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Category: Biodun Jeyifo

World literary scholarship and the dialectics of “morounmulo” and “morounmubo”: for Tejumola Olaniyan @ 60

This week, Tejumola Olaniyan, the Louise Durham Mead Professor of English and African Languages and Literatures at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, turned 60. In writing this tribute to one of the foremost scholars in the world in the study of the literatures, theatres, popular cultures, social media and genres of artistic and social expression of Africa and its diasporas, let me quickly deal with and then move beyond my personal relationship with him: he was once my student, both in Nigeria and the US (OAU-Ife and Cornell); then he became, simultaneously, my professional colleague and younger friend. And also, to quickly add that Teju, as he is widely and fondly known, was an exemplary student of mine, one of the best that I have had among a large group of former students that I am immensely gratified to have taught and mentored, former students that it would be the prayer of any teacher to have had in their careers.

In writing this tribute, I am immediately struck by the challenge of not over-praising a scholar of Teju’s impressive gifts and accomplishments – except that in this case, the challenge is actually the reverse, which is to say, failure to accord him what is due to him in the very attempt not to over-praise him. First, there is the distinguished body of essays, monographs and books that he has published singly under his own name. Some of these have become reference points for other scholars around the world in African and Diasporic studies. On the strength of these self-authored works of scholarship alone, Teju’s place in the front ranks of global African studies is already assured. For instance, there is his first published book, Scars of Conquest, Masks of Resistance, which, even for a first book, still magisterially compares the dramas of Africa, African America and the Caribbean. Also notable is Arrest the Music!: The Rebel Art and Politics of Fela which, together with Sola Olorunyomi’s book on Fela, more or less founded the global academic industry on the life and career of the radical musical superstar. And there are also the essays and articles on diverse aspects of the theatre, literature and postcolonial studies of Africa and the other spaces and locations of the global South, many of them teasing out connections and implications either ignored or misrecognized by other scholars.

But beyond that distinctive body of works stamped with his personal register, Teju has worked assiduously and extensively with other scholars to co-produce or co-edit some of the landmark and indispensable books in the field. Indeed, as I write this tribute in my study, I am looking at these books that will be found on the shelves of the personal “library” of most scholars in our field: Taking African Cartoons Seriously: Politics, Satire and Culture (Michigan State Univ. Press, 2018); State and Culture in Postcolonial Africa: Enchantings (Indiana University Press, 2017); Audible Empire: Music, Global Politics, Critique (Duke University Press, 2016); African Diaspora and the Disciplines (Blackwell, 2010); African Literature: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory (Blackwell, 2007) In all these tomes jointly produced with other senior and junior scholars, Teju has demonstrated a capaciousness of scholarly productivity, an influence among peers that very few in academia ever achieve. This requires a brief explanation.

In this matter, academia does not differ from the general principle that in the life of modern intellectual, political and cultural professions institutions and professions, nothing matters as much as being genuinely and widely respected by others in one’s profession. However, it is necessary to point out that unlike many other professions – lawyers, doctors, engineers, accountants and scientists – among academics, only a select few ever achieve this distinction of the admiration or even veneration of their colleagues. In plain language and with reference to literary academics in particular, lucky, very lucky is the woman or man that enjoys the universal respect of all scholars in her or his field. Teju Olaniyan is, at the current time, one of the few of whom this can be said in global Africanist literary and cultural studies. I would like to briefly reflect on the nature of this achievement through the prism of a parable about modern intellectuals that was very influential around the middle of the last century.

In 1953, Isaiah Berlin, the great British Marxist cultural theorist, in a celebrated essay published in 1953 on Leo Tolstoy and Russian intellectuals of the pre-revolutionary era with the title, “The Fox and the Hedgehog”. This is the essay that first gave a typology of modern intellectuals and intellectualism that has become widely accepted as a sort of guidepost. In the essay, Berlin, adapting one of Aesop’s famous fables, divided all modern academics or intellectuals into two broad types, each one corresponding to either the fox or the hedgehog. The fox typically travels ceaselessly from one farmyard to another in an endless search for livestock and produce to meet his wants. He never stays in one fixed place but perambulates through the vast expanse of a region, of a country, indeed of several countries since the fox observes no boundaries between farmyards, districts, regions and countries.

In contrast, the hedgehog lives all her or his life in one field, one farmyard in which she/he both burrows deep into the soil and ferrets across every inch of the farm. On account of this deep and wide rootedness in one place, the hedgehog knows just about all that is there to know about the past and the present of the farmyard. From these two profiles, Isaiah Berlin drew his famous typology of modern intellectuals: those, like the hedgehog, who stay at home and both dig deep and look everywhere in the native soil of knowledge and wisdom; and those who, like the fox, travel restlessly and ceaselessly, gathering all the lore, all the ideas and tales of distant and faraway lands. Concluding his parable of modern intellectualism in that essay, Berlin decided that since it is near impossible to be both the fox and the hedgehog in the modern context of the vast expansion and comingling of knowledges from multiple and diverse areas of the world, one must be highly conscious of what it now entails to be either one or the other, the fox or the hedgehog. In the essay, Berlin did leave open the possibility that a few or a rare order of intellectuals attempt to be both the hedgehog and the fox.

It ought to give us an indication of the quality of Teju’s achievement as a scholar that as soon as I began to gather my thoughts together for this tribute, Isaiah Berlin’s famous essay came almost spontaneously to my mind – but with a twist. Let me explain. So, it is no longer possible to be both the hedgehog and the fox since in our contemporary world the explosion of knowledge, indeed of knowledges, has become forbiddingly too expansive? Well, we have seen the emergence of scholars that combine the strength and uniqueness of their own individual productivity with the collaborative productivity of other gifted toilers in the field. From this, but only as an aggregate, as a makeshift collectivity, we have seen exemplary cases in which the hedgehog and the fox combine in the work of scholars whose personal contributions are indivisible from their inspired collaborations with other scholars, young and older, at the beginning and at the peak of their careers.

Here, I am thinking of a scholar like the late Abiola Irele. I am thinking of the quality of Irele’s own individual intellectual production, side by side with the extraordinary value of his many collaborations with just about everyone in the field. Of course, I do not ignore the fact that Teju has just turned 60 – which is a long way from the 81 years of Irele’s life. And neither have I lost sight of the fact that Irele exercised a great intellectual influence on Teju himself and may very well have been an unconscious model or inspiration for Teju’s also unconscious aspiration to achieve, like Irele, an integration of the best of the “fox” and the “hedgehog” in his lifework. This observation leads me to the central axis around which I wish to arrange my most important reflections in this tribute which, in the title of the tribute, I am calling the dialectics of morounmulo and morounmubo.

In a literal and non-idiomatic sense, the words mean, respectively, “I go into the world laden with gifts” and “I return home bearing treasures from my sojourn abroad”. More expansively, in the two terms, we are in the universe of exchanges, borrowings and appropriations between the entirety of the world’s languages, cultures, traditions, knowledges and beliefs. The two terms in combination connote both ancient and modern universes of the exchange of ideas and values across the world; after all, our species has always travelled, migrated and comingled. Above all else, in these two terms we are in a universe of travel, of sojourn in foreign lands among racially or ethnically different peoples.

In morounmubo, which is the primary and much better-known of the two terms, a returnee from a long sojourn in a foreign land, announces that the scholar has returned home laden with a bountiful harvest of the fruits of her time and labor away from home. In this respect, the best of morounmubo are spiritual or psychic gifts of a non-material nature, like wisdom, like a heightened appreciation of the unique and priceless individuation of oneself and/or one’s people, one’s culture among all the other peoples and cultures of the world. Finally, the thing to keep in mind about morounmubo and morounmulo is the fact for a very long time, it was generally believed that Africa and Africans had little or no morounmulo while, conversely, they always took “morounmubo” far in excess of their parlous “morounmulo”.

In his poem on Abiola Irele’s death, Wole Soyinka calls death and the afterlife the “diaspora of no return”. To which I add here that for most intellectuals of the African world, the diasporas of our continent in the rest of the world are places of endless cycles of sojourns and returns. You could in fact say that this is true of the intellectuals of all the regions of the contemporary world: for all of us, the boundaries, the borders separating homelands from diasporas have almost completely disappeared. The return home is never complete; the journeys back – again and again – to the diasporas are never-ending. Only that eschatological “diaspora of no return” escapes from this “law”. In the case of global Africanist literary and cultural studies, this is fundamentally constitutive of the field. Where is the scholar in this field today, anywhere in Africa and the African diaspora, who does not aspire to be widely and solidly grounded in the literary and cultural productions of both the African continent itself and, at the same time, those of the diasporas in the Caribbean, the Americas and, increasingly, Europe?

Tejumola Olaniyan is in the advance guard – i.e. the avantgarde – of this new formation. Before him, there had been the pioneers, the pacesetters like Irele, Ulli Beier, Okpewho, Achebe, Soyinka, Ngugi, Micere Mugo, Kalu Ogba. Because of their work, their collective contribution, Teju and his generation now have a much more solid sense of “morounmulo” than did previous generations of African scholars abroad in the world arena. Furthermore, you could say that Teju’s work, his productivity, in at least the last ten years, has been largely predicated on this constitutiveness of journeys back and forth between home and diaspora, nation and the world. He is acutely aware of Africa’s structural disadvantages, its “development of underdevelopment” in the global order of neoliberal capitalism, together with their effects on institutions and practices of the state on the arts and the media in our continent. But unlike in the past, this “unhappy consciousness” is deeply inflected with a sense of possibility, of an openness to a futurity that is not decreed but must be achieved by us.

Will he ever return home permanently? A nostalgic question, one which increasingly seems to be belated or anachronistic, even if it cannot not be asked, not only of Teju but of all of us whose situation is as translocal as his. Surely Nigeria and Africa need scholars of achievement and his generosity back home! Ah, but do not forget: “morounmulo” and “morounmubo” now have very different connotations from the time when the boundaries between “home” and “world” were very solid. Madison, Wisconsin is very far from Ile-Ife, the place where I first encountered Teju and his extraordinarily gifted classmates. But I say this now with a completely different notion of what is possible between “Madison” and “Ife” than I would have said three decades ago. Think, think very productively, Teju, on “morounmulo” as you do on “morounmubo”.

Many years and decades of productive and fulfilling personal and professional life!

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

April 7, 2019
For the abolition of our predatory legislature: let the campaign start now, before the next cycle of elections (3)

With or without the involvement of our legislators. This sentence, this declaration has resounded throughout the discussion in this three-part series. In our concluding piece in the series, it is best to start with a brief clarification of the declaration. Thus, I suppose that it would be readily accepted by all who have been closely following the series that in asking for an end to our predatory legislature, I have tilted far more heavily on getting the task done without the involvement of the legislators themselves. Indeed, I have indicated clearly that all attempts so far made to convince or shame our lawmakers into ending their unregulated jumbo pay packages have failed. If that is the case, why do I still apparently leave open the possibility that, somehow, our legislators can be made to get involved in the task, the project of ending their legalized and institutionalized predatoriness? Have I forgotten that all attempts by any legislators to blow the whistle on the outrageous size of their pay packages have been met with fierce, crushing backlash by both the leadership and the rank-and-file membership of the National Assembly?

No, I have not forgotten, compatriots. And so, I say yes, our lawmakers have never shown the slightest interest in making a deep and significant reform of their unjust and decadent system of self-remuneration. But I also say, now, that though we have pleaded with them, we have remonstrated with them and we have even tried to shame them into doing what is right and honorable, we have never really done anything of consequence or significance to back up our words, our remonstrances and our protests with any actions. Permit me to put concrete flesh on this abstract claim.

Many are the Nigerians from all walks of life, all parts of the country, all faith communities and all locations on the political and ideological spectrum that have roundly condemned and asked for something, anything at all to be done to end the humungous pay packages of our lawmakers The list and the range of such Nigerians cannot but impress us: Olusegun Obasanjo; Chief Segun Osoba; Emir Sanusi of Kano (when he was the Governor of the Central Bank); Dino Melaye: Shehu Sani; Femi Falana; Itse Sagay. And as I mentioned last week, many organizations have also called for an end to the legislative greed and sleaze. Falana, Sagay and Emir Sanusi have been particularly trenchant. But even they, whose statements have been uncompromising, have not backed their opposition with any action that could have made the legislators sit up and take notice – and act.

In case anyone is prompted by the preceding observation to think that I am unproductively downplaying what compatriots like Falana, Sagay and Emir Sanusi and others like them have done in drawing attention to the injustice and wastefulness of our lawmakers’ predatoriness, let me quickly douse the flames of such a critique by openly and loudly including myself in the critique. I have lost count of the number of times in this column that I have made this issue the object of my withering critique and protest. Indeed, my critiques, my protests began when this column, under a slightly different title, was being published in The Guardian. But what have my and other compatriots’ critiques over the years and decades amounted to? What will be achieved by yet more protests and critiques by me and others in our commentaries and columns in newspapers and the social media? The answer to this question has a crystalline clarity and simplicity: Nothing. From the epigraph to this piece, a celebrated observation of Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th American President: “In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing; the next best thing is the wrong thing; and the worst thing you can do is nothing”.

In the present context, I shall make no commentary on this famous observation of Teddy Roosevelt beyond a deliberate focus on the conclusion of the observation: the worst thing you can do is nothing. We have written things, a lot of things, to and about our legislators; but we have done nothing to make them sit up and recognize, in Roosevelt’s words, that we are in a moment of decision. This is somewhat similar to the common saying, “your bark is worse than your bite”. We must face the truth, compatriots: all of us who have relentlessly protested against the predatoriness of our current legislative order, our barks have been worse than our bites. Indeed, to our legislators, we probably seem to be completely toothless. Well, if the metaphor of barking and biting seems too sanguine, then let us use the agricultural metaphor of blunted hoes that are useless for the task of weeding and preparing the national farm or vineyard for seeding, growing and eventual harvesting.

But what if we presented a petition signed by a million plus signatories making very specific demands for the end, the abolition of legislative predatoriness in our country, now and forever? Would the honorable lawgivers be able to ignore us then? And what would that action do to and for us, that is to say, the action of drafting the petition, translating it from English into around the twelve to fifteen major languages of the country and going on the massive drive that would get a million plus signatories? Is it possible that we may well exceed a million signers of the petition? Wouldn’t the people, wouldn’t Nigerians in the process discover that they can and should have a say in the matter of their country being the nation, the economy with the most unjust and lopsided pay structure in the world? And what if we deposited certified copies of the petition to such organizations and bodies as the UN, ILO, WHO, UNESCO, AU, EU, ECOWAS and WEC and the WSF? Is it possible that the poor and the super-exploited majorities of other countries in our continent would be inspired by our example? Simply, simply, compatriots, is this something that we can do, that we should do?

In the petition – which from this point on I will refer to as The Petition – we should make two or three things absolutely clear and unambiguous. First, we should let it be known that we the people, are not asking only or merely that the pay packages of our legislators be greatly reduced. Far beyond this, The Petition will ask that, like the salaries and wages of every other Nigerian worker in public or private employment, the pay packages of our legislators must be regulated by an agency or body outside the legislature itself. Currently, this function is supposed to be exercised by the so-called Revenue Mobilization Allocation and Fiscal Commission (RMAFC), but several times in the past few years, the Chairman of that body has complained that the Commission has been effectively blocked by the National Assembly from exercising its statutorily sanctioned regulatory functions over the determination of the wages, salaries and allowances of our legislators. There is no other legislature in the world which, like our own legislature, determines and regulates its own salaries, allowances and remunerations. The Petition will be absolutely clear and uncompromising in this demand. The slogan here is: There is no other name for self-regulation in a democracy than plutocratic dictatorship!

The Petition will also insist that the regulation of the salaries and wages of our legislators will have its frame of reference located in Nigeria, not in the United States, not in the developed economies of the Western world in Europe and North America, and certainly not in a netherworld somewhere without location on planet earth. Remember, compatriots, that the present payment and remuneration package of our legislators was borrowed from the United States; however, unlike the Congress of the United States, it is not regulated by any organ of the state and the nation outside the legislature itself. All Nigerians who live and work in Nigeria get remunerated in alignment with economic and social conditions in Nigeria. The exceptions are the few dozens of Nigerian citizens that work for Nigerian branches and franchises of multinational corporations doing business in Nigeria – and of course, the less than 500 members of the National Assembly. Specifically, this item in The Petition will focus on the extreme anomaly by and through which our legislators receive 116 times the per capita GDP of the average Nigerian. What should it be? Like South Africa’s 14.5 times of the GDP? India’s 7.5 of the country’s GDP? Italy’s 5 times?

The Petition will need to draw upon the provisions and principles of Chapter 2 of the Nigerian Constitution, 1999, by far the most progressive, egalitarian and humanistic section of our Constitution. Yes, most of the provisions and principles of this Chapter of our Constitution belong to the order of so-called “non-justiciable” instruments of state policy. The term “non-justiciable” refers to provisions and entitlements of the Constitution whose enjoyment, though ethically desirable and noble in intention, cannot be secured in the law courts. They include social welfare rights, employment rights and economic opportunities for all without deference to considerations of birth, status and wealth. All told then, the present pay packages of our legislators constitute the greatest violation of and affront to Chapter 2 of our Constitution. The Petition will once and for all take care of this anomaly!

The Petition seems to be conceived as a sort of Charter of Demands: will it be a Charter of Demands? In responding to this question, we come back to our initial starting point in this concluding piece in the series: with or without the involvement of our legislators. If The Petition, its implications and its impact grow beyond the limited scope of reform of the legislature, what we will ultimately have will be a Charter of Demands. But if some members of the National Assembly come onboard to endorse many of the principles and objectives of The Petition, the whole movement might not grow into a conjuncture, a crisis that would give birth to a Charter of Demands.

To many reading this piece, it will perhaps seem counterfactual to expect, or even to think that a significant number of members of the National Assembly would endorse the provisions and principles of The Petition. But since this has never been tried in our country, we do not know just what will happen. A million plus signatories? Perhaps signatories or signers numbered in millions and from virtually all the ethno-linguistic and geopolitical zones of the country? It has never happened before. And it will bring forth developments that we have never allowed ourselves to contemplate. Like a parliament of the people and for the people. Like ruling class politicians and political parties taking up reform of our predatory legislature as a matter of primary ideological and political reorientation. Like seeing the new and younger politicians and political parties actually campaigning for reform of the predatory legislative order long before and in between the recent and next cycles of elections. What do the following legislative bills already passed in some of the National Assemblies of the Nigerian 4th Republic have in common: The Freedom of Information Act; The Adjudication of Criminal Justice Act (ACJA); The Minimum Wage Act; The National Human Rights Commission Act; The Pension Fund Act; and the UBE Act? They are all laws that you might expect from a reformist legislature that, in the right context and under special circumstances, could be prompted to act in the interest of the people.

With or without the involvement of the legislators themselves. And without a military coup, thank you very much. Expect to hear and read more of this issue beyond the confines of this medium in the coming weeks and months. A comprehensive, peaceful, life-affirming movement, compatriots. The cheating, the thieving, the wuruwuru, the suffer-suffer done do, compatriots!

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

March 31, 2019
For the abolition of our predatory legislature (2)

With or without the legislators’ involvement, we must abolish our present predatory legislature. This was the closing declaration of last week’s beginning piece in this series. It will be our main topic in this week’s continuation of the series. But first, as promised at least twice in the course of last week’s discussion, we need to give a fuller explanation of the contention that our predatory legislature is the heart and soul, as well as the center of gravity of all the looting of our collective wealth and national assets, all the plunder, wastage and squandermania that characterize the running of governmental affairs in our country at the local, state and federal levels. Indeed, the tentacles of predation and exploitation of and from our legislature reach out so far and wide as to include the Judiciary (Bar and Bench), the Police, the Armed Forces and the other security services, as well as the religious estates of churches, mosques and synagogues. Is this not an exaggeration, this claim that wherever you find looting and corruption in the public affairs of this country, its ultimate foundation is the legalized and institutionalized looting in and by our predatory legislature? No, it is not an exaggeration, compatriots!

To establish the veracity of this claim, we have to bear three things in mind. The first is the often-forgotten fact that the humungous remuneration of our legislators did not exist before 1999, the year of the inauguration of the present 4th Republic that restored civilian democratic rule. This is to say that prior to 1999 and the restoration of “democracy” after the long interregnum of military dictatorships, what our legislators received as salaries and remunerations in the two previous republics of civilian rule were not exceptional; they were not out of tune with the pay packages of parliamentarians in the rest of Africa and the world – as they are now, beginning in 1999. Secondly, the outsize pay package was copied from traditions and practices of the Congress of the United States of America as part of the wholesale adoption of the American presidential system to replace the Westminster model that had been in force during periods of civilian democratic rule in our country. But note that what we copied from the Americans did not come with the strict regulation that governs how much American legislators can claim and how they are to spend and account for what they claim. In our case, and starting in 1999, what Nigerian legislators claim as salaries and allowances can only be regulated by the legislators themselves – which effectively means no regulation at all.

This leads us to the third and perhaps the most important thing to bear in mind as we approach the crucial subject of the centrality of our predatory legislature to the miasma of corruption, waste and squandermania in the current political order that we know as the 4th Republic. What is this thing? It is the sheer scope or size or nature of the pay packages of our lawgivers. The figures are disputed, but even the lowest figure given by some legislators themselves – around N15 million naira per month for each legislator – is the highest in the world. The highest figure, calculated by none other than Professor Itse Sagay – N29 million per month – is the highest in the history of modern parliaments. Even Olusegun Obasanjo, the man under whose presidency the bonanza began, has called it nothing short of “unarmed robbery”. And in July 2013, The Economist, one of the most influential economic newsmagazines in the world, ranked Nigeria as the country with the most unjust and lopsided pay structure in the world, based mainly on what our lawmakers pay themselves as salaries and allowances. Measured in terms of earnings per capita GDP, the British magazine calculated our lawgivers’ pay packages to be 116 times the per capita GDP of the average Nigerian. Indeed, it is instructive to recall here the comparative figures given by the newsmagazine for other countries in relation to Nigeria’s 116 per capita GDP: Kenya, 76; Ghana, 29; South Africa, 14.5; Brazil, 13; India, 7.5; Italy, 5; Bangladesh, 4.5 Finally, some civil society organizations have calculated that though our legislators and the staff of the National Assembly number less than 10,000, they receive annual salaries that are together bigger than the budget of 21 out of the 36 states of the federation. To cap it all, our legislators’ pay packages are placed under a special category of expenditure known as “statutory transfer” which makes it mandatory for the federal government, after receiving any revenues, to immediately make transfers to the account of the National Assembly before other considerations.

Dear compatriots, if you are curious about where I got all these facts, figures and statistics from, please know that the question is unnecessary, almost to the point of being redundant. Why so? Well, because the scandal of Nigerian lawmakers’ salaries and allowances is a topic that has attracted considerable interest around the world. If you spend one hour on the subject on the Internet, one hour only, you will be amazed at how much material you will get. And indeed, I must state very clearly here that, with regard to the subject, I am by no means a lone voice crying in the wilderness. One group, #OpenNASS, is worthy of mention and praise for the persistence and diligence with which it has gone after this mega-scandal of our predatory legislature. The only quarrel I have with the organization and others like it is the fact that they see the problem as one of making our legislature more transparent and accountable when, to me, it is as clear as daylight that what is needed is far beyond asking for transparency and accountability; it is the abolition of the legislature itself in its present form. The strongest case for this is the centrality of this predatory legislative order to the scale of predation and exploitation in our barawo democracy.

Corruption on a mega scale, in both the public and private spheres of affairs in our country, did not start in Nigeria in 1999 with the inauguration of the 4th Republic. Corruption had become lord and master in the land in the years and decades of military dictatorship, reaching its zenith under the presidencies of Sani Abacha and Abdulsalami Abubakar. What happened in 1999 in the new and hitherto humungous pay packages of our legislators was the institutionalization of corruption on a mega scale as completely legal and unchallengeable in the law courts of the land. To see this clearly, compatriots, you must see the difference between income and wealth. Most men and women, the old and the young never, never get wealthy from incomes. And this has been true in the past as it is true in the present. And it is as true in capitalist economies as in non-capitalist or socialist economies. Indeed, you could say that income is as different from wealth as working hard to survive is to winning a lottery: most people will, in their lifetimes experience the former while only a fraction of the human race will ever experience the latter. With the exception of legislators of the Nigerian 4th Republic.

With the inauguration of the 1st National Assembly of the 4th Republic in 1999, the normative, age-old difference or distance between income and wealth was abolished. If you so prefer, compatriots, you could say that the difference was collapsed. If you are receiving N15 million or N29 million a month, your income will become wealth in less than a year. And since you’re elected for four years for every cycle of the legislature, you would have become a very wealthy woman or man even if you served for only one electoral cycle. Please, note that this is all perfectly legal, even if it is also abysmally unjust and exploitative in a very poor country whose economy is yet to be transformed into a middle-income economy – in spite of the immense oil wealth. As much as this is crucial to grasp and hold on to as a fundamental aspect of the centrality of our predatory legislature, what is even more important to grasp is the fact that the legalization of greed and sleaze on such a grandiose scale made possible an impunity, an immensity of looting and thievery in our country that is almost unique in the democracies of the world. As we all know, the criminal justice system in Nigeria, starting from around 1999, has been unmatched by any other country in the world in how politicians and public officeholders can walk free without successful prosecution and return of their stolen loot. In case the logic of my argument here is not clear enough, permit me to make it clearer: if you want to know why looting and thievery became so pervasive in the 4th Republic, you must pay attention to why the legalization and institutionalization of greed and sleaze in our predatory legislature fatally corrupted the criminal justice system in our country, starting from around 1999.

Is it any wonder that on top of their humungous salaries and allowances, we still read and hear of illegal and unconscionable acts of colossal thievery by our legislators like “budget padding”, contract scandals and bribes from lobbyists? Many legislators have been caught red-handed but have gone scot-free. Nigerians ask themselves, helplessly, why the most overpaid legislators in the world still feel driven to steal and loot on a such a massive scale. Why, why and why? Because with the abolition of the distance between income and wealth, the doors opened wide for unlimited and unregulatable looting and thievery. And the lawyers, the magistrates, the judges followed suit. As did the prelates of the churches, mosques and synagogues. Franchises, all of them, with a few exceptions. Almost all connected to the banks and the financial services industry. And all, all of them connected to the global capitalist pool whose centers are in Europe, North America and the resurgent Far East.

In all the foregoing, I have concentrated on the broad picture, on the formal features. But at the end of the day, the real significance is measurable in the concrete, searing terms of human suffering and insecurity, the like of which members of my generational cohort had never seen anywhere in our country in the years and decades of our youth to our early to mid-life adulthood. Truly, I ought to devote an entire column to the cost in human terms of the centrality of our predatory legislature to the scale of poverty, want, joblessness and insecurity in the lives of the majority of Nigerians at the present time. That being impossible in the present discussion, permit me to say only this: our country has become one of the most challenging countries in the world to be born into, to live in and, mirabile dictu, to die.

But this is not to end with despair, with a jeremiad of complaints and protestations. When you are calling for the abolition of some terribly unjust and unregenerate state policies, actions and, indeed, a way of life, the last thing you want to do is lapse into a dolorous or defeatist discourse. As a matter of fact, the main impulse for this series came from my sense of the defeatism in addressing complaints and protests about our legislators’ pay packets to the legislators themselves in the hope that we can either convince them or, shame them, into doing what is right, what is in the interest and for the good of the majority of our peoples everywhere in the land. My contention in the discussion has been that this is strategically unwise and ill-advised. I had thought that I would get to this concluding issue this week. Clearly, that is not possible in the space left for this week’s column. For this reason, this will be our starting point in next week’s concluding piece in the series. For now, permit me to end with the following hint of what I will be arguing next week. What is it? This is it: we can and should tactically call and work for reform from within the predatory legislature itself; however, strategically we should work outside the legislature through a comprehensive, non-violent movement for the abolition of the current legislative order. With or without our legislators’ involvement; and without a military coup, thank you very much.

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

March 24, 2019
For the abolition of our predatory legislature: let the campaign start now, before the next cycle of elections
By a very curious accident of history, slavery in the United States and serfdom in Russia were both abolished around the same time – the early to mid-1860s. However, in spite of this uncanny chronological closeness of the two events, there is no direct correlation between them. Except of course that there is a sort of indirect but indisputable correlation between the two world-historical events in the fact that from the mid-eighteenth century in Europe and the Americas, the so-called Age of Enlightenment had started circulating ideas leading to the eradication of slavery and serfdom, ideas like the inhumanity of slavery and serfdom and the innate dignity and freedom of every woman, man and child. But what does this have to do with the subject of this piece, a call for the abolition of our predatory legislature?

The answer to this question is unambiguous: slavery and serfdom were legalized systems of predation; before they could eventually be abolished, ideas for their abolition had to have circulated widely. I am suggesting that the same thing, the same process will ultimately have to be applied to our predatory legislature: as a legal and institutional form of predation, we will need the wide and relentless circulation of ideas for its abolition. Are such ideas already in circulation? If they are already in circulation, which politicians, writers, thinkers and visionaries have expressed such ideas? If, on the contrary, they are not (yet) in circulation, how can we make sure that they do get into circulation on a scale appropriate to their need and urgency? These are the questions that I wish to address, in a provisional form, in this piece. For this reason, compatriots, please be prepared to encounter some unusual reflections and observations in this piece.

The first unusual observation I propose is this: the very idea of comparing such extraordinary, world-historical events as the abolition of slavery in the Americas and serfdom in Russia to the abolition of our predatory legislature. Yes, the salaries and remuneration packages of our legislators have been roundly and universally condemned at home and abroad as being extremely and unjustly big for a poor, developing country. And yes, what our legislators get as salaries and allowances have been denounced as the largest in the world and in the history of modern parliaments. But as far as I am aware, nobody has ever denounced our legislators’ pay packets as a legalized and institutionalized form and practice of predation and exploitation – like slavery and serfdom. But what else is our predatory legislature if not a modern-day form of slavery or serfdom when the great majority of Nigerians live below the poverty line and most of those who have work or employment of one kind another earn wages and salaries that are a tiny, tiny fraction of the humungous salaries and emoluments of our legislators?

The second unusual observation that I wish to propose in this piece is, hopefully, simple and uncomplicated. It is this: slavery and serfdom were legalized forms of predation that were not abstractions but policies and practices of exploitation that produced suffering and immiseration for a vast number of human beings; without such indices as skin color or racial and caste identity as slavery and serfdom did, modern forms of super-predation like our predatory legislature have also produced and are still producing human suffering and alienation of great proportions, sometimes equal – in kind and scale – to those produced by slavery and serfdom. If, compatriots, you think that this is an exaggeration, please go through UNESCO and WHO data and statistics of human trafficking, sexual slavery and the trade in human organs in our own present era. Indeed, when last did you see the dozens, the thousands of youths in our cities and towns hawking wares that fetch them worse than starvation wages? Has this commonplace sight encountered on a daily, perennial basis ever brought into your minds the great absurdity, decadence and injustice of Senators of the Nigerian Republic who earn N29 million naira a month?

The third and final unusual observation that I wish to propose in this discussion is slightly more complicated than the other two propositions that I have already discussed. For this reason, we need to be a bit more careful in elaborating it. At the heart of the proposition is the idea that only to the extent that we see our predatory legislature as the foundation and the center of gravity of the much vaster order of predation, exploitation and organized thievery that is our unique Nigerian Republic, only to that extent can we be enabled to see the need for the abolition of the kind of legislature that we currently have. Because this is such a crucial point in this discussion, I shall deal with it only summarily here and return to it in next week’s column for a much fuller exploration.

So, for now, think of this unusual observation in the image of the network of the many parts, the many tentacles of that fascinating organism, the Hydra. It has a center, a nodal point that connects and directs all the parts, all the tentacles, but only in the most indirect and even separate and distinct manner imaginable. That core, that center of gravity of the Hydra is akin to how our predatory legislature relates to the entirety of our barawo “democracy” or republic. In next week’s continuation of the series, I shall give a fuller account of this proposition. For now, the following preliminary explanation should suffice for the present discussion: in the recent general elections, all the violence, all the thuggery, all the slayings, all the mayhem, all the vote-buying, all the ballot-box snatching and the open and flagrant violations of laws imposing spending limits on campaigns, all come out of the center of gravity provided by our predatory legislative order. Compatriots, we must abolish this legislative order or form of “democracy” or it will, in the end, finish us. But we hardly ever hear anyone calling for its abolition.

It is precisely because this has neither been done nor is about to be done that we seem to be caught on the horns of the following dilemma: in order to end this outrageous practice, the National Assembly would have to pass legislation to that effect; but the National Assembly has shown clearly that it would never pass such a legislation. Indeed, on quite a number of occasions, our legislature has indicated quite clearly that it would discipline and isolate any legislators that dare to propose such a law. But this seems to be a dilemma only because we fail to start with a proposition for the abolition of our predatory legislature itself. As this is the bottom line of this discussion, permit me to now directly address it.

Ostensibly, the main reason why even its most determined and articulate critics refrain from calling for the abolition of our predatory legislature lies in the fact that they equate such a call to a coup, a return to the rule of military dictatorships in our country. But this is false; it is disingenuous; and it is duplicitous. Why so? Well, the abolition of a predatory legislature is not the same thing as the abolition of the legislative order or system itself; in the first instance, it is the replacement of one form or mode or legislature by another. This is a widespread and commonplace phenomenon in the history of modern legislatures in nearly all the regions of the world, this phenomenon in which more patriotic, egalitarian and humanistic legislative orders replace the more decadent, predatory and retrogressive ones. Like all the legislatures we have had since the return to civilian “democracy” in 1999, from the 1st to the outgoing 8th National Assembly. This means in effect that we are not caught helplessly between a rock and a hard place or between a choice of two evils – military rule or a predatory legislature. We can move from one form of legislative order to another – and without the help of a coup, thank you very much!

We can and must now pose the challenge that we face as one between the predatory legislature that we have now or a legislature that we should demand and fight for that, once and for all, ends the system of predation that permeates our entire socio-political order at the present time. This is all the more necessary because, as I have insisted, our predatory legislature is the foundation, the heart and soul, the center of gravity of the extreme predatoriness of our republic. But how do we bring this about? How do we abolish this predatory legislature without a coup, without abolishing the legislative institution itself? To put the question more bluntly, how do we make the legislature end pay packages that are the center of predation, exploitation and maldevelopment of our “democracy” when we already know that, by itself, our legislature will never pass laws to end the unjust humungous salaries and allowances?

The answer to that question is, counterintuitively, quite simple and it is this: we must place the project of abolishing this predatory legislature at the center of all our progressive, transformative politics. That is all we need to do. Is it really that simple? Yes, it is, as incredible as this may sound because we have never asked for the abolition of this mode or form of the legislative process. All the time, compatriots, we have been terrified by the blackmail that if the legislature goes, the military – which is always and forever hovering in the background, biding its time and waiting to step in – will come back. We have been appealing to the legislators themselves to do the right thing. Or we have been trying to shame them to do the right thing – all to no avail. It is now time to put an end to this approach or strategy and adopt another one that states clearly and boldly that the present legislative order can and must be abolished without a coup, without relying on the military to do what is necessary.

And indeed, when we think deeply and seriously about the matter, compatriots, is it not very strange that no political parties have ever placed an end to the absurd pay packages of our legislators at the center of their campaign manifestoes, let alone ask for the abolition of predation and exploitation as the raison d’etre of our current legislative order? The closest that any opposition political party has come to such a demand was when, in one of the televised presidential debates, Omoyele Sowore of the AAC was asked by the mediator what his party would do to deal with this seemingly insoluble challenge of how to end our legislators’ humungous pay packages without a coup. What did Sowore say in response to that question from the mediator? He said that his party, together with the Nigerian people, would bring it about, with or without the legislators themselves.

Please note, compatriots, that the issue came up in that televised presidential debate as one of the incidental issues of the one-hour broadcast; it was, moreover, an issue that came at the tail end of the program. Thus, it was not one of the central issues considered important enough to place at the center of the debate, this vital project of the abolition of the legislative predation that is at the heart of our barawo “democracy”. But even so, Sowore gave the best possible response to the question in the given circumstance. We will do what needs to be done, what is crying to be done with or without our legislators’ involvement, he said.

I wish to end this discussion on the ambiguous implication of that response. As difficult as it is to imagine, reform, deep reform, is still possible from within the legislature itself. It is not unknown in the history of modern legislatures for reform of the legislative order to come from a corrupt, morally bankrupt and institutionally decadent legislature itself. Only, first of all, the call for reform, the project of transforming the legislative order must come from outside the legislature itself; it must come from the people themselves. With or without the legislators – this will be our starting point in next week’s concluding piece in the series.
- Biodun Jeyifo
bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu
March 17, 2019
Are the things that differentiate APC and PDP stronger than the things that unite them? [Post-elections reflections through a “Q and A” approach]
Q: So, are the things that differentiate the victorious APC from the defeated PDP stronger than the things that unite them as ruling class political parties?

A: I don’t think so since the things that unite all ruling class parties in Africa and the developing word tend to be stronger than the things that separate them. However, asking this question first before we have asked and responded to questions about the differentiating and unifying things themselves is like putting the cart before the horse or like starting a story at its end rather than at its beginning. There is also this fact: politics in the poor, crisis-ridden countries of our continent and the world is often like warfare and for this reason, the horse must come before the cart, otherwise we will never make our way out of the “war zone” of our politics and econmomy.

Q: Very well then, let’s proceed as you suggest. What’s the “horse” here? Or more appropriately, what are the “horses” here if we make a distinction between the things that differentiate the APC and the PDP and the things that unite them. Can we take them one by one starting with the differentiating factors between the two parties?

A: I agree with you completely, especially because both the campaigns and the results of the general elections this year have clarified differences between the two parties far beyond any of our past general elections since the return to civilian rule in 1999. Basically, the ruling party, the APC, has emerged as a center-right, populist and “nationalist” party while the PDP, as the main or indeed only opposition party, has done everything possible to confirm its right-wing, pro-business and pro-imperialist leanings. Not only did Atiku and the PDP do and say everything necessary to indicate that their administration would be a very business-friendly one, they also signified to the world of international finance and global capitalism that under their rule, Nigeria would overnight become a place where it is both good and profitable to do business. To demonstrate his utter seriousness on this point, Atiku loudly and clamorously declared that even at the cost of his life, he would once and for all privatize and sell off NNPC. And as if all these were not enough, Atiku and the PDP openly invited the US and the European Union to impose travel bans and economic sanctions against any Nigerians that worked to prevent them from winning the elections by unfair means. Dear compatriot, if you were surprised that Atiku, who had been unable for a long time to obtain a travel visa to the US finally succeeded in doing so during the campaigns, look no further for an explanation than these Atiku-PDP decisive embrace of old-style pro-capitalist and pro-imperialist agendas…

Q: Wait a minute, wait a minute! Are you saying that APC itself is not pro-capitalist, pro-imperialist and pro-privatization? When APC took over from PDP as the ruling party, did it not continue massive privatization of national assets and public enterprises and utilities as a matter of both ideology and policy? Isn’t it for mostly sentimental reasons that Buhari is still reluctant to sell off NNPC? Aren’t leading members of his administration or his party like Raji Fashola and Nassir El Rufai, aggressively pro-privatization? What…

A: You’re right, you’re right and all these things that you say about Buhari and the APC are true or correct. But don’t ignore or underestimate the important differences, the consequential distinctions between the Right and the Centre-Right, especially in the context of the desperate or even needless tragic conditions for the vast majority in a country like ours and indeed in all the developing nations and regions of the world in which the promise, the dream of transforming the national economy into a middle-income economy more or less permanently remains a dream while the few wealthy get wealthier and wealthier and the poor get poorer and poorer. There is no certainty, definitely no absolute certainty that things would get better under a center-right party like the APC because this depends on many other factors beside ideology. But I believe that it is very crucial that all Nigerians know and take note of this emergent differentiation between the APC and the PDP. Think of it this way, compatriots: no leading political party in our entire post-independence political history has been as vigorously and even as militantly pro-business and pro-imperialist as the PDP under Atiku Abubakar…

Q: Well, okay, you’ve made your point effectively. But how many Nigerians are aware of and really care about this difference in ideology and policy between APC and PDP? And isn’t there a continuum rather than a clean division between the Right and the Center-Right? At any rate, I think that the most important difference between the APC and the PDP in the elections this year is the fact that, for the most part, the solid base of APC is now in the North while conversely, the solid base of the PDP is now in the South. Isn’t that the case? It seems to me that when the APC emerged as a very broad coalition with an impressive national spread in 2014, its main promise was that it was, at last, forging an organic and consequential identity of political interests between the North and the South, especially in relation to the ethical and ideological imperative of the interests of the poor of both regions. That seems to be gone now, no?

A: Well, I am not sure that it is gone for good, gone forever. Please, don’t leave out of account the massively crucial fact that Buhari especially but also the party, fell far short of their promises, their campaign manifestos. In essence, they had a three-point manifesto, both in the 2015 and 2019 elections: security; the economy; the fight against corruption. On the first two – security and the economy – Buhari and the APC performed woefully, so much so that it was nothing short of an outrageous presumption to present these two objectives again as their rallying points in 2019. On security alone, Buhari’s performance between 2015-2019 is quite possibly the worst performance of any Nigerian head of state to date! And on the third leg of their three-legged manifesto – the war against corruption – at best the verdict is mixed and at worst, another failure of the president and his party. Those inclined to give Buhari a passing grade for the war on corruption claim that at the very least, the arrant impunity of corruption during the PDP years is now gone, possibly forever. But I say, not yet and I give the examples of Mainagate and the case of Buhari’s first SGF, Babachir David Lawal and I say, not so fast, impunity of corruption is still very much with us! All the same, I think we should not be over-hasty in pronouncing the end of North-South populist unity under the reign of Buhari’s APC. If the party succeeds in decisively curbing corruption and the recovered loot is put to effect substantial amelioration of the woeful conditions of the poor of the South and the North, then the promise of Buhari’s second coming of 2015 might be revived. At any rate, what I am emphasizing here is a claim that one of the most important differences between the APC and the PDP is a perception, beginning in 2015, that Buhari and his party portend a unity of the North and the South that is based on the identity of the social and economic interests of the poor of both regions in their tens of millions. If that has now been exposed by the 2019 general elections as a mere dream as far from fulfillment now as in 2015, the cause for this is precisely the fact that the things that unite the APC and the PDP are much stronger than the things that differentiate them.

Q: Ah, I can’t wait to hear what you have to say on that point – the things that unite these two bitterly opposed ruling class parties. But before we get to that juncture in this conversation, I would like you to address the specific issue of the increased antipathy towards Buhari and the APC in the three zonal regions of the South-west, the South-south and, especially, the South-east. Does this not indicate a return to the historically big and divisive contention between the South and the North under a charismatic leader whose return to power was premised on, precisely, bringing the North and the South closer together?

A: Yes, unquestionably, it does, it does. Here, we have to be very frank: Buhari is a man, a politician, who is (now) greatly feared and perhaps even despised in many parts of the South. In this respect, it is an understatement to say that his administration has recorded a great failure in security matters; he actually scares the living daylight out of millions of people in many parts of the South – and parts of the North too. How many people in the South would you ask whether or not Buhari is coldly and calculatedly partisan in the destructive clashes between herders and farmers, and how many would tell you, point blank, that the President is an inveterate partisan of the herders? Most, if not everyone that you ask! Of course, the herder-farmer conflicts have a greater complexity than the issue of Buhari’s partisanship, but because he is also known to exhibit strong and undisguised parochial and sectionalist sentiments and ideas in other areas of our national life, the herder-farmer standoff has taken the dimension of a specter for all the other failures of the president and his party. This can be extended to his big electoral problems in the South-east and the South-south: the widespread feelings of marginalization and second-class citizenship in both regional zones of the country had been there long before Buhari’s rise to power. However, they have grown immensely under Buhari – at the same time that his charisma has not failed to produce discernible effects in both regions! Indeed, this point provides us with a way to perceive how and why the things that unite the APC and the PDP are much stronger than the things that separate and differentiate them.

Q; How so? And what are these things anyway? Please be very concrete in your response to this question.

A: Well, I was going to invoke some “theoretical” explanations like the collective project of surplus extraction and primitive accumulation as the most powerfully cohering element among all our ruling class political parties and politicians, but I suppose you will deem that not “concrete”, not clear enough! So, let me put the same explanation in a very concrete formulation: as the president, as a senator, as an honorable, and as a very high public officeholder, ask not what you can do for your country; ask, instead, of what your country can give you for your service to “your people” and your country. That is what unites all our ruling class political parties and politicians. And that is what is known in “theoretical” discourse as primitive accumulation as an elemental force. Do you know the word, “tropism” compatriots? I mean tropism as in hydrotropism, phototropism and geotropism? As the common term in all these three phenomena of nature, tropism is the elemental force that drives all living things to, respectively, water, sunlight and places where we feel rooted, where we feel the force of connection to a place, a locality that we do not feel toward any other place in the world.

Q: Tropism? That is what unites all our ruling class political parties and politicians? And it is stronger than differences over restructuring, over powerful ethnic, regional and religious loyalties and over gender and generational demands for redistribution and restitution?

A: Yes, compatriots, yes. Except that tropism itself comes with a natural, enlightened self-interest that our ruling class politicians do not have. All living things have a tropism that drives them toward the warmth of sunlight and the slaking of thirst by water. But all living things also know that too much of sunlight, too much of water is harmful and potentially destructive. Have you, compatriots, ever come across a Nigerian ruling class politician who feels and acts on the realization that too much of taking from our collective wealth and national assets is harmful, have you?
- Biodun Jeyifo bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu
March 10, 2019
The great, confounding gaps between what is open and what is hidden and what is and isn’t in the elections
There was violence, there was mayhem, there were ballot-box snatchers and there was loss of many lives during the first round of our 2019 general elections last weekend. But compared with other elections in our recent past, nothing came close to the worst that we expected, that we prayed not to happen. If you expect your child not to do well at all in school and he or she does little above average, you give thanks and hope that next time around, the results will be even better. That is exactly how many Nigerians feel about the elections – with the possible exception of the aggrieved and bitter PDP leadership. In this piece, I start with the admission that like most Nigerians, I am relieved that things did not go as horrifically bad as they could have gone, as, indeed, we all feared they would. But beyond this, beyond the provisional and restrained hallelujah of my feelings, I wish to point out and discuss certain things that the elections revealed that we ought to worry about. As we shall see, these are things about which both the victorious APC and the defeated PDP are in almost complete agreement. Collectively, I call these things the gaps between what is open and what is hidden, and what is and what isn’t.

Before delving into the subject of this piece, I deem it necessary to provide a short framework of explanations concerning my assumptions in the following discussion. Forgive me if it sounds too “professorial”. I will make it very short and then go directly to the topic of the essay. Thus, in the sub-field of logic in the academic discipline of philosophy, you can say that wherever you go, there you are; you cannot be anywhere else in the country, let alone the planet. This is a version of the well-known English adage that states that you cannot eat your cake and still have it. However, in philosophy, there are more fields in addition to logic. For instance, there are the sub-fields of ethics and metaphysics. In ethics, questions will be raised beyond your being where you go and nowhere else on the planet. Questions like what you might have done or not done while you were there to affect your life and the lives of others. And in metaphysics, issues might be raised as to the possibility that while you are logically and physically where you go, in spirit, psyche and imagination, you might be somewhere else as distant as possible on our planet, perhaps even in our entire solar system. If there is a lesson, a moral to this framework of assumptions, it is this: take seriously the logical limitations and consequences of where you are, of life and its realities; but know that beyond logic, there are hidden and perhaps even illogical dimensions to what we do and don’t do as human beings in general and members of a national community in particular. Having made this clarification, let us now go the issues.

Perhaps the most startling and consequential gap between what is open and what is hidden and what is and isn’t in the election last week is the gap between, on the one hand, what transpired during the announcement of the results of the presidential election at the National Collation Centre at Abuja and, on the other hand, the things that either barely happened or did not happen at all at the other collation centers in the country at the local government and state levels. Permit me to present this as carefully as possible. At the National Collation Centre, the INEC Chairman and the State Collation Officers, Presidential Election (SCOPE) were impressively meticulous, patient, diligent and thorough in their presentations. The intention, the calculation was to appear as unimpeachably professional, accountable and impartial as possible. To a large degree, it worked, so much so that one could be forgiven if one thought that what happened during the two days of the announcements of the results at Abuja could serve as a model of how to conduct official business against the background of the endlessly dysfunctional ways in which the country and the people are served by state bureaucracies and bureaucrats in Nigeria. Obviously, it was all a carefully choreographed and brilliantly executed SHOW. One could even say that it was all a RITUAL, the performance of which was to lend legitimacy and dignity to the process and, especially, to whoever was eventually declared the winner at the end of the ritual process – which happened, in this instance, to be Muhammadu Buhari.

INEC did nothing to show, to display or to theatricalize its collation operations at the local government and state collation centres as it did at Abuja. In most of the democratic nations of the world, the announcement and public legitimation of election results are at their most open, concentrated and publicized at the local and state levels. As a matter of fact, many nations do not have formal collation at the national level; the national winners are extrapolated from the results declared at the local and state levels. Against this general global trend, INEC went out of its way to browbeat all news outlets, all media organizations not to publish results that did not come from it. Understandably, this was to prevent fake and misleading “results” from taking the place of genuine results. But this should not have prevented INEC from publishing the results at all the collations centers at the local government and state levels, long before getting to collation of all results at Abuja; indeed, it should have served as an incentive for INEC to publish results where and when they were first collated. Thus, in my judgment, anything could have happened during and after the collations at the local and state levels before the final one at the National Collation Centre. Indeed, I go one step further, since I know my country and its politicians: I strongly suspect that both APC and PDP “worked” on the results at those lower collation levels before the national, depending on which areas of the country and their bureaucracies each party controls. I go even one step further and draw attention to the fact that Buhari refused to sign the new electoral law passed last year; if he had done so, among many other things, INEC would have had no choice but to clearly display election results at every level of collation in the country.

In my mind, the great SHOW, the RITUAL process at the National Collation Centre at Abuja will long remain the outstanding image of the 2019 elections. I have said that to me, it was a show intended to lend credibility, impartiality and legitimacy to the elections. More generally, I now add that the SHOW was also intended to legitimate the overwhelming electoral and political dominance of the APC and the PDP, both of which, on nearly all grounds, are mirror images of each other. This conclusion is not based on strict logic, since INEC can in no way be validly accused of being institutionally committed to the dominance of the APC and the PDP. For this reason, our critique of INEC must be based on the law(s) that set up the body, together with its overemphasis on ritual over substance and theatrics over real democratic accountability. To do this, we must move beyond the place where INEC is to places where it isn’t and won’t go if it is not nudged to do so. This in effect means that we must go to the other great gaps between what is and what isn’t in our present political order.

I have some very sobering facts and observations to make on this issue, compatriots. For instance, to most commentators and pundits, the greatest gap of all is the one between registered voters and actual voters – in every state and every regional zone in the country. This year, in most cases, it is said to be well below 50%. I beg to differ from this consensus. More precisely, I wish to state that for us to get an accurate sense of potential voters that are routinely excluded from electoral participation in our country, we must first get the gap between the actual percentage of citizens of voting age and of registered voters before fixating on the gap between registered voters and actual voters. The cases of Lagos and Kano, the two most populous states in the federation are very revealing on this issue.

Let us take Lagos first. With a population of about 21 million, it has only about 6.6 million registered voters. Since the voting age is now 18 and the national median age is also 18, this means that there are close to 11 million people of voting age in the state. This gives us two great gaps. The first is between people of voting age (around 11 million) and registered voters (about 6.6 million), giving us a difference of 5.4 million. The second gap is the well-known one between registered voters (6.6 million) and actual voters (slightly under 2 million) which is around 4 million This in effect means that those excluded from participation in electoral democracy in Lagos State are close to 11 million people, much larger than the current fixation on around 4 million as the number of the excluded.

The pattern in Kano State is similar to that of Lagos State, though not as dramatic. The state has a population of about 16 million of which we can say about 8 million are of voting age. The number of registered voters is about 5.4 million. This leaves us the figure of about 2.6 million of people of voting age that are unregistered. If we add that figure to the gap between registered voters and actual voters (3.4 million), we get a grand total around 6 million. Thus, although Kano has consistently had the largest number of actual voters among the 36 states of the federation, it too presents us with a great, seemingly unbridgeable gap between those who could be active participants in our democracy and those that actually do participate in it. In effect, this goes well beyond the phenomenon of voter apathy which, normatively, is the gap between registered voters and actual voters. In other words, what we have here is apathy plus exclusion plus social invisibility; and it pertains to very large segments of our population.

Compatriots, here are some summative figures to ponder as we take stock of the aftermath, in years and decades, of the elections. We have a population of about 180 million. In January this year, the INEC Chairman announced the figure of 84 million as the total number of registered voters. This is not just a huge gap; it is a crushingly huge gap. Is it illiteracy that is responsible for so high a number of unregistered adults of voting age in our country? Is it poverty? Is it despair and imposed nihilism? Or is it, as I believe, a combination of all the above? Whatever any of us can say in response to these questions, of one thing we can be sure: neither the APC nor the PDP cares a jot about the significance of these gaps between what is and what isn’t and what is open and what is hidden in the culture of politics dominant in our country under the diarchy of the APC and the PDP. This leads me to the concluding paragraph of this piece that I wish to devote to the open and hidden aspects of the announced results of the presidential elections.

Here are the open aspects. With a few exceptions, the South voted massively against Buhari, especially in the South-east and the South-south. And in the South-west that had voted hugely for Buhari in 2015, the PDP and Atiku gave APC and the President a run for their money, scoring victories in unexpected places and coming close to the APC in places where they lost. The reverse is true, in general, in the North where Buhari won big in many of the places he expected to win and lost narrowly in places where he was expected to lose heavily. APGA, which used to hold sway in the South-east, has been wiped out – at least for now. Thus, the coalition that brought Buhari to power in 2015 is gone – or has been largely reconstituted. These are the open aspects. What of the hidden aspects? Remember, compatriots, that only a small percentage of our citizenry actually participate in our elections, in our “democracy”. If I am asked to put a number to this, I would say about 25%. Which kind of INEC, which kind of electoral practices can bring these hidden aspects to our consciousness and a truly progressive intervention throughout the country?
- Biodun Jeyifo
bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu
March 3, 2019
Free, fair, credible and peaceful – for every dream, there is its reality
It is Friday, February 22, 2019 and I am writing my column for the week. By the time that it appears two days from now on Sunday, February 24, 2019, the first round of the 2019 general elections would have taken place. That is then; I am writing this piece in the time of now. And I am wondering how it will be then. Specifically, I am thinking about – peace. Concretely, I am thinking, asking: will the elections, on the whole, be peaceful? Iwalesin secularist that I am, nonetheless, I am “praying” silently but fervently for the elections to be peaceful. I am hoping, with a desperation that surprises even me, that by the time that this piece is published, the news outlet will not be awash with gruesome stories of homicidal violence and mayhem in many parts of our country. In this thought, I see and acknowledge my oneness, my solidarity with virtually all my countrymen and women: with nary an exception, we are all yearning for peaceful elections; we are all hoping that by this time next week, we would not be inundated with tales and pictures of deaths and destruction in many parts of the land – as usually happens at the end of many of our elections in this country and on our country. This is why the title of this essay contains the four words, free, fair, credible and peaceful.

Human beings are defined, are constituted by both the reality of their lives and the dreams that arise in response to the reality. Quite simply, very few things are free, fair, credible and peaceful in the reality of the collective, associated lives of most Nigerians. Nowhere is this truer than in the time of elections. That is precisely why we dream of free, fair, credible and peaceful elections. In general, from the simplest to the most complicated aspects of our lives, human beings everywhere hope that their dreams do not repeat or reenact the worst aspects of the reality of their lives. I do not know about you, compatriots, but I know that in the last four to six months, I have not seen or heard of any other grouping of words in the print, broadcast and social media to the same degree that I have encountered those four words – free, fair, credible and peaceful. At home and abroad in the wider world, you encounter the same words when you come across reporting or commentary on our 2019 elections. Indeed, it was the regularity, the constancy with which I encountered those words in recent months that finally drew my attention to their dream or otherworldly vintage, that is in relation to the lived realities of collective existence in our country.

Of the four words in the exemplary or symbolic concatenation that I am discussing in this piece, the one that seems not to be immediately apparent as a dream motif inversely related to social reality in Nigeria is “free”. By this, I mean that while it should be immediately apparent that the words “fair”, “credible” and “peaceful” do not remotely seem to have anything to do with public, collective life in Nigeria – the Nigeria of the PDP and the APC – the word “free” seems to be far less distant from our ideas and feelings about life in our country. Precisely, I am suggesting that for the most part, Nigerians do not feel that they are unfree, that they live under a dictatorship or even a repressive political order. Of course, sometimes, Buhari has been rather lax in his dealings with the rule of law; he has been very flexible in deciding which orders of the law courts to obey and which to ignore. But so far at least, he has generally kept his innate anti-democratic and autocratic instincts in check. At any rate, being unfree is not something most Nigerians complain about, no be so?

But how many tens of millions of Nigerians have the freedom not to starve, the freedom not to be the recipients of some of the most inferior and worst services, products and treatment from both public utilities and private enterprises? The freedom not to die useless, senseless deaths on badly constructed and maintained roads and highways and ill-equipped hospitals and clinics? The freedom to live dignified, anxiety-free lives with neighbours in communities across the length and the breadth of the country that are not plagued by bandits, kidnappers, cultists and official and unofficial extortionists, do we have this freedom in Nigeria? With all these freedoms drastically curtailed or outrightly denied, what true and real freedoms remain? The ill-usage that Nigerians routinely receive at home from their government is second only to the same contemptuous treatment that Nigerians receive in many other parts of the world – without the intervention of their government. As this is not the subject of this essay, I will not deal exhaustively with it. But my point, my intent in bringing it up for notice should be fairly evident to the reader by now: being free in an expansive, enriching and humanistic conception of the word, is not a notable part of being a Nigerian in our age – the age of the PDP and the APC. And that is why I include the word with the other three words – fair, credible and peaceful.

For every dream, there is its reality: this is the other part of the title of this piece. Free, fair, credible and peaceful elections are desired by every nation on the planet. I do not forget that fact. But there is another fact of historic, global significance that I also do not forget: in many parts of the world, free, fair, credible and peaceful elections are no longer mere aspirations or dreams; they are achieved and regularly repeated experiences. Significantly, a few of such nations are on the African continent. I think we can all agree that our country, Nigeria, is not one of such African nations. From this, I think, I hope that we can all agree that elections are not (yet) free, fair, credible and peaceful in Nigeria because so many other things that affect the quality of life in our country are also not free, fair, credible and peaceful. In other words, the dream of fair and credible elections in Nigeria goes far beyond elections themselves to just about every other aspect of our lives, including, incidentally, the lives of our social and political elites. This is what that phrase, “for every dream, there is its reality”, implies in this piece.

If a dream is not a nightmare, if it is euphoric and comforting, we embrace it. This is common to all human beings, as individuals and as entire communities. This is what dream interpreters and social psychologists mean when they say that dreaming is a very important aspect of human lives, in particular the psychic and imaginative aspects of our lives. From this, I wish to say, simply, that we must never give up on the dream of free, fair, credible and peaceful elections – whatever happens or does not happen in the ongoing 2019 general elections in our country. Throughout the sixteen years of the reign of the PDP, the dream of elections that are free, fair, credible remained just that, a dream, a fantasy as illusory as the dream of a deluge of rain and water in an unforgivingly dry and parched desert. [Especially under the duo of Maurice Iwu, the amoral and cynical INEC Chairman in the period and President Olusegun Obasanjo, Nigeria experienced its worst and most violent election malpractices to date] The 2019 elections are the very first to be organized and conducted under the reign of the APC. Whatever happens in the elections, whoever wins or loses, this is one question we must all face: what are elections going to be like under the reign of the APC?

There are many dimensions of this question to keep in mind. One: if the APC loses, the question becomes automatically redundant. However, remember, compatriots, that APC and PDP are two sides of the same coin since, quite literally, a large chunk of the PDP leadership have been APC chieftains, just as many in the leadership of the APC were once doyens and kingpins of the PDP. Thus, like a customer seated in a barber’s swivel chair while having his head shaved, Nigeria may be caught between a rock and a hard place in the gap between the dream of free, fair and credible elections and the overwhelming reality of the unfreedom, incredibility and unfairness of life for most Nigerians.

Another dimension of the question to keep in mind is how long the reign of the APC itself will be, that is, if the party wins in these 2019 elections. Everything on the horizon of the present indicates that APC will remain unevolved and non-evolving. Like the PDP, indeed like all the ruling class political parties, its main driving force is the combination of dedication to the idea of a rotational presidency and deep ethno-regional primordialism, thinly overlaid by confused progressivist and populist ideological pretensions. And there are no thinkers, no visionary intelligentsia among the party’s leadership. If there are, they are yet to emerge as a clearly distinct and influential formation within the party. Above all else, the APC, leadership and rank-and-file membership, is as dedicated to the primitive accumulation project of diversion of our national wealth and public assets to private ownership and control as is the PDP and, indeed, all the ruling class parties. I beg, may I talk this one in true wazobian Nigerian Pidgin: looters and would-be looters borku inside APC as dem borku inside PDP and all the other big men and women parties and na so ‘e go be until…

I will not end this piece on a negative, despairing note. We must keep our dreams of free, fair, credible and peaceful elections in Nigeria alive, knowing fully well that it is a dream appertaining to all aspects of the quality of life for all in our country. Let us look out for and take note of every aspect of the dream that stands out clearly during and after the elections. Euphoric, comforting and inspiring dreams often come to us, not as entire wholes but as fragments, as bits and pieces of broken porcelain being laboriously glued together again. Thus, I would ask, compatriots, that we keep in mind any of the following things that might strike us as unusual during and after the elections.

The army and how obtrusive or decisive or, conversely, unobtrusive and minimal its participation was/is in the elections. In all the countries of the world where elections are routinely free, fair, credible and peaceful, there are never any army tanks and trunks and any soldiers, in uniform or mufti, in sight. Shoot at sight, Buhari more or less said to the police and the other security forces, if you see any ballot box snatchers. This clearly implied that the president expected the use of force to disrupt the smooth and peaceful conduct of the elections and is more than ready to meet force with force. Pay attention, compatriots, to the scope of the militarization that we see in the course of the elections.

Look also, compatriots, to what I would describe as the NECO yardstick of pass and failure in the conduct of the elections. At one time in this country, NECO passes used to be as low as 10%. In one particular year, 2003, the success rate was 1.8%. Yes, 1.8%, leaving a failure rate of 98.2%. In more recent years, an improvement of sorts has happened and passing percentiles of 45% to 55% have been recorded. If you can detect a NECO pattern in the election results, know, compatriot, that it is not yet Uhuru in free, fair and credible elections in Nigeria.

Finally, dear reader, look to how confirmed or, conversely, confounded are expectations of voting allegiances along primordial and ethno-regional lines in the results of the elections. In all the nations of the world, demographic trends are often very marked in how people vote. For instance, in the United States, the two huge coastal areas, the Atlantic and the Pacific, together with the large urban centers, have electoral allegiances quite distinct from those of communities in the hinterland and the rural areas of the country. But not demographics but primordialism dominates our elections. Will this pattern repeat itself in this electoral cycle? The APC and the PDP are betting on this while some of the newer, “upstart” parties like African Action Congress (AAC) and the Young Progressive Party (YPP) are hoping to buck that pattern. For every dream, there is its reality? No, or not entirely so. Rather, for every reality, the dream is there to reshape and transform it when conditions become auspicious.
- Biodun Jeyifo bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu
February 24, 2019
Things that will happen and not happen after the elections: my tame and wild predictions
I am writing this piece on Friday, February 15, 2019, two days before the start of the Nigerian 2019 Elections. I am a secular rationalist, not a soothsayer, not a prophet. But strangely, I feel in a prophetic mood, the kind of mood that descends on our well-known men and women of prophecy deliverance every New Year’s Eve – the Adeboyes, the Oritsejafos, the T.B. Joshuas, the Oyakhilomes. Yes, I know that no one will take my “prophecy” or “prophecies” in what follows in this piece seriously. But beside their own worshipful flocks, how many people really take the annual prophecies of our professional, “holy” soothsayers seriously?

And there is also this fact: in this piece, I will not vouch for an absolute certainty that my prophecies about things that will happen after the elections will happen. Of course, I am sure that most of them will come to pass, but that will not be my focus in this prophetic message to all my countrymen and women. Rather, what I will bet my reputation on, what I will vigorously defend from now and for months and maybe even years after the elections, will be my prophecies, my auguries about things that will not happen. And precisely because these will be prophecies about things that will not happen, I am collectively calling them prophecy by negative dialectics. First, then, let us go to my prophecies on things that will happen. [If, dear compatriot, you find most of them too trite, too banal, just skip them and go straight to my prophecies about the things that will not happen!]

About the things that will happen, I will first address a very special category that I am calling either the prophetic future perfect or future conditional. This is of course based on that specific aspect of grammar known as tense – things that deal with time and its passage, both in the past and in the future. The English language has one of the largest number of tenses among the languages of the world and for this reason, let us make the best use that we can of this numerical largess in the present context. Thus, I predict, with great confidence, that by May 30, 2019, the by then newly elected president would have been sworn in a day before. This is because he will be sworn in, by constitutional provision, on May 29, 2019. Should it be Muhammadu Buhari – we are continuing with our future conditional tense – I predict that he will be 76 years old. That’s because he is already 76 now and won’t be 77 until December 17, 2019. If it is Atiku Abubakar, he will be 72 years and that’s because he too, is already 72 and won’t be 73 until November 25, 2019.

Let us now move to things that will happen that are of more importance since they pertain to things that are more notable than birthdates which, after all, are fixed and cannot be changed. Thus, I predict that the next National Assembly will be the 9th, not the 10th or the 11th. That’s because the one that just ended and will be replaced by the 9th National Assembly was the 8th. Take my word, my prediction for it, compatriots: the next National Assembly will be the 9th. Take my word for it also that in sartorial colorfulness and variety of local styles of ceremonial attires, that 9th National Assembly will be as brilliant and as elegant as all the previous National Assemblies before it were. To foreign correspondents and commentators reporting on this sartorial richness of our lawmakers, many of the dresses will seem like stage costumes in a theatrical period piece. We will of course take offense that what we regard as the best of our dress culture will be called “costumes” by these foreign correspondents, but in this we will be a tad hypocritical on our part. Why so? Well, don’t we all secretly also regard many of the dress codes and styles from parts or regions of the country different from our own quaint costumes? And don’t many in our country, especially among the social and political elite, believe that not character, not patriotism but colorful and sumptuously elaborated clothes maketh the man or the woman? And after all, our legislators are the highest paid, not only in the world but in the history of modern parliaments. In that case, what is wrong in our parliamentarians also aspiring to be the best and most colorfully costumed legislators in the world?

It will also happen, dear compatriots, that after the elections, the post-election judicial tribunals of 2019 will explode into a scale hitherto unknown or unseen in this country. This prediction is based on absolutely irrefutable grounds. First, before the elections, the scale of judicial review of candidates selected or unselected by the competing political parties reached levels we had never seen in any previous electoral cycle since the return to civilian rule in 1999. Indeed, this close to the elections, in some states like Rivers and Zamfara, the entire electoral slate of the ruling party remains under review and possible disqualification. Secondly, the APC, the incumbent party in power, has shown clearly to Nigerians and the whole world that it expects that its victories will be challenged, especially at the presidential, senatorial and gubernatorial polls. As a matter of relevant fact, that’s what the suspension of CJN Onnoghen was all about. And thirdly, if there was and is so much judicial contestation by candidates within their own political parties, isn’t it a solidly grounded prediction that the coming judicial tribunals between candidates from opposing parties will break new records in number and costs? Thus, it is with great confidence that I predict, compatriots: billions of naira and millions of dollars will change hands in the “industry” that will emerge in the post-election tribunals of 2019.

The earth, our planetary home, rotates on an axis that is tilted, not straight like an arrow. That axis, together with its tilt, is invisible. But we know it is there and has been there since the creation of our planet. The seasons come and go; and night comes after day as day itself comes after night. These are therefore all verities of nature, of existence. The things that happen after elections, indeed the things that happen in politics, are not like the verities of nature – like the invisible axis on which the earth rotates. But most political orders and politicians, especially the most predatory and decadent ones, like to project the things that happen under their dispensation, under their rule, like things that happen naturally and inevitably, like the verities of time and of existence itself.

Following this logic, I predict, with absolute confidence, that after the forthcoming 2019 elections, our lawmakers will continue to be the highest paid legislators in the history of the modern parliament. This will not be because the present political order in our country will subsist, will last like the verities of nature; rather, it is because, so far at least, our rulers have convinced Nigerians that, just as we can do little or nothing about night coming after day, so can we do little or nothing at all to put an end to the monstrous injustice and absurdity of our lawgivers’ pay packets. This observation leads me to my prophecies concerning the things that will not happen after the elections. Please remember: I am collectively calling this prophecy by negative dialectics.

The great scourge of poverty afflicting six to seven out of every 10 Nigerians will not end. If Buhari and the APC win, their so-called “social protection” projects for the poor, like “Tradermoni” and free and nutritious school meals for hundreds of thousands, not millions, of schoolkids across the country will not make the slightest dent on the scale of despair and immiseration in our country. If Atiku and the PDP win, their first order of business will be to deepen and widen the gap between the rich and the poor, no questions asked. Few countries in the world is as awash with wealth as our country while remaining simultaneously on the list of the countries with the lowest poverty reduction rates in the world. This will not change, compatriots, whether it is the APC or the PDP that wins the elections and forms the next administration at any level, federal, state or local. This is because it is not miniscule and paternalistic “social protection” schemes but an entirely new and egalitarian social contract between the rich and the poor, the powerful and the marginalized of all parts of the country that is needed to seriously and massively address the scourge of widespread poverty in our country. The Nigerian ruling class and some of their political parties used to be aware of and be driven by this necessity for a social contract in our society. But this was before the inception of civilian rule in 1999. Since then, the sixteen-year reign of the PDP, followed by four years of the APC, have wiped out all traces of the recognition of the need for a social contract in the collective consciousness and political will of all our ruling class political parties and politicians.

One of the most obscene and unjustifiable indications of this lack of awareness and political will to forge a social contract for our democracy is the golden pension parachutes with which many former governors in this country are flying high in the skies of opulence, decadence and self-engorgement as the great majority of their fellow countrymen and women remain mired in poverty and desperation. These golden pensions include salaries for life that are among the highest salaries paid on our planet; medical, vacation and personal expenses allowances of a scale normally associated with kings and emperors of the feudal past; palatial mansions at state capitals and at the national capital in Abuja built and maintained at the expense of the respective state; and PAs, drivers, housekeepers and security personnel all maintained at public expense. I predict that it will not happen, the end of this extremely decadent golden pension scheme for some former governors and I name some of its beneficiaries: Ahmed Bola Tinubu, Raji Fashola, Rotimi Amaechi, Bukola Saraki and Goodswill Akpabio. Seeing the mixed nature of this list between progressives and conservatives, I am tempted to predict that one or some of them will voluntarily give up their “entitlement” to this golden pension. But my instincts direct me in the opposite direction and thus, I confidently predict that it will not happen – not a single one of them will voluntarily give up the “ilabe”.

It is a depressingly long list, the number of things that ought to happen but will not after the elections. Nigerians throughout the country are yearning to live together in peace, mutual respect and celebration of our diversity in our multiethnic and multicultural country. But this will not happen, especially if Muhammadu Buhari wins. Unless of course a miraculous change comes over him to transform him overnight from being the most parochial, clannish and divisive Head of State we have ever had in this country. But that will not happen, alas.

It will also not happen, the challenges that we face in meeting the great shortfalls and inadequacies in our physical and institutional infrastructures with knowledge, wisdom and mastery of sophisticated technologies and techniques. As I write these words, with all my neighbors, I have just experienced four days of total blackout from an unending power outage at Oke-Bola in Ibadan and I am still in a daze from the experience. And believe me, compatriots, although I know that most Nigerians experience this particular problem on a much vaster scale than me and my neighbors at Oke-Bola, that knowledge offers me no solace, no relief from the feeling that I am the citizen of a country that time and modernity have left stranded in a confounding netherworld.

Nearly above everything else with the exception of the mass poverty of most Nigerians, it bothers me that this will not happen after the elections: reform of our judiciary to make it serve the rule of law and the fair, just and equitable administration of justice to all. The government and the judiciary – they are the worst enemies of the rule of law and equality of all before the law. This will not change after the elections.

We must look beyond elections for restitution and justice in this country, compatriots. They will come, eventually. This is my ultimate prediction
- Biodun Jeyifo
bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu
February 17, 2019
Fact and factitiousness in the saga of the Onnoghen suspension: preface to the last predators’ electoral warfare in Nigeria?
Everybody knows that the suspended CJN, Onnoghen, was axed because Buhari and the APC do not want him presiding over the Supreme Court when appeals for review of “victories” from the forthcoming elections finally reach that highest level of our judicial order. But the APC is saying that that is not the case, that Onnoghen was suspended because of his corruption, because millions of dollars had been found unaccountably lodged in his bank accounts over the years. The point I wish to make in this essay is that while both of these reasons for Onnoghen’s suspension are true, Buhari and the APC are saying one reason is a fact while the other reason is mere factitiousness. In other words, to the APC, Onnoghen’s corruption is a fact while the allegation that he was suspended because of the ruling party’s fear and anxiety over the havoc that Onnoghen could do to the party after the elections is factitiousness. But as one man’s meat is another man’s poison, so is one man’s fact another man’s factitiousness. This is the first of the two major points that I wish to explore in this article.

The British, the Americans and the EU, together with many Nigerian opposition parties and electoral monitors, all apparently think that Buhari and APC’s post-election fears and anxiety is the fact while Onnoghen’s sleaze is a mere ploy, a phony and factitious excuse. And Onnoghen himself, in the depth of his shame and degradation, has jumped at this “lifeline”. To his relief, which we can only hope will be temporary, he has been tremendously buoyed by the support of the main opposition party, the PPD, together with his lionization by many activists and militants from his region of the country. Why? To a very large demographic and electoral constituency in this country, the fact of Onnoghen’s corruption has become mere factitiousness while his “victimization” has become the essential fact of the matter. For this reason, unless the crisis is resolved now, before the elections, we will definitely hear more of claim and counterclaim between fact and factitiousness in the weeks ahead during and after the elections. And what we will hear will be very dangerous to the health, the being of our national community.

While we await what will be after the elections, I suggest that it is important for us now to reflect on the point that while claims and counterclaims about fact and factitiousness pervade the whole of social life, it is around corruption that it is at its most potentially damaging or even destructive. Let me explain. As long as no one is hurt and no undeserved benefit is derived from any claim that something is not what is claimed about it but is another thing entirely, no harm is done, no damage is caused. The following example of this might be unpalatable to many readers of this piece, but please know that I invoke it without any religious prejudice. Thus, I know of many neighbours, friends and relatives who place great value on “holy water” and the miraculous powers associated with it. To the thousands or perhaps even millions to whom it is like an elixir, the intertwined mix of fact and factitiousness in “holy water” can never be unraveled but who cares as long as it does not cause any bodily or psychical harm or damage? But think of the hundreds or thousands of adulterated drugs and medications that slip through the fastidious inspection regimes of NAFDAC, with their inextricable mix of fact and factitiousness. Think of the harm that these drugs and medications cause and you get a sense of how corruption is the dreaded and hellish abode of fact and fakery, truth and falsehood in our country. And then think, compatriots, think about corruption in both the APC and the PDP as the kingpins of fact and factitiousness in our country.

When corruption reared its head and bared its fangs close to Buhari in the presidency and his political party, what did he do? Nothing, absolutely nothing! His former SGF, Babachir David Lawal, stole a humungous amount of money meant for the rehabilitation of hundreds of thousands of persons displaced by the of Boko Haram insurgency. Buhari removed Lawal from office only after months and months of public outcry and it is only now, more than two years later, that that he is being arraigned for trial. Also, the former Chairman and the entire National Executive of the President’s party, the APC, stole more than two billion naira from party coffers; but they were never handed over to the anti-corruption agencies; they were never arraigned and prosecuted; they were simply allowed to walk away with the loot for enjoyment for the rest of their lives.

The notorious case of Maina was even worse: with help from the Ministry of Justice and the Presidency itself, Maina came back from exile as an internationally hunted felon who had stolen billions of naira from national pension funds; he was given a job in Buhari’s administration and when another public outcry arose, he was not arrested but was helped to escape again. Additionally, most Nigerians don’t know this, but in the legal profession, it is a well-known and much talked about fact that the Minister of Justice and Attorney General of the Federation personally presides over the activities of a group that he formed and that has no basis in law. Again and again and again, this group withdraws cases of corruption being investigated or already being tried under extremely dubious pretexts. In other words, this group more or less operates like a racketeering cabal within the Ministry of Justice. Its operations and practices have been brought to the attention of the president and the presidency, but nothing has been done about it. Indeed, someday, when the history of the epic struggle against corruption in this country is written, Abubakar Malami, the AGF, together with this group within his Ministry, will feature prominently as a high point in the mix of fact and factitiousness on the same scale as the current crisis precipitated by the Onnoghen suspension.

But, but, what of the sixteen years of the PDP in power? With regard to the unprecedented scale in the rise of mammoth corruption in the period, didn’t we discover that it is completely futile to try to shame people that are incapable of feeling shame? Things got so bad, so unconscionable, that Obasanjo and Atiku, as President and Vice President respectively, dragged themselves into the mud with accusations and counteraccusations of corruption that threw up revelations of the venality of both men that ought to have led to their impeachment. Didn’t Obasanjo, as a matter of both fact and factitiousness, deny that he ever sought a third term in office and that what we all saw and heard about “third term” was a figment of our imaginations? Senators that had collected 50 million each from Obasanjo stepped forward to testify that Obasanjo had paid the money to them to buy their support for his third term bid; yet Baba Iyabo asserted that it didn’t happen! And Goodluck Jonathan, wasn’t it this PDP last of the Mohicans in power that infamously declared that stealing is not corruption? He never succeeded in explaining what he meant by this absurd distinction between stealing and corruption but that is precisely because he saw the difference in terms of one being fact and the other being factitiousness. In the sixteen years when the PDP was in power, just as it was difficult to separate fact from factitiousness when it came to corruption, so was it difficult to explain why some looters were caught – the minority among looters – while some, the majority, were never caught, never made to return the loot they had stolen. Three years into the time of the APC’s rule, the same pattern has been established and it is behind the Onnoghen suspension. This observation brings me to the second major issue that I am exploring in this essay. What is this issue? This question requires some elaboration to make it clear.

To both the APC and the PDP, Onnoghen’s venality, his sleaze, is not the real issue; the real issue is his post as the Chief Justice of Nigeria who happens to hold that post at a moment of national elections that everyone predicts will be close and is therefore being bitterly fought. In other words, like Dasuki, like Ibori, like Obasanjo and Atiku, like Ibrahim Maina and Babachir David Lawal and like the former National Executives of the APC all of whom, under the rule of both the PDP and the APC, got away with stealing billions from our national coffers, Onnoghen would have gotten away with the millions of unaccountable dollars found in his bank accounts if he wasn’t the CJN at this point in time. In other words, the APC is crucifying him while the PDP is beatifying him for the same reason: not for his corruption but for being unlucky or being “blessed” to be caught at this very moment just before the elections. This in effect means that corruption is not the point – most if not all in both the APC and the PDP practice it and benefit from it. The point is corruption as the condition of possibility for the continued perpetuation of

the severe predatoriness of our “democracy”.

I confess: I am making this issue the ultimate foundation of my reflections on the crisis caused by the Onnoghen suspension because it is the point about which, as a Nigerian, I am most bitter, most angry, most irreconcilably opposed. But there is also this: too many Nigerians, men and women, old and young, Southerner and Northerner, have been pushed to take one side or the other in the division among the polity that the Onnoghen suspension has precipitated. A grave error! Please, compatriots, do not fall into their traps. Buhari, APC, Atiku, PDP, Onnoghen himself – all of them do not care one jot about the suspended CJN’s corruption; what they care about is the political and electoral capital that they can lose or, conversely, harvest, from the hapless CJN’s suspension. If they can cut a deal, Onnoghen will never spend a day in jail and he will walk away with the three trillion naira unaccountably found in his bank accounts. But if they cannot cut a deal, they will, both of them, plunge the nation into a terminal crisis if things are taken to their absolute logical and existential limits, the heavens help us!

In the title of this piece, I raise the specter of the coming elections as perhaps the last predators’ electoral warfare in our country. This may seem inflated, but I have my reasons for using the terms that conjure up the specter for our consideration. There were four electoral cycles in the sixteen years of the rule of the PDP. In every successive one of those four cycles, the scale of rigging and electoral malpractice by the PDP kept rising. Indeed, let me remind you, compatriots, that throughout the period of the reign of the PDP, the American State Department and their national security chiefs kept predicting the imminent end of Nigeria. The elections that will start next week will begin only the second cycle of national elections in the reign of the APC. But close to three-quarters of APC is former PDP. Thus, if three-quarters of APC is PDP, it means that a whopping six out of every eight of the chieftains of our ruling class political parties are really PDP. And if you say that Buhari himself was never in PDP before dissolving his CPC into the APC, remember that he was once in the most warlike, anti-democratic party of all, the military autocratic party of ambitious and corrupt generals that held our nation in thrall for the longest stretches of our postcolonial political history. Thus, Buhari, Atiku, Onnoghen: they are all ready for war. How many “last” electoral wars can a nation survive?
- Biodun Jeyifo bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu
February 10, 2019
For the records: from the NADL, a statement of great clarity and patriotism that every Nigerian must read
From the moment that I read it, I felt, instantly, that the Statement published below as an excerpt from a slightly longer piece must be read by all Nigerians. Not only that, I felt that it is also a Statement for the historical records. I know of no other Statement or Declaration in recent times from members of the Nigerian legal profession – the Bar and the Bench – to match the insight, the candor and the courage with which this Statement addresses the crises of monumental corruption and great public distrust and contempt afflicting our judiciary. The Statement deals primarily with the crisis of confidence that has erupted over the suspension of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Nigeria, W.S.N. Onnoghen by President Muhammadu Buhari; but it goes far beyond this to engage longstanding issues concerning the collusion of lawyers, magistrates and judges in subverting the dispensation of justice and the rule of the law itself in our country. In this regard, it should be noted that the Statemen deals with only the judicial aspects of the Onnoghen suspension; it substantially leaves out the bitterly divisive, reactionary and nation-wrecking politics of ethnic and regional brinksmanship that caused and also fuels the crisis that erupted from Onnoghen’s suspension, a crisis in which all sides are tainted with rank opportunism, cynicism, lies, deceit and bad faith. Close to its conclusion, the Statement makes the following declaration: “As bad as allegations of misconduct and corrupt practices in the Judiciary are, Nigerians must realize that sleaze is not the defining characteristic of the Nigerian Judiciary. Corruption in the Judiciary is not the norm. It is an exception. The Judiciary in Nigeria is doubtlessly an institution of integrity and decency”. Alas, I do not think that most Nigerians would agree with this view of our judiciary. All the same, let us hope that more like-minded members of the Nigerian judiciary like the NADL will rise to the enormous challenge of rescuing their profession from the infamy and the odium that pervade its public profile]

The National Association of Democratic Lawyers (NADL) hereby issues this Statement in reaction to the ongoing crisis of confidence rocking the Nigerian Judiciary, arising from the filing of charges bordering on violations of the provisions of the Code of Conduct for Public Officers contained in the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, as amended, against the Chief Justice of Nigeria ( CJN), Hon. Justice W.S.N Onnoghen, at the Code of Conduct Tribunal; his suspension from office, and appointment of Hon. Justice I.T Muhammed as Acting Chief Justice of Nigeria by the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, President Muhammadu Buhari; and the investigation of both the suspended CJN, and Acting CJN by the National Judicial Council ( NJC), for acts of misconducts.
1. The NADL condemns the suspension of CJN Onnoghen from office, and his replacement, as aforesaid by the President of Nigeria, Muhammadu Buhari. Under Section 292 of the Constitution, judicial officers, including the suspended CJN, have security of tenure, which guarantees that they can only be removed or suspended from office in accordance with the dictates of the Constitution. The NADL, therefore, calls for the rescission of the decision of the President, suspending CJN Onnoghen, and replacing him with an acting CJN.
2. The NADL also expresses serious reservation about the hasty disposition of Hon. Justice I T. Muhammed, Acting CJN in accepting to be appointed and sworn in as Acting CJN, when judges of the lower bench who in the past had demonstrated that grave error of judgment or seeming unbridled ambition had, in the past, been visited with career terminal sanctions by the NJC.
3. The NADL blames the suspended CJN Onnoghen for frustrating the holding of the 88thStatutory Meeting of the NJC on the 15th January 2019, a day after 14th January, 2019, when the CJN Onnoghen was scheduled to be arraigned in Court, by an inexplicable indefinite postponement. By that heedless postponement, the NJC was denied of the earliest opportunity it could have had to discuss the CJN’s code of conduct challenges, and charges that were filed against him. If that meeting had held, perhaps, the NJC, based on the I.N. Okoro, J.S.C and N.S, Ngwuta, J.S.C precedents, could have placed Hon. Justice W.S.N Onnoghen, on suspension, for undergoing a quasi-criminal trial, like an interdiction in the public service. NADL assumes that the said postponement must have goaded a restive Executive Branch of Government into reaching for the misguided suspension of the CJN on Friday, the 25th of January 2019.
4. Following the realization that there was fire on the mountain of the Nigerian Judiciary, the NJC, which was prevented from having a meeting on the 15thJanuary 2019, had to meet on Tuesday, 29th January, 2019, by requisition. The meeting, from which suspended CJN W.S.N Onnoghen and Acting CJN I T Muhammed recused themselves, and which was chaired by Rtd. Hon. Justice Umaru Abdullahi, PCA, decided, amongst other resolutions, to query both CJN W.S.N Onnoghen and Acting CJN I T Muhammed regarding the petitions submitted against them; one petition against the CJN regarding the code of conduct infractions, and two against the Acting CJN regarding his presenting himself for appointment and swearing in by the President, upon the suspension of the CJN by the President. Both of them were given seven (7) days [an abridgment of time from the regular fourteen (14) days query answering period] to answer the queries, to enable the NJC determine the matters on the 11th February 2019.
5. While the NADL commends the NJC for eventually taking charge of the damaging allegations against the suspended CJN, the NADL has serious reservations about the patent lack of exhibition of urgency by the NJC in the consideration and resolution of the crisis. The Judiciary in Nigeria today is in a state of emergency. The NJC and its members would not have sacrificed too much for Nigeria and the Judiciary, if it had elongated its sitting, accelerated its proceedings and conducted an expedited hearing and fast track determination of the petitions. The petitions could have been reacted to in one day, the focal issues being whether the suspended CJN fully and faithfully declared his assets, and if not why; and whether the Acting CJN offered himself for appointment, and if so why? . Thus, a verdict in the form of recommendations to the Executive Branch of Government (the President) could have been rendered in three (3) days. By extending the petitions resolution period, the NJC, wittingly or unwittingly, is elongating the nightmare of the legal profession community in Nigeria and the people of Nigeria. The adjournment of the NJC Meeting to 11thFebruary 2019, four (4) days to the conduct of the Presidential and National Assembly Elections will further generate an avoidable state of paralysis, uncertainty and acrimony in the Judiciary, in the legal profession and in the polity.
6. The NADL condemns the leadership of the Nigerian Bar Association for its handling of the CJN Onnoghen charge and suspension issue. In its statements, pronouncements and resolutions, the NBA Leadership has restricted itself to flaying the action of the Executive Branch of Government, mouthing hackneyed phrases about rule of law, due process, independence of the judiciary, separation of powers and adherence to constitutional principles, without paying equal attention to ethical demands in a legal profession that prides itself as honourable, and giving necessary attention to the issue of integrity and credibility in the Judiciary and how to effectively combat cases of corrupt practices in the legal profession, Bar and Bench. By this lopsided disposition, the NBA Leadership has helped in portraying Nigerian lawyers as supporters of infamous conduct in the Judiciary, before the Nigerian people, especially non-members of the legal profession.
7. The NADL commends the Court of Appeal, Abuja Division, for striking out, on Wednesday the 30thof January, 2019 the appellate request for stay of proceedings of the CCT, made by CJN Onnoghen, in affirmation of the inviolability of Section 306 of the Administration of the Criminal Justice Act, which prohibits stay of criminal proceedings; and in obedience to and fidelity with the decision of the Supreme Court in Olisa Metuh v. FRN, 2017, 11 NWLR, Pt. 1575, 157,
8. The NADL calls on political power holders and interest groups to refrain from further politicizing the current crisis in the Judiciary. The current “clash of power” is between the Executive Branch of Government and the Head of the Judiciary. It is not a clash of power with the entire Nigerian Judiciary. Even if it was assumed that it was a clash of power between the Executive and the Judiciary, the Legislature is not, at this stage, involved in the dispute to warrant the rumoured bid of the Senate or National Assembly to trigger the original jurisdiction of the Supreme Court under Section 232 of the Constitution, by filing an action in the Supreme Court of Nigeria. Bringing an action between the National Assembly or Senate, under contemplation, to the same Judiciary will mean that the three arms of government will be entangled in a suit, the outcome and dimension of which may be unpredictable. To be clear, there is no cause of action between the Senate and the President on the CJN Onnoghen issue yet, as the Senate is yet to sit or have any session to adopt a resolution on the matter since CJN Onnoghen was charged to the CCT or suspended by the President. The statements being made “ from the throne” by the Senate Leadership cannot be a substitute for sittings and resolutions, as the power to confirm the appointment of a CJN or to remove him from office resides in the collectivity of the Senate, and not in the Senate Leadership alone. In the same vein, it is very doubtful whether the Senate Leadership can institute an action in the Supreme Court under the Original Jurisdiction of the Supreme Court without a formal authorizing resolution to that effect. If such an action is ever permitted by the Supreme Court, the Court may render itself open to individual senators or groups of senators bringing applications to challenge the competence of such an action, which being an action akin to a representative action must have the concurrence of all the unnamed represented parties.
9. In the prevailing situation, the NADL calls on CJN Onnoghen to seriously consider a resignation from office in the interest of the Nigerian Judiciary. While doing so, he may wish to explore the plea-bargaining provisions under Section 270 of the Administration of Criminal Justice Act and other similar provisions that may enable him wrap up his planned prosecution and earn himself a dignified and orderly exit from his current travails. In making this suggestion, NADL believes still in the presumed innocence of the suspended CJN Onnoghen under the law and the Constitution. The NADL does not deem or adjudge him guilty.
10. The NADL urges Nigerians to continue to repose confidence in the judiciary. As bad as allegations of misconduct and corrupt practices in the Judiciary are, Nigerians must realize that sleaze is not the defining characteristic of the Nigerian Judiciary. Corruption in the Judiciary is not the norm. It is an exception. The Judiciary in Nigeria is doubtlessly an institution of integrity and decency.
11. Finally, the NADL believes it is time to revisit the constitution and composition of the NJC in a constitutional amendment. The NJC has twenty-two (22) members, including the CJN and a Supreme Court Justice next to him in ranking. The CJN appoints twelve (12) out of the twenty members. There is an obvious difficulty in making the NJC work to sanction Supreme Court Justices in deserving cases, let alone exercise disciplinary control over the CJN, except when pushed and forced as it is the situation now. The oddity of having serving Supreme Court Justices, largely exercising disciplinary control over themselves needs to be cured in a creative constitutional re-engineering exercise. The time has, therefore, come for retired jurists, including retired Supreme Court Justices, Court of Appeal Justices, eminent legal scholars and professors of law and lawyers of impeccable integrity to be the members of the NJC, including the Chairman and Deputy Chairman of the NJC.
Jiti Ogunye,

Chairman, Board of Governors, NADL nadlnigeria@gmail.com
- Biodun Jeyifo
bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu
February 3, 2019