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Category: Biodun Jeyifo

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

    Review of Olusegun Osoba and Yusufu Bala Usman, Minority Report and Draft Constitution for the Federal Republic of Nigeria, 1976, Centre for Democratic Development Research [CEDDERT], Zaria, 2019

    How long, by the way, is the American Constitution? It depends on how one configures “length”. The original document produced and signed into law in 1787 was contained in only FOUR parchment pages. As a printed text, it is about 17 pages. If you add its 27 amendments, the Constitution in its current incarnation comes to about 34 printed pages. These facts are worth stating if for no other reason than the fact that starting from the 1979 Nigerian Constitution, all our Constitutions have been structurally based on the American presidential system of government. However, while the American Constitution, with all its amendments is only 34 pages long, the Nigerian Constitution of 1979 is 120 pages long, with the resounding figure of 279 Sections as its component parts. But wait a minute, wait a minute, the 1999 Nigerian Constitution, the one currently in force as the ultimate law of the land, is even longer: 169 pages, 320 Sections! But what does length have to do with modern constitutions? What does it have to do with Nigerian Constitutions in general? Above all else, what does length lave to do in particular with the text under review in this piece, Minority Report and Draft Constitution of 1976 (hereafter MRDC ‘76) of Olusegun Osoba and Yusufu Bala Usman?

    In length, MRDC ’76 is like the American Constitution. At 65 pages, it seems much longer than the 34 pages of the American Constitution. But that’s a little misleading because the text is in a very bold print with a font that is larger than the very fine print of all the official Nigerian Constitutions – e.g., 1979; 1985; 1989; 1999. Thus, if MRDC ‘76  had actually been printed in the very fine print and small font of the typical Nigerian Constitution, it would have been less than half of its pages, probably no more than about 32 pages. Thus, MRDC ‘76 has the distinction of being the shortest, the most distinct of all Constitutions ever fashioned in our country. Thus, though it is not structurally and ideologically based on the American Constitution like our 1979 Constitution, it is ironically rather like the American Constitution in its brevity.

    More fundamentally, it turns out that brevity is not the only quality that MRDC ‘76  shares with the American Constitution. Above brevity, above succinctness, MRDC ‘76  shares with the US Constitution the great prose virtues of simplicity, clarity and gracefulness. Whether you are very learned or of very modest education, you go away from a reading of the American Constitution with the feeling that you have both understood and been moved by what you have read. This is exactly the same sentiment, the same impression with which you are left when you have read MRDC ’76: it is simple; it is clear; it is gracefully written, almost like the best of Chinua Achebe’s prose!

    I am making this particular point the first issue of this review partly because since Nigerians are used to Constitutions that are long, full of jargon and written in a language style that takes ponderous legalese – the special brand of language used by and for lawyers – as its model, nobody can use that as an excuse for not going right away to buy and read MRDC ’76. Indeed, the effect of reading this historic document by Osoba and Bala Usman will be salutary in proving that moderately educated people can not only enjoy reading the nation’s Constitution, but they can do so without the help of a lawyer to interpret the meaning of any word, any phrase or sentence to him or her. This, indeed, was the impact of MRDC ’76 when it was first released to the Nigerian reading public in 1976: everyone came away with their assumptions about Constitutions being written only for lawyers and the highly educated completely debunked and demystified. On this point, I think, again, of my opening comparison of MRDC ’76 with the American Constitution: next to the Bible, the book that Americans like to read the most is their Constitution. Since Osoba’s and Bala Usman’s draft Constitution never became our official Constitution, we will never know whether it would have come to be as popular and as beloved by Nigerians as the Americans love to read and be inspired by their Constitution, but I can report here that in 1976, nearly every literate Nigerian who could lay his hands on the mimeographed copy of MRDC ’76 was reading it and loving what they were reading. However, at this point, the comparison with the American Constitution ends.

    Why so? First written at the so-called Constitutional Convention of Philadelphia in 1787, the American Constitution was so faulty, so imperfect that it was to take more than two hundred years and 27 amendments for its contents to resonate with nearly all Americans. Slaves, women, workers, immigrants, the poor and the disabled had to fight for very long periods for their rights, needs and interests to be incorporated into the Constitution. For instance, at one stage, in the American Constitution, the black person, man, woman or child, was defined as “three-fifths of a person”, the “full person” being the white male person. In sharp contrast, MRDC ’76 was apparently deeply informed by the mistakes as well as the achievements of many other Constitutions in history and in the world, including both the American Constitution and many versions and incarnations of the Constitution of the defunct USSR, especially the 1936 Constitution, thought by many historians of Constitutions to be one of the best Constitutions of the defunct Union of Soviet Republics.

    I confess that in 1976, I did not know this dimension of MRDC ’76, that its drafting was inspired by the errors as well as the achievements of other Constitutions in the world. All I knew, all I was immensely inspired by was the fact that Osoba’s and Bala Usman’s draft document had come from the Left, our Left and that in language and style, in contents and perspectives, it was infinitely superior to any other draft Constitution ever produced in our country. Can you even imagine it, compatriots: on university campuses, among workers and their unions, in faith community gatherings, people were talking of MRDC ’76 as Nigerians now talk about Man City versus Liverpool! And the document had not even as yet been published as a book but was being circulated in mimeographed and cyclostyled sheets of paper held insecurely together by paper clips and bounders! This was not a work of fiction, not an episode of the “Village Headmaster” and certainly not the latest of the escapades of Baba Salah; it was the minority draft Constitution of two members out of the 49 Constitution Drafting Committee (CDC) that the Murtala-Obasanjo regime had convoked to draft a new Constitution for the Nigeria that would come to be after the departure of the military from their autocratic rule. With the release of their minority draft, Osoba and Bala Usman, the two dissenting members of the CDC, became more popular, better known and more respected than the 47 members who produced the draft that would eventually become the 1979 Constitution.

    At this point in this review, I must, if not exactly disagree with the Foreword written by my old comrade, Dr. Abubakar Siddique Mohammed and the “New Introduction” written by Olusegun Osoba himself in the just released, published version of MRDC ’76, I must considerably expatiate on their insistence on the supposedly great gap between their Minority Draft and the Majority Draft that became the 1979 Constitution. This is because while it is not inaccurate to insist on the great differences between the two drafts respectively by the Minority and the Majority of the CDC, it is not helpful either to overstate the differences. Let me put the point that I am making here in a nutshell: even though Osoba’s  and Bala Usman’s draft Constitution was rejected by the majority of the members on the CDC and the military government headed by Obasanjo, in actuality the Minority Draft and the great debate it sparked in the nation produced a decisive impact on the 1979 Constitution that was based on the Majority Draft.

    In other words, in spite of the valid criticisms that the “Foreword” and the “New Introduction” make about the 1979 Constitution, that Constitution was not a document that constitutionally entrenched all the injustices, the looting, the rampant corruption, the insecurity and the divisiveness of the reign of the Babangida and Abacha dictatorships, of the Obasanjo era of the reign of PDP and the APC and of the current free-fall dystopia of the Buhari era; rather, the 1979 Constitution is in reality a document of solid social-democratic and progressive ideological and ethical vintage. And this is due largely to the great debate sparked by the release in 1976 by Osoba and Bala Usman of their Minority Draft. This is the second major point of this review: MRDC ’76 never became the Constitution of the country, but it launched far-reaching popular and elite debates in the 1980s and 1990s that produced such landmark events and developments as the 1979 Constitution itself; the transformation of the old, conservative and timid NAUT to the radical and resurgent ASUU; the Political Bureau of 1986; the June 12, 1993 national crisis; and ultimately, the withdrawal of the military from the levers of power in 1999.

    This review is in two parts. Logically, having stated the impact of MRDC ’76 over the course of the of the four decades since it was released in 1976, I should now go ahead and deal with that issue. But this is not how I wish to proceed. Rather than take that path of first tracking the path of the effect and impact over the years and decades of this historic document by Osoba and Bala Usman, I believe that it is necessary to first deal with the impact of the document in its own day, in its own moment in the sun, so to speak. The best way to do this, in my opinion, is to give a sense, an indication of what people encountered then in the document and might again encounter today if they go out and buy the published version of the document. Permit me to explain what I mean by this observation in the rest of this first part of my review this week.

    There are four parts to this newly republished MRDC ’76 in book form: the Foreword; the New Introduction; the Minority Report; and the Draft Constitution. Logically, the first two were not in the original document; they are additions or supplements to the two other parts, the Minority Report and the Draft Constitution. I suggest, compatriots, that when you buy and begin to read the document as a whole, go first to the last of the four parts, this being the Draft Constitution itself. I assure you that you will be amazed not only by how easy and reader-friendly it is, but also how deeply moving it is, especially in its most basic, most fundamental sections, these being the first three chapters: Chapter One, The Fundamental Principles of the Constitution; Chapter Two, Citizenship; and Chapter Three, Fundamental Rights, Freedoms and Duties of the Citizen. Altogether, these three chapters take up about only 11 of the 65 pages of the Draft Constitution and yet they make anyone reading them extraordinarily hopeful that our country can be a land of justice, peace, equal opportunity, fairness and unity, a land where the best and the most generous and benevolent instincts and dispositions of human beings are given the possibility to operate without let or hindrance.

    Altogether, there are 12 chapters in the Draft Constitution. Although, all are equally important, I wish to highlight Chapter Four, The Fundamental Economic and Social Objectives. This is because it ought to be the chapter that is the most different segment from everything and anything in the Majority Draft that became the 1979 Constitution. But this is not the case at all because between this chapter and Chapter Two of the 1979 Constitution, the difference is nearly like the difference between 6 and half a dozen. This will be our starting point in next week’s continuing, final installment in the series that makes up this review.

    • Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu 

     

  • Apostrophes to friendship, socialism and democracy: encounters between now and eternity

    [Outline of a Preface to a collection of tributes and memorials published in this column]

    Apostrophes to friendship, socialism and democracy”? It is the title of a book of essays that collects in one volume tributes and memorials most of which were published in this column over the last six years, though a few of the essays date back to the period when the column was published in The Guardian. Altogether, there are about sixty essays, poems, prose-poems and haikus in the collection. Some former teachers and mentors of mine are in the volume: Wole Soyinka, Professors Ayo Banjo, Dan Izevbaye, Dapo Adelugba and Abiola Irele; and Mr. Modupe Oduyoye. There are essays on Chinua Achebe, J.P. Clark and Nadine Gordimer among writers older than my generation of the Nigerian/African literati. Akin Isola, Femi Osofisan, Niyi Osundare, Festus Iyayi, Esiaba Irobi and Chimamanda Adichie feature as writers straddling both my generation and a generational cohort younger than ours. Two very special categories featured in the collection are personal friends and classmates of many years and decades and comrades in the progressive and revolutionary working class and mass movements of the last five decades. Not surprisingly, there are many overlaps between these two categories of intimate personal friends and comrades. In a nutshell, that’s the complement of persons and perspectives contained in this book titled Apostrophes to Friendship, Socialism and Democracy.

    Apostrophes? And to friendship, socialism and democracy? Frankly, I have no rational explanation why, once my mind settled on the word, I knew instantly that “apostrophe” is the word that perfectly communicates the sentiment that I wished to express in bringing all the essays in this book together in one volume. Apostrophe here of course refers to the literary or poetic form, not the punctuation mark. This is the form or technique of textual composition that uses direct address to a speaker or an interlocutor that may be present or absent at the moment of address or enunciation. Indeed sometimes, the person addressed in or through the form of the apostrophe may in fact be dead or be an inanimate object. In nearly all cases, the person or object is addressed as if she, he or it is not only present but can understand and absorb the content, the emotion of address: “Oh, thou howling winds of Kilimanjaro!”; “Death, where is thy sting?”; “Lord… thou preparest a table before me in the presence of my enemies and my cup runneth over!”

    In my primary schooldays very early in my encounter with the English poetic heritage, the apostrophe had been one of the favorite forms or techniques of poetic expression for me and many of my fellow pupils. This was partly because the King James Bible was full of apostrophes, especially in the Book of Psalms and the Book of Songs. And much later in secondary school, I discovered that Shakespeare delighted a lot in the use of apostrophes. In both the Bible and Shakespeare, apostrophes constantly enabled the expressions of emotions of great sorrow and anguish, but also of nearly inexpressible joy and wonder. Thus, it was definitely the memory of my encounters with the form of the apostrophe in all these sources that as soon as I began to think of a title for this volume, the term “apostrophe” came to mind as the appropriate designative term for this book on mourning and celebration, on great sorrow and equally great inspiration and hope in the lives and deaths of many men and women that I have, in the course of my life, known or encountered. But if that is the case, why does the title of the volume say apostrophes to friendship, socialism and democracy and not apostrophes to the named individual women and men whose lives, accomplishments and, in some cases, deaths, constitute the contents of this book?

    I swear that I did not know the answer to this question before setting out to write this preface to the volume. But now that this is happening, the explanation is so simple as to be banal in its obviousness: I had absolutely no inkling, no intimation that these mourning or celebratory essays would ever be collected in one volume; and I wrote each essay, each tribute or memorial singly, absolutely without a thought to its connection or relationship to any other essay. There is only one exception to this fact and that is the second of the two tributes to Abiola Irele in this volume: I wrote it very conscious of the first tribute written a year earlier precisely because the work of mourning Irele’s transition seemed still uncompleted. But in all the other essays, all the other celebrations or lamentations in the volume, my emotions, my intuitions were totally focused on the individual I was apostrophizing.

    This is perfectly understandable: when you are writing about most of the men and women whose lives, transitions or accomplishments grace the pages of this volume – Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, J.P. Clark, Nadine Gordimer, John La Rose, Pope Francis, Bill Gates among others – you know you are writing about individuals whose uniqueness cannot or should not be buried under generalizing abstractions or symbolizing tropes. In other words, Achebe is far more engaging than the writer everyone knows as the author of the most popular novel in modern African literature, Things Fall Apart; Soyinka is infinitely more important than the writer many lazy critics and teachers erroneously see as a writer of difficult, obscure or impenetrable poetry and prose; and Nadine Gordimer is more than white and South African only because she was a very early prophet of the end of apartheid; if you don’t get past these clichés in writing about them and about all writers, you have simply failed in getting to the essence of the person and the writer. This is as much a matter of the demands of good, effective biographical writing as it is also an ethical principle that pertains to one’s credibility as a witness to history and truth.

    Of course, I do acknowledge the fact that over the years in which the essays collected in this volume were published and before then the decades in which I published tributes and memorials in other newspapers, I gradually developed an awareness that without ever planning it, I had become a consummate writer of tributes, memorials and reflections on, principally, members of my own generation, but also members of the generation before mine. In vain have I struggled to know and understand why and how this came to be. Of course, I am not completely bereft of some explanatory ideas. For instance, although the great majority of the writing that I have done are professional academic writings for other academics, for as long as I can remember I have also been powerfully drawn to journalistic writing with the aim of reaching a much wider readership than I can access through my academic writing. In that context, it stands to reason that one of the forms of journalistic writing toward which I would drift would be “social biography” through tributes, memorials and essayistic obituaries. But then, not all journalists, cultural journalists included, develop the habit of writing the kind of testamentary essays collected in this book. For that, something extra, something acting as a motive force was needed.

    The closest that I have come to an explanation or understanding of this motive force that pushed me to become a producer of “apostrophes” to my contemporaries is the sense of a great challenge that I have felt in writing every single one of the essays, poems and prose-poems collected in this book. This is a challenge like no other that I have faced in all the other forms and modes of writing that I have done both professionally and avocationally. What was/is this challenge? Let me put the matter simply: it is the challenge of writing modern, present-day apostrophes in conditions that no longer make it easy to do so when the conventions authorizing both the production and the reception of apostrophes are no longer what they used to be. I have stated that in an apostrophe, you act as if the person or object addressed will hear you or respond to you or, at the very least will not ignore you. In its classical form, the apostrophe was praise or lamentation, wonder or dread, expressed in a mostly formulaic idiom. It is not that I could not have written of the passing of Achebe or Irele in elegantly formulaic essayistic apostrophes. But would that have pleased or satisfied anyone among the survivors and friends of the two departed giants of Nigerian and African letters? And Achebe and Irele themselves, would they have thought that what I wrote about them revealed true and illuminating aspects of their lives and works?

    At bottom, that is what writing apostrophes in the modern context implies and demands: that you will strike a chord of truth and insight that all will recognize, accept and perhaps even cherish, especially those about or of whom you write. Truth not flattery; insight, not superficiality; sympathy, not sentimentality. Who doubts that Femi Osofisan or Niyi Osundare, Eddie Madunagu or Seinde Arigbede, Dipo Fasina or Ropo Sekoni would not instantly know and separate truth from flattery in a tribute written about them? And if it is the case that though departed, Achebe, Irele, John La Rose or Akin Isola can somehow read and take a measure of what you have written as memorials to them, does that not all the more impose very stringent demands on your writing testaments about their lives and works? Yes, of course, this is a convention of writing and enunciation, but it is a greatly revered convention and I am not one jot coy in admitting that in writing all the tributes and testimonies in this book, I was very mindful, very respectful of this convention that some about whom I wrote, though dead and gone, could read and judge what I wrote about them.

    By a very long shot, deaths and birthday anniversaries dominate the occasions that provided the impetus for the production of the tributes, memorials and testimonies in this collection. Why then did I not have deaths or birthdays or mourning and celebration in the title of the book? Why friendship, socialism and democracy as the key terms, the frames of reference for the contents of the book? I confess that socialism provided the axis for the decision of what title, what point of departure to select for organizing the contents of the book into a whole that is not reducible to any of its parts. Why so? Because both in the sheer number of persons written about  and in the intellectual rigor entailed in the writing, socialism provided my toughest challenge and, at the same time the most satisfying results. This was/is because I could write far more easily about friendship and my personal friends than I could write about my comrades in the struggles for socialism in our country, our continent and our world. Does this also mean that I found it relatively easier to write about writers, artist and performers than I did about my comrades in the revolutionary struggles? The answer is yes. Permit me to bring this Preface to a close by briefly reflecting on this assertion.

    There are only four persons in this book whom I never personally met: Pope Francis, Bill Gates, Adah Igonoh and Amayo Adadevoh. All the others I not only met but had significant encounters of one kind or another with them. The word encounter here has diverse connotations: fleeting, sustained, personal, literary, intellectual, mentorship, and political. To put this observation in concrete terms, I met Chinua Achebe only about three or four times but because I have not only written substantially about him but also taught him extensively in my classes, it is almost as if my encounters with him were as many and as weighty as those with Wole Soyinka who was not only my teacher but who I have met in a simply uncountable number of times. Think therefore of this fact: my encounters with the comrades in the struggles for socialism do not have the temporal weight of my encounters with Soyinka or Achebe, but seen in terms of investment of body and soul, of both material and non-material, spiritual resources, encounters with my comrades have been far more consequential and far more ethically self-forming. However, please note that although the group of those I call “comrades” in this book does not include many of my close personal friends, most of such friends do think of themselves as, broadly speaking, socialists. Note in particular that without exception, all about whom I have written in the book consider themselves democrats of one kind or another. Hence the triad of friendship, socialism and democracy.

    In conclusion, it remains for me to acknowledge that for a historical materialist, the ever-present reality of death lies perhaps too heavily on the contents of the book. But is not the most effective encounter of all that between now and eternity?

    • Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu 

     

     

  • Why it both matters and does not matter to say APC is center-right and PDP is hard right

    “A little to the right and a little to the left” – Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida, 1990

    Who was it who said that in their ideologies and economic programs, the APC is center-right and the PDP right-wing? I was the one who said so last week in this very column. It was not the first time of my saying so in the column. And in all certainly, it probably will not be the last time either. But why am I making this an issue in today’s column? The answer to this question says a lot about how retrograde political journalism in general has become in Nigeria in the last three to four decades.

    I take no satisfaction from the fact, but today, I am one of the very few columnists that use such terms as “center-right”, “hard right” and “centrist” in my newspaper writings. This is remarkably different from what the situation was in the 1970s, 80s and 90s when writing about politics in newspapers and other news media in our country was saturated by constant and even invariant mention or discussion of political tendencies, policies and politicians as being either leftist, centrist or rightist. Indeed, one could rightly say that the deployment of the terms became so common, so over-used that the terms came close to being emptied of their meanings and connotations in other countries of our continent and the world.

    One famous or, perhaps infamous instance of this sort of widespread but empty use of “right” and “left” in Nigerian politics about three decades ago is the one indicated in the epigraph for this essay: “a little to the right and a little to the left”. As those old enough and well-informed about the period know, Babangida made the statement when he formed the two parties that eventually contested the fateful June 1993 elections, the National Republican Convention(NRC) and the Social Democratic Party (SDP). Babangida formed the two parties as the cornerstone of his ultimately deceptive and bankrupt “Democracy Project” that was intended to usher in a civilian democratic government that would take over from the military.

    With advice and guidance from respected and influential political scientists from our universities and foreign, mostly Western advisers, Babangida and his regime wanted the two parties to be completely detribalized and centrist, with one party being a “little to the right” and the other “a little to the left”. Everyone knew that by these terms, Babangida intended that one party, the NRC, would be pro-capitalist and pro-business while the other party, the SDP, would be  pro-socialist, pro-workers and devoted to the interests of the poor of the urban and rural communities. But as we all now know, even though the SDP survives till today, nothing but the national betrayal and great calamity of the annulment of the June 1993 electoral victory of the SDP and M.K.O. Abiola came from Babangida’s formation of these two parties of the “right” and the “left”. But this is not the focus of this piece today. What then is our focus?

    I will give a short and precise answer to that question: in 1990 when Babangida made that “a little to the right and a little to the left” remark, ideology, economic programs and policy initiatives completely dominated all political discussions in Nigeria; today, the more you look for ideology, for economic and political visions guiding and distinguishing our political parties from one another, the less you see. In plain terms and not to mince words at all, between the early to mid-70s to the mid-90s in Nigeria, capitalist ideology and its vision of development were under severe scrutiny and contestation. In the universities especially but also in the arts, literature and popular culture, national conversation about the past, the present and the future in our country and continent was almost totally dominated by a radical, some would say – and actually did say – “extremist” critique of capitalism. As a consequence of this, virtually all the defenders of capitalism were welfarist – for the simple reason that an outright defense of hard, conservative right-wing capitalism seemed futile and self-defeating at the time. From this we can derive a very important principle of all modern political discourse: anywhere in the world where you hear or read of terms like “right”, “left”, “center”, “center-right” and center-left”, it means that in that context or space, the dominance, the hegemony of capitalism is seriously under scrutiny and challenge; conversely, anywhere in the world where these terms are noticeably absent, it means that the dominance of capitalism is taken for granted and other ideologies – ethnic-irredentist, religious-fundamentalist or regional-revanchist – take over and hide, if not completely eclipse the dominance of capitalism. Such a nation-space or historical context is what we have in the current PDP-APC era in Nigeria.

    Will this era last? I do not think so. Definitely, I hope not! Very well: when will it end, when will its lurching from one crisis to another endlessly come to an end, one way or another? I do not know the answer to this question either. What I do know, with considerable confidence in my projection into the future on this particular issue, is that the uncontested dominance of capitalism of the present PDP-APC era will come to an end and this sooner rather than later. Why do I think so; what is the basis of my certitude, my seeming over-confidence on this observation, this claim? Good question! The answer, quite simply, is that throughout the whole world, the dominance, the hegemony of capitalism is being challenged by both left-of-center social democracy and solid leftist anti-capitalist movements of the poor and their supporters. Thus, Nigeria is not and cannot be isolated forever from these currents of contemporary global politics.

    Permit me to break this assertion down to easily demonstrated and understood propositions: in the name of saving our planet from extinction, in the name of ending the widening and deepening gaps between the rich and the poor of all the nations and regions of the world, in the name of creating more and more jobs for exploding population growths in most parts of the planet, and in the name of unborn generations that will come after us, social-democratic and anti-capitalist movements throughout the world are challenging the dominance of unregulated and unregulatable capitalism. How can any thinking person believe that we in this country will not ultimately be swept into the vortex of these global and regional currents and movements of politics and history, compatriots? As a matter of fact, is it not the case that we have already been swept into the vortex, as witnessed by the number of our youths that are part of the waves of migrants streaming endlessly into the global North and perishing tragically in the attempts? Or the growing communities of the Nigerian diaspora on the African continent itself, especially in South Africa upon whom, periodically, are visited great violence as the scapegoats of the failing policies of that country’s post-apartheid state?

    Against the background of these immediately preceding questions and observations, it matters a lot that we should say of our two dominant political parties, the APC and the PDP, that they are, respectively, center-right and hard right. To state this observation in its most easily understood formulation, think, compatriots, of the following incontrovertible declaration: if Atiku Abubakar and the PDP had won the recent presidential elections, it would have taken a few months, perhaps a few weeks and most definitely not years, for them to sell off the NNPC, the nation’s cash cow, to complete private ownership. In contrast to this, Buhari, we know both from his recent presidential campaign and several statements he had made in the past, is staunchly resistant to the idea of selling the NNPC to private moguls in his party and the other ruling class parties that are only waiting, waiting for the right moment to sell that national ATM machine to themselves once and forever, amen! In this context, Atiku and the PDP can be said to be for complete private ownership and control of the means of production – the classical definition of capitalism – while Buhari and the APC would seem to be for state control of important areas of the production process, side by side with private ownership of parts of the total machinery of production and distribution.

    What of aspects of economic production in our country that are very important for the well-being or indeed the survival of working and non-working Nigerians, aspects like oil subsidy and deregulation of the provision of amenities and services like electricity, water, education, health, collection of taxes and revenues? In all of these, the PDP is for complete deregulation so that private investors and operators can be free of so-called state interference. In contrast, Buhari remains committed to oil subsidies though he is clearly wavering and may give in to the tremendous pressure building up, not only among all the other ruling class parties but within his own party, the APC. The stand of the PDP in all these aspects of economic production in Nigeria is that of the hard right, pro-capitalist parties of the world, especially of the Western countries. And this is why just before the last presidential elections, Atiku suddenly became “attractive” to the Americans to whom, previously and for a long time, he had been an undeclared persona non grata.  As for Buhari and the Americans, it is an open secret that our President’s obsequious longing for their love, their approval has been persistently and coldly rebuffed.

    Bringing these reflections to a close, it is important for me to stress that as long as Nigerians recognize that the PDP aspires to be a solid alternative to the APC with regard to the crucial ideological and economic terms we have discussed in this piece, so long will it be important to be aware, be very aware, that one party, the APC, is center-right while the other party, the PDP, is hard right. This is not a vote, not a plea for the APC, compatriots. Far from that, my stand really is – a pox on both of their houses! For the truth is that ultimately, between the center-right and the right, the difference is like the difference between getting a dangerous viral fever and cold and getting pneumonia: both can kill. If you wish to have the analogy in a somewhat more neutral or even benign form, the difference between the APC and the PDP, that is to say the difference between center-right and hard right, is the difference between a capitalism with the guilty conscience of rich folks whose bellies are full while the bellies of most of the population are empty and the capitalism of rich folks who say, without any sentiment at all, that it is not their fault that some are rich and most are poor.

    No, compatriots, ultimately, it does not matter in the least that APC is center-right and PDP is hard right. This is because while in theory and in sloganeering they may express different views about such things as public control of the crucial means of production, provision of subsidies for utilities and services, or regulation of both public and private enterprises, in practice and in reality, the APC and the PDP are doing the same things: looting the nation and its resources dry and busy transferring our collective assets and resources to themselves. For both parties, the debates going on in most of the other nations and regions of the world between capitalism and social-democratic and anti-capitalist movements and forces don’t apply here at all. What we want, what we should talk about in Nigeria is long, list of moralistic and sentimental objectives: provide good leadership; respect our diversity; unite us in spite of our differences; substantially curb or altogether eliminate corruption; stem the unending decay or malfunctioning of our institutions; correct the decay, the devaluation of our educational systems; restructure and redistribute the resources and responsibilities that the central government in Abuja controls jealously. Do all of this while you take for granted, while you take as natural and incontestable the capitalism of both the hard right and the center-right!

    A futile wish! Why so? Because capitalism is not an emanation of nature. It is always and forever facing challenges, revaluations, revolutionary transformations, regressions, etc., etc. Who says, who thinks that our capitalism is unique and will be different from all the other capitalisms in our world?

     

    • Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Slow and unsteady loses the race – Buhari’s and APC’s unregulatable nationalist capitalism

    Do you remember, compatriots? In 2015, at the beginning of his first term as an elected civilian president, it took Muhammadu Buhari five months to form his cabinet. As we can all recollect, this record-breaking slowness took all of us by surprise, especially as Buhari and the APC came to power on the basis of a vigorous and successful campaign of – change! The surprise, the disappointment was greatly enhanced by the fact that when Buhari finally announced his cabinet, with only a couple of exceptions, it was a lackluster ministerial cabinet, one of the most mediocre in our country in the last few decades.

    Buhari is a complex man. In only one term in office as an elected president, he has managed to emerge as perhaps the slowest and laziest head of state we have had in the post-independence era. On the security front, he has woefully underperformed. All over the country today, life is more unsafe, more onerous and insecure for most Nigerians than at any other time in the  last five decades, always excepting the period before and leading to the civil war. And as if that was not enough, Buhari’s underperformance in the security front is tinged with undisguised expressions of sectionalism and ethnocentrism. And yet, he retains a large measure of his charisma with the masses and his mystique for millions of his followers, especially in the North, but not excluding parts of the South. His administration, including the presidency itself, has been rocked by corruption scandals; but at the same, Buhari’s reputation for personal moral integrity remains wondrously unquestioned.

    A few days ago, I was stunned by television broadcasts of the last cabinet meeting of the president’s first term as, one by one, all the minsters gave lavish and obsequious praise of Buhari, as the man himself smiled from ear to ear in open acknowledgement of the verbal songs of praise being showered on him. All the virtues in the holy books of the Abrahamic religions were asserted as Buhari’s valid and inspiring qualities. One minister said that the president’s love of humanity was unequalled. Another said that it was Buhari’s simplicity, his total lack of pretension that had most impressed him. A female member of the cabinet asserted that “Mr. President” was very interested in women’s welfare and affairs, against widespread perceptions of Buhari as being not particularly politically correct in women’s issues. Chris Ngige’s praise was particularly colourful. “Mr. President”, the outgoing Labour Minister said, “when I tell people that you love humour, that you crack jokes, that you even raise one leg while laughing, they don’t believe me!”

    Bearing all these contradictory things about Buhari in mind, are you, dear reader, among those who are anxiously awaiting the announcement of the cabinet for the president’s second and final term in office? Well, if you are, I am not! Why not? Because, in spite of his complexity, in spite of his mix of good and bad qualities, Buhari is very predictable, so much so that, give or take a few unknowable possibilities, the outline of what his last term in office will be is fairly clear. To put the matter as succinctly as possible, I predict, quite confidently, that the president’s laziness will continue and that together with this slothfulness, his sectionalism will combine with his centrist ideological beliefs and attitudes toward capitalism to make the road ahead as tough for most Nigerians as they have been in the first four years of his first term. In other words, beside his personal qualities and predilections, there are also the ideological and political tendencies of Buhari’s party, the APC that I for one characterize as center-right. Taken together, it is the combination of, on the one hand, Buhari’s personality and moral worldview and, on the other hand, his party’s policies and programs, it is their combination that makes it possible for us to predict where Buhari will take the country in the next four years. In my view, this is not a good place at all, to put it mildly.

    Before going in detail to this assertion, this prediction, permit me to say that I take no satisfaction at all in making the prediction. This is because I do wish the president to succeed in his final term for the simple reason that his success will be the success of the country. Who wishes the mass killings in many parts of the country to continue? Who wants the widespread insecurity of life, .limbs and possessions to continue unabated? Who wants the rising tide of hatred and intemperate animosities among our peoples to continue? I think I can say with a measure of confidence that definitely, Buhari, the president himself, does not want these terrible things to continue happening in the collective, associated experience of our peoples. How do I know this? In responding to this question, let us return to the major part of the title of this piece: slow and unsteady loses the race.

    Of course, this a reference to the moral of one of the most popular fables of Aesop, that of the hare and the tortoise. In the fable, the two animals enter into a race to see which of them would first get to the finish line. The result of the race seemed foregone, for who does not know that the hare is infinitely faster than the tortoise? But the foregone assumption about who would be the winner of the race failed as the hare became so complacent about the certainty of his winning the race that he took time to rest before reaching the finish line. A fatal error, for the hare fell asleep and the tortoise, who had all the while been slow but quite steady in his slothful pace, wins the race. If you wish to express the moral of the fable with a dialectical negative, you could say that victory does not always go to the fastest; sometimes, it goes to the slowest, the most persistent, the most steady. But please note: slowness combined with unsteadiness is a fatal combination.

    Do not forget, compatriots, that Musa Yar’ Adua was given the nickname, “Baba Go Slow”. That was before Muhammadu Buhari’s second coming as an elected civilian president. As we now know, if Yar’ Adua was slow, Buhari is super-slow; he is supremely unhurried. He is notorious for taking long, unhurried time to read reports whose ramifications need urgent attention and/or action. He takes all the time in the world to respond to questions arising from controversial actions or statements credited, either to him or to leading members of his administration. Indeed, things may be falling around him in either the presidency or the ruling party, but Muhammadu Buhari, imperturbability personified, remains stolidly unconcerned. If one can talk of a negative dialectic to imperturbability, one can say of the president that he has turned unaccountability into a virtue. What is truly, truly amazing is the fact that quite often, Buhari’s virtuous unaccountability and unresponsiveness pertain to loss of lives, loss of hundreds of lives. Slow and unsteady loses the race…

    The unsteadiness stretches right across the length and breadth of Buhari in office as both unelected military autocrat and elected civilian in mufti, in baba riga. Fortuitously for Buhari, Nigerians have a short memory span and we tend to remember the past rather selectively. Thus, where there are no fundamental differences between Buhari as military dictator and as democratically elected president, most Nigerians see a big difference, a difference that shows the younger despot as a man of quick and decisive action and the old and aging, super-slow “Sai Baba” as a ruler surrounded by people he cannot control. But this ignores the fact that as both military and civilian head of state, Buhari has shown a tendency not to distance himself from his erring or even thieving subordinates, that is as long as they remain personally loyal to him. And if that means that he loses face and credibility with the mass of ordinary Nigerians, so be it. Thus it is that both as a military ruler and civilian president, the man with the myth of incorruptibility was and is surrounded by officials and practices of morally dubious intent. To cap it all, to those who have decried the contradictions in his rule and personality, Buhari has been completely indifferent. Thus, there is a great steadiness in his unsteadiness.

    For me, the real import of this steady unsteadiness can be found in one of the least understood or even acknowledged aspects of Buhari as a ruler. This is his populist and centrist ideological relationship to capitalism. As military ruler, he was very forthright, very insistent in his opposition to usurious capitalism. Indeed, so forthcoming was he on this point that he did not balk from alarming Nigerian Christians as a community by declaring that his economic policies would gradually shift from unregulated capitalism to the principles and practices of “Islamic banking” which, famously, is against exorbitant interest rates, the cornerstone of the profit motive and surplus extraction in all modern capitalisms. Indeed, it was with the utopia of “Islamic banking” in mind that, upon seizing power from Shehu Shagari in December 1983, Buhari embarked on an ambitious project of a very rapid repayment of all of Nigeria’s sovereign or external debts. At the time, there was little doubt that had he not been overthrown by IBB, Buhari and his regime would almost certainly have fulfilled that mission.

    Fast forward, compatriots, to the present. Beyond their personalities and past experiences as ambitious politicians, the thing that distinguished Buhari from Atiku Abubakar in the last presidential elections was their respective ideological visions of the future of capitalism in our country, our continent and the world. To simplify a lot, let us go to the most essential, the most symbolic expression of this difference: Buhari promised not sell off the NNPC and most of the profitable public ventures of the Nigerian nation and people; Atiku vowed that if it was the very last thing he would do, selling off the NNPC was the greatest aspiration of himself and his party, the PDP. More expansively, Atiku and the PDP promised that they would effectively wipe out all vestiges of opposition to the complete privatization and deregulation of the Nigerian economy, from its commanding heights to the valleys of small and medium scale enterprises. And especially, Atiku promised that extremely favorable terms of trade would be offered to investors from any part of the world to come and do business in Nigeria.

    Compatriots, if you are looking for the crucial differences that mark the APC as center-right and the PDP as vigorous or hard right, these are the expressions. But only as abstractions, alas. This is because in practice, in reality, all the big stalwarts in both the APC and the PDP are for unregulated and perhaps even unregulatable capitalism. The two parties, together with all the other ruling class parties and politicians are for the free-for-all capitalism based on merciless primitive accumulation that is in force in the economy and polity in Nigeria at the present time. Perhaps the most telling expression of the unregulatable nature of Nigerian capitalism in the PDP-APC era is the unregulated and seemingly unregulatable nature of the salaries, bonuses and emoluments paid to our legislators by, of course, the lawmakers themselves.

    This legislative predatoriness sets the example and the tone for everything else in the rampant unequal distribution of wealth in our society, compatriots. Without a doubt, when the economic and social history of the present era comes to be written, the most important development will be found to be the massive transfer of public wealth to the private ownership of a class of Nigerians who themselves produced no appreciable wealth to speak of that could be equitably redistributed to all or most Nigerians. How supremely ironic that a man like Buhari who has cast a large shadow as a disciplined and virtuous ruler should be so lacking in the capacity and the will to regulate the agbero capitalism that is eating away at the foundations of our society and polity.

    • Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu  

  • The right to life – but only of the unborn (white)

    Trump’s America is, to say the least, a profoundly baffling country; it is one of the most confounding societies in the developed, liberal Western democracies, if not indeed in the entire world. There are many facts and experiences that one could adduce to prove this observation or claim but none is more telling, more indisputable than the stone-age fanaticism that surrounds and pervades the fight against women’s reproductive rights by the so-called “right to life” crusade which is more correctly and better understood as the anti-abortion movement. This is the subject of this week’s column. Let us get right into it.

    The central question is: why should there be so much passion, so much vitriol, so much intolerance around abortion? It is perfectly understandable, though not excusable, that on the basis of scriptural or faith-based considerations, many decent people can be against abortions. Moreover, although it is stretching things too far to assert that a six-week old fetus is already a human being with all the rights that all living human beings have, we can still understand the sentiment, the life-affirming ethics behind such a claim. But to go from that claim to the assertion that there are no considerations whatsoever that can make us weigh the rights of the fetus against the rights of others – including and especially the rights of its mother – is that not fanaticism taken to the nth degree? But that is precisely where the anti-abortion crusade has pitched its battle in the United States at the present time: absolutization of the rights of the unborn fetus and near complete evisceration of the rights of the mother. In effect, this amounts to the abrogation of the reproductive rights of all women. Let us put some concrete flesh on the bare bones of this incredible contention in order to arrive at the real-life politics of this fanatical right-to-life crusade.

    Flash back to last year’s epic battle over the nomination by Donald Trump of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. There were no attempts made to hide or to dissemble about the calculations as to why the success of the nomination mattered so much to the anti-abortion crusade: if Kavanaugh became an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS), the balance of anti-abortion and pro-abortion justices on SCOTUS would tilt in favor of the anti-abortion side. And that would mean, sooner or later, indeed sooner than later, that the established legal protection in settled law for the reproductive rights of women would be gone for good. The ruling that established that legal protection for women is known as “Roe V. Wade”.

    Well, as we all know, although Kavanaugh almost lost the battle for the success of his nomination for SCOTUS, he did get in narrowly. But that was enough. Enough for what? Enough for the avalanche of extremist anti-abortion laws from state legislatures from around the country controlled by the crusaders, the right-to-life fanatics. The goal, the purpose of these laws from around the country is the end, the nullification of “Roe V. Wade”. And when that happens, America would become perhaps the only country in the world in which no reason, no consideration of any kind could make any woman legally obtain abortion. What of a woman who gets pregnant from a criminally violent rapist? She will not have access to legal abortion in a post-Roe V Wade America. And a woman who gets pregnant from an incestuous rape by her father or sibling? Ditto. The fetuses that such victimized women carry in their wombs have more rights than the traumatized mothers who want to end their trauma, pain and shame through a safe and legal abortion.

    It is perhaps useful to explore some of the theological and ethical grounds for the fanaticism of the anti-abortion crusaders. Here’s one line of argument: life is precious because it is a gift from God, a gift beyond human capability to create. In decadent, promiscuous and amoral America, this gift of life is being all too casually destroyed by the easy availability of abortions. The tragedy of this situation is worsened by the existential fact that the human fetus is the most defenseless and vulnerable being in nature and society. The teaching of Christ on this is clear: it is our duty to protect and defend the rights of the defenseless and the vulnerable, especially those like, fetuses, that absolutely lack the means and the ability to protect and defend themselves.

    These arguments and considerations seem rational and humanistic, though they are also endlessly naïve and gratuitously sentimental. Why so? Well, this is because throughout the history of all human societies, the survival of our species has been augmented by carefully balancing the rights and privileges of fetuses and infants against the rights of their parents, especially the childbearing and child-rearing mothers. The main reason for this is the enormously crucial fact that of all living beings in creation, the passage from fetus through infanthood is the longest amongst us, human beings. Where nearly all the other species take at most a few months to complete the passage, we take years during which the dependency of the fetus-infant is near total. This, in fact, is the reason why bearing and raising children, which used to depend almost solely on women, have gradually over the course of time been gradually democratized to more and more involve men. This is why, among liberal families in America today, you will not hear a man say, “my wife is pregnant”; what you will hear him say is, “we are pregnant”.

    Beyond the theological and sentimental arguments, there is another factor driving the anti-abortion crusade in the United States that is notable for the silence around and about it. As a matter of fact, I would argue that it is the single most important factor of all, even though hardly anyone talks openly about it. What is this factor? It is the Malthusian fear or angst that among all the racial and ethnic groups, population growth is overwhelmingly against Whites. The current projection is that by mid-century in the current hundred-year cycle, Whites will no longer constitute the demographic majority of the country. Here, we encounter an irony: Malthusianism usually entails a vigorous push against population growth; among the ranks and throngs of the anti-abortion crusade, the driving force is for more population growth – among Whites.

    Let us admit it: contemporary White nationalism in America should not be equated or integrated with the anti-abortion crusade. This is because there are legions of many Non-Whites in the armies and foot soldiers of the movement since, in fact, the ideological core of the movement is religion. But all the same, there are eminently valid reasons why race should not be ignored in any discussion of the fanaticism of the right-to-life movement. This issue is captured in one seemingly very simple question: why do people who claim to care so much about life, people who claim that we should cherish life in all its stages, why do such people again and again demonstrate that they do not care about Black lives, about Brown lives, about the lives of immigrants and refugees? They shout to the skies that they care about life and yet they wildly cheer Trump’s savage separation of children from their parents among the asylum seekers on the southern border of the country – all because they are not White enough? Let us look more closely at this issue.

    Why has the Black Lives Matter movement become so poignant as a cross on the moral conscience of America? Is it because the shooting of unarmed Black men, women and children by White cops happens again and again? Perhaps. Or is it because most of the White police officers who shoot down these unarmed Black people almost always go unpunished? This we must register: perhaps even more than the regularity with which the phenomenon happens is this fact that most of the perpetrators go unpunished.  Or is it really that a great number of White officials and community leaders show little or no interest in bringing the practice to an end as quickly as possible? I think this is it! For not only do White police officers who shoot down unarmed Black men often go scot-free, they in fact are often protected and even treated as vilified heroes by Policemen’s Benevolent Associations dominated by Whites and by prominent voices in White communities across the nation. Indeed, the very phrase, “Black Lives Matter” arose precisely because it seemed more and more indisputable that to many Whites across the length and breadth of the country, Black lives didn’t seem to matter at all. At least not as much as the lives of fetuses.

    This preceding bitter remark is intended to bring some distancing perspective to our discussion. What do I mean by this? Well, mainly, I mean that the conversation about the fanaticism of the anti-abortion crusade is so charged, so irrational that people quite easily forget that most people in America are for women’s right to safe, regulated and legal abortion as an indivisible part of women’s reproductive rights. What does this tell us? It tells us that the anti-abortion crusade does not have the demographic and political strength that it claims and projects. In this regard, it is very much like the National Rifle Association (NRA) which deliberately projects the image of being majoritarian in the country, when in fact, most Americans support reasonable gun control and background checks on all potential gun owners and buyers. To look at how devastatingly effective the NRA has been in preventing legislation for gun control, one would think that the organization has the support of most Americans. But this is not the case at all, by a long shot. Yes, America is without equal in the world in gun ownership and mass homicides from gun shootings and a lot of the responsibility for this comes from the NRA’s effective lobby against legislation to curb the uncontrollable circulation of guns in the country. But like the anti-abortion crusade, the NRA does not have demographic advantage, not to talk of numerical superiority, on its side.

    I confess: it was a deliberate act on my part to bring the anti-abortion movement together with the NRA in my reflections on the demographic politics around the veneration for life that is at the heart of this essay. Of all the Western liberal democracies, America is without parallel in the number and constancy of violent deaths. On the surface, it would seem that the fanaticism of the anti-abortion crusaders is a humanistic response to this overall cheapness and fragility of life in the country. In other words, one could say that the anti-abortionists have had enough of how cheap life has become in America, more so in Trump’s America. But this is completely false. As we have seen, the crusaders care only or mostly about the lives of fetuses, not the lives of mothers and parents whose responsibility it is, not the government’s, to give their children real, meaningful and dignified lives.  Of especial concern is the reverse Malthusian angst of many conservative Whites driving the crusade against abortions. When you look at this without sentimentality and without any quasi-religious blinkers, what the crusaders are really about is a new and reconstructionist view of childbearing women as factories which, absolutely without fail, must bring the fetus to term and life, no matter under what circumstances it was conceived. This is why, for instance, in all the recent legislations imposing more and more restrictions on abortions, the punishment is entirely on the doctors who provide their services to women seeking abortion: punish, not the vessel carrying the fetus, but the “technician” who empties the vessel of its cargo.

    Life is indeed precious, unquantifiably and immeasurably so. But it is all of life, not life only at the moment of its inception. Of very special consideration is life that brings life: the mother and the fetus-that-will-be-the-child. Oh, how presumptuous, how hubristic it is to try to silence the voice and the choice of the mother in this chain of being!

    • Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Progress and the romantic imagination: new “Alalubosas” for our children, their children and their children’s children

    [For Niyi and Segun Aiyegbayo; Charles Atugbe; Dele Thomas and Ayo Aiyegbayo, RIP]

    Lake Alalubosa is gone now, almost certainly forever. It has been gone for more than five decades. Where it once nestled in the woodlands of “Igbo Agala” in Ibadan, neo- and pseudo-capitalist developers have built estates that are touted as the most upscale and expensive in Ibadan. There are no signs, no traces left of the natural and man-made things that marked the lake in its unique and splendid isolation: the woodland itself, with its richness of almond, guava and mango trees; and the dirt road that led to it where, sometimes, we would come across the drama of a python in the last stages of its consumption of a frog or a bush-rat. More a pond than a lake, Alalubosa seemed to our early-teen imagination like a local Lake Chad – big, awesome and endlessly intriguing. Though our small band of friends and classmates shared it with the rest of the city of Ibadan, we felt a deeply affecting and incontestable “right” to it. That peculiar sense of “ownership” is at the heart of my essay on the lake in this piece.

    There were and are not many lakes, ponds  or bodies of standing water in Ibadan. Of course, there were streams and little rivulets here and there, the famous Ogunpa stream that cuts right across the city like a local Thames or Seine being the most prominent. But lakes or ponds? Alalubosa was all by itself as the city’s biggest draw as a body of water deep in the woods where picnics could be held in natural surroundings of great appeal. Indeed, on every Easter Monday, the whole city, principally the youths, made a sort of mandatory “pilgrimage” to the lake for an all-day and all-comers’ picnic and jamboree. Led by their Captain, “Fine Shege” on horseback, Ibadan’s fraternity of “cowboys” turned out en mass in their colourful attires, patterned of course on the model supplied by the “real” cowboys of Hollywood “B” films, themselves imitators of the true cowboys of the Wild, Wild American West. The Boys Scouts and Girl Guides also showed up at these Easter Monday picnic-jamborees, smartly dressed in their uniforms. And of course, food sellers, ice-cream vendors and alcohol and cool drinks merchants were also there aplenty to inject the only dose of petty-capitalist commercialism into the grand holiday feast that was Alalubosa on Easter Monday.

    There was no doubt about it: Easter Monday at Alalubosa was the biggest cultural event of the year at Ibadan, with the single exception of the Oke’badan Festival which was a mammoth affair perhaps unequalled in size and grandeur by any other city or town in the old Western Region. Think of the crowds we sometimes see at “Redeem Camp” on the Lagos-Ibadan expressway, holding up traffic in either direction for hour after hour for nearly an entire day. Now think of that crowd in a street procession making its way round the city, great and not-so-great ancestral masquerades at the head of the procession. The procession ended at the Eleiyele Hills where ritual ceremonies in honour of the founders and protective deities of the city concluded the festival. That was Oke’badan.

    Alalubosa on Easter Monday was a smaller affair than that. There were no processions of the Easter Monday revelers  or picnickers to the lake, if we make a small exception for “Fine Shege” and his cowboys. Before finally heading to Alalubosa, they went around town regaling the main districts or quarters of the city with their music, their songs, their dancing and their displays. All others went to the lake in small groups of family, friends, neighbours and community. And at the lake, it was all a secular affair because, in spite of the Christian association and resonances of Easter, no reenactments of the Easter cycle of Christ’s last days were performed. The music played, the dances executed and the games organized had little or nothing to do with Heavenly or Divine aspirations. And by a long shot, everything was dominated by the young the , together with a small number of the old, but young at heart. All that was really needed, it seemed, was the presence, the romantic appeal of the lake and its bucolic environment.

    I remarked earlier in this piece that “we” felt a very special relationship to the lake or even a proprietary “ownership” of it. Who were the members of this “we” and how and why did we come to have that sort of relationship or feeling about Alalubosa? “We” were the classmates and friends at a local primary school at Oke-Bola in Ibadan indicated in the list of people to whom this piece is dedicated at the head of this essay. While the city came as a mammoth community to the lake only once a year, from the mid to late 1950s to around 1963, we frequented the lake so often that it became a sort of haven, a sort of beatific playground for the soul and the spirit for us. This sense of specialness was considerably heightened by the fact that, on account of occasional drownings of kids there, our parents and  elder siblings explicitly forbad us to go to Alalubosa. The eldest of my siblings, Brother Ayo, aka “Brother Sapele”, God rest his soul, once applied the whip to me so severely for going to the lake that I fell ill dangerously from the flogging. Did this stop me and two other siblings that were co-conspirators of our forbidden swimming trysts at Alalubosa? No it did not!

    The best part of the time spent at the lake was, of course, the swimming, the very thing which we were forbidden to do there. But we also immensely enjoyed picking and consuming fruits and berries that we picked in the woods on our way to the lake. On my part, I consumed enough mangoes to make me so turned off eating mangoes almost to the extent of making me puke at the mere sight of mangoes today. And sometimes, we would do a marathon race to the lake to find out who were the budding long-distance runners among us. But the swimming was the very best treat that we gave ourselves. This may have been not only because “we” all learnt to swim at Alalubosa, but also because all of us were self-taught swimmers. And here, I must mention other classmates and friends who always went with us to the lake but never learnt to swim: Kolasi Akinpelu (now known as Fatai Oluwatoyin Ogunlana, alias “Baba Eko”); Taiwo Jeyifous; Jide Jeyifous, RIP; Jimoh Layiwola (RIP); and Fatai Odueko.

    Even with the vast distance of time between then and now, I still thrill to the memory of how I learnt to swim at Alalubosa. Charles Atugbe and Ayo Aiyegbayo being, in my view, the best swimmers among us, I implored them to teach me how to swim, with no luck. They simply said to me, “look closely and observe carefully what we do when we are swimming”. Good enough? No! Because, once they moved away from the shallow parts of the lake where the non-swimmers were wading and fooling around in the waters, you couldn’t really see what exactly they were doing beneath the surface of the lake when they moved away into deeper waters and began real swimming. All my entreaties to them fell on deaf ears. And then one day, one fateful day, I happened by chance to see a frog leap into the shallow end of the lake where I was and began to swim and something prompted me to not only look but look very carefully. When I had looked enough, I ventured to imitate, to reproduce, as exactly as I could, the motions of the swimming frog. And, voila, I was floating and I was moving through the waters, my “teacher” completely unaware that it had just made a very grateful pupil out of me. And I gave what must have been close to a primal cry to Charles and Ayo to come and see me swimming!

    The following “story” is well-known: a mountain climber is asked why he or she goes around the world climbing one mountain after another when she/he knows that mountain climbing is extremely dangerous. She or he answers: because the mountains are there! We were asked, endlessly, why we went swimming at Alalubosa when we knew that there were no lifeguards in attendance and that many kids did drown there. We of course had no answer to the question. Had we known it at the time, I suppose our answer should have been because Alalubosa was there. It called out to us and we responded to its call powerfully, ineluctably. What the world of our parents and the city authorities ought to have done is turn Alalubosa and its woodland into a public park where safe swimming and recreational sports would have become available to all kids and young adults. This never happened or could never have happened because the true, generative spirit of the romantic imagination has rarely ever manifested itself in Nigerian capitalism. We of course did not know this at that time. Our “ignorance” was rewarded by the illicit pleasure that we felt about Alalubosa being our own special retreat.

    Later on in life, I would go on to university and major in English and I would come into contact with British Romantic literature, especially in poetry and the novel. I would fall in love with this movement in British literature above all the other periods and formations of British Lit. This would broaden to a beginning recognition of the romantic spirit in all of human cultures and civilizations, with special pertinence to the revolutionary impulse in both society and individuals. This actually came to pass no later than five years after we had stopped going to Alalubosa. Which makes me extremely curious as to why it was to take me more than another decade to make the connection with Alalubosa as the place in my life where it had all begun. Permit me to end this journey to the past with an account of how this happened.

    I put the date at mid-1976. I had just returned from graduate studies abroad. On this day, I was driving along the main thoroughfare that runs past the turning into the dirt road that leads to Alalubosa when, on a sudden impulse, I made to turn into the dirt road only to discover that it was no longer there. In astonishment, I got out of the car and tried, completely in vain, to  find were the road was. Gradually discovering that it was gone, I then began more slowly and with great deliberation to find the markers, the leads that could get me to Alalubosa. But they too were gone, so much so that when I finally got to where the lake ought to have been in the woods, both the lake and the woods were gone. The estate that stands there now had not yet been built and so there was nothing there, just denuded woodland and a vast patch of space overgrown with weeds where the lake ought to be. For what remains of this life for me, I hope never to experience again the vastness and the barrenness of the emptiness of psyche and spirit that I felt at that moment.

    Other things follow logically from that extreme sense of negation. The primary school that I attended in the “Alalubosa phase” of my childhood has no school playing ground; that, too, is gone, taken over by rentable dwellings. The Agodi Gardens that had the only other substantial body of water like a pond or lake in Ibadan is also now mostly gone. If you drive through most of Ibadan any time past 8 pm, it is as if you are driving through a ghost town. Most of the factories have closed down and remain mere hulks of what they once were. The growth pattern of capitalism worldwide has generally been from the mercantile to the industrial. But in Ibadan, the Ibadan of less than the last one hundred years, the reverse pattern is what we get: from the industrial to the mercantile.

    The disappearance of Alalubosa into the ghostly past of history is the ultimate measure of this distorted “progress”. But even the reverse is itself reversible. It is still possible to build other Alalubosas for our children and their children’s children. First, you have to sweep away the “agbero” capitalism in force in our economy and politics at the present time. Then, we have to rediscover the romantic spirit and imagination in a world which has taken it away from its locus in nature and relocated it in the virtuality of Internet lakes and oceans.

    • Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu         

     

  • I work, therefore I am – May Day 2019 Reflections

    [For the millions able and willing to work but denied work in our country]

    Yes, of course, the title of this piece derives from the famous declaration of the 17th century French philosopher, Rene Descartes: “cogito, ergo sum” (I think, therefore I am). Thought, thinking, not feeling, not spirituality, is the distinguishing mark of life, of existence? Yes, that is what Descartes said and meant. The issue has been debated for centuries and I do not want to get into that discussion in this piece. Instead, the proposition that supplies the title for this piece – I work, therefore I am – is what I wish to explore in this essay, bearing in mind the fact that May Day 2019, the international celebration of workers and workers’ rights, was celebrated earlier this week.

    It may perhaps surprise many fellow Marxists and socialists reading this piece to learn that while I wish to praise work and workers in these reflections, I will not do so romantically. Work, real work of any kind, is extremely demanding; some kinds of work are even physically  debilitating or emotionally bruising. And don’t we all know that work can sometimes be so daunting that we stay away from it until the very last minute when we can longer postpone it any longer? Indeed, laziness or an aversion to work is a well-known human trait, at all times and in all societies. [In the course of my own life, I have met many persons profoundly averse to work!] As a matter of fact, there is a tradition of thought within classical Marxism that envisions a future stage in human economic and social development when our productive powers as a species would be so developed that full automation will make human labour unnecessary or superfluous. Readers interested in this line of thought will be highly entertained by reading a monograph written by Paul Lafargue, Karl Marx’s son-in-law, revealingly titled, “The Right to Be Lazy”!

    In the face of so many caveats, do I still insist, in line with the title of this piece, that life or existence is defined by work? Yes, I do. But what of retirement from work in the twilight of life? Are retirees – of which I myself recently became a representative – no longer filled with life and existence because they have stopped working? Are they precluded from my assertion of life’s value and authenticity around the centrality of work? What of those who are naturally or accidentally disabled and are therefore unable to work? Are their lives not full human lives? And if and when, thanks to full automation, machines or robots do all the work that needs to be done, won’t the proposition, “I work, therefore I am” become a ridiculous and pompous abstraction? In other words, faced with so many “conditionalities”, do I still place work at the center of life, of existence? Yes, I do. As an ideological and philosophical effort to justify workers’ day this year and in the years ahead, here are some reasons why I hold this view that at the center of life is – work.

    Indisputably, the great majority of us humans work, either to put food on the table or – which amounts to the same thing – to avoid the precariousness, the indignity of being dependent on others for our livelihood. That’s the bottom line and it goes all the way back to the last stages of “natural full employment” in the hunter-gatherer societies of the past. When human beings moved beyond that stage, full employment stopped and to find and keep a job became a defining and constitutive aspect of what it is to be human. In plain language, at the hunter-gatherer stage of human development, though there were no “employers” or “employees”, everyone was fully employed, both in keeping living generations well-provisioned and in biologically and socially reproducing the next generation of offspring. It is easy to conjecture that there were lazybones who did not like to work even at that stage of human development, but I can’t imagine that they would have found things easy! It was with the emergence of class societies and great inequalities of wealth and opportunity that slackers or idlers who do not like to work began to find a social basis, an ideological and even sometimes theological justification for their opposition to the fundamental centrality of work in human existence. Let us look at this observation more closely.

    If you buy slaves or inherit serfs to do your work for you to enable you, through their labour, to accumulate wealth on a vast scale, are you spared from working? The answer is no, a decisive no. You still have to work, you still have to struggle to keep that wealth for yourself and your heirs. In other words, what happens is not the disappearance of work for the idle rich, together with the individuals and groups that serve as their personal and institutional henchmen; rather, what really happens is a reconstitution and redefinition of work to embrace physical and mental labour; spiritual labour and policing labour; the labour of the fields and that of the masters’ mansions and households; the labour of the markets and that of the factories; and the whole gamut from extremely esoteric labour whose usefulness very few understand to the labour of disposing the human and material wastes of organized, civilized life. Work is indeed at the center of life and no person, no social group can escape from the necessity of work; you only have to look carefully and ask the right questions to know what the state of work is at any point or moment in society. This observation leads directly to the central issue that I wish to explore in these reflections. Permit me to carefully state what this issue is.

    We started with that interesting reformulation of Descartes’s famous declaration on thought: “I work, therefore I am”. Let us follow this with the reverse of the declaration: “I do not work or I have no work, therefore I am not, or I do not exist”. If my starting declaration is correct, then this reversal of the declaration should also be correct. But we know that logically, this is not the case. This is because millions, tens of millions of people in our country do not work or have no jobs, but they are alive, they exist. Obviously, there is something wrong here, no? Yes, there is and it is tying my declaration to bare, literal logic. In other words, if we move beyond logic, we find that the reverse of my opening declaration is actually correct and accurate. This means that the tens of millions of people in our country and the billions of people in the world who do not work and have no jobs may not be literally and logically dead, but their collective condition is close to what radical sociologists call “social death”.

    On this occasion of the marking of this year’s workers’ day, I charge my country and its political rulers with the monstrous crime of the social death of millions of our peoples. And what exactly is social death? It is the amalgam of forms and expressions of widespread despair, insecurity, immiseration and panic in the poor and jobless segments of the population, forms and expressions that are both open and hidden, docile and aggressive, desperate and at the same time palpably manipulatable. It has been misdiagnosed as “stomach infrastructure” and it is the special hunting ground of ethnic and regional political gladiators and warlords. The PDP, in its sixteen years in power, laid the foundation and built the basic infrastructure of its human and social edifice and the APC is doing its best to add its own unique brand of hypocrisy and greed to the evolving House of Hunger that is social death.

    A while back in this discussion, I stated that social death has been misdiagnosed as “stomach infrastructure” in this country. Let me now explain what I mean by this. One of the most “psychedelic” forms of stomach infrastructure is a vote-selling and vote-buying practice known in the Yoruba-speaking Southwest regional zone as “dibo ko se’be”. Literally, this means “sell your vote so you can cook stew” but more expansively it means, “the vote you sell won’t lift you out of poverty, but it will fetch you your next square meal”. From this, we can see that stomach infrastructure is the symptom, not the disease itself. The disease is – unending absence of work for the masses, for the multitudes, in their tens of millions, the majority of them in their youthful years.

    Since this piece is intended to solidarize with work and workers on the occasion of this year’s May Day, it would not be wrong to see the general drift of my observations as a call, a demand for a declaration of a state of emergency to attack endemic job scarcity and massive unemployment in our country. But while this is true, my sights are set much higher than that; they are set at nothing less than the transformation of the existing conditions of work for both the rulers and the ruled, the elite and the masses, the wealthy and the poor. To give this observation a concrete expression, these two questions ought to serve to cue the reader into exactly what I have in mind here. These are the questions. Do the conditions of work of our rulers enable egalitarian and humane conditions of work for the ruled, the masses of the people? What is the general condition of work at the present time, in terms of both social justice and productivity? In bringing these reflections to a close – but not a closure – let us briefly explore the ramifications of these two questions.

    The answer to the first question is an unambiguous no. Everyone knows that Nigerian lawmakers are the highest paid legislators in the world. Everyone ought to know this, but I don’t think they do: Nigerian legislators set their own levels and scope of remunerations and they are extremely secretive about how they do this and arrive at the figures determined for their pay packages. This is hardly surprising since it does not seem in the least that our lawgivers base their pay and remuneration on local Nigerian economic and social conditions or, for that matter, on the conditions of any other country in the world. Let us be clear about what this implies: our legislators work in and for Nigeria; but the conditions within which they work and remunerate themselves correspond to the economic and social conditions of no country in the world. This is so attractive to every other sector of the national elite that it sets the terms and the tones for everything else that is corrupt, distortive and unjust about work and pay, wealth and poverty in our country.

    Considering our second and closing question, it is an open secret that the factors of production – power supply, infrastructures, incompetent and dysfunctional bureaucracies, over-dependency on costly foreign imports for vital components and spare parts, work habits, etc., etc. – are all so precarious in the Nigerian economy that productivity is far, far below optimal. It is equally an open secret that among all these factors of production, the one demonized the most is the work habits of Nigerian workers. By this is meant the work habits of working-class workers, not middle-class professionals, not lawyers, doctors, university dons. Given these facts, need we be surprised that the absence of social justice in the national economy and, more generally, in social relations of production, is hardly ever mentioned in critiques levelled at the cost of production in our country.

    Workers produce more and better when they are paid well, when their conditions of work are egalitarian and dignified. This is indeed a fundamental tenet of liberal, progressive capitalism: when you treat work and workers with fairness, equitableness and dignity, it is life itself that you are honouring. I work, therefore I am. I end with that declaration – without having forgotten my indictment of our political rulers with the crime of social death for tens of millions of our peoples.

    • Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu              

     

  • “I appreciate you, Sir!” – misadventures around the grammar of serviceable religious discourse

    The very first time that I was ever “appreciated” in the elliptical idiom or grammar of Nigerian christian religiosity, it was with a bag of rice. The “appreciator” was a pastor, a man of the cloth. Before presenting me with the bag of rice, he made a long speech in which, though he used the word “appreciate” only once, he made it abundantly clear that every other word, every other sentence that he spoke revolved around that word, “appreciate”.

    “I appreciate you Sir”, he began. “You have been wonderful to us. Since you took over the duty of collecting rent for the church from your brothers, you have been far more understanding, far more tolerant than your brothers. Ah, your brothers say they are Christians; you say you are “iwalesin”; and yet, you have been far more flexible to us as a landlord than your brothers! Even your immediate junior brother, the one who regularly attends our church every Sunday, he was not as understanding, he was not as tolerant as you. He once promised that he would persuade you and other members of the family to let us use the space and facilities for our church services and our children’s Sunday-school program for free. But he didn’t fulfill his promise; he made sure that our rent was paid in full when due. But you, Sir, you are different. I can come to you anytime to apprise you of the difficulties that we are having. And not once have you ever let us down; not once have you failed to reason with us. As a matter of fact, I don’t mind saying it: you say you are “iwalesin”, you say you are not a Christian, but you are! Who but a true Christian could be as kind and understanding as you have been? At any rate, my Senior Pastor asks me to make sure that I let you know that this bag of rice is but a very small token of our appreciation”.

    The speech ended and the bag of rice was duly delivered. I thanked him but made mild utterances and gestures of refusal of the gift, but the pastor would have none of it – he had “appreciated” me and that was the end of the story. But not quite. It so happened that before his visit of “appreciation”, I had been thinking of summoning him and telling him that he and the church were already more than two years in arrears of payment of their annual rent. Thus, the bag of rice became an inconvenient obstacle to my need to remind him of the long-overdue rent. And so, once again, I thanked him for the bag of rice and he left.

    About a month later, I summoned him and he came back. “Pastor”, I began, “I appreciate the bag of rice that you gave me, but I must let you know that my brothers have been bothering me about the non-payment of rent by your church for more than two years now. You know yourself how they are. They say that you are taking advantage of my tolerance. They say that if I let the unpaid rent accumulate uncontrollably, you and the church will stop paying permanently. One of them even went as far as to say that I should not have taken that bag of rice from you. But I told him to shurrup! I told him that before you gave me the bag of rice, you said, “Sir, I appreciate you”, in the same voice, in the same manner in which, in your prayers, you, say “Baba loke, I appreciate you!”.

    The look of surprise on his face was incredible. It was as if what I had just told him was absolutely unspeakable, the very stuff of blasphemy of the most daring kind. But far more potent were his words: “I did not appreciate you the way I appreciate my God! You are committing a great sin! You are a man; you are not God! We give bags of rice or gift hampers to well-wishers and helpers of our Church as a kind of seasonal practice. Sir, how can you harbor such a thought, let alone actually utter it? That bag of rice had nothing to do with the rent we are owing you and the family and by the grace of God, we shall pay what we owe, every kobo of it”.

    “Pastor, I appreciate what you are saying”, I began in response to his outburst, but he did not allow me to finish what I was about to say by almost shouting his rebuttal to me which was, “there you go again, with that word, ‘appreciate’. When I say I appreciate somebody, it means that I hold them or who they are in high esteem. I never say the word to just anybody, least of all with the intention of bribing them, as you seem to be suggesting about the bag of rice that we gave you”.

    “Pastor, don’t take this matter farther than it should go. I admit that I am teasing you by playing with and on the word “appreciate” as you used it when you presented me with that bag of rice. You see, in the grammar of the English language, it is very unusual to say that you appreciate somebody, to say you appreciate a man or a woman or anybody. The standard, grammatical thing is to say you appreciate what they have done or are doing. A man, a woman, a doctor, a professor, these are all concrete nouns and in English grammar, it is extremely unusual to the point of incorrectness, to use the word “appreciate” with concrete nouns, with persons or objects of nature like the moon, the sun, oceans and rivers. In other words, you appreciate the radiance or brightness of the sun, not the sun itself, just as it is the kindness or gentleness of a person that you appreciate, not the person himself or herself. Thus, to say you appreciate me is not a normal, standard use of the term in English grammar. The correct, standard and grammatical use of the word is to say you appreciate my acts of kindness or  tolerance, kindness and tolerance being abstract nouns qualifying persons with those attributes…”

    Had I been carried away by my speech on the grammatical and non-grammatical uses of the word, “appreciate”? Quite obviously, the pastor thought so, judging by the look on his face. It was as if I was speaking total gibberish to him or, worse, that I was insulting him. With a quavering voice and a barely suppressed irritation, he said: “Sir, what are you talking about? Everybody uses “appreciate” the way I am using it – highly educated people like yourself and others not so educated, like me! Are you telling me that they are all wrong and you, you alone, are right? Sir, if you do not mind my asking you, who are you to say that we must not use “appreciate” to praise and worship Jesus because Jesus is a concrete noun? What is English grammar compared with the mighty, everlasting power and majesty of Jesus? Did English grammar create itself? And the grammarians of English and all the other languages in the world, they can tell us what word to use and how to use them when we praise and APPRECIATE God? Ha, this is why they say too much learning is a dangerous thing”!

    At this juncture, I realized that the conversation was going dangerously off-track, if it had not, in fact, already done so. The basic issue we had to resolve was the non-payment of long overdue rent, perhaps caused or aided by the pastor’s calculation that by giving me that bag of rice, he had “bought” my acquiescence in his non-payment of due rent. So, I had to get the conversation back to this issue. But first, I had to acknowledge that he was justified in his irritation, his umbrage at my “learned” discourse on the grammatical limits of the word “appreciate” when applied to persons and not to actions and abstract qualities. Bearing this in mind, I said to him, “Pastor, who is saying that grammarians have the authority to tell pastors, theologians and worshippers how to  address God or Jesus? That is not my point at all. And even if it was, who would listen to me and follow my instructions? But really, Pastor, I am only playing language games with you. The way in which you say “I appreciate you to me or to any other person started with your using that sentence, “I appreciate you” with Jesus or God or both. From that religious or worshipful context, you and Christians in general transferred it to other non-religious contexts, to mere mortals like you and me. And please, don’t forget that when you gave me that bag of rice, you simultaneously “appreciated” me in almost reverential tones. When you praise God, when you “appreciate” Him, don’t you do so with gifts and offerings? Pardon me for seeing a similarity between appreciating Jesus with offerings and appreciating me or other mere mortals with bags of rice and gift hampers! If you like, forget all these side issues and tell me when you and the church will pay the long overdue rent”.

    He did not pay the rent. As a matter of fact, three months later, he and his church moved out of the rented space, having paid for only six months out of the total two and half years of rent owed. Moreover, before leaving, they stripped the place clean of all salvageable items of furniture and electrification – window and door frames, toilet fixtures, electrical wiring and light bulbs, the Plaster-of-Paris sheets of the ceiling. My brothers who had been the previous rent-collectors before I briefly took up the role to avert their endless quarrels over how to collect and share rents collected from the tenants of family properties, had a good laugh at my expense. To them, I had proved to be as incompetent as they had been in collecting rent and, regardless of whatever I said, the Pastor and his church had successfully walked away with hundreds of thousands of naira by “appreciating” me with a (mere) 20-pound bag of rice. This ends the story proper, leaving us with the afterword, the postscript.

    I know for a fact that that Pastor is not a reader of this column; as a matter of fact, he is not a reader of newspapers and their columns. Away from his pastoral duties, he is a full-time motor-cycle dispatch rider at a bank. In my imagination and my fancy, one day, someone will relate the account that I have given in this piece to him. He will immediately recognize himself in the nameless “Pastor” of this piece. Who knows? Perhaps he will start reflecting on how he transferred the “Almighty God, Baba loke, I appreciate you” of his sermons and prayers to the “I appreciate you, Sir”, that he addressed to me, a mere mortal, a grammarian who mocks the use of “appreciate” for concrete nouns instead of its normal or standard use for actions or abstract qualities.

    And you, dear reader, do you  often say “I appreciate you” to Jesus, your loved ones or people you respect? How long have you been saying it and/or hearing it said to you or in your presence? Can you vouchsafe that you have never heard it said with an intent to cajole, manipulate or take advantage of the persons to whom it is addressed? Historically, the words or terms that have been used to seek the benevolence and the grace of divine persons have been extremely more potent, more talismanic than “appreciate”. Some of such words are: adore, worship, venerate, and glorify. Now that “appreciate” has joined the list, the transference or displacement from the divine to the human has become infinitely easier. And religious discourse can more easily move back and forth between the theological to the commercial and from the transcendent to the ordinary. Welcome to the elliptical grammar of Nigerian religious discourse!

    At any rate. dear reader, know that I appreciate you for your patience in reading through this piece.

     

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

     

  • The resurrection of Christ and the 1989 Constitution: a lay, secular Easter sermon

    The state shall manage and 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 opportunity. Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, 1989, Chapter 2, “Fundamental Objectives and Directive Policies of State”, Article 17B

    Brethren and sisters, readers and compatriots, the theme of our sermon for this Easter Sunday of 2019 is taken from the central theological message of the ministry of Christ himself – which is victory over death and the ravages of body and mind, flesh and spirit – together with the central ideas of Chapter 2 of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, 1989.

    What in the world connects the resurrection of Christ with Chapter 2 of the Nigerian Constitution of 1989, you might ask? Well, as we know, in the Christian cultural calendar and symbolic order, Lent, the period of fasting and mortification precedes Easter, the promise of triumph and apotheosis. In other words, there is great suffering, there is unspeakable torment, there is even a moment of great doubt and insecurity. But after all that comes triumph and rebirth.

    You could apply the same order of discourse to the political and social context that produced our 1989 Constitution, especially its ideological and philosophical core, that 2nd Chapter from which comes the opening epigraph to this “sermon”. This Constitution was produced in the context of draconian and unjust military rule in our country. Specifically, military autocracy brought unfreedom, corruption and hardship to the country and its peoples, especially the poor and those who resisted military rule. If you want to get a sense of what the experience was for Nigerians in general and those who resisted in particular, you should read Kunle Ajibade’s prison memoir, Jailed for Life and the harrowing stories collected in the late Festus Iyayi’s Awaiting Trial. Torture, extreme arbitrariness and arrogance of the rulers, a terrible climate of fear and insecurity for the ruled, a future utterly bleak for the country as a whole. But right there in the midst of it all, the 1989 Constitution, especially that incandescent Chapter 2. Yes, you could say of it: after mortifications of Lent comes the promise of Easter.

    For readers who do not know this of me, my “sermons” are secular, “iwalesin” discourses; they are resolutely non-theological. This one is not different. Thus, the resurrection of which I speak in this piece is historical and symbolic, not theological. Theology of course interests me immensely, not as an index of belief and unbelief but mostly as a major current of human thought and an elaborate symbolic recasting of the things of this world. For instance, for me, at the heart of the sacred Easter sacrament of Christianity is the powerful myth of dying and resurrecting gods that exist in virtually all the religious traditions of the world. In this myth, which is essentially about the union of the body and the spirit, the human and the divine, gods are born in miraculous circumstances; they experience all the trials and tribulations of human life; they die and then resuurect. As symbolic anthropology and the field of comparative theological studies have taught us, this myth is itself rooted the eternal cycles of nature: spring; summer; autumn; winter. All that is born lives to die; and then new life is born.

    Beyond this cycle of life, death and resurrection symbolized in the Lenten and Easter sacraments, for me there is another actual, historical “resurrection” in the ministry of Christ. As a fact of history, a measurable cultural phenomenon, this “resurrection” is almost without parallel in human affairs past and present. Permit me to state what it was/is, simply, before making any commentary on it. First, Christ endures great and unmitigated suffering on the way to Cavalry. Secondly, in the capital punishment perpetrated on him, he experiences crucifixion, the most ignominious of the period and certainly one of the most horrific of all times. Thirdly and finally, in spite of all this, indeed against the logic of this unspeakably annihilating conclusion of his ministry, he “resurrects” into history as one of two or three of the most influential persons that ever lived and walked on this earth.

    This rigorously historical angle on the resurrection of Christ is all the more stunning if, dear reader, you bear in mind the also historical fact that Christ himself and early Christianity as a new religion arose from a colonized, oppressed people, a people to whom suffering and oppression on a colossal scale seemed their never-ending fate. With regard to crucifixion as a form of capital punishment at the time, it was reserved for the worst offenders, the most ignominious felons of the Roman Empire. And with regard to a metaphysics of collective guilt and punishment, Christ and the people from whom he came were thought to bear a sacrificial burden for all of humanity.

    But Christ sought to erase the barriers between Jew and Gentile and specifically made the multitudes of the poor of all races and nations the vast subject of his ministry, of his peerless parables and aphorisms. These were very strategically smart and inventive means to ensure the success of his mission. But in the end, they did not save him; they did not ensure the success, in his lifetime, of his life’s work. Why and how then did his historical and global “resurrection” come about? We shall come back to this question at the end of this piece. For now, let us take up the matter of the 2nd Chapter of the 1989 Constitution.

    Permit me to repeat the words of the epigraph to this piece, Article 17B of that Constitution: “The (Nigerian) State shall manage and control the 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 opportunity”. Indeed, permit me to make another quotation from the same chapter of the Constitution, Article 15(1); “The Federal Republic of Nigeria shall be a state based on principles of democracy and social justice”. Remember, compatriots, these were drafted and adopted at the height of a military dictatorship when social justice, equality of opportunity for all and maximum welfare of all Nigerians were nowhere visible on the horizon of either existing realities or long-range future possibilities. Indeed, to read all of that 2nd Chapter of the 1989 Nigerian Constitution is to be in another world, another universe from the lived and suffered realities and conditions of life for most Nigerians at the time. On the one hand and in the Constitution, Nigeria can and should be a much better and infinitely more humane society than it was; on the other hand, in the Generals’ Nigeria, life was hellish and bleak. Seems like Lent and Easter kept completely apart, doesn’t it? Permit me to provide a context for this disjuncture.

    Let it be known, compatriots, that throughout the years and decades of the imposition of life-denying and life-destroying military autocracy in our country, great sacrifices and equally great acts of idealistic reimagining of what the country could be arose to confront the terror and oppression of military rule. There were many, many debates, colloquia and national conferences on what was happening to the country and where we could expect it all to end, negatively or positively. The debates were all-encompassing: the place of Nigeria in the world economy; the place of Nigeria in the comity of nations, especially with regard to freeing the remaining colonized nations of the African continent from imperial domination of the old order;  the specific case of apartheid South Africa as the last bastion of racist minority rule in Africa; the rise of neoliberalism as the fulcrum of global capitalism and the widening circle of debt peonage for the nations of the developing world, etc., etc.

    I remember in particular the so-called Political Bureau set up under the Babangida military presidency that supervised the most comprehensive countrywide political debate ever undertaken in the country, then and now, to decide which form of ideology and economic order Nigeria should adopt. The Bureau went everywhere in the country, covered every inch of territory, asking, consulting and weighing. Do you know, compatriots, which ideology, which form of political and economic order Nigerians chose in overwhelming numbers? Socialism, believe it or not! And in a related and also countrywide debate, Nigerians asked the government, the military not to borrow money from the World Bank and the IMF but to manage our substantial oil wealth in the interest of every Nigerian, present and future generations included. If, dear reader, you have been wondering where that incredibly idealistic and egalitarian Chapter 2 of the 1989 Constitution came from, look no further than these debates and colloquia as the breeding ground. And remember the promise of the sacrament of Easter: out of suffering, out of mortification comes hope and resurrection.

    Logically, the question arises: why did that 2nd Chapter of the 1989 Constitution disappear in the 1999 Constitution that is in force today? Well, in a very strict and narrow sense, it did not entirely disappear. This is because you can find traces of it in Chapter 1 of the 1999 document: words, phrases, faint echoes of ideas. The technocrats, the lawyers and the politicians had taken over completely, whereas idealists and philosophers had been quite influential in the drafting of the 1989 document. There is nothing short of a bitter irony here in the fact that by the mid to late 1990s when professional politicians became more and more certain that military rule was on its way out and they would soon be holding the reins of power, they turned their minds away from egalitarian and idealistic principles to the technocratic and formalistic aspects of “democracy”. Permit me to express this in very concrete terms.

    Prior to the drafting and adoption of the 1999 Constitution, all the exercises in constitution making under the military in the 1980s had been quite robustly influenced by some of the fiercest opponents and critics of military rule, mostly from the Left and the Center. Some names stand out: Segun Osoba (the historian, not the former governor), Yusuf Bala Usman, Eddie Madunagu. Others – many of them – worked underground or in the shadows, content to make their contributions through comrades and compatriots working in the open arena and the legal marketplace of ideas. These were the sources of the revolutionary and idealistic 1989 Constitution, especially that landmark Chapter 2. These sources were close to the people, close to the experience of great suffering and also to the knowledge that if your solidarity with the poor is not merely romantic, from your epistemic closeness to suffering can and should come a vision of how to end suffering and offer restitution to the poor. Well, all well and good, but the 1989 Constitution has been replaced by the 1999 Constitution and that 2nd Chapter of the earlier document exists now in the newer and current Constitution as a very faint echo or shadow. And the suffering continues, without the intimation of the resurrection in sight.

    This preceding observation leads me back to an earlier question that I promised to engage at the end of this “sermon”: how and why was the death and the utter failure of Christ at the end of his life and mission eventually led to the historical and global “resurrection” that is almost without parallel in the history of the world? Put differently, Christ died, in the most horrific and ignominious capital punishment of his time and his followers were then scattered to the four winds of the earth; and yet the religion based on his life and teachings moves billions and has been at the center of the cultural calendar of the world for more than a millennium now. How did it happen, this one-of-a-kind resurrection? Certainly, the adoption of Christianity by Emperor Constantine as a state religion from being the religion of the poor helped a lot, especially when considered in the light of how the rich and the powerful in many other places and times in the world followed the example of Constantine. But I would place my bet on the central place of the unbreakable link between suffering and redemption, death and resurrection, especially for the multitudes of all races, nations and classes. Just consider, compatriots: Lent without Easter?

     

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • The good, the bad and the ugly: post-elections lessons from America

    [Yes, I had the 1966 iconic film of director, Sergio Leone, in mind in choosing the title for this week’s column. But since the very catchy title has been adopted for many uses, I am only following a long line of appropriations of the famous movie and its title. Thus, in what follows, in using the film and its moral fables as an inspiration, I give my sense of developments in US politics, government and public affairs after the midterm elections of 2018. I do this in the belief that we in Nigeria and other parts of the world will find much to learn from the exercise. Dear reader, as you read the following notes on the good, the bad and the ugly in America at the present time, please remember that many aspects of our own politics, governmental structure and even constitutional arrangements in Nigeria were copied wholesale from the United States, with very little or no revisions to suit our own historical, cultural and economic conditions.]

    The Good

    The United States is a diverse, pluralistic and multicultural nation, like Nigeria. Indeed, like many of the nations of the planet, since monolingual, monoethnic and monocultural nations like South Korea and Lesotho are in the minority of the states of the world. Trump and his white-nationalist, neofascist base came to power on the basis of stoking the fires of division and separation between the communities of the country, using hatred, bigotry and violence as their tools. At the height of the “success” of Trump and his movement, it seemed as if their energies, their mojo came from elemental forces, from nature itself. For this reason, only the comprehensive mobilization of all progressive, unified and also elemental forces could defeat Trump and his movement. And that is what happened in the midterm elections of 2018.

    In about the last a century and half, America had not seen the kind of coalition of forces and combination of energies across generations that won the landslide victory against Trump in last year’s midterm elections. Black, brown and white, old and young (especially the young), men and women (especially women), and citizens going back many generations together with recent immigrants to the country, all came together. It seemed like rousing all the binding, centripetal forces of nature – and it has been so celebrated. Fortunately, the victorious forces have not been carried away by euphoria; they know all too well that their victory was partial, that Trump and his allies still control the presidency and one of the two houses of Congress. But even so, look at what the branch of Congress controlled by the victorious forces of a united, progressive and multicultural America has begun to do. It has begun to exercise regulatory checkmates on Trump’s abuse and misuse of the presidency. It has begun to map out agendas and policies more beneficial to the working and non-working poor, to the protection and enhancement of the environment for living generations and the posterity of generations that will come after us.

    Worthy of special notice is the fact that the new alignment of forces after the midterm elections of last year has shifted considerably in the direction of taking head on the blatant and corrosive misogyny and sexism of Trump and his base. The number of women that campaigned and won in the elections was unprecedented. But beyond number – although that is very important – there is the quality and the diversity of backgrounds represented by the new female congressional members. For beyond taking up the militant sexism of Trump and his allies, the new radical female members of the legislature have also taken up the establishment of the Democratic Party itself. Katie Porter, Ilha Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others have given every indication that they will raise and promote issues that both ruling class parties, the Republicans as well as the Democrats, have for long been too timid or too obtuse to raise in a vigorous and spirited manner. One of these is the issue of socialized medicine that would, for the first time in history, make medical care free and available to all citizens regardless of class, status or lack of the means to pay for it. Here is another issue that they are taking up: complete equality of women and men in the workplace and in guarantees for state support of the work of raising children and members of the next generation.

    In all these developments, it may seem both that good and evil are fighting it out in Trump’s America and good is increasingly more empowered than evil, but everyone knows that   the struggles are not being waged by angels and demons but flesh-and-blood human beings. This is important because among all the economically and scientifically advanced nations of the world, America stands almost alone in still being considerably driven by Christianity of a medieval, fundamentalist and superstitious kind – like Nigeria, like many countries of the developing world. Thus, the moral fable of the good, the bad and the ugly will take us only as far as our rationality and our humanness will take us. This leads us to the rubric, the tale of the bad.

    The Bad: the unfolding saga of Barr on Mueller

    Only in America, you’d have to say. Robert Mueller submits his long-awaited Report and Trump’s Attorney General, William Barr, gives a four-page report on the Report. Nearly three weeks after the release of the Report and two weeks after the release of his own “report” on the Report, Barr still refuses to let America and the world get the chance to read Mueller’s findings for and by themselves. Meanwhile, Barr’s “report” has completely overshadowed Mueller’s Report – at least for now and for the foreseeable future of the next few weeks or even months. To say that this is bad for Trump, bad for Barr and also bad for America is to make an understatement.

    In many countries of the world, when the findings of a report are so bad, so damaging to a ruler and his administration, the report simply is suppressed and it never sees the light of day. America being one of the hallowed leaders of the “free world”, to completely suppress the Mueller Report is obviously out of the question. But what is the effect of delaying and prolonging the release of the Report? Here is one development: a firestorm has erupted about what Mueller’s Report actually contains, based on what Barr has “reported”. This is partly because some members of Mueller’s team have told some newspapers that Barr’s “report” severely misrepresents Mueller’s findings. But these disgruntled members of Mueller’s team have done this in secret, not boldly, not openly. Meanwhile, note that Mueller also is completely silent on what his Report contains. This leads us to what is bad, very bad about this charade of Barr on Mueller.

    Mueller’s Report contains findings on allegations of the worst possible crimes against the state and against the American people: colluding with a foreign power to subvert elections to the highest echelons of public office and the most consequential institutions of American and Western liberal democracy. And on top of that, obstructing the course of justice. It is impossible to think of any crimes or misdemeanors worse than these two and indeed in American political and constitutional history, no president has ever been accused, credibly, of these two crimes – with the singular exception of Donald Trump. I say credibly accused because everything contained in the investigations was actually either said or done in public by Trump and/or his allies during the campaigns of the 2016 presidential and congressional elections. In all truly democratic countries of the world, not only would Trump and everyone connected with the actions and the charges voluntarily stay far away from the investigations, they would be compelled to do so. But throughout the two years of Mueller’s investigations, Trump himself and dozens of his surrogates were extremely vocal, extremely sanguine in their attacks on Mueller and his team. Only in America? More precisely, only in Trump’s America.

    There is a name, a diagnostic appellation for what has happened with and in the Mueller investigation and what is happening now, as the delayed release of the Report in its fullness: it is institutional decay of the highest order. We look to politicians and their supporters when things are vey bad, so bad that the rulers seem to be working against the interest of the nation and its peoples. That is correct and necessary. But perhaps far more deadly is when transindividual institutions don’t work or can’t work. That’s what is at stake in the unfolding saga of Barr on Mueller. We are familiar with institutional decay in Nigeria and in many parts of the developing world. The Americans are not. Let us hope that they will not pay a very costly prize for this.

    The Ugly

    Ordinarily, we do not think of ugliness as something alarming, something terrifying. But think of the following detail from classical Greek mythology: the head of the Medusa was so terrible in its ugliness that anyone who gazed on it had his or her heart turned into stone. Obviously then, the ugliness we are talking about here is moral rather than physical; experiential rather than innate. Welcome to Trump’s America and the great circulation of moral ugliness, of ethical ugliness as a tool of political and financial opportunism. The evidence is galore.

    Perhaps the most egregious, certainly the most blatant, is Trump’s complete merger of his personal economic and financial interests with the interest of the American state. His children and his son-in-law all use their connection to their father to make clients and benefactors of the family businesses to do their bidding quite openly – and often quite at odds with the interest of the American state or even economy. Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, is completely in the open about this, as he goes about the Middle East and the Arab world as a sort of American diplomatic ombudsman for the region, extracting commercial advantages from some of the world’s worst autocracies in return for shielding them from Western and world condemnation. At the height of the scandal of the murder of Khashoggi in Turkey by the Saudis, Kushner coordinated Trump and America’s cover for the Saudis. Please note that Trump and Kushner maintained that they were acting to safeguard Saudi contracts for supply of American military hardware, whereas Trump and his son-in-law were in reality acting in the interest of their own commercial and economic windfalls from the Saudis. A life, the bloodily severed head of Khashoggi, with the torso chopped into pieces for the hundreds of millions reaped by Trump and Kushner – that is the face of the moral ugliness at the heart of affairs of state in America at the present time.

    It needn’t and doesn’t always take such lurid, melodramatic forms. Indeed, for the most part, the form it has taken with Trump is the kind with which we are very familiar in our region of the world: filling cabinet posts and political appointments with kinsmen, friends, and business partners who are not only unqualified for the positions they are appointed to but are the very worst, the most mediocre and dysfunctional for their posts. In all of American history, no president has appointed more incompetent, lazy and clueless cabinet members and public officeholders than Trump. It gives no comfort to Americans that many of such appointees have been exposed and been forced out of office because no sooner has one departed than Trump appoints another in his or her place. As I write these words this week, the Homeland Security Secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, has just been fired. Why? Not because she refused to carry out the monstrously inhumane orders of Trump to separate children from their parents at US borders, but because she wasn’t thorough enough in carrying out the orders. This is symptomatic of the ugliness in Trump’s officialdom: you must not hold back one inch from the lies, the deceptions, the cruelties of the boss!

    Nero. Caligula, Mussolini. Trump is in this faux-illustrious company.

     

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu