Category: Biodun Jeyifo

To quickly and necessarily dispel the surprise that the title of this piece may cause, let me state here that for someone like me that is deeply passionate about the place of politics and religion in human lives and affairs, it is not a simple or easy thing for me to disavow both the need and right to vote and be voted for and the need and the right of religious expression and freedom. Politics for me is one of the highest of human institutions and practices; that is when it is conducted right, when it is at its most egalitarian and liberating.

Also, I am deeply mindful and respectful of the role that organized religion has historically played in expanding the bounds of learning, of reading and writing, of music, of the arts of architecture, painting, iconography and sculpture, of community spirit and selfless service in our world – without of course ignoring some of the terrible crimes and cruelties that have been perpetrated and are still being perpetrated in the name of religion. With specific regard to Christianity, although I stopped being a Christian around the age of 21, I regard Jesus of Nazareth as one of the two or three greatest visionaries and moral reformers that ever lived and walked this earth.

But I don’t vote; and I am not a Christian, not a religionist. The period of another electoral cycle presents me an opportunity – a compulsion, almost – to reflect on these facts and issues.

Perhaps I should begin these reflections with a “confession”: In the general elections of 2015, though I did not vote and was skeptical of Buhari’s and his party’s ability and preparedness to fulfil any of their campaign promises, I wanted PMB and APC to win and win decisively over Goodluck Jonathan and the PDP; but in 2019, I have not the slightest positive sentiments toward either of the two presidential candidates and the two political parties, one of which will win. In other words, remarkably unlike 2015 when I felt a preference for Buhari and the APC even though I didn’t vote for them (or for any other candidates and political parties), in 2019, the argument that half a loaf of bread is better than no bread at all or that being in the frying pan is better than being in the raging fire does not wash with me in the least.

I write from a deep suspicion that there are millions of my fellow countrymen and women who feel this way. Or ought to feel this way. The reflections in this piece are directed primarily at such fellow Nigerians though, of course, other compatriots who suspect that the coming elections, like many before it, will not lead to better prospects for the country are also welcomed to join in scrutinizing the thoughts I will be expressing in the piece. To put the matter in a somewhat playfully ironic term, my aim is to give the reader reasons not to feel unpatriotic and cynical if, in the coming elections, you do not vote for the APC, or the PDP, or any of the other registered political parties.

Why I don’t vote and why I am not a Christian are complicated things, but I will try to be as clear and as succinct as possible in writing about them in this piece. First, then, why I don’t vote before coming to why I am not a Christian, not a religionist, together with the connection between the two.

The right to vote and be voted for did not come to our part of the world – indeed, any part of the world – freely and easily; it came through struggles: protests, agitations, marches, demonstrations and even strikes. When I say that I don’t vote, I have this historic fact in my mind. If formal colonial rule in Nigeria lasted for about a hundred years, liberal democracy on the basis of full, free and universal adult suffrage came to our country only in the closing quarter of that whole period; for the longest stretch of the period, we did not have the right to vote and be voted for in our own country. I don’t vote but I do not look down on those who vote; and I am not indifferent to the consequences of either voting or not voting. What I do not like, what I find extremely objectionable, is the fact that in our country and many other parts of the world, the right and the need to vote and be voted for has been turned into an elaborate but completely empty ritual that has to be performed every two, three or four years, depending on the country. Yes, an elaborate and empty ritual; but its consequences for the lives of tens of millions of people are truly awesome. Like the effects, the consequences of religion on the lives of billions of people on our planet.

When I stopped being a Christian in my twenties, it did not happen abruptly or precipitously; it happened gradually, almost imperceptibly. First, I stopped going to church. This was significant because I had been deeply enraptured of church music and the poetry of communal worship. I did not understand it well at the time, but I think I stopped going to church because the uplift of spirit that I felt when I heard the music – particularly the organ – began to be at odds with my growing sense that explanations that official Christianity in particular and religion in general gave for very troubling questions about life and human existence were either misleading or downright fraudulent. Very gradually, I began to find my own “explanations” – by myself and with the aid of many thinkers and traditions and formations of thought and praxis, principally Marxism and revolutionary Pan Africanism. To this day, I am still deeply and ineffably moved by some idioms and classics of church music, but without the slightest acceptance of the ritual – the elaborate but empty ritual – that normatively goes with it.

In the foregoing discussion, I have used the word “empty” in conjunction with the term “ritual” with regard to both religion and politics, Christianity and electioneering campaigns. Permit me to now clarify a little on why I deliberately use that word, “empty” in this context. I confess to a bitter, sarcastic intention. Both in our electoral politics and in contemporary Nigerian Christianity, an inordinately large amount of emptying is going on – the emptying of collective wealth and resources, of hopes and aspirations, of manageable present circumstances and reassuring future prospects, of security of life for our peoples in their millions upon millions. For “emptying” substitute the word “looting”: looted lives, looted faith, looted patriotism – in the churches and mosques and in and by the ruling class political parties.

I hasten here to remind the reader that these thoughts are not meant to convince people not to vote but to let people who don’t vote know that they are not being unpatriotic, not being cynical – unless of course these are their own reasons for not voting. Thus, I repeat: I do not look down on those who vote; and I do not think that voting is a meaningless act or social obligation. My purpose in this essay is more limited, more self-aware than that: it is to say, as loudly and as vigorously as I can in this season of elections, that voting is not all we can and should do to right the wrongs and correct the errors of our present way of life. More specifically, I am saying, compatriots, do not let them fool you and your families and neighbours into thinking that the coming elections will result in significant and lasting improvements in our lives; look beyond the elections in readiness for the struggles that lie ahead of us as a national community. In other words, just as I know that I cannot or should not preach to Christians to stop being Christians because of the massive “emptying” and “looting” going on in the churches, so also would it be completely unwise and unproductive for me to say to the readers of this piece that intend to vote that they shouldn’t. Permit me to use an analogy to drive home the essential point that I am making here: after church service(s), after communing with others in worship and/or thanksgiving, you must and will return to the ordinary but perpetual business of living and subsisting on what you have and don’t have; in the same manner, after the elections come the days, months and years after and then, brothers and sisters, you will see the politicians in their true colors!

So far in this discussion, I have focused on the similarities between why I don’t vote and why I am not a Christian. As I hinted in the title of this piece, this closeness does not mean that they are the same thing. No, they are not, even if religion and politics are so interconnected, so mutually intertwined in the politics of bitter and opportunistic divisiveness that reigns among our professional politicians. Why not? Well, because while ritual is endemic to religion, it is an added element, not an essential part of politics. As a matter of fact, it could and should be said that one of the most important things that should be done to our electoral politics is to de-ritualize it, to make it more responsive to the immediacies of bare life for the majority of our peoples. In other words, if you take ritual out of religion, what remains cannot survive; on the contrary, only if you take ritual out of politics can it blossom as an institution, a collective practice in which the country and its peoples have a chance to thrive and compete well in an extremely competitive and unequal world.

This last point leads me to my closing remarks in this piece: a merciless individual and collective self-critique that pertains to the participation of Leftist progressive political parties and/or individual candidates in the coming elections. Permit me to introduce the point by way of a series of questions. Why am I not involved with or in any of these Left-leaning or progressive parties? Why do I include them in my determination not to vote? Is it because they have not the slightest chance of winning, either as individual candidates or as registered political parties vying for nationwide or state-wide offices? Am I sitting in the sidelines to complacently observe what will happen or not happen in the coming elections, aloof from it all, as if individual circumstances and moral lassitude offer me protection from the profoundly troubling consequences that are sure to follow on the elections of 2019 in our country?

My response to these questions will be brief. For this reason, the response will require further elaboration in a future column (not next week!). This, in essence, is the response: we have all, on the Left, individually and collectively, done little to work against the tides that have turned elections into the elaborate but empty rituals that they have become in our country since the resumption of bourgeois civilian politics in 1999; in between elections, there is little or no movement of the masses and their organizations to make the rulers and the ruled aware that there is far more to the political existence of nations than elections; and the super-exploited and marginalized masses of our countrymen and women have had no resolute leadership from the Left, from progressive forces, to indicate viable alternatives outside of, or working productively with electoral politics.

Obviously, a topic for another day. Meanwhile, I won’t vote in this year’s elections. And I stopped being a Christian, a religionist, a long time ago.

• Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

This is, of course, the last weekend of both this month and this year. As I sit down to write this last column of the month and the year, it occurs to me that by the time I might have finished writing this particular column, I would, in effect, have written all the columns for the month of December 2018 on the subject of higher education in Nigeria and our world.

I realize also that up to the present moment of writing this last column for the month and the year, I have based much of my observations and reflections on aspects of my own biographical experience as a teacher, scholar and researcher in the last half-century. These included the occasion of my voluntary retirement; the acceptance speech for the award to me of an honorary doctorate of letters; and a conversation in which I was a participant following the ceremonies for that award.

In this concluding piece of this unplanned and rather “accidental” series, I move out of and beyond biography in order to focus objectively on what I consider the central intellectual and ideological challenge or crisis of higher education in our country. And what is this central challenge? In a nutshell, here is what I think, what I suggest that it is: although the yawning gap between demand and supply in higher education in our country (and our continent) exists on the three distinct but related fronts of quantity, quality and justice, only in the “front” of  quantity is the shortfall primarily, indeed almost exclusively recognized; in the other “fronts” of quality and justice, the shortfall is barely recognized and therefore barely understood and engaged.

It is helpful to break this “thesis” down into a concrete, easily understood formulation: most Nigerians – the rulers and the ruled – know and accept that what seems to be an over-supply of public and private universities in our country still leaves more than half of all qualified applicants for university education without places in the existing number or complement of our higher education institutions. Thus, the demand for the founding of still more private and public universities in our country continues to be very high, to be very much like the thirst for water in a drought-stricken land. [Just this month alone, it was announced that six more federal universities will soon be created] However, very few Nigerians – the rulers especially but also the ruled – recognize that a demand for quality higher education exists in the country, a demand for which there is barely any supply. Worst of all, the recognition barely exists in our country that the demand (and supply) of quality higher education also amounts to a demand for quality lives for all, not just for the economic and intellectual elites, the glitterati and the literati.

In this piece, I shall be raising more questions for which neither I or anybody can provide ready answers. In general, this is because in the life and experience of nations and the human community as a whole, questions often arise for which the answers are either not (yet) there or will ultimately be found through trial and error or baptism of fire. And there is also the fact that I am not a professional economist; least of all am I an econometrist, a term that describes a specialist in the branch of the science of economics that deals with quantitative, measurable, mathematical interrelationships between demand and supply, production and consumption. If this is the case, how then could I presume to know that there is indeed a demand for relevant and qualitative education hidden behind the demand for more and more universities for all qualified youths and not just the children of the elite? Hasn’t it become quite obvious that much of the demand for more and still more universities in Nigeria essentially constitutes a demand more for certification than for the real content and substance of knowledge?

These questions are misleading because they presume that only economists, only econometrists, can and should talk about economics, especially the economics of supply and demand, of production and consumption pertaining to higher education in our country. But just as it is often said that politics is too important to leave to politicians and law too critical to leave to lawyers, so also is it true to assert in the present context that the political economy of demand and supply in higher education in Nigeria is much too important to leave to economists. Indeed, as we proceed with the discussion, it will hopefully become clear that the issues and the questions that will be raised will need the concerted thoughts and efforts of intellectual activists and concerned people beyond professional economists or econometrists.

Perhaps we should begin our engagement of these issues and questions by making several statements all of which, together, give us only a small sense of the enormity of the challenge, the crisis that we face. Here are the statements. Universities are not primary schools and neither are they secondary schools; it takes time, dedication and considerable investments of financial and human capital to create and sustain them. More critical is the historic fact that both in their origin and for the longest span of their modern history, universities were not intended to be places of instruction and learning for the masses, for the demographic majority of national communities; the nations that have achieved this feat are few precisely because of the enormity of the challenge. Nigeria does not appear now, or in the foreseeable future, about to join such nations; as a matter of fact, we seem about to become one of the worst national cases of how not to set about confronting this challenge. And most important of all, we seem dazed, we seem confounded about what to do about the crisis.

Permit me to put this observation in as blunt a manner as possible: if you have been setting up both public and private universities in the way in which primary schools are established, what do you do when the effects of the resulting immense devaluation begin to appear and magnify? Close down the “universities”? All of them? Some of them? Or only the worst among them? Let market forces decide which ones will survive and which ones will thrive? Institute responsible, enlightened and patriotic measures of massive investment and regulatory reforms to reverse the decay and staunch the hemorrhage? Which investors in private universities, which governing councils of public and private universities, which Vice Chancellors will take the lead and provide the leadership, the models that will work and inspire others? Have the Nigerian people a role to play in making these decisions and determinations? So many questions, so many options among and between which we seem to be lost!

But that is not the case. We have not lost our way in a maze, a labyrinth. Our own history, together with the experience of other lands, provides us with examples and models can provide a way out of what seems to us now a cave of darkness and confusion. In a brief elaboration of this belief, I offer in the second segment of this piece, a short profile of two paradigms for engaging the challenge of democratizing higher education in the modern world.

The capitalist and non-capitalist paradigms

For most of its history, the modern university was established on a non-capitalist basis, with wealthy landowners and, later, industrialists, playing a very secondary role to the primacy of the role of religious orders, municipal bodies and the national states in the foundation, maintenance and development of universities. While this is true, it is equally true that when capitalism and capitalists entered into the business of founding and sustaining universities, they did so on a massive and decisive scale. But since there is capitalism and there is capitalism, it is important to specify here that it is productive, world-changing capitalism that we are talking about here, not a capitalism, like ours, that is yet to move beyond primitive accumulation and the continuous and massive looting and transfer of collective wealth to private and unregenerate ownership.

Think here, compatriots, of the average or typical economic magnate in Nigeria that sets up a private university. The goal, the objective is to certify “customers” or “consumers” who come to the university at the end of their degree program. I do not ignore the exceptions here; I only emphasize the fact that they are exceptions that establish the norm. In true and productive capitalism, certification is a means to an end, this end being the production of relatively well-educated, skilled professionals that can reliably and efficiently work in a modern economy: teachers, journalists, administrators, chemists, engineers, doctors, dentists, scientists and researchers. A university, any university, that is unfortunate enough to get a reputation for certifying “unemployable” and barely literate graduates will soon go out of business in a truly capitalist economy and nation. But that is not the case here; as far as I am aware, no Nigerian university has ever been confronted with and held accountable for producing “unemployable” graduates – though there are constant and very loud claims by private and public employers in Nigeria that they find many of the products of our tertiary institutions unfit and ill-prepared for the job market in the professions for which they have glowing certification.

It is futile to appeal to the great majority of our private universities to abandon or even decrease their emphasis on (mere) certification as the main objective of their mission. Why? Well, in the first place, they will vigorously deny that is their mission and will assert that their goal is to produce the best graduates possible in the world in any given field. More substantively, even though this is a glaringly evident fact, the great majority of our private universities will never admit that they lack the capital base, the infrastructures, the facilities and the teaching and research faculty to produce highly literate and skillful professionals for the economy. In other words, and to put the matter again rather bluntly, they will never admit that they were set up the way primary or secondary schools are set up.

I write here of the non-capitalist paradigm of higher education as a product, a beneficiary of its decisive role in the history of higher learning in our country and our region of the world. In my undergraduate years, there were only five universities in the country and they were all not only state-funded, they were also very generously funded. I had a scholarship and was thus speared of paying fees, but all the same, I never heard of a student that was sent away or was prevented from taking examinations for not paying fees that were far from exorbitant anyway. And as soon as we graduated, we all, almost without exception, found good, generously salaried and superannuated jobs, in government or in private corporations or enterprises. And there was an extraordinary emphasis on the quality of the higher education that we got, so much so that we thought we were as good as the products of any and all other national university systems in the world. But it was extremely elitist and inegalitarian. I say it now with deep shame and embarrassment: we were made to believe – and we did believe – that only a few members of a select group needed and could cope with the rigours of instruction and learning for higher education.

Did this non-capitalist, public-funded tradition of qualitative higher education run into ruination because it was democratized and made available to a far wider circle of educable Nigerian youth than had ever been intended as its beneficiaries? I think so. But this was not done intentionally; rather, it was done in a blind, slothful, misguided and chaotic linking of demand and supply on those three fronts: quantity, quality and redistributive justice.  The capacity, the resources and the wherewithal are there in our national, collective wealth for funding higher and qualitative education for all educable youths in our country. One answer is finding the right mix of the capitalist and non-capitalist paradigms. But how can we get this mix when, unlike the non-capitalist paradigm, the true and generative capitalist paradigm has never been known or tried in the history of higher education in our country?

• Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

The Visitor, the President of the Republic  ably represented by the Acting Executive Secretary of the NUC; the Chairman of the Governing Council of the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ife, Dr. Yemi Ogunbiyi, my friend, my brother; the Vice Chancellor of the University, Professor Eyitayo Ogunbodede; other members of the governing council here present; distinguished professors and lecturers of the University; invited guests from all walks of life; great students of great Ife; ladies and gentlemen; and the talakawa of the land to whom restitution and justice will come one day in our country; I shall make this acceptance speech brief, but hopefully, not empty. The theme of my speech is truth; expressed a little more expansively, it is the tension, the contradiction between truth and facts, especially with regard to present and future prospects for higher education in our country and our world. In order to frame this theme with suggestive metaphor and parable, permit me to start with two short narratives, one factual and the other mythic.

The first narrative, the factual one, can be found in The Punch newspaper of November 16, 2013. That issue of the newspaper contained an interview of the late Akinwumi Isola conducted by one Olufemi Atoyebi. In the interview, Akin Isola made the following remark in response to a question asking him why he had left the University of Lagos for the University of Ife:

“I had to leave UNILAG in 1974 because I was given an appointment at the University of Ife. The major reason I was tempted to move to Ife was because all my fiends like Professor Wole Soyinka, Yemi Ogunbiyi, Biodun Jeyifo, Kole Omotoso and so on, were teaching there. It was at the University that I spent all the rest of my academic career”.

Unfortunately, I read this interview – that had been published in 2013 – only this year, 2018, a few weeks after the death of Professor Isola. If I had read the interview before his death, I would have had some very interesting questions, some conundrums, for him. This is because contrary to the “facts” stated in this segment from the interview, Isola could not have come to Ife because we, the friends mentioned as one important cause for his moving to Ife from Unilag, were not yet in Ife in 974 when Honestman moved here! Wole Soyinka, Yemi Ogunbiyi, Biodun Jeyifo, Kole Omotoso – not a single one of us moved to Ife before Akin Isola. Soyinka came in 1975; Omotoso came in 1976; I came in 1977; and Yemi Ogunbiyi came also, I believe, in 1977. If the other friends Isola collectively called, “and so on” in the interview were already here before his arrival in 1974, I do not know. But we whose names were specifically mentioned were not yet here at the stated date.

Obviously, the facts do not match the truth in this account by Isola himself of why he came to Ife in 1974 and stayed there for the rest of his career before his retirement in 1994. Now, we know the facts; but what is the truth? The truth is that in the course of the twenty years that he taught here, Isola apparently experienced great and sustaining community with many friends, colleagues and students. And as a result of this experience, he thrived here as a teacher, a scholar, a writer, a fabulist. That is the truth against which the mistaken facts are merely accidental and rather factitious to the essential truth-content of the statement in his 2013 interview in The Punch. In other words, in this particular instance, in this particular story, as erroneous and inapplicable as the facts are, they do not in any way contradict the truth. I shall come back to this point later in this speech but for now, I wish to move to the other story, the one that is all myth and contains no facts at all and yet contains profound truths about human existence, in particular, knowledge or knowledges. It is an Afro-Cuban myth and it goes as follows:

“In the beginning of Time, Olofi created the world and all the elemental things in it. He created the earth and the sky, light and darkness, beauty and ugliness. And he created Truth and Falsehood. Deliberately, he made Truth very big and powerful, while making Falsehood skinny and weak. However, to make up for the weakness of Falsehood, Olofi made him very cunning. From his cunning, Falsehood made a cutlass with which to protect himself if the need for it ever arose. One fateful day, Truth and Falsehood met and in the heat of an argument, a bitter and ferocious fight broke out between them. Being very big and strong, Truth felt completely on top of the combat, not knowing that Falsehood had fashioned a machete for his defense. And so, it was with this machete that Falsehood cunningly managed to cut off the head of Truth. This act so enraged Truth that with a terrifying cry, he seized Falsehood and with a single pull yanked off his head that he then placed on his own headless neck. And from that day, what we have had is that grotesque mismatch: the body of Truth and the head of Falsehood.

Needless to say, this myth is open to many interpretations. The body of Truth and the head of Falsehood: in my profession of critical theory and literary studies, this is the kind of ambiguity, conundrum or enigma that we love to work on, that we can indeed write an entire monograph or even a book on. Obviously, I cannot write a monograph, let alone an entire essay on it in the present context. That being impossible, in this speech, I will therefore limit myself to only two interpretations of the myth. Here is the first one: if the head is the seat of falsehood, then all the things that we most associate with the head – reason, thought, intelligence – must be full of lies, deceit, manipulativeness. In contrast to this, the body that is the site of Truth suggests that the things that we feel in our bodies, that we feel in the skin of physical existence will never deceive us but always render to us the truth of what we are feeling and experiencing. That is one possible interpretation of the myth.

But there is our second interpretation which suggests that since Truth and Falsehood are lodged in the same body, since in fact the head and the body work together in an interrelationship of parts within a system, we can never succeed in completely separating the two, Truth and Falsehood. And if this is the case, we must see Truth and Falsehood not as mere opposites but as inevitable contradictions that we must do our utmost best to decipher in order to make the contradiction work for us and not against us. Indeed, it is in the light of this view of contradiction that Bertolt Brecht, one of the greatest dramatists of the 20th century, famously declared that “contradictions are our only hope”. How do these two narrative parables or metaphors connect to the theme of this acceptance speech? Well, let us take first the story that deals with facts in relation or non-relation to truth.

Here are two facts from the past of this University concerning the honorary degree that I am being given today. In 1984, Chinua Achebe was given this same degree, the first writer and public intellectual to be given the degree by OAU-Ife. It was a totally unprecedented move by any Nigerian university and Achebe demonstrated the wisdom of the decision by delivering a Convocation Lecture titled “The Truth of Fiction” that is simply one of his best essays and certainly a tour de force of insight and eloquence. A year or two later, the name of Wole Soyinka was brought forward for consideration by the Senate and the Council and everyone thought it was a foregone probability that he would be given the award. However, Soyinka’s nomination got so embroiled in extremely petty political shenanigans that the Nobel laureate had to ask that his name be withdrawn from consideration and many Senate and Council members said good riddance! But then, a year later, in 1986, Soyinka won the Nobel Prize for Literature and both the Senate and the Council completely reversed themselves, going so far as to send emissaries to the new Noble laureate to please lift his ban on his name being considered for this degree. Your guess is as good as the next person’s on Soyinka’s response to this plea from the University.

I could add many other facts to these concerning Achebe and Soyinka and the D. Lit degree of OAU-Ife. Some facts are impeccably benevolent, progressive and community sustaining; others are the complete opposite of the values that should sustain an academic community, the national community and our world. But none of these facts can erase the truth which is that at the very same time when contradictory acts about giving the award to Achebe and Soyinka were being executed, the Obafemi Awolowo University was in a sort of Golden Age of brilliance, progressiveness and innovation. And Ife was almost exceptional among all Nigerian universities. For instance, I have said that Achebe’s Convocation Lecture of 1984, “The Truth of Fiction” stands as one of the best of his dozens of essays. Well, let me recall what Achebe himself said when he delivered the lecture here: he said that when he got communication that he was being given the award and had to give a lecture, he knew the sort of colleagues, the sort of academic audience waiting for him at Ife and therefore he knew that he had to be at his very best.

That is the kind of place that Akin Isola was reminiscing about in the interview in The Punch that I cited as the source of the first of the two framing stories for my reflections in this speech. A university community that had the likes of H.E.O. Oluwasanmi and Ojetunji Aboyade as Vice Chancellors, that had both Wole Soyinka and Ola Rotimi, two of the greatest among African playwrights, drama professors and theatre directors on its staff, that had pioneers in indigenous African cultural and linguistic studies, that had social and natural scientists of the highest training and productivity and, in my own professional field, that actually drew up and began the first systematic graduate courses in critical theory literary and cultural studies on the African continent – that was the truth of OAU-Ife then. I have said many times that that Ife was the place where I finally became the sort of teacher I had always wanted to be; and it remains one of the most fertile in my production of scholars of the next generation. Indeed, I am deeply gratified that many of my colleagues and students from the era are present here today. That is why I solemnly declare this honour is not just for me but for all of us.

In bringing this speech to its conclusion, I now return briefly to our second framing story, the Afro-Cuban myth on the body of Truth and the head of Falsehood. Chairman, Governing Council; the Vice Chancellor; great students of great Ife; ladies and gentlemen, like almost all Nigerian universities without exception, this University is facing crises of such a serial manner that one can say that we are in what one philosopher has called a state of (permanent) exception. For instance, Ife is the birthplace of ASUU; today, ASUU is in a state of profound and crippling crisis at the University. Ife has always been at the forefront of progressive and mature students’ unionism in this country; today, student unionism in the University is in great turmoil badly in need of self-renewal and institutional re-legitimation. Vice Chancellorships are fought bitterly and self-destructively. All in all, a perfect replication of the body of Truth and the head of Falsehood. Definitely, this University, all Nigerian universities face this profound serial crisis, this more or less permanent state of exception. But remember, I said earlier that contradictions are there not to crush us if we study them carefully. Truth has not vanished; it is only entwined with Falsehood.

I thank the University for this great honour which, as I have said, is not only for me but for all of us. Especially, I thank the Chairman of the Governing Council and the Vice Chancellor. May theirs be the wisdom and the grace to always be able to separate truth from falsehood and may their time in office usher in another era of brilliant, progressive and humanizing education for present and future generations of our youths.

Biodun Jeyifo                                                                                                                                      

D. Lit (Honoris Causa), Obafemi Awolowo University.

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

I wondered whether Marx had not made those pathways too steep. His exposition seemed too slow and leisurely for someone like myself impatient to understand the world and to change it quickly. I was relieved to hear that Ignnancy Daszynski, our famous Member of Parliament, a pioneer of socialism, an orator on whose lips hung the parliaments of Vienna and Warsaw, admitted that he too found Marx’s Das Kapital too hard a nut to crack. “I have not read it”, he almost boasted, “but Karl Kautsky has read it and written a popular summary of it. I have not read Kautsky either, but Kelles-Kraus, our party theorist, has read him and has summarized Kautsky’s book. I have not read Kelles-Kraus either, but the Jew Herman Diamand, our financial expert, has read Kelles-Kraus and told me all about it”. Isaac Deutscher, “Discovering Das Kapital”

As indicated in this column last week, this is the first week after my last week of teaching after nearly half a century. Don’t ask me yet how it feels because it is still too soon to tell. What I can talk about, what indeed I wish to talk about now in the freshness of my retirement, is what I regard as perhaps the single greatest challenge that I faced in my years and decades as a university teacher and researcher. With a view to being as precise and concise as possible on this topic, here is how I would describe the challenge, the crisis: higher education, higher learning, was historically never intended for the masses of ordinary humanity; however, within the space of my experience as a university teacher in Nigeria and America, I gradually came to know, to understand that higher learning was, in our age, being mightily called upon to extend its benefits far beyond the tiny fraction of social elites for whom it had been created and to whom it had been restricted for nearly a thousand years. Basing my reflections on my own biographical experience but going far beyond it, the following are my thoughts on the issue.

In last week’s column, I began with an account of how, when I moved as a graduate student from the University of Ibadan to New York University in 1971, I began to teach university undergraduates in place of candidates for the Ordinary and Advanced levels of the GCE that I had been teaching at the Faculty of Education in UI. To this account, I now wish to add the clarification that the students I began to teach in New York were extremely unlike the university students I had known in Nigeria, both as members of my generational cohort and those who came before us. What did this mean?

Concretely, it meant that the majority of students I was teaching were workers enrolled for their college or university education on the basis of the conversion of their wages to stipends for their university fees. Incidentally, I had a full and indeed rather generous scholarship from UI for my graduate studies at NYU. But then and now, New York City is one of the most expensive cities in the world to live in. For this reason, I had to supplement my bursary from UI by income from part-time teaching at two colleges of the City University of New York (CUNY), Hunter and Queens. Most of the students at these colleges had neither the high school quality education/grades nor the social and economic background of students at the elite private universities in New York City like Columbia and NYU. In all honesty, try as much as I can, I cannot recall my first impressions or feelings about teaching students who were either full-time or part-time workers, a “species” of university students the likes of whom I had never met before then nor, indeed, deemed imaginable! But there is one thing I do remember vividly, especially as this thing goes to the heart of the matter in this discussion.

As I do not think I can find a better or more “delicate” way to put this “thing” across, I think I had better express it directly: I very quickly found a great gap, indeed a chasm, between the knowledge I was rapidly acquiring as a doctoral candidate at NYU and the knowledge I was dispensing to my students at Hunter and Queens Colleges. On the one hand, I was reading and absorbing the intricacies of literary and dramatic theory from classical Greece and Rome to the 20th century; I was reading and consuming abstruse Marxist and liberal philosophical texts; I was reding some of the foundational texts of the disciplines of sociology, anthropology and linguistics; and I was writing lengthy term papers on canonical British and European authors and texts for my graduate courses. But on the other hand, without dumbing down what I taught my worker-students, I found that it was extremely difficult for me to bring the materials that I found the most penetrating or illuminating in my graduate classes to bear on what I was teaching my worker-students – as I very much wanted to! Later, much later, indeed nearly a decade later, I would find out how to do this, how to bring the most challenging of my readings, research and writings to bear on my teaching of both undergraduates and graduate students. But I testify now that it was never an easy task. At any rate, the important point that I wish to emphasize here emerged when I (finally) realized that this was not a problem, not a challenge unique to my unfolding experience as a teacher and researcher but was something of the very essence of higher learning itself as the raison d’etre of the university for much its thousand-year plus history.

Logically or ordinarily, I should now expatiate on this exclusivist or elitist dimension of universities for much of their existence in the last twelve hundred years. But there is one more biographical detail to fill in before we get to that huge topic. This pertains to what happened when I finished my studies in the U.S. and returned home to Nigeria to teach, first at U.I., then at OAU-Ife. What was this thing that happened? Well, I discovered that the undergraduates at UI and Ife that I had to teach were still full-time students, as I and my cohort had been when we were students; they were not worker-students like the ones I had taught at Hunter and Queens Colleges of CUNY. This meant that I found it a little bit easier to bring the difficult and challenging materials from my research and writings into my classes. As a matter of fact, I found that many of the students at UI and Ife were very eager for me to challenge them, to even good-naturedly goad them to engage difficult and even abstruse authors, texts and thinkers. This thrilled me enormously and I rose to the promise of this change in pedagogical circumstances. And then I made a discovery that was nothing short of life-changing: at Hunter and Queens Colleges in New York, instead of dumbing down my teaching to the worker-students, I had been making great efforts at remediation for the considerable lack in their level of preparation for university education. It is useful to briefly recount what this entailed.

For anybody at any level of education, there are certain texts, authors and thinkers that are extremely challenging, extremely daunting to read, understand, absorb – and teach. I give a few famous or “infamous” examples: Hegel’s “Master-Slave Dialectic” in his magnum opus, The Phenomenology of Being; all the volumes of Marx’s Das Kapital; Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason; Wole Soyinka’s Idanre and Other Poems and Madmen and Specialists; and T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland. I cite these only as examples since there are countless other texts like them. Now, without being really conscious then of what I was doing when I taught at Hunter and Queens Colleges, instead of not teaching this order of texts at all, I did teach some of them, but only with elaborate summaries and explanations of what they were saying, laying much emphasis on how much learning and perhaps wisdom one stood to gain if one took up the challenge of reading them for and by oneself. That is what I am calling the imperative of remediation in this discussion: instead of not teaching very difficult texts at all or teaching them half-heartedly and therefore badly, you try to address the lack of prior adequacy of capacity, training and interest of the given student(s).  This “imperative” rests on a belief that is important to highlight: the fundamental belief that every woman and man is educable to the highest possible level, always depending on the effort, the passion and the interest that one brings to the pedagogical relation between teachers and learners.

Remediation, as I have expressed it in the preceding discussion, seems easy. But this is far from being the case. In my own life, in my own career, I have been greatly haunted by its often spectral effects. For instance, many have complained of the (needless) difficulties of my best scholarly works. Two of my closest personal and intellectual friends, Eddie Madunagu and Femi Osofisan, have complained about this aspect of some of my work. Indeed, Osofisan has gone so far as to declare publicly that one day, he is going to translate my book-length study of the works of Wole Soyinka into English, thereby implying that the “English” in which the book is written is not for ordinary mortals, not to talk of the masses. In my defense – if we can call it that – I have argued that quite often, scholars write to and for other scholars, thereby developing a critical idiom that is opaque, if not completely inaccessible to communities of readers outside the scholarly community. I have also argued that in some of my scholarly writings, I have broken free of this specialized, rarefied idiom and reached for a broader audience or readership.

And here we come to the crucial point in this piece. For almost nine-tenth of its close to twelve-hundred-year history, the university has operated precisely on that principle that higher learning is for the elect of the mind and the intellect, not for the generality of the peoples of the nations and societies of the world. That higher learning should also be for the mases – this is a completely late-modern idea that came into prominence after the end of the Second World War. And even then, this idea came to our part of the world as a powerful motive force only in the third quarter of the 20th century. Definitely, my undergraduate education at UI – mine and that of all the members of my cohort – was based on the belief that only the chosen, select few were deserving of higher learning. I abandoned that belief with which I was inducted into the academic profession only because of the lessons in remediation that I had learnt at Hunter and Queens Colleges, together with the radicalization that I received from Marxism and activist struggles for social and economic justice on the ground.

I wish I could end this piece on a positive, upbeat note but unfortunately, I can’t. This is because remediation is in shambles nearly everywhere in our world, most especially and poignantly in our part of the world. In the present context, I cannot go fully or even expansively into this topic. But here is what, in essence, it entails. Higher learning that is relevant, qualitative and humanizing remains and will forever be a very challenging and daunting project. The only way in which it can be successfully extended to the mases is through massive and sustained projects of remediation. But as we have all seen as more and more universities have been founded and wider circles of the populace beyond the elites have been brought into higher institutions, no discernible large-scale projects of remediation are taking place. Standards have crashed disastrously, so much so that not only students are in need of remediation, but also the teachers, inclusive of large segments of the professoriate. Can lecturers, can professors, be persuaded that they, too, need retraining, need remediation? It can be done and perhaps will be done. Alas, the conditions do not seem ripe for this to happen.

Yes, this past week has been my very last week as a professional teacher. This is because at the end of June 2019, my voluntary retirement will come into effect. Meanwhile, in the last two academic years, I have been in what was described as a “phased retirement” plan in which for every one of the two years, I would teach only in the first of the two semesters of each year and go on leave for the second semester. This meant that my two-year phased retirement plan had prepared me well for this last week of my teaching career. More specifically, the time that I had to prepare for retirement made it possible for me to decide that when the time came – as it did this week – I would make sure that it would be so unsentimental that it would be like just any other week of my close to half a century of teaching. But things did no go exactly as I had anticipated them to go and, in a way, I am glad that they didn’t.

The first thing that “went wrong” was the fact that, contrary to my decision to leave quietly, to leave without informing the students in either of my two courses this semester that this week would be my last semester of teaching, I broke that decision and did tell the students that theirs would be my last classes. I would be lying if I claim to know why I broke that decision and instead of leaving quietly I chose, virtually on the spur of the moment, to tell the students in each class that this was my last week of teaching. In each class, I was surprised by the spontaneous gasp that erupted from nearly all the students when I made the announcement. Then, in quick succession, I was deeply touched by the students’ reaction to the announcement. Some students said that I did not look or seem to be someone close to an old professor who was about to retire. Others said that, as a matter of fact, they had been hoping to take other courses that I would be teaching in the future, some as soon as next semester! Others went farther by asking if my decision to retire could not be cancelled since it was voluntary at an institution like Harvard where you could continue teaching for as long as you wished!

We are all creatures of sentiment. I was very deeply moved by the students’ expressions of regret or concern about my retirement. Yes, their concern smacked of self-interest, but it was self-interest of the good kind. And without being exactly explicit about it, they were paying me a tremendous homage, the kind that has more worth than any awards, medals or prizes. Extremely lucky is the teacher whose students make spontaneous, heart-felt expressions of regret when they learn of that teacher’s imminent retirement! It is one of those rare but cherished moments in the teaching profession when you feel that you are in the greatest and most fulfilling profession in the world. A part of me still feels that I should have gone through those last classes of my teaching career like any other classes, devoid of any “annunciation”, any sense of a formal ending. But when something made me choose not to go that way, I was very pleased to discover that I probably would have “hurt” the feelings of the students – my students – if and when they found out that the classes this week were the last they were ever going to be able to take with me. This feeling, this thought, led me back to wondering why, in the first place, I had not wanted to announce my retirement in the classes this week.

I am still not sure of the reason – or reasons – but here are some reflections in lieu of a reason about which I have complete clarity or certainty. The very first classes I taught took place in 1971 when, as a postgraduate student at UI, I taught as a part-time lecturer in the Department of Extramural Studies of the Faculty of Education. I was teaching external candidates of the Ordinary and Advanced levels of the GCE. This means that, roughly speaking, I have been teaching for forty-seven years. When I moved as a postgraduate student at UI to New York University, I continued to teach, but this time, my students were university undergraduates. I don’t think this made much of a difference because I was still a student myself teaching students at lower rungs of the educational ladder. All over the world in the academic profession, when you are a student teacher, you are subjected to supervisory visitations by senior, older hands in the profession to see how effective you are as a beginner in the profession. On the surface, this might seem to have been what turned me into a teacher, what made me last for close to fifty years in the profession, most of the time as a fulfilled professional. But that is not the case. What do I mean by this?

Well, there is both a funny side and a very serious side to this issue. Here’s the “funny” side: as a student teacher, you very quickly discovered that the anxieties and insecurities that you feel in the classes that you taught were also there in many of the teachers of the classes in which you sat as a graduate student! Some of these teachers were very eminent professors who ought not to have felt or showed any anxieties, any insecurities at all but they did! On the more serious side, you, the student teacher, discovered that the great professors, the eminent women and men of higher learning, felt the same relief, the same gratitude when their classes went well that you felt when things went well in your classes. Thus, I surmise that what really turned me into a teacher with a passion for the profession in that period of my career when I was both a student and a teacher of students was the fact that I made the great discovery that teaching is so close to learning that you really cannot separate the two. Let me restate this observation, this “discovery” that I made in those years in the early 1970s when I was a student teacher: teaching is inseparable from learning because knowledge – or, more precisely knowing – does not flow in one direction; rather, it flows always and forever back and forth between teachers and learners and learners and teachers.

I do not of course wish to erase or even diminish the great distance that normatively exists between vastly educated and erudite teachers and researchers and their students and acolytes. To the contrary, as I formally retire from the profession, I wish to affirm the great and incalculable benefits that I have received from the access that I have had to the resources and conditions of work at some of the world’s great centers of instruction, learning and research. No, by no means do I want to take this for granted. However, what I am doing here – in this first among what will certainly be a series of reflections on my retirement – is clarify my experiences and thoughts over the course of the last fifty years about the place of teaching and learning in the modern university. Permit me to pose this issue as a concrete question: what will my experience of teaching and learning be after my retirement from the university, the academy? Put differently, when the classroom and the obligations of directly instructing and mentoring students go out of the question after my retirement, what will be left? Will I still be the teacher-cum-learner that I have been these past five decades?

In a way, life has already partly answered this question for me. Without delving too much into what is a profoundly personal and private matter, I can say a little here about the fact that illness of a chronic nature partly compelled me finally to act on my long-held intention to retire voluntarily long before I got too old, too “post-senescent” to be an effective teacher. Indeed, this semester of my last teaching term before retirement, I almost took a medical leave – which I had never taken once in all my forty-seven years of teaching. I was more than entitled to it, a medical leave made necessary by the effort and the time it takes to remain the active, enthusiastic and even passionate teacher that I hope I have always been. In late August, as the beginning of the semester approached, I worried endlessly about teaching when I was so ill, when I could easily apply for and get a medical leave. In the end, I chose not to take the leave and I am glad that I took that decision. This is because it turned out that the continued teaching, the continued appetite for the encounters, pleasures and insights of and from the classroom greatly enhanced my morale to meet the challenges of the chronic condition of illness. Well, enough said about this!

What is really important for me to share with the reader in these reflections is my certainty that that the classroom, being in my opinion a microcosm of life itself, my retirement will almost certainly be another round, another mode of teaching and learning – without the pressure and the controlled pedagogical environment of the academy. The “classroom of life” is more capacious, more stimulating than the classroom of the university, the academy? Yes, something like that. But, actually, more than that. And that is the heart of the matter for me. With all the talk of “town and gown”, of the university as necessarily a part of life outside its boundaries, it was never easy for me to integrate and manage my activities and obligations outside the university with my professional work in the academy. At one time in my youth, I actually resigned with the intension never to return to the university system. Why I returned, why I then went on to spend the next forty years in the academy, that is an experience I have never really understood and probably never will, even as others have offered “explanations”, either on my behalf or to spite me.

Since I have never been completely absent from the “classroom of life”, my full reintegration to it should be both smooth and fulfilling. For one thing, I shall have the time to do as much – or as little – as I want, without the tremendous pressure of the needs of my advanced graduate students placing too much weight on choices I make or do not make. In concrete terms, this column will be a huge beneficiary of my retirement! For instance, as I write this piece – the first since my last class yesterday, Thursday, November 29, 2018 – the previous constant pressure of meeting my deadline while also meeting my obligations as a teacher is almost absent. By this time next week, that pressure will be gone. Perhaps I should be cautious, I should not be too certain about retirement and its benefits? Perhaps I shall miss the pressure that I so much long to put behind me now? We shall see, but I hope not!

As we approach the presidential, federal, state and local elections early next year, one thing troubles my mind. This is the fact that once again, the majority of working and jobless poor people throughout the country will, as usual, not be voting in their own economic interests simply because they will not vote at all. Moreover, the small percentage of them that will vote will be doing so for the benefit and interests of the wealthy and/or corrupt minority of Nigerians that rule the country through their control of the ruling parties. This phenomenon is not unique to Nigeria; it is a fact of electoral behaviour in many nations and regions of the world, rich and poor, “developed” and “developing”.

Yes, the phenomenon is more pervasive in some countries than others, but it is common enough in our world to be regarded as a near universal phenomenon. Since it was not always the case that poor people had the right to vote, since in fact it took a long time in many parts of the world to achieve universal adult suffrage, it is bewildering to reckon with the fact that having at last won the right to vote, many of the world’s poor choose not to exercise that right. This is the topic of this week’s column, this deeply ironic fact of all the democracies of the world, liberal and illiberal, that the poor hardly participate in the electoral system for and in their own economic interests, whether they vote or do not vote. Before coming directly to the topic, permit me to explore a few relevant issues that may throw some light on our main topic.

Poor people vote but they cannot be voted for. Since there is no law in Nigeria or any country in the world that supports or enforces this proposition, it means that I am expressing it as a law, as even a constitutional doctrine, with an ironic intent. This is because it is rare, to the point of an impossibility or a joke. for any poor woman or man to present herself or himself as a candidate seeking the votes of fellow citizens. I mean, have you ever heard of such a phenomenon? Well, I have! And it was in this country under the regime of Ibrahim Babangida, when a bunch of penniless jokers formed the “YCIC Party” and presented themselves as candidates in the proposed but eventually cancelled elections of 1992. What does YCIC stand for? “You Chop; I Chop”! One still wonders whether that party would have recorded any significant electoral victories if the elections hadn’t been cancelled because of its bold claim: “all politicians, all political parties are in the game for money; we are being completely honest about this; if you vote us to power, we will chop and you, the electorate, will chop too”. But this was unlikely because everybody, including the generality of poor Nigerians, did not take the YCIC Party seriously. And that left our unwritten but ironclad “law” intact: poor people vote but they cannot be voted for.

As we explore the ramifications of our topic in this piece, it is necessary that we separate what happens when the poor vote from what happens when they don’t vote, even if the same result is produced by the two scenarios – the interests of the wealthy, of the corrupt, of the nation-wreckers prevail. [If this sounds too bitter, I admit it: I am very bitter on this point] It so happens that there is a name, a term for when the poor in their tens of millions don’t vote and it is “voter apathy”. Now, voter apathy is relatively very high in our country. Moreover, it takes some very cynical and self-defeating forms that are not common in other parts of the world. Now, one of the worst forms of this phenomenon of voter apathy in Nigeria is the act known in the Yoruba-speaking parts of the country as “dibo ko se’be”. Roughly translated, it means “make sure that if your vote cannot get you any other thing, it will at least get you enough to fill your soup pot for a day or two”. I am absolutely sure that there are equivalents of this phrase, “dibo ko se’be”, in most of the other languages of the country since open and flagrant vote buying and selling operates throughout the length and the breadth of the country.

For readers who might think that this practice of open and extensive vote-buying in Nigeria has not much to do with the wider phenomenon of voter apathy, I offer this following pithy explanation: vote buying is to voter apathy what the buying of the blood of the poor is for sustaining the nation’s blood banks. Why so? Well, in each case, the value of the “commodity” – the vote or blood – is dictated by forces and agents that have little respect for the intrinsic, life-sustaining values of the commodity. For readers who might regard this analogy between the selling of blood and the selling of votes by the poor as too strained, let me explain that I am drawing here on traditions of political thought that regard the vote as the bloodstream of the nation as a political community. In other words, I am thinking here of slogans designed to act as powerful counterforces to voter apathy like this slogan: “Make your vote count as if your life depends on it because it does!”

The preceding point leads directly to the heart of the matter in this essay: how and why the poor, when they vote, often vote against their own economic and social interests. Permit me to allude to how this issue played out in the presidential and federal elections of 2015 in contrast with what the pattern was in all the elections held between 1999 and 2015. What does this mean? Well, in 2015, largely because he seemed very credible in his anti-corruption electioneering promises and partly because all Nigerians – and especially poor Nigerians – knew that drastically reducing or altogether ending corruption was in their economic and social interest, Nigerians overwhelmingly voted for Buhari and the newly formed APC.

But, remember, compatriots: three times before the elections of 2015, Buhari had contested the presidential elections, losing very badly on each occasion. On each of those three previous occasions, Buhari had threatened fire and brimstone if he did not win; he had threatened Armageddon; and yet on each occasion, he had lost hopelessly. Well, not completely because he did win in his “home” regional zone of the Northwest and parts of the Northeast. At any rate, here’s the essential point that I am making here: In all the elections before 2015, Buhari lost because the votes he could manage to garner were mostly from his “own people” and had little to do with the economic and social interests of either his own people or of other Nigerian peoples; in the 2015, elections, his own people and other Nigerian peoples, mainly poor, saw their economic and social interests in Buhari’s electoral victory. What am I making of this argument?

This much I know: Buhari and the APC may prevail over Atiku Abubakar and the PDP in 2019. It is by no means a dead certainty, but it is highly probable. But what cannot be contested, what only the diehard, fanatical supporters of Buhari and the APC will argue is the proposition that if Buhari and the APC win in 2019, they would have done so on the same basis as their victory in 2015. This is because the people’s interests, the interests of the masses of the poor and the exploited and the looted and the interest of Buhari and the APC have diverged and gone completely different ways between 2015 and 2019. Let me be very concrete and frank on this point: in 2015, Buhari’s victory was a combination of the votes of his “own people” and the votes of the generality of poor Nigerian who saw in him an embodiment of their own interests, hopes and aspirations; in 2019, a Buhari victory will be comprise of the votes of his “own people” and the votes of the “own people” of his allies in other parts of the country, principally the Southwest and parts of the Northeast and the South-south. And broadly speaking, none of these blocs of voters or electoral constituencies will be based on the economic and social interests of the poor and the excluded majority of the national electorate.

This leads us back to the starting point of this discussion: when poor and underclass voters of the world shake off voter apathy and exercise their right to vote – ignoring for the moment their right to be voted for – they nearly always vote against their own economic interests. The typical factors are race and racism; tribe and tribalism; religion and religious bigotry; locals and indigenes versus settlers and immigrants; or a combination, any combination, of all of the above. The United States of America, one of the supposedly leading nations of liberal democracy in the world and in modern history, has for a long time down to the present period been based on deliberately counterposing the interests of white and black working and non-working poor against each other. A few concrete details: for a long time and again down to the present period, the suppression of the votes of the black working class was achieved by the active support of the white working and non-working poor, especially in the South. Another item: white and black evangelicals are normatively divided and opposed on either side of the big racial divide though, of course, both communities belong to the Christian faith at its most conservative, orthodox and literal-minded in their theology.

In moving to the conclusion of these reflections, let me make an observation based on hope, stubborn hope. What is this observation? Well, very simply, I say that we must not give up on hope, we must believe and work for those moments as we had in 2015 when the interests of the poor and the excluded converged with the interest of the diverse and multiple communities of the nation. Many voted for Buhari and the APC because they felt that they were voting for their “own people”; but an even larger number voted for Buhari because they saw in him the possibility of the realization of their interests, hopes and aspirations. This means that it is not always and forever the case that the poor vote against their own interests. But since this is not a frequent or regular occurrence, this means that true and progressive compatriots must recognize that elections do have their limits. In our country, elections take place very four years. What happens or does not happen in between this cycle of four years per every electoral season – that must become the object of our intense study and activist interventions.

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu