numbers. We are talking about 200 million Christians around the world being persecuted in some shape or form because of their faith.

    The example of Nigeria is a very stark one. The noble Baroness knows Nigeria well. This was a focus area for my right honourable friend the Foreign Secretary’s recent visit, and I assure the noble Baroness that any of the organizations that seek to represent or hijack a religion are doing so erroneously. It is important for all communities, all faiths, to stand against them. I am of course referring to Boko Haram and the Islamic State in West Africa. Through development, diplomacy, and security initiatives, we will defeat these radical extremist groups once and for all.

    Lord Anderson of Swansea, Labour

    My Lords, Nigeria is a valued member of the Commonwealth and as such, has signed the Harare Declaration and all other relevant declarations, yet Nigeria is mentioned by Open Doors as among the 50 worst countries in the world in which to be a Christian. What have the Government done, consistent with their new policy on religious persecution, to assist the Government of Nigeria to fulfil their commitments under the Commonwealth? Does the Commonwealth have a role in this tragedy?

    Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon, Minister of State

    First, I totally concur with the noble Lord. Membership of the Commonwealth brings additional responsibilities for any country wishing to be an active and fully engaged member. I assure him that we are working closely with the Government of Nigeria. President Buhari himself has condemned these clashes. There is also an initiative from the Christian vice-president, who is taking forward a national strategy to address the issue of violence directly. He has already engaged directly with governors. We are also providing support and assistance to communities on the ground to ensure that those communities—be they of whatever religion, Christian or Muslim—can work together to defeat the scourge of extremism. This is a long process; that does not mean that we bail out at the first challenge. I fully accept that the situation of Christians in Nigeria is dire, but it is important that we engage even more forcefully now to ensure that we can beat the groups which seek to destabilize Nigeria.

    Baroness Berridge, Conservative

    My Lords, as a fellow officer of the APPG it was a pleasure to respond to the request from the noble Baroness, Lady Cox, for the group to launch an inquiry into this matter. The evidence has been that the violence goes across many states but that it is complex and various factors are at play. One key theme has been that the perception is rising that religion is a motivating factor, due to the use of social media, fake news and, often, the lack of capacity in civil society to investigate what is happening. Whatever part religion actually plays, in and of itself, the perception that it is playing a heightened role is a concern. Will my noble friend the Minister please outline what funding from the FCO and DfID can be given to civil society in Nigeria to increase its capacity to get accurate information about these attacks? Many of them, particularly Muslim-on-Muslim attacks, are going underreported in Nigeria.

    Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon, Minister of State

    My noble friend is quite right to point out the extensive level of support. I assure her that our work in Nigeria represents, I believe, the fifth-largest DfID support programme and our second largest in Africa. Various organizations are engaged on a series of initiatives; whether we are talking about schoolchildren, teacher training or building community capacity, we are working at all levels. When my right honourable friend the Foreign Secretary visited Nigeria, he went to Maiduguri and saw directly how the UK is contributing to a programme for Nigeria to fight against terrorism. Again, we have emphasized the importance of the British Government standing in support of all initiatives. We are working with a raft of organizations on the ground and I will write to my noble friend in that respect.

    Lord Chidgey, Liberal Democrat

    My Lords, in answering the Question that I put to the Minister last December, he said that the development of policies and plans with European partners to address the escalation of violence and deaths in Nigeria was “work in progress”, and that the Nigerian Government were planning to introduce a Bill to address the events that have occurred between the Fulani and the farmers. Can he confirm what progress has been made in developing these policies and plans with our European partners since then, and advise how much, if any, of the £150 million of new British aid announced by the Foreign Secretary will be allocated to these projects?

    Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon, Minister of State

    The noble Lord is correct to ask that question. Progress is being made; obviously, the election in Nigeria may have caused certain things to come to a halt but there has been a renewed focus. I have already referred to the vice-president’s initiative. On the Bill that the noble Lord refers to, we are providing direct assistance to the communities affected. Consideration is currently being given to that very Bill, which will look at, for example, grazing reserves, routes and cattle ranches, to ensure that we can address the issue of land in Nigeria.

    1. Obasanjo’s four scenarios

    Let none of the four prophetic projections of Obasanjo in his recent open letter to Buhari come to pass – as we have it the plot of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel, Chronicle of a Death Foretold: a planned assassination is revealed but because the townspeople are terribly complacent, nothing is done to prevent the assassination and so it happens anyway. This was also the fate of Cassandra in ancient Greek mythology – to give prophecies that are disregarded because she is deemed mad and possessed and thus worthy of being totally ignored; unfailingly, all her prophecies came to pass. But aspects of the first Obasanjo “scenario” are already happening. Therefore, let not the fate of Garcia Marquez’s novel and Casandra’s disbelieved prophecies befall that last three of Obasanjo’s “scenarios”! In this instance, compatriots, forget the messenger who, I agree, is often a megalomaniac; think only of the message.

    “To be explicit and without equivocation, Mr. President and General, I am deeply worried about four avoidable calamities:

    1. abandoning Nigeria into the hands of criminals who are all being suspected, rightly or wrongly, as Fulanis and terrorists of Boko Haram type;
    2. spontaneous or planned reprisal attacks against Fulanis which may inadvertently or advertently mushroom into pogrom or Rwanda-type genocide that we did not believe could happen and yet it happened.
    3. similar attacks against any other tribe or ethnic group anywhere in the country initiated by rumours, fears, intimidation and revenge capable of leading to pogrom;
    4. violent uprising beginning from one section of the country and spreading quickly to other areas and leading to dismemberment of the country.

    It happened to Yugoslavia not too long ago. If we do not act now, one or all of these scenarios may happen. We must pray and take effective actions at the same time. The initiative is in the hands of the President of the nation, but he cannot do it alone. In my part of the world, if you are sharpening your cutlass and a mad man comes from behind to take the cutlass from you, you need other people’s assistance to have your cutlass back without being harmed. The mad men with serious criminal intent and terrorism as core value have taken the cutlass of security. The need for assistance to regain control is obviously compelling and must be embraced now.

    • Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Now, for another El -Rufai: Hadiza Isma and her novel, An Abundance of Scorpions

    Yes, Hadiza Isma El Rufai is the wife of the Governor. An Abundance of Scorpions is her first novel, It is a good read, a very good read. I couldn’t put it down as soon as I started reading it and ultimately finished reading it, all 319 pages of it, in only three extended sittings. And no longer had I finished reading it than I called Femi Osofisan, my friend, to recommend that he should get a copy of the novel. As much a product of the author’s status as the First Lady of Kaduna State, interest in the novel should be based on its inherent literary interest. I understand that Governor Rufai actually has three wives, but as the novelist appears to be the first to whom he got married, she has more claim to the title than the other wives.

    This, indeed, is the basis on which I have the temerity to write this short review of the novel side by side with my sharp critique of the Governor: at the core of the remarkable freshness and originality of the feminist politics of An Abundance of Scorpions is a gentle but at the same time scathing critique of the vanity and empty-mindedness inherent in the culture of First Ladies in our country. This is of course only a part of the humanistic and progressive, cosmopolitan social vision of the novel. But before I come to this, permit me to deal, first, with the literary interest of the novel.

    There are many overt and covert metanarrative allusions to other novels and novelists in An Abundance of Scorpions. The most explicit are to Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and some of the novels of Sydney Sheldon, the American writer of romantic suspense novels, one of the biggest and most successful writers of pulp fiction of all time. More subdued but no less resonant are the intimations of Mariama Ba’s So Long a Letter, especially with regard to the mesmerizing effect of a first-person narrative technique in the account of how a widowed woman survives when she finds herself caught on the horns of what second-wave feminists call the “traffic in women”. What does this mean? It is the practice, the “traffic” through which a woman, any woman, has human worth and dignity only to the extent that she is attached to and has the protection of a man, either as a daughter, a wife, a sister, a mother, a cousin, or the grown-up ward of male in-laws.

    Charlotte Bronte and Mariama Ba are highbrow authors to genuflect to, but not Sydney Sheldon; he is decidedly middlebrow at best. So why bring in Sheldon, going so far as to give actual titles of the American pulp writer’s novels that the narrator-protagonist of An Abundance of Scorpions, Tambaya, is reading? The ready answer is of course that this is completely in character with Tambaya’s social and educational status as a nurse, educated but without a university degree, who loves to read romantic pulp fiction of the kind that Sheldon writes. But more complexly however, the pulp fiction element relates to the emotional and sentimental aspects of Tambaya’s personality while the allusions to the likes of Charlotte Bronte and Mariama Ba relate to her intellectual yearnings, her drive to gain a deeper awareness of the tragedies and challenges to her as a woman who, for the fist time in her life, confronts what it means to be without the crutches of patriarchy presented as children, husbands, brothers, suitors. This, I think, is the source of the novel’s equal mix of sentiment and rationality, of suspense and mature reflectiveness.

    The social vision that emerges from this foundation of eclectic literary sources and allegiances deserves readers’ attention on its own terms, even if the author is so unrestrained in revealing her sources. As one reader, I was especially struck by the ease with which the author combined a genuine critique of the divisive and absurd aspects of religion and politics in our country with an equally genuine observance of piety and even rectitude. Specifically, it is religious piety and rectitude as taught and practiced by the Moslem faith. Is this because love and sensuality are given a space in the novel’s plug for piety? Or because the very long midsection of the novel deals with both charity and cruelty, kindness and harsh officialdom in an orphanage? Or because the protagonist-narrator, Tambaya, wins and keeps our interest from the first to the last pages of the book? It is all of the above. I have not said much about the plot because I do not want to give the story away; but I can report that it an absorbing story. Grab a copy of the novel. At the very least, no monolithic North confronts a monolithic South in the novel. Unlike the Governor’s tale of two Nigerias.

    • Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu  

  • Dangerous half-truths and self-serving simplifications in El-Rufai’s tale of “two Nigerias”

    As reported verbatim in some news outlets, here is the full text of Governor Nasir El Rufai’s much-discussed, controversial recent speech on “two Nigerias”:

    “Looking at the statistics, Nigeria appears to be a middle-income country. But, if we segregate those statistics across states and zones, you will see that, in terms of human development indicators, Nigeria consists of two countries; there is a backward, less educated and unhealthy northern Nigeria, and a developing, largely educated and healthy southern Nigeria.

    “We have to speak the truth to ourselves and ask why is it that northern Nigeria has development indicators similar to Afghanistan, a country still at war? We have the largest number of poor people in the world, most of them in northern Nigeria. Nigeria also has the largest number of out of school children, virtually all of them in Northern Nigeria.

    “Northern Nigeria has become the centre of drug abuse, gender violence, banditry, kidnapping and terrorism. We have also been associated with high divorce rate and breakdown of families. These are the challenges that confront us. This is the naked truth that we have to tell ourselves.

    “We must therefore, as leaders at all levels, have conversation about the way forward for our part of the country. Because increasingly, as many of you must have seen on social media, we are being considered as the parasite of the federal economy, even though, that is not entirely true.

    “Because northern Nigeria still feeds the nation. The richest businessman in Nigeria is still Aliko Dangote, not someone from Southern Nigeria, thank God for that. So, we still have a lot to be proud of. We should be proud of our culture and tradition, as well as unity. You hardly can find someone from northern Nigeria convicted of 419 or being a Yahoo boy. That is something we should be proud of. We are generally considered to be more honest and less corrupt than other Nigerians. That is something we should be proud of. In addition, our demographic superiority gives us a very powerful tool to negotiate in politics. And that is something we should be proud of and we should preserve. So, we have every reason to unite and not be divided.

    “I therefore call on you the youth, you account for 80 per cent of the northern population and the future of this region lies in your hands, not in the hands of dinosaurs like me. I’m 59 and among the oldest five per cent of the northern population. I shouldn’t even be governor; I should have been governor 10 years ago. But ‘na condition make crayfish bend’, so we are here. We have to do something about the situation of northern Nigeria and we must do so as a group of 19 Governors, not individual state governors.”

    As soon as I read this divisive and dangerously simplistic speech, I knew instinctively what the reaction from the “South” would be: El Rufai should either own up to the fact that those responsible for Northern poverty and “backwardness” are Northern leaders or he should just shut up! I have not been disappointed: that has been the reaction from the “South”. This means that El Rufai knows his countrymen and women very well; he knows that the myth of a monolithic North confronting a monolithic South works very well and for political leaders from both regional zones. But just as El Rufai’s claim of a monolithic North that is economically and educationally more “backward” than the South is a simplistic half-truth, so is the retort that Northern leaders are solely responsible for the social and economic woes of the North also a simplistic half-truth. The truth, and nothing but the whole truth, is that all political leaders from the North and the South and from all the ruling class political parties are responsible for the terrible state of economy, society and politics throughout the whole country. Looters, mega looters, have come from the two zones of the country and when they have looted, they have neither looted monolithically from the North nor monolithically from the South; they have looted from all of us. That is the truth, nothing but the whole truth.

    Yes, one could  say that Northern politicians have for most of the postcolonial period been the “senior partners” of the country’s political and administrative establishment and have thus probably looted more in simple arithmetical terms than their Southern “junior partners”. But, compatriots, do you have the slightest doubt that if they were the “senior partners”, political leaders from the South would have been more honest, would have looted less than Northern politicians and bureaucrats? Everything we have seen of state capture at all levels of government, federal, state and local, tells us that this is extremely naïve, that when given the chance, Nigerian politicians loot their own people, their own part of the country as much as they loot the country as a whole.

    Now, without over-personalizing this controversy around El Rufai himself, I would all the same like to pose some questions around his own role in the unfolding tragedy of poverty and social injustice in our country. I have in mind in particular his role as Minister for the Abuja Capital Territory when he was in the PDP and when, as Director General of the Bureau of Public Enterprises, he was also responsible for coordinating the massive privatization project of that political party and its federal administrations. If they know nothing else about him, Nigerians must know this about Nasir El Rufai: he it was who supervised the greatest transfer of national, public wealth to private ownership on the African continent.

    Nigerians must know too, that El Rufai has never given an audit, an account of what the payoff, the benefit from massive privatization has been for the country, never. If he has, if somehow I missed it, would the Governor please step forward to let us know where such a report could be found? Meanwhile, here’s what we know objectively: public utilities, services, assets and enterprises have been privatized galore, but the services provided to Nigerians and the wealth generated from the privatization have barely benefited Nigerians in their millions; the beneficiaries have been a couple of hundreds of wealthy Nigerians whose “good luck” is the ill luck of the Nigerian peoples in their tens of millions. In sum then, El Rufai is the embodiment, the heart and soul of crony capitalism via privatization of national wealth and assets in Nigeria. He has a lot to gain from diverting the nation’s attention from this fact to the myth of a monolithic North confronting a monolithic South.

    The myth of a monolithic North has in particular been used again and again to prevent Nigerians as a whole, but Southerners in particular, from recognizing and embracing genuinely progressive currents of politics, culture and social activism of or from the North. Even among many Southern radicals and progressives, the stereotypes of unalterable and pervasive Northern ideological and political conservatism and “backwardness” persist, quite against the well-established historical fact that in many instances, currents and waves of grassroots and mass political radicalism have come from the North, around the cities of Kano, Kaduna and Zaria; in NEPU and PRP radical social-democratic politics; and in the foreign policy of Murtala Ramat Mohammed, among many other currents. Indeed, I  have heard some Southern progressives express amazement upon discovering, through “Kannywood” films, of the existence of a vibrant, cosmopolitan Hausa-language Hip-hop music and culture. And so I say, it is not only the growing numbers and the aggressive visibility of almajiri youth that frighten the Northern political establishment; it is also the recognition and embrace of these Northern radical and cosmopolitan currents of politics and culture by the South, in effect by the whole country. That, in a nutshell, is what is behind the half-truths and the simplifications of El Rufai’s tale of two Nigerias. Please compatriots, don’t allow him and others like him to lock you into the political and ideological dead end of a monolithic North versus its monolithic Southern Other.

     

  • The great silence on neoliberalism – postscript to PwC’s song of praise to Nigeria and Nigerians

    The tail can never wag the dog, as I discovered yet again at the end of last week’s piece in this column. Because I necessarily had to devote most of the piece to summarizing and discussing the talking points of Dr. Andrew Nevin’s lecture at the birthday party for Pascal Dozie, I had only two short paragraphs at the end of the essay in which to put across my own views, my own critical take on Nevin’s enormously crucial ideas and propositions concerning present circumstances and future prospects for the Nigerian economy and society. But of course, two short paragraphs cannot even begin to address issues raised in four pages of nearly 2000 words: only in futility can the tail hope to wag the dog.

    In this postscript in which I now attempt to provide an expanded version of my all-too brief conclusion last week, it is perhaps necessary to remind the reader of the three essential points of Dr. Nevin. As a quick side issue, let me remind the reader that Dr. Nevin is the Chief Economist of PricewaterhouseCoopers. For those unfamiliar with this multinational corporate organization with the rather quaintly spelled name, it is one of the two biggest and richest professional services conglomerates in the world.

    I first became aware of this corporation when I was in my last years as an undergraduate at the University of Ibadan in the late 1960s. It was then mostly known as a reputable, high-flying auditing firm. For virtually all my classmates majoring in Economics, it was number one on the list of firms by which they desperately hoped to be employed, which was then simply called “Coopers”. It became PricewaterhouseCoopers – or PwC in its shortened form – when it became very big and truly global and tremendously expanded its operations to include virtually all areas of professional services. I might add here that the change in the spelling of the name of the corporation, in effect its branding, is more in tune with the global culture of neoliberalism. More on this point later. Meanwhile, let’s get to a brief recapitulation of the three issues of Dr. Nevin that I could not discuss substantially or critically in the piece in this column last week.

    At the centre of these three issues is the celebration, indeed the glorification of the Nigerian diaspora as the saving grace of the Nigerian economy. There are many components to this. There is the fact that remittances from Nigerians in the diaspora have displaced revenue from oil as our main export, and this by a factor of nearly three to one. There is the growing size of the diaspora, now estimated by the Federal Government to be about 15 million, seen in conjunction with the fact of an annual increase estimated to be about 1.3 million. And there is also the tremendous achievement of the diaspora for a relatively young immigrant group as indicated in the fact that Nigerian Americans now earn more than the average American. Above all else is of course the geometric rise of export of people in relation to export of oil.

    I should of course state here that Dr. Nevin is not unaware of the profoundly ambiguous nature of this development and he does lament the fact that this clearly indicates that many people leave, many people emigrate because their skills cannot be monetized in our economy. But he could have added that a sizeable proportion of the emigrants are unskilled workers and face many tough challenges in their new countries of residence or citizenship, just as he could also have added that human catastrophes from illegal emigration has become one of the most tragic aspects of the new economic order of neoliberal globalization. Libya, Turkey, Southern and Eastern Europe: tens of thousands of Nigerian immigrants are either dying or languishing in camps and jails.

    In order to save space for a critical discussion, it is helpful to link together the two other issues of Dr. Nevin that I reviewed last week. These are, respectively, the great shrinkage of the public sector in the last few decades and the corollary rise of the self-organization and tremendous resilience of the informal sector. Let me put these in plain terms: our government, your government, dear reader, spends only a pittance on infrastructures, utilities and services; because of this, Nigerians have to provide nearly everything for themselves, a challenge they have become very adept at managing. It is galling in the extreme to learn that together, all the levels of government in Nigeria – federal, state and local – now spend only 10% of the GDP for public sector expenditure, down from 25% about 20 years ago.

    What is truly alarming is the fact that the trend is worsening, not improving and we may begin to expect a slip from the current 10% to a single digit percentile around the corner of future horizons. If that is the dire prospect, what comfort, what reprieve can the resilience of the informal sector be realistically expected to provide? No matter how resilient and buoyant the informal sector is, can it by itself build and repair roads and bridges, provide free and quality education for all school-age children and clean and drinkable pipe-borne water for our cities, towns and villages? Unfortunately, these are questions that Dr. Nevin does not ask and since he doesn’t ask them, doesn’t provide answers to them. The reason that he doesn’t, indeed couldn’t ask questions like these lies in the great silence in his talk on, yes, neoliberalism.

    And what exactly is neoliberalism, more specifically, global neoliberalism? Well, in response to this question, I would say that the problem is with the word, “exactly”. This is because it is very tough to be exact about neoliberalism. True, there are some keywords through which you can succinctly apprehend it, words like “privatization”, “deregulation”, “austerity” and “globalization”. But even these words are not uniformly applicable to every region or nation of the world. Take for instance “globalization” which, in the neoliberal agenda, encourages industries to move abroad for cheaper labor and higher profits. This seems uncomplicated, that is, until you realize that it divides the world into “home” or rich countries from which industries move into “foreign” or poor countries in search of the cheapest labor and highest profits available in a region of the world or, indeed, the whole world itself.

    Thus, for anyone seeking a grasp of neoliberalism, I would ask that this is a cardinal point to keep in mind, this observation that though neoliberalism is a global phenomenon and a worldwide economic agenda of contemporary capitalism, it affects the diverse regions and nations of the world differentially. One prime example that I like to draw attention to is this quite telling fact: in the 1970s, 80s and 90s when most of the developing countries of the world were being told, indeed were being forced to make very drastic cuts in government spending on education, the rich countries of the global North maintained their public expenditures on education and in their protected and well-endowed private universities, spending actually increased. Indeed, in light of this particular aspect of neoliberalism, Nigeria is one of the few countries in the world that provides us with an object lesson in the contradictions of neoliberal globalization. Incidentally, the same issues highlighted by Dr. Nevin in his lecture are remarkably useful for underscoring the veracity of this observation, this claim that although we should never forget that neoliberalism is a global phenomenon, its effects around the different regions of the world are highly differentiated.

    In one of his examples for Nigeria’s inability to perform in alignment with both the size and the resilience of its national economy, Niven states quite correctly that Ghana, with a considerably smaller economy and not as ebullient an informal sector as ours, still attracts a significantly higher figure for DFI (Direct Foreign Investment) than us. Behind this obvious fact is another one which Niven ignores or is either unaware of or indifferent to: Nigeria is extremely inconsistent in applying neoliberal rules and protocols. On the one hand, few countries in the world are as diligent as our country in enforcing massive cuts in government expenditure, this being the what Niven calls the unending shrinkage of the public sector. But on the other hand, though Nigeria has taken onboard one of the cardinal points on the neoliberal agenda, this being privatization of national assets, resources and wealth, there is a lingering unwillingness to go full-scale in that direction. For those reading this piece, the pointers here are the refusal to remove what remains of oil subsidies and the resistance to complete privatization or selling off of the NNPC, the national oil corporation.

    Will Buhari and the APC eventually privatize the NNPC? Will they remove the last vestiges of oil subsidies under the tremendous pressure they are facing now and will increasingly continue to face in the months and years ahead? And the massive shortfalls and cuts in government spending on public expenditure, will they continue? If  the answer to everyone of these question is yes, would the decisions taken – or not taken – have been taken completely by our own free choice as a nation, a people, not something forced on us by forces of indirect but controlling power on our economy? These are the questions that arise precisely from bringing neoliberalism into our discussion where Nevin had completely kept it out of sight and out of consideration. This, in fact, is the genius of neoliberalism: the power to make the nations and regions of the world take enormously consequential decisions of state policy and economic well-being that are forced on them as if they themselves made the decision(s) on their own volition.

    Compatriots, we have come to the heart of the matter: neoliberalism has such a commanding, hegemonic power in the global economic order of the present because it has placed market forces in control of social policy in most of the nations of the world whereas traditionally, political parties that win elections, become ruling governments and formulate social policy had seemed to be the planning and controlling agents of history and politics. As a matter of fact, where Keynesian economics, the previous great international economic order had placed the state and massive public spending as the engine of progress and social justice, neoliberalism arose from the relocation of the lever of power in the market. It is instructive and salutary to take a look at the term “neoliberalism” itself in this regard: the old “liberalism” pertained to liberation of the individual from all forms of oppression and degradation; the “neo” in neoliberalism pertains to the “liberation” of the market and market forces from all forms of regulation. Of course, if it turns out that liberating market forces from all forms of regulation or control means the same thing as putting them in control of everything else, most especially state policy, that’s all well and good.

    Earlier in this discussion, I referred to the change of the name of the conglomerate that Niven works for to the psychedelically spelled PricewaterhouseCoopers as a sign, a trope of neoliberalism. What do I mean by this? Well, when you make the market and market forces the putative lord of the universe, you get incredibly creative, playful and risqué in what you do in the market. Let me give just one seemingly unconnected example of this phenomenon. When I was a youth who loved and played soccer up to my undergraduate days at Ibadan, there were only 11 players in a team and all of them wore jerseys numbered from 1 to 11, nothing more, nothing less. These days, the players are still eleven in number but the numbers that you see on their jerseys can start, go back or forward and stop anywhere from 11 itself to 30 or 42 or 49, all randomly chosen.

    That’s the culture of neoliberalism, a culture in which branding is infinitely more important than the literal content of things. That’s the fascinating aspect of the market as construed and organized in neoliberalism. And that’s the source of the designation PwC. That’s why Nevin is so rapturous about the export of people as our new numero uno in forex earning and bare economic survivability: the success stories are more “sexy”, more captivating than the uncountable hardship stories – people getting poorer and poorer everywhere in the world. That’s neoliberalism in spite of the few successes in its global dispersions of people. I happen to live and work in the United States and Nigeria. I am part of the social elite of the diaspora that Nevin celebrates in his talk. But in Nigeria and around the world including in  the USA itself, I see images and read of stories of Nigerians and Africans in waves of migrants and would-be immigrants caught in a vortex of appalling, tragic conditions. We ignore the horror tales of neoliberalism only at our peril.

    Erratum

    Last week, I gave the erroneous dates of 1930-2019 as the lifespan of the late Professor Molara Ogundipe. It is of course 1940-2019 and the error is much regretted.

     

    • Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

     

     

  • Profoundly heartening and disturbing news from PricewaterhouseCoopers, Nigeria

    (A copy of the talking points of the lecture came to me only a few days ago. I am talking of a lecture delivered earlier this week by Dr. Andrew Nevin, Chief Economist of PricewaterhouseCoopers, Nigeria (PwC), at the 80th birthday party for Pascal Dozie, founder of Diamond Bank, Chairman of the New Nigeria Foundation and one of the most successful investors and corporate personalities in Nigeria. Indeed, only at a social function for such an icon of Nigerian venture capitalism could a talk of such far reaching consequences have been given. More of an informal talk than a lecture as such, what Dr. Nevin had to say will come as a bracing revelation to any thinking Nigerian who gets to read it. For this reason, my discussion of the talk in this piece is intended to provoke the publication, in full, of the talk. I swear that in my discussion, I have tried as much as possible not to distort, not to either overstate or understate anything that Dr. Nevin said in his talk. At any rate, I know for a certainty that this will not be the only commentary or the last word on the talk, at least once it is published. Finally, the talking points of the talk that I discuss in this piece were circulated at the party for Dozie; they are thus already in the public domain]

    Of the five talking points discussed in the lecture, I will discuss only three in this piece. These are: remittances from Nigerians in the diaspora – not oil revenues – as our most important source of revenue and the only thing that is keeping Nigeria from economic collapse; the relentless and seemingly unstoppable shrinking of the public sector in our country in the last few decades; the self-organization and tremendous resilience of the informal sector of the economy. These issues are discussed separately in Andrew Nevin’s talk, but that they are all interconnected is something that becomes evident after one has read his observations and reflections on all of them.

    If it is true that facts and data don’t lie, then consider the significance of the following data. In 2018 – which happens to be last year – remittances from the Nigerian diaspora totaled US $22 billion. Oil revenue for the year remitted to the Government by NNPC was, at US$11 billion, less than half of the remittances from the diaspora. Meanwhile, the estimate of remittances from the diaspora for this year is US$25 billion. Beyond these, consider the fact that data for unofficial remittances through the informal, so-called “Aboki” system are not  included in these official data; when they are included, remittances from the diaspora are close to US$40 billion. This staggering sum is more than triple what the NNPC remits to the Government annually.

    Remember, compatriots, that our national currency, the Naira, is among the so-called ‘“non-convertible” currencies of  the developing world. Thus, we badly need for our revenues from oil to be in dollars, the first among the convertible currencies of the world. With this in mind, think now of the significance of the fact that not only are remittances from the diaspora almost triple oil revenues, they are in dollars and are thus crucial to the volume of FX or forex available for exchange and circulation in our national economy. In other words, far more without the remittances from the naija diaspora, our national economy would be so short of forex that it would sooner or later, sooner than later, collapse.

    Why do we keep on regarding oil revenue as our main or primary source of revenue, especially revenue designated in forex? Why are we so extremely slow to recognize and deal with the fact that our main primary export is not oil but people? Is it because we do not normally think of people as exportable commodities? Nevin believes that it is because the change from oil to people as our main export item happened so gradually and imperceptibly that we never really became aware that the change was happening or has, indeed, been irreversibly consummated. However, while it is one thing to become aware of this momentous change in the structure of our national economy, it is another thing entirely to decide the terms in which we should conduct a productive national conversation on it. I shall come back to this point later in this piece after discussions of the other two issues earlier indicated. For now, let me make this preliminary observation: Nigeria is not the only country in the world wherein export of people, of nationals has become a major, if not the primary export commodity or item. This situation is indeed similar to or congruent with the experiences of many other developing countries of Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and Latin America.

    With regard to the second issue – the relentless shrinking of the public sector – I must confess that although I was very aware of its occurrence, I simply had no idea that it was as catastrophic as the figures and data supplied by Dr. Nevin imply. Here’s one statistic: between 2000-2002, public sector expenditure in Nigeria averaged 25% of the GDP; in 2017, public sector expenditure, at N13.2 trillion naira, was only about 12% of the GDP. Since N1.3 trillion of that sum went into debt servicing and the National Assembly alone cost us N125 billion naira, it means that only about 10% of the GDP was spent for public expenditure. Here is another stat, a monster of a stat: 10% of the GDP for public sector expenditure works into about N70K per capita – which means that only N70,000 (seventy thousand naira) per person was spent at all levels of government in a whole year for everything, including health, education, public sanitation, infrastructures and utilities, policing, armed, security services and social welfare services. This is one of the worst figures for per capita public sector expenditure in the world.

    The severe shrinkage of the public sector means that for the most part, in the last few decades, what the public sector no longer provides Nigerians have had to provide for themselves – and this also includes nearly everything. This observation leads to the third of the three issues discussed by Dr. Nevin in his talk that I wish to discuss in this article. Let me remind the reader what this is – the self-organization and tremendous resilience of the non-governmental, informal sector. Logically, this arises from the shrinkage of the public sector with the attendant monumental decrease in what the government, the public sector actually can and does provide for Nigerians in their millions. After all, nature abhors a vacuum, right? Yes, but this is more than merely filling a vacuum; it is nothing short of a true measure of what Nigerians can do in the face of the great challenges that they face day in, day out. This section of Dr. Nevin’s talk is simply the best part and by a long shot.

    In Nigeria, people are getting poorer and poorer, the government and/or the public sector provides an absolute minimum of services needed for a modern society and the little that it provides is grossly inadequate; moreover, life is full of insecurities and the young are restless and desperate. By all rational calculations, Nigeria should be a failed state, a collapsed society. But it isn’t. Nevin asks why and he says it is primarily due to the great resilience of the informal sector which turns out to be doing for oneself what the government or the formal sector cannot or will not do. This is of course not the first time that our informal sector has been praised for doing what the formal sector, the public sector cannot or will not do. What makes Dr. Nevin’s take on the issue so compelling is the fact that his profile of the informal sector is juxtaposed to his stunning account of the shrinkage of the public sector. After all, against white, black appears more black and white itself more white. In other words, if we didn’t have the tremendous ingenuity and self-organization of this informal sector, if all that we had was the gross insufficiency and the mediocrity of the formal sector run by the government, Nigeria would long ago have gone the way of so many other nations of Africa and other parts of the developing world where, again and again, the nation has proved to be a limit beyond which the people cannot go. In Nigeria, according to Nevin, things seem to be going in the other direction: the people constitute the tremendously unbounded limit against which the nation must be measured.

    In bringing this discussion to an end, I wish to extrapolate some logical conclusions of Dr. Nevin’s talk that he does not make himself, even though they are, in my opinion, crying to be made. In his talk, not the government, not the leaders and not even any segments of the social and political elites but the Nigerian people themselves, at home and in the diaspora, are the real heroes. Although it is Nigerians in the diaspora that are deliberately singled out for hero-worshipping by Nevin, he comes near to expressing the same sentiments in his comments on the informal sector. Based on this, the whole talk seems to be framed by an unspoken but palpable Nigerian exceptionalism. Since we do know ourselves that we are prone to uncritical exceptionalism when we think of or talk about our destiny on the African continent and indeed, in the world, we ought to be wary of it when it is being argued by a foreigner who has evidently been mesmerized by a heavy dose of naijaphilia.

    Such caution is all the more necessary given the fact Nevin seems almost completely oblivious of neoliberalism as the global and historic context for all his claims and reflections in his talk. People becoming our primary export “commodity” to displace oil from that august position? The unending shrinkage of the public sector? The informal sector coming to the rescue in the wake of the collapse, the chaos and mediocrity of the public sector? Not a single one of these happened without the overdetermining savage war of neoliberalism against the nations and peoples of the world, principally the peoples and nations of the developing world at first but later on all the nations and peoples of the world. We became a debtor-nation or a debt-ridden nation thanks to neoliberalism. Everything else followed from that historic fact and datum. Of course, don’t blame it all on neoliberalism; but don’t excuse neoliberalism completely from blame either.

     

    Comrade Egbon, Adieu: for Abiodun Molara Ogundipe (1930-2019)

    When she died last week the world of scholarship lost a great colleague and an irreplaceable pathfinder. I called her “Comrade Egbon” and she called me “Comrade Aburo”. One reason was because we were namesakes. Also, when she taught at UI, she briefly dated my maternal uncle, the late Mr. Sunday Ajayi-Obe and for a while there was hope of a marital union between them, at least as far as my uncle was concerned. But it was primarily because from the first time or day that I met the person behind the legendary figure, I felt a closeness of spirit which she also apparently felt. One of our first prolonged discussions was about feminism and its many phases: she checked me out thoroughly, intellectually. I think that she found me not (too) wanting and accepted me as a man in feminism. She was of a generation of the Nigerian and African literati that was overwhelmingly male-dominated, this in an age when crude gender discrimination, plain rudeness and smarmy condescension of virtually all men towards all women was the order of the age. Though she was actually rather soft-spoken, she was nonetheless feisty, feisty and heaven it was that could rescue any man that made the mistake of  condescending to her as a woman.

    She was a gifted lyrical poet and it always saddened me that she did not give to poetry what the medium demanded of her gifts: sustained work and attention. I often think of one of my favorites among her poems, Firi! She was also a first-rate critic and an inspired theorist, one of our best, no less. When she defended her doctoral dissertation on narratology in the poetry of Okot p’Bitek at Leyden University, I was the External Examiner. First, to my discomfiture but later to my amazement, our roles were reversed: she became the Examiner and I became the Examined! Let this stand as my ultimate acknowledgement of what she meant to me and many of us: an “elder” who was a comrade, a mentor, an inspirer, a kindred spirit.

    • Biodun Jeyifo bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • The Minority Report and Draft Constitution of 1976: in its time and in the stream of history (2)

    I concluded last week’s beginning installment in this review by comparing the difference between Chapter 4 of MDRC ’76 and Chapter 2 of the 1979 Constitution to the difference between 6 and half a dozen. Since this was deliberately provocative, did I thereby diminish the considerable differences between the two documents in their respective other chapters and sections? I don’t think so. To prove this point, permit me to provide a temporal or historical context for this assertion of similarity, if not of identity, between Chapter 4 of MDRC ’76 and Chapter 2 of the 1979 Constitution.

    When I first read the 1979 Constitution in the year in which it was formally instituted, I did not download a copy from the Internet as I have had to do in writing this review. This is because the Internet was not then as widely available as it is today. In other words, I had to get a printed copy of the Constitution and to do this, I had to drive to Lagos to obtain a copy at the Government Printer’s Office as there was no copy available in any of the bookshops in Ife or Ibadan. In that first print-run of the 1979 Constitution, the single most intellectually and ideologically interesting item was a so-called “Preamble” to Chapter 2 of the Constitution. Today, that “Preamble” is gone from all or any versions of the 1979 Constitution that you can download or buy in print form. To get it, you have to lay your hands on that original first print-run of the document. This is a pity because that “Preamble” is, in my opinion, the finest document of progressive social democracy in our political and constitutional history. Here, I can only summarize what it says.

    Can any country in the developing world simultaneously pursue economic development and social justice or the production of wealth side by side with its egalitarian redistribution? That was the question that the “Preamble” posed and answered. After extensively reviewing policies and actions regarding this issue around the world, the Preamble concluded that although it was always a great challenge everywhere in the developing world to pursue wealth creation and social justice simultaneously, that is the path that the Federal Republic of Nigeria would henceforth take. The “Preamble” even went as far as to state that it was unfair and unacceptable to persuade the masses of Nigerians to wait first for wealth to be generated in an adequate quantum for redistribution to take place. In other words, to conservative and liberal politicians who have always cynically argued that since you cannot redistribute poverty, you have to create wealth first before you can distribute it, to such politicians and their ideological and intellectual supporters the “Preamble” stated unequivocally that in Nigeria wealth generation and redistribution would henceforth go together.

    Although I do not have any direct evidence to prove this, I strongly believe that it was the fierce and widespread debate provoked by Osoba’s and Bala Usman’s Minority Draft Constitution that led to the intellectual and ideological progressivism of that “Preamble” to Chapter 2 of the 1979 Constitution. However, in place of such direct evidence, what we have is the textual and circumstantial evidence that we see in that Chapter 2 itself, most especially in Section 16 which deals specifically with the economic system for Nigeria. Perhaps it is best to quote directly from that Section itself:

    “The State shall, within the context of the ideals and objectives for which provisions are made in this Constitution

    (a) control the national economy in such a manner as to secure the maximum welfare, freedom and happiness of every citizen on the basis of social justice and equality of status and opportunity

    (c) ensure….that the economic system is not operated in such a manner as to permit the concentration of wealth or the means of production and exchange in the hands of a few individuals or of a group

    These are pretty much the same things or principles that Chapter 4 of MDRC ’76 states: an economic system in which the control of the economy, together with the means of production and exchange, is controlled by the State. The difference lies in the more unambiguous and precise language. For instance, where the ’79 Constitution talks of “every citizen”, Chapter 4 of MDRC ’76 always specifies concrete classes and groups as in the following quotes:

    1. The Federal Republic of Nigeria is committed to fostering the establishment of just social relations in all sectors of production and in all spheres of society and therefore shall especially support and protect the interests of the peasant farmers, nomads, artisans, petty traders, and wage earners and shall also develop genuine producer and consumer cooperatives and collectives.
    2. The Federal Republic of Nigeria shall within the framework of this Constitution treat with special urgency and determination the question of land ownership and control and resolve it in the interests of the peasant farmers and tenants on the principle that land shall be owned and controlled by those that work it and live on it.

    I do admit it: to say 6 is the same thing as half a dozen is an equivalence, a generalization that obscures many specific things in each of the numbers between one and six. In this particular case, between the generalization in the ’79 Constitution’s principle of state ownership and control of the economy and the means of production and MDRC ’76’s addition of socialization of the means of production in favour of oppressed or disadvantaged classes and groups, there is a lot at stake. In other words, while you can hide and obscure many crucial things behind generalizations like “every citizen” and “means of production”, there is little that you can hide behind specifications like “peasant farmers”, “wage earners” and “land”.

    All the same, it is important to remind the reader that my point in applying the trope of 6 and half of a dozen was to argue that contrary to the imputation of Segun Osoba in his “New Introduction” that there is a gulf, a chasm between the 1979 Constitution and MDRC ’76, I am arguing in this review that the difference, the distance between them is not that great. Also, I am arguing that it was in fact the debate that MDRC ’76 generated that led to the closing of the gap between the two documents. To this contention I now turn in the remaining part of this review.

    It is perfectly understandable that both Dr. Abubakar Siddique Mohammed in his “Foreword” and Olusegun Osoba in his “New Introduction” jump from the institution of the 1979 Constitution to all the terrible and dispiriting things that have happened politically, economically and morally in Nigeria since then. Comrade Siddique is particularly trenchant in his account of how the gap has widened immeasurably between the few wealthy men and women and the majority of Nigerians in the intervening years and decades. He is equally persuasive in his account of the political opportunism that has led to ethnic, regional and religious divisiveness, especially with regard to the violence and the insecurity it has caused and continues to cause.

    For his part, Osoba is devastating in his graphic account of the serial nature of the corrupt and dysfunctional misuse of the concentration of wealth and power in political elites, first in the time of military autocracy and later in the era of the civilian succession, showing graphically how closely entwined military and civilian elites have been from 1976 to the present. Especially, Osoba provides a focus on Olusegun Obasanjo as both exemplar and eminence grise of the military-cum-civilian despoliation of the nation, its resources and, possibly, its posterity. Much has been written about Obasanjo; very few can match the power and the insight of Osoba’s portrait of this man. Finally, and to his great credit, having provided such a valuable profile of Nigeria in ruins from 1976 to date, Osoba ends with what he calls a Five-Point Minimum Agenda which, in my opinion, demands serious consideration by all thinking and patriotic Nigerians, incidentally of all ideological persuasions.

    But, did it all originate with the 1979 Constitution? Neither Mohammed nor Osoba explicitly make this argument. But that is what they are saying, implicitly! Implicitly, because they do not give any attention whatsoever to the struggles that have taken place in Nigeria since 1976. It is as if, once Osoba’s and Bala Usman’s Minority Report was not accepted and their Minority Draft Constitution seemed to have gone into historical oblivion, no more significant political, economic, social, intellectual and constitutional struggles took place. But this is simply not the case at all. Indeed, rather paradoxically, as I have sought to show in this review, the first major struggle that took place between 1976 and 1979, these being the dates, respectively, of the release by Osoba and Bala Usman of their historic Draft Constitution and the institution of the 1979 Constitution was in the realm of constitutional reform itself by way of that very 1979 Constitution which, in my reading, was a bye-product of Osoba’s and Bala Usman’s Draft Constitution and the debate that it generated.

    Perhaps Segun Osoba, from his membership of the Constitution Drafting Committee (CDC) from which he and Bala Usman resigned, knows some things about the other 47 members of that CDC that serve to prevent him from admitting that his and Bala Usman’s Draft Constitution may have influenced the 1979 Constitution? I do not know. What I know is this: Segun Osoba has to be one the last men in Nigeria to be reminded that from 1976 to date, and especially throughout the late 70’s to the 80’s and 90’s, there were struggles in virtually all spheres of the public, national life of this country precisely because he was himself in the forefront of many of the struggles. As was also Abubakar Siddique Mohammed. Why then do both men almost completely leave out a consideration, a reexamination, no matter how briefly, of those struggles in which they themselves took part? Again, I do not know. I definitely can say that whatever is the answer to this poser, it is not defeatism. Why so? Because the segments written by both men in MDRC ’76 do not in any way read like words or testimonies from defeatist compatriots. Indeed, if anything, Osoba’s Five-Point Minimum Agenda is a “fighting” manifesto!

    In a long sentence in which he introduces this Five-Point Minimum Agenda, Osoba says the following somewhat revealing things concerning preconditions for any reform that might have a chance at success at the present moment in our country’s affairs:

    In view of the persistent misconduct of successive regimes in power in Nigeria, the Nigerian state is currently enmeshed in a profound crisis of governance that is not capable of being resolved or alleviated by a resort to the normal practice of constitutional, legal, judicial or other institutional reform. Lawlessness and corruption have become so endemic in all sectors of state, society and economy that any strategy of change that is short of the “root and branch” overthrown of the existing order is doomed to fail. For instance, the legal basis of governance, i.e. the legitimacy of laws passed in the National Assembly and State Houses of Assembly is often and viciously subverted by the self-centeredness, careerism and corruption of the so-called “lawmakers”…[pp 6-7]

    Osoba’s argument here is unassailable. This is its most forceful proof: they passed the Administration of Criminal Justice Act (ACJA) in 2015. It was intended to make the administration of criminal justice in Nigeria fairer, faster and more efficient. To date, it has been observed or effected far more in neglect than in enforcement. But there is an unperceived irony in Osoba’s argument here and it is this: at the very moment that he is supremely suspicious that any constitutional or legal instruments can work for meaningful reform, he and CEDDERT bring out this historic constitutional document written in 1976. Irony? Yes. But also, unquenchable revolutionary hope!

     

    • Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu