Category: Biodun Jeyifo

The midterm elections are over and providence, acting through the will of the people, has answered the desperate prayers of the majority of Americans for a Democratic “blue wave” to wash away the creeping autocracy and savage political tribalism of race against race, ethnic communities against ethnic communities created by Trump and Trumpism in under two years. In other words, and in plain language, the Democrats won and they won big in the elections. As of the date of the writing of this piece – Friday, November 9, 2018 – the final results have not yet been confirmed and officially recorded since, in a few states, the votes are still being counted. Nevertheless, the great majority of the votes have been counted and the staggering nature of the Democratic “blue wave” is already palpable. Permit me to give a few selected details.

First, in regaining control of the House of Representatives, the Democrats have outperformed all expectations of a whopping electoral victory. As things stand now, the Democrats have 225 seats to 199 seats for the Republicans, the party of Trump. Already, this is a margin of victory of historic proportions; it is much larger, for instance, than the Tea Party “red wave” of 2010 under the presidency of Barrack Obama. Of the 11 seats in the recent midterm election remaining for pickup by either party, the general expectation is that, going by the trends in the ongoing vote counts, the Democrats will pick up the majority of the seats, bringing the margin of their control of the House to around 36 or 37. Please remember that all they needed to win to regain control of the House was 23 votes.

Of course, the Democrats did not take control of the Senate. As a matter of fact, on Wednesday, the day after the election, the Republicans thought that they had not only retained the control of the Senate but had in fact substantially increased the size of their control of that upper chamber of Congress. But lo and behold, in subsequent days and as the continuing counting of the remaining votes progressed, Senate seats that the Republicans thought they had won turned out to have been won by the Democrats. It is still probable that they, the Republicans, will still have control of the Senate when all the counting of votes might have been concluded, but the increase in Republican control is likely to be no more than, at most, two. Given the fact that the Democrats were defending 10 seats in solid “red states” and the Republicans only one seat in a “blue state”, it was a great feat for the Democrats to have staved off the maniacal marathon campaigns of Trump to retake all the 10 seats in “red states” held by the Democrats.

In my own opinion, the single most important aspect of the astonishing victory of the Democrats in midterm elections 2018, is the extreme broad base, the diversity and the astute coalition politics undergirding the so-called “blue wave”. Thus, while the electoral base of the party of Trump is primarily – if indeed not exclusively – Whites buffeted by the restrictive community of Cuban Americans of Florida, here is the “rainbow coalition” makeup of the Democratic blue wave: African Americans; Asian Americans; Native Americans; women, especially black women; the youth population under the age of 30 of all demographic constituencies. Since Whites are still a dominant majority in the populace and the electorate, the great gender gap between women and men in party and electoral affiliation is a huge factor in the current and increasingly shrinking demographic and political spread of the Republican electoral base. In other words, for a long time now, the Republican party has been struggling to widen its appeal, its support far beyond the long racial dominance of Whites; Trump and Trumpism came on a mission to cast off diversity, inclusion and coalition-building, in the belief that Whites will still constitute the majority and will probably do so for a few more decades. This “strategy” has been dealt a crippling blow, a devastating refutation by the size and spread of the Democratic “blue wave” of midterm election of 2018. This is the central axis of the ideas and reflections that I wish to explore in this piece.

At this point in the discussion, permit me to restate the two basic ideas that I explored last week in the runup to midterm election 2018. The first idea is the fear and dread that if Trump and the Republicans won and retained control of both houses of parliament, America might tip over into the precipice of a homegrown, brutal and corrupt autocracy supported by tens of millions of Americans, most of them White and either openly defending white supremacy or quietly colluding with it. In support of this thesis, I offered as evidence many of the policies and actions of Trump and Trumpism, together with their impact. Let me remind the reader of the most troubling and astonishing aspect of this impact: Trump has so degraded nearly all the cherished, historic institutions of liberal democracy that Trump’s America now remarkably looks like many of the authoritarian and dysfunctional regimes of the Third World. That was the first of the two central ides that I explored in last week’s column.

In the second separate but linked idea, I suggested that Trump and Trumpism are also dire threats to the whole world. Why? Because Trump is not only intent on consolidating his neofascist and radically anti-democratic rule at home in the United States, he and his inner circle of supporters and loyalists are vigorous in their promotion or encouragement of dictators, “strongmen” and megalomaniacs in other parts of the world. Indeed, it was precisely on the basis of this particular point that I proposed what I regard as perhaps the central thesis of both this essay and last week’s piece: in Trump and Trumpism, we have a double jeopardy of historic dimensions. What is the nature of this double jeopardy?

Well, for much of the 20th century, America supported and propped up brutal and corrupt dictatorships in many parts of the world, in the mistaken, tragic belief that this was good for American global hegemony with regard to the country’s ideological, political and economic interests; but now, in Trump and Trumpism, what America has for such a long time done to other countries and peoples, America is now doing gradually but effectively at home, to its own institutions, its own peoples, its own future and posterity. In effect then, the abyss, the precipice that I have talked so much about in this series is a specter, a looming apocalypse for both America itself and the rest of the world. And on this point, it is very important, I believe, to draw the attention of America and Americans to the doubleness of this jeopardy because Americans have never really thought much about what their governments and ruling circles have done with regard to planting and supporting brutal and corrupt dictatorships around the world. This is a willful and unconscionable “innocence”, the kind of innocence about which, incidentally, James Baldwin talks about brilliantly and eloquently in his book, The Fire Next Time.

Logically, the Democratic blue wave of midterm election 2018, will not, in the first instance, seek to stop Trumpism and its dangerous adventures around the world. The immediate and perhaps only agenda is to stop or checkmate Trump and Trumpism at home. Let me be very specific and very concrete on this point: in the next two years leading to the end of the four-year term of Trump’s presidency, the Democrats are going to effectively, perhaps even overzealously, subject Trump to inquiries and investigations the likes of which we have never, ever seen in American political history. Eti wa a kun; oju wa a ri: our ears will hear much; our eyes will see a lot, a hell of a lot!

In the two years in which a Republican-controlled Congress exercised absolutely no checks and balances on Trump and his erratic and damaging actions and words on the presidency and virtually all the institutions of governance, Trump has engaged in levels of criminality, obscenity and mendacity previously unmatched by any modern American president. Now – boy oh boy! – all will be revealed and stopped, piece by piece by piece. Indeed, I predict, with great assurance, that by the end of the process, Trump will become completely damaged goods, so much so that he will either not be able to stand for election for a second term or if he does, he will not get the automatic endorsement of his party. In other words, as from January next year when the Democrats take control of the House, Trump will start facing a barrage of exposure, damage and loss of charisma and authority that will spur many Republicans who have secretly despised and hated him to come out of the woodwork.

If this predictive scenario is played out and Trump either goes to jail, is impeached or unceremoniously goes into political oblivion, Trumpism will not automatically come to an end with the personal fate that awaits Trump himself. As I remarked last week, Trumpism has become a beast lodged in the heart and the interstices of the American political order. In concrete terms, white supremacist jingoism and the politics of hate and fear have become deeply embedded in the political soul of America, almost in the manner in which, before historic desegregation, it marked and disfigured virtually all aspects of American life and culture. But all the same, there is a sliver of hope that the monumental cleanup that Democratic control of the House will set in motion as from January 2019, might provide yet another beginning for America. The crucial thing here is for the Democrats to keep faith with the broad and diverse coalition that made their victory in the election possible: the millennials; women; communities of color; educated and enlightened whites, especially suburban white women.

Bringing these reflections to a conclusion, I must draw the reader’s attention to a caveat: in the next two years before the presidential elections of 2020, gridlock will persist in Washington between the two parties and not much legislation to improve the condition of the working people and the middle classes that voted so strongly for the Democrats will be enacted. For that to happen, the Democrats will have to regain control of both houses of parliament in 2020. But before then, there will be the next two years of a divided Congress to go through. In those two years, the agenda, the main task will be a massive cleanup. Ironically, this was what Trump himself promised in 2016: a massive “draining of the swamp”. But he did not or could not drain the swamp; rather, the swamp not only claimed him, it almost completely drowned him.

In the final analysis, although the election was fundamentally a referendum on Trump and Trumpism, its ramifications are much bigger than Donald Trump. Just consider this, dear reader: if the Republicans had won and maintained their control of the House and the Senate, America would today have been tottering on the edge of the precipice. That it is not, that a massive cleanup is about to start, that is worth celebrating. For it is not always the case that a country is given the boon of a fresh start at new beginnings.

It is perhaps necessary in this concluding piece in the series that began two weeks ago in this column to start with the observation that even though the voices and forces of, on the one hand, restructuring and, on the other hand, anti-restructuring have dominated political discourses in our country in the last two or three decades, the real fault lines lie elsewhere and not in this particular opposition. In other words, I am suggesting that beyond and perhaps also above the opposition between federalists and anti-federalists, there are deeper, indeed more fundamental oppositions and contradictions in the role that metanarratives and micronarratives play in the constitution and the continuation of our country as a national political community. Please take note, dear reader, that I am talking specifically here of narratives – meta or micro – that are both told and untold on either side of the divide between federalists and anti-federalists.

In order to make a brief elaboration of this observation, permit me to quickly draw attention to one untold narrative before spending more time on the narratives that are regularly told and peddled, justifiably but also endlessly. What is this untold story or narrative? It is the terrible story of the conflict between justice and injustice in every part, every inch of the country, absolutely without any exception. Everywhere in the country, among and within all the ethnic, religious and regional-zonal communities of the land, this narrative exists anywhere and everywhere that one chooses to look, hear and listen. It is a quality of life narrative and also a narrative of bare existence itself; it is a human rights story and a socio-economic justice narrative. Of course, it is not the case that it is a forgotten or ignored story; rather, what I am arguing is the fact that it is a story that is set apart and bracketed in controversies between the federalists and the anti-federalists, almost without any exceptions.

Readers of this piece familiar with Marxist revolutionary thought and history might perhaps see in what I am arguing here a recycling of the old, so-called contradiction between the class question and the national question. I admit that this is not incorrect. However, beyond an impulse to revisit this old Marxian dialectic of class and nation, I am in this concluding piece to the series drawing attention to what strikes me as almost a Nigerian exceptionalism in the contemporary global rise and spread of ethno-nationalism. Let me put this observation or claim across as simply and directly as possible: in most of the other parts of the contemporary world, those who lead the ethno-national movements or struggles, whether separatist or only devolutionary, are not those who have robbed and looted their own peoples; rather, it is for the most part those who have consistently opposed the oppression and suffering of their peoples that lead the movements. Yes, wealthy ethno-nationalists who made their wealth through heartless looting and cheating often bankroll many of the ethno-national movements of the contemporary world, but it is rare for them to be the leading voices and figures in such struggle and movements – of course Nigeria excepted!

In order not to be accused of distorting the actual facts of the opposition between the fervent proponents of restructuring and federalism and the diehard apologists of the hegemonic, business-as-usual anti-federalism in power in the country at the present moment in history, I should perhaps specify here that I am making a distinction between the intellectuals and the politicians on both sides of the divide between federalists and anti-federalists. What do I mean by this distinction? Well, take this newspaper, The Nation, as an instructive case. Together with The Punch, this newspaper arguably has the most articulate and persuasive phalanx of proponents of federalism and restructuring among the news and information media in the country. Now, none of them can be accused of being unaware of the fact that the two leading ruling class political parties, the APC and the PDP, are totally dominated by wealthy men and women whose sources of enrichment are not in industry, not in manufacturing, not in inventions and innovations and not even in venture capitalism, but in naked and relentless looting of the wealth and resources of the nation. But all the same, for the most part, these intellectual warriors of federalism look to reformists and strongmen in either of these two parties – but mostly in the APC – for leadership of the federalist, restructuring projects. Or, failing that, they have not looked elsewhere – for instance, among the masses themselves – for leaders of clean, robust and mature movements of devolution. This observation brings me to a crucial point in the ongoing discussion.

Permit me to state the point with as much clarity as I can muster since its significance for present and future developments in the durability of political community in our country cannot be overstated. And so, very simply, I say that the case for federalism, for restructuring and devolution has been powerfully and persuasively made in Nigeria in at least the last decade and half – perhaps even longer than that. That being the case, we need to pay attention to how this significant development came to be. The conventional wisdom would give the tireless official and non-official debates that have taken place in the country – at national conferences, in seminars and public lectures and in newspaper advertorials, reports and columns – as the source of this triumph of the case for federalism and restructuring in our country. But this completely ignores the fact that the cause or project of federalism or restructuring is yet to achieve the status of a project or movement involving the action, the intervention of the masses of Nigerians in their millions, in their tens of millions. I make this assertion in light of the documented fact that in many other parts of the contemporary world, ethno-national and religious communities demanding true federalism or devolution are, typically, mass movements, i.e. movements in which the masses are actually matching and demonstrating with their feet, with their hearts and with their minds. But not in Nigeria.

I take a pause in my feelings, my ruminations on this matter. Ethno-national narratives are rife in our country. There are well-known stories of long held dreams of perpetual domination of all other groups in Nigeria by the Fulani or the Hausa-Fulani. There are narratives of the plight of the ethnonational groups of the South-south, in particular those in the Niger Delta. The narratives of the exclusion of Igbos, after the alleged failure of the project to exterminate them during the civil war, are known to every literate, adult Nigerian, Igbo and Non-Igbo. In the Southwest, quite possibly the ideological and intellectual powerhouse of the case for federalism and restructuring in the country today, there are innumerable stories being openly told of divide-and-conquer projects from the “North”, with “traitors” and “opportunists” on one side and “defenders” and “saviors” on the opposing side. Also well-known are the stories of the past and present travails of the peoples of the North-central region of the country, especially of the Benue and Plateau States, on both religious and minority-status grounds. Indeed, in the wake of the repeated cycles of savage killings associated with unchecked, rampaging herdsmen, these narratives from the Middle Belt region of the country have become the core of the case for the prevalence and “authority” of ethno-nationalism in our country at the present time. I think about all these narratives and I ask: why are there no mass protests and demonstrations for federalism and restructuring in Nigeria? I ask further: the stories are there, the mass feelings and sentiments subtending them are there, but where are the mass protests and demonstrations, the likes of which we routinely find in many other ethnonational movements in the world?

I would be lying if I said that I know or have the answer to these questions. I am not entirely clueless about probable answers, but I think it is meet and proper for me to admit that what I have in lieu of definite answers are hunches, educated guesswork. Here is one hunch, the one about which I spend most of my waking hours worrying about the most: all over the country, in every ethnonational and regional community, the masses of ordinary people are too preoccupied by the challenges of surviving with the minimum of material and psychological resources they can muster for them to march and protest about the narratives of exclusion, marginalization or domination they are told and themselves talk so much about. I think also of the Yoruba adage which, roughly translated, states that when hunger takes residence inside the stomach, there is no room for any other thing to enter therein. And please note that Nigeria is not noted for hunger demonstrations and marches either. Finally, I think: yes, the masses everywhere are not marching and protesting about the ethnonational narratives of domination they are so much obsessed by and that’s probably a good thing for Nigeria in the short run, but in the long run, it will all explode one day, in what ways and with what effects, no one can tell.

On the grounds of the global balance of forces and the world-historical process, everything that I have talked about in this series has happened or is happening in the age of a fully globalized neoliberal capitalism. Here are the few important things to keep in mind about this phrase which, to many right-wing or even independent readers, sounds like jargon, a Marxist jargon, if you please. Perhaps the most important thing of all to know and keep in mind about neoliberal capitalism everywhere is determination to keep regulations in check, to the barest minimum possible. There was an earlier phase of capitalism known as laissez faire capitalism which also tried to keep regulation within and between countries minimal, but it did not achieve success anywhere close to neoliberalism. That is because under laissez faire capitalism, it was still possible to distinguish between foreign and domestic capital, with a view to protecting domestic capital from the more powerful and rapacious foreign capital. But that is no longer deemed particularly necessary as all the financial services industries of the world are now very closely integrated and the billionaires of the world really have no country, so to speak.

To deregulation must be added privatization, on a monumental scale, of public wealth, resources and assets as the second important thing to keep in mind about neoliberalism. There is talk of PPP, public-private-partnership, but na lie! In many places throughout the world, where the “public” should be in the so-called PPP talisman, there is only “property” which gives us “private-property-partnership”: it is the same groups or classes of people who sell off public properties and assets that buy them. Only in a few places in the world has PPP worked to the betterment of public good and in those places, the difference has always come from how mobilized the public, the people are to protect and defend their interests. This leads us to the final or closing arguments in this series.

Neoliberalism has generated untold wealth in the world, probably on a scale that was thought impossible in all previous stages of economic growth in human history. But so also has it produced a widening of the gap between the rich and the poor, the haves and the have-nots, this in the very face of wealth production on a monumental scale. This, in turn, has turned many communities in the world against globalization. Hence the rise of nationalism and ethnonationalism in virtually all the regions of the world. The question is: when will the project of federalism and restructuring in Nigeria be informed by these worldwide currents?

As a sort of recapitulation, here are the questions with which I concluded last week’s piece in this column: “But what of the micro-narratives of survival and dignity for all the nations, ethnic and clan groups in the world? What of the fact that they are now rampant, not only in the successor nations of the Soviet Union but in nearly all the regions of the world? And Nigeria, why do musicians no longer sing of continental heroes of the struggles of Africa? Why is a Pan Nigeria metanarrative, not to talk of a Pan African one, so widely held in suspicion now?”

On the surface, the answer to these questions is quite simple: in our continent today, very few are the political and civic leaders who can speak in terms of the struggles of all the African peoples and be believed, not to talk of being followed. African leaders still talk of the continent as a whole, but only in terms of cooperation between the different sub-regions and countries, in discourses that vigorously and jealously guard the sovereignty of each nation. And within the nations themselves, leaders still speak of national unity and a common destiny, but everyone knows that they act mostly on behalf of their kinsmen and their ethnic and religious communities. Indeed, most important of all, everyone, including the leaders’ kinsmen and women and members of their ethnic and communities, know that political leaders, with very few exceptions, act only on behalf of their own individual selves, their own individual greed, lust and thievery. As the second epigraph to this piece states, the word of a confirmed rogue carries no weight!

Ah, but that adage comes from another age! Now, in our postcolonial age that has been overwhelmed by a rapacious global neoliberalism, the words of confirmed and even convicted rogues carry weight within their own ethnic and religious communities – as long as they are seen by and within those communities as heroes and champions. This point leads us to an appreciation of the complexity of the questions with which I began this piece. This point has to be very carefully and clearly explained: the micro-narratives of survival and dignity of ethnic nationalities and regional blocs in our country and our continent are not the creation of the looters in power in most of the African countries and the developing world; the rulers and politicians are for the most part cynical opportunists that are appropriating the micro-narratives for and in their own interests. This is because the micro-narratives have, in a manner of speaking, always existed. They were there when, in virtually all the colonized regions and spaces of the earth, the grand, totalizing metanarratives of struggle and liberation dominated the politics of more than three-fifths of the population of the planet. If this observation or claim seems too abstract, permit me to make it plain and straightforward.

All human groups, no matter how small and marginalized, have their own separate narratives of their struggles for survival and dignity, of their right to be in the world and in history with other groups. And we know that there is no extant language in the world in which such narratives are absent. More importantly, we know now that such narratives become “micro-narratives” when they are superseded by metanarratives that link them to the struggles of other peoples and communities. In other words, all the ethnic and language groups in Nigeria, Africa and the world have their own separate narratives of survival and dignity, narratives that became “micro-narratives” when they were subsumed into the grand, totalizing metanarratives of the struggles of all the colonized nations and peoples of the world. Anyone who knows the intimate details of the struggles for independence from colonialism in Nigeria, Kenya, India and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and all the other countries of Africa and Asia knows of what it took to incorporate the pre-existing micro-narratives into the historic metanarratives.

At this juncture in the discussion, I come to a particularly subtle or enigmatic issue concerning how narratives, whether they are meta or micro, operate in our world, especially with regard to building and sustaining political communities. It has been said a million times that we became Nigerians, we became Africans on the basis of colonial acts, edits and policies. In the specific Nigerian case, who does not know, putatively, that it was Lord Lugard that made us “Nigerians” by the amalgamation of the Southern and Northern Protectorates in 1914? But then, why have we left out of the story the fact that we became “Nigerians” also because we began to tell stories of ourselves as Nigerians, stories that we told both to ourselves and the whole world? “We are the stories that we tell ourselves”, as the first epigraph to this piece declares. Please note this hugely crucial fact: having made us “Nigerians” by colonial fiat, the British actually continued to encourage and manipulate the different and separate micro-narratives of our ethnic groups and religious communities. To the very last days of their overlordship in Nigeria, the British never tired of their exoticizing fascination with what they considered the “riot” of languages and ethnicities in our country. In other words, we, not the British, created and told metanarratives of ourselves as Nigerians, as Africans, as Black people.

It is important to put some flesh on the bare bones of this general profile. Thus, while it is true that the English language played a huge role in creating and legitimating metanarratives that made us Nigerians, it is also true that virtually all our indigenous languages and mother tongues played their own important parts in the story. The same is true of all the arts, all the idioms and genres of performance. Remember Hubert Ogunde? He wrote and performed in Yoruba, but his materials came from everywhere in the country: the Iva Valley miners’ strike and massacre of 1949; the agitation and struggles of the trade unions and the nationalist leaders; the Aba Women’s Revolt of 1929. The Onitsha Market Literature pamphleteers, as I reminded readers in last week’s piece, wove stories, in their inimitable manner, of the heroes of Nigerian and African liberation struggles. Nigerian Pidgin of the period was redolent with songs, tales and jokes about us as Nigerians and our tumultuous struggles against the British. One radio program in the then NBC, the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation, comes to mind: “Save Journey”. It was the rage of the whole country in its fascinating tales of the escapades of Nigerians of diverse ethnic backgrounds forging common identities on the road across the length and the breadth of the country. We are indeed the stories that we tell ourselves.

The case of Hubert Ogunde is indeed instructive. I have said that he drew the materials for his plays from a broad, Pan Nigerian archive. But he also relayed stories that could be regarded as micro-narratives of Yoruba ethno-national provenience. The latter was mostly in plays from the 1960s onward, while the former was in plays of the 1940s and 1950s, “Yoruba Ronu” (“Yorubas, Think!) being the most ethno-nationalist of the 1960s plays. But here is the important point that I wish to make here: while Ogunde’s plays and films of the 1960s to the end of his life were centered around ethno-national themes and ideas, he did not abandon the metanarratives of his younger and earlier years and days. Was this because Ogunde’s plays and films of this period were rooted in a metaphysics, a spirituality of general human dread and deliverance? Perhaps, but the broader point to take away from this observation is the fact that, at bottom, there really is no fundamental contradiction between metanarratives and micro-narratives; the one should flow or lead into the other. Why so, if so?

Here, I draw briefly from the ideas of the German Marxist philosopher, Walter Benjamin and our own Chinua Achebe on the heritage of narratives in and for all human communities. From Achebe: there are benevolent and malevolent fictions and narratives. Often, we can distinguish one from the other, but then quite often also, it is difficult to separate them. That being the case, we must always be vigilant, we must never give up in our efforts to separate the benevolent from the malevolent fictions and narratives. For those interested in exploring these ideas about narratives in the works of Achebe, the most relevant texts are the powerful essay titled, “The Truth of Fiction” and the series of metafictional reflections in the novel, Anthills of the Savannah. Here is the kernel of Walter Benjamin’s ideas about narratives: at one time in the cultural evolution of humankind, there were two distinct and separate traditions. These were, one, stories based on local experiences and told only by and to neighbours who have never travelled and for the most part will never travel far from home and, two, stories told by travelers of experiences and encounters on their journeys to close and distant places. But then, adds Benjamin, that age of complete separation between the two historic traditions of narrative is long gone and now local stories have merged with stories of faraway places.

In case anyone might miss the point I am deriving from Achebe and Benjamin in this discussion, let me make it clear: metanarratives and micro-narratives are often intertwined; and they both must pass the difficult test of their truth and falsehood contents, considered in terms of what good or harm they might cause to those who tell and hear them as stories. There is a special reason why I am placing this emphasis on this point and this is because now that ethno-nationalist micro-narratives have largely replaced or displaced the metanarratives of liberation of the late colonial and early postcolonial periods, the purveyors of the reinvented micro-narratives seem unaware of, or indifferent to the two conditionalities of Benjamin and Achebe. And please note, dear reader, what I ascribe to Achebe and Benjamin in this piece is actually not limited to them: all the cultures, all the language or speech communities of the world know that there are harmful stories and morally uplifting stories; they know that if you allow stories that frighten you and cripple your will to dominate your life, you will pay dearly for it.

I had expected to conclude the series this week, but clearly, there are still a few loose ends to tie up. One of these is precisely what kinds of micro-narratives I have been talking about in this series. I have said that these micronarratives are dominant in Nigeria and much of Africa and indeed, other parts of the contemporary world: well, what is the truth of this assertion? For instance, in the Nigerian case, is this related to the debates over the confrontation between proponents of restructuring and the unrelenting apostles of national unity and a strong, over-inflated centre? And if we are now beyond neo- or postcolonialism in a fully globalized capitalist neoliberalism, what does this portend for the pervasiveness of micronarratives of ethno-nationalists of the Left and the Right? Please join me in next week’s piece that will most assuredly conclude the series by taking up these questions.

Friday, September 28, 2018. I am writing this piece that will appear in this column in two days. By the time that this happens, something of great significance would have happened to change the course of the Supreme Court of the United States, otherwise known by its shorthand cognomen, SCOTUS. Yesterday, Thursday, September 27, 2018, all day long except for about two and a half hours when I had to go and teach, together with the couple of times when I had to go and get something to eat, I sat glued to my television set to watch a special hearing of the judiciary committee of the US Senate on a nominee to SCOTUS, Brett Kavanaugh. Altogether, the session lasted from around a little after 10:00 am to about 6:45 pm, just a little shy of a total of 9 hours.

Special sittings of the Judiciary Committee of the US Senate for confirmation of nominees to SCOTUS have, in recent times, become highly contested and theatrical affairs that draw audiences countable in their millions. Yesterday, the audience that watched the event all over the country was unprecedented in the dozens of millions that it attracted. The event was vintage American “breaking news” telecast that often has an effective global audience, thanks to the long reach of CNN, the king of the “breaking news” televisual and Internet phenomenon. For this reason, I think almost everyone reading this piece is aware of this event and its essential details. This is why I believe that apart from the barest minimum necessary, I do not have to go over these details and we can thus go directly to what I am calling in the title of this piece a long recess of SCOTUS from institutional independence and probity. So, what is the barest minimum of information or contextualization that we need to get us going?

Even before the allegations of grave sexual misconduct against Kavanaugh surfaced, his nomination had been very controversial. In the first place, everything hinged on the fact that if his nomination went through, he would tilt the balance of the justices of SCOTUS in favor of extreme, hardline conservatives against the liberals. At the moment, the balance is based on the fact that there are four on each side of the ideological divide. Now, in my own personal opinion, the US is mostly a centre-right country and often more “right” than “centre” in that combination, although the centre-left and the left do constitute quite a sizeable minority. At any rate, in this calculus of the political affiliations and ideological temperament of the current 8 Justices of SCOTUS, we can say that there is a delicate balance between these two camps. Kavanaugh would change that balance decisively not only because he is very, very right-wing and conservative, but also because he is openly and militantly so.

To round up on this minimum of details that we need to get into the real subject of this piece, it is useful, I think, to highlight two particularly salient aspects of Kavanaugh’s conservative, right-wing militancy. These are, first, the fact that he has stated categorically that American presidents cannot and should not be indicted for any crime or felonious misdemeanor committed while they are still in office. Of course, this pertains right now to Donald Trump, who faces the high probability of indictments that may arise from the Robert Mueller investigation. Beyond shielding Trump, this also has the dire prospect of turning America presidents (POTUS), into emperors or dictators above the law – all the laws of the land – while in office. In the second place, Kavanaugh is more right-wing than any of the current justices of SCOTUS on issues like workers’ rights, women’s rights, affirmative action, immigrants’ rights and regulatory controls over the economy and the environment. On women’s rights in particular, he is coldly and brutally hostile; this is quite apart from the four allegations of sexual assaults perpetrated by him. Clarence Thomas, the only African American Associate Justice of SCOTUS, has the dubious distinction of being the most conservative person on SCOTUS; but most commentators believe that Kavanaugh, if he succeeds in the ongoing vetting process, will be to the right of even Clarence Thomas. This is why, in the opinion polls, Kavanaugh has the highest disapproval figures in the history of polling about SCOTUS nominees. And especially, Kavanaugh is extremely unpopular among women of all categories – racial, ethnic, class, status and even political affiliation.

At this point, a small digression from the focus on SCOTUS to my own memory, my own experience of the high points of institutional crises in our own Supreme Court in Nigeria might help to bring a comparative perspective to the things that I am writing about in this piece. In the last years of my high school education, our “Supreme Court” was not our own local Supreme Court, it was the Privy Council in the United Kingdom, the highest court in, formerly the British empire and latterly the British Commonwealth. Nigerians who either had not been born then or were too young to have been aware of such things cannot imagine the great awe in which we all held the institutional power and legitimacy of the Privy Council. It was bad enough if your case was ever taken to that body overseas. But the heavens help you if you lost there. It was almost like losing in the metaphysical court of the Almighty!

But something happened in 1963. The NNDP or “Demo” as it was popularly known, seized power from the Action Group in the Western Region in elections that were so openly and cynically rigged that, Alhaji Dauda Adegbenro, the Premier “defeated” by S.L. Akintola, took his case all the way to our own Supreme Court, losing at every level to Akintola and the NNDP. This was because, as everyone knew, all the higher courts in the country were under the sway of the NPC, the NNDP’s allies that controlled the federal government. Well, to make a long story short, Adegbenro and the Action Group took their grievance to the Privy Council and the whole country waited for something bracing, something unforgettable to happen either way.

This did happen, but not in the way anyone had expected: Akintola and the NNDP lost but they completely rejected the decision of the Privy Council. I still vividly remember the burning headlines of one of the Yoruba-language newspapers of the period, “Akintola Taku!” It’s literal translation into English as “Akintola stubbornly refuses” does not do justice to the resonance of the phrase in Yoruba. Closer might be the longer and somewhat awkward, “Akintola’s Daredevil Refusal!” That was the last case from Nigeria that went to the Privy Council because soon after that, the NPC-led coalition that controlled the federal government declared the independence of our judicial order from the Privy Council and launched us into the serial and more or less permanent crises of the institutional probity and legitimacy of our Supreme Court. The most recent, indeed the current expression of this crisis of the probity of our Supreme Court can be seen in its complicity with prominent SAN’s hired by accused mega-looters in simply ignoring or setting aside the provisions of the Administration of Criminal Justice Act of 2015 (ACJA) with regard to the efficiency, expeditiousness and fairness of all criminal trials in Nigeria.

Getting back to SCOTUS and the controversial nomination of Brett Kavanaugh, it is perhaps necessary for me to explain why the specter of a long recess from institutional independence and probity looms over the success of his nomination. Like all law courts including all the supreme courts of the world, SCOTUS has recesses in between periods of unbroken sittings of the court. The longest recess of the year is the summer recess that lasts from either the last week of June or the first week of July to the first Monday of October. Apart from this long summer recess of nearly three months, SCOTUS has shorter recesses at about two-week intervals between sitting sessions when cases are being heard and judgments are being delivered to very short recesses when the Justices take stock of the cases before them and write up their judgments. Taking all these together, a long, interminable recess is out of the question in the operations of SCOTUS or any other supreme court in the world for that matter.

But of course, I am using the term “recess” in this piece in a way that though it is not unrelated to the standard usage of the term, it nevertheless expands its connotations widely in order to engage the ethical and philosophical bases on which the legitimacy and authority of SCOTUS are based. Let me put this more clearly: SCOTUS, like all the supreme courts of the nations of the world, usually has such a vast number of cases coming from the lower courts for review that it can never afford to take any long recesses from the calendar or roster of its operations. But what if, beneath a strict observance of its fixed order of operations between sittings and recesses, it takes a long recess from justice, from transparency and from probity? That is the heart of the matter in this piece.

Established in 1789 by the Judiciary Act of that year and as part of the US Constitution itself, SCOTUS, at about 229 years old, is one of the oldest supreme courts in the world, especially outside Europe. For many times in that long history, it has taken long recesses from racial justice, gender equality, the rights of other so-called hyphenated Americans beside Whites and the rights of workers and poor people in general. On the fate of Black people in particular, its recesses have lasted for very long periods, so much so that from the time that it granted full legal and moral personhood to Black people in the Plessy Versus Fergusson Case of 1896 – also known as the 14th Amendment – it took  58 years before the appearance of a more far-reaching and consequential SCOTUS decision instituted complete legal equality between Blacks and Whites, this being in the so-called Brown Versus Board of Education decision of 1954 (a.k.a. 15th Amendment). The same is true of SCOTUS decisions about women’s rights, workers rights versus the rights and interests of corporations and the wealthy: long, long recesses.

In the Kavanaugh case, we are on the brink of another one of these regressive and oppressive recesses when SCOTUS falls under the control and manipulation of powerful political, economic, racial and patriarchal forces and interests, in the process completely shedding its mantle of fairness, probity, legitimacy and authority. Thus, the forces pushing for the success of the nomination of Kavanaugh are formidable. But so are the forces ranged against him and those forces. But Kavanaugh and his backers have one considerable advantage: appointment to SCOTUS is for life, quite unlike what obtains in most of the other supreme courts of the nations of the world. When this provision was inserted into the originating legislation of 1896 that brought SCOTUS into being, life expectancy at birth of Americans was under 40. Now that it is between 78-80, the Associate Justices typically serve for many decades. Kavanaugh will be the youngest member of SCOTUS, quite apart from also potentially being its most militantly conservative. Thus, we are perhaps looking at a long, long recess from liberal, progressive and egalitarian decisions. However, it is also the case that we are looking at a looming period when, stripped of the last shreds of its aura of probity, authority and legitimacy, SCOTUS will come under a kind of pressure that it has hitherto never experienced in its long history. Hopefully, the Justices of our own Supreme Court are watching this unfolding drama. But I cannot bet on it.

Although I do not remember now how far back in time I first wrote about sports in this column, I do remember the surprise that it generated among many readers. One particular reader I shall identify by name since he is a younger friend and also a dedicated reader of this column. He is Wumi Raji, Associate Professor of Theatre Arts at OAU, Ife. Upon reading that first column on sports, he immediately sent me an email expressing his great relief to see that apart from reading, writing and worrying endlessly about the state of affairs in our country and our world, I still found time to watch and apparently enjoy sports, specifically tennis. Something similar happened these past two weeks when I have been writing about the US 2018 Open women’s singles final. This time around, people who wrote me did not exactly show surprise that I had written about a sporting event; rather, what many stated was how surprised they were to read and encounter the minutiae and details of tennis history and personalities in what I had written about the US Open. This idea is what prompts me to write this epilogue to the pieces that appeared in this column in the last two weeks.

It is a mistaken idea to think that only professional sports journalists and columnists should either write about sport and/or show an interest in the history and the other myriad of things peculiar to sport. In the first instance, as we all know, people, “ordinary” women and men, talk a lot about sports. Not only that, they make it their business to know what is going on, or what is not going on in sports. In this respect, it is safe to say that there are literally hundreds of thousands, even millions upon millions of sports commentators or “specialists” in this world. Indeed, comparing Nigeria with the United States, I would argue that there are far more self-made and self-certified sports commentators and analysts in Nigeria than in America. In my neighborhood at Oke-Bola in Ibadan, I hear many more commentaries on sports in the street and the roadside shops than the zero number of times that I have heard similar sports comments and analyses in the neighborhood where I live and work in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Moreover, the number of people in Nigeria that call in to participate in radio programmes on sports, especially football, is astounding, as I have found when I find the time – and the inclination – to listen to or “eavesdrop” on the conversations in these radio broadcasts.

Surprise, surprise: the people, the workers, the small or minuscule scale entrepreneurs, the hawkers and vendors, the unemployed and the so-called “unemployables”, they all show and express as much interest in sports as they do about politics and the (terrible) state of affairs in the nation and the world! If that is the case, what is the explanation for this fact? Let us not fail to see the answer to this question that stands as openly revealed as sunlight on a cloudless day: the significance, the fascination of sport is in sport itself. Yes, people often link nationalism, patriotism, ethnic or racial pride and passionate interest in a local team with whatever it is that makes sport significant in its own right. However, ultimately such sentiments are based on something inherent in sport that makes it possible and perhaps necessary to foist so many extraneous things on it. That something is compounded of the combination of talent, skill, creativity and genius that we find in spor in a manner in which we do not find them in virtually all other spheres of life – politics, trade and commerce, warfare, science and technology and even professions like teaching and religious pastorate.

Since an uncountable number of books, monographs and articles have been written on the significance of sports as sports, we do not need to dwell too long on the subject in this essay. In this context, it is enough, I think, to remind the reader that in the considered opinion of many philosophers, thinkers and pundits, the inherent significance of sports lies in the fact that all the things that we admire and cherish in it all constitute ends in themselves, without a need to be justified by how much value it generates in quantifiable terms. Think of soldering, teaching, trading, engineering, manufacturing, fashion and design, thieving and looting: the skill, the creativity, the genius we find in them are all calculated in measurable terms, in value added production. In sports only is the question of value added secondary to value that is inherent, immanent in sport itself. But that is not the end of the story! This observation leads us to the second part of this piece, this being sport not only in itself but in the world, powerfully and complexly.

For those among the readers of this piece who might have detected echoes of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s distinction between Being-in-itself and Being-in-the world or Being-with-the-other, I confess that I do have that Heideggerian distinction in mind in writing this piece. However, since this is not a professorial lecture but a newspaper column, rather than give a lengthy and largely unnecessary explanation, let me simply say that the pertinence of these ideas and concepts from Heidegger lies in his insistence that while Being-in-itself cannot and does not stand alone but is intimately and ultimately linked with Being-in-the-world, we must nonetheless give Being-in-itself its due acknowledgment and significance. In plain language, this means that for us to understand the powerful economic, commercial and political forces that we often find at the centre of the organization of sports in our epoch, we must first give sport its due as being inherently and immanently self-justifying. To give concrete expression to this abstract idea, permit me to go back to some aspects of what I wrote in this column in the preceding two weeks.

One of those who wrote to me on those pieces in this column in the last two weeks said dramatically, “I never knew that you were a fan of the Williams sisters!”. Yes, I am a fan of Venus and Serena because it is a great pleasure to watch them play, especially when they are at their best. With Serena especially, when she is serving well – and she has been almost universally adjudged to be the best server in tennis history, male and female – every other aspect of her game is in full steam – her pace and power, her movement, her shot selection and her crosscourt ground strokes. And at such moments when she is playing with the full panoply of her skills and talent, she even comes to the net a lot, something that is ordinarily not part of her armory. Beyond Serena, there are many other female and male players of the past and the present that I admire greatly and loved/love to watch – Pete Sampras, Andre Agassi, Martina Navratilova, Roger Federer, Yanick Noah, Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic, Justine Henin, Nick Kyrgios and many others. This is all strictly and exclusively with regard to their skills and talents as tennis players. But beyond that and with regard to their off-court lives and affairs, it is a different matter altogether. For instance, the day that I found out that Sampras was a Florida Republican, he fell out of favor completely as far as I was concerned! This, in spite of the fact that I have not read anything to indicate that he is in the right-wing, covertly or openly racist wing of the Republican party. What I do know, what his being Republican indicated to me was an explanation for why he was so apolitical, why he seemed not to care much about all the issues of gender equality and racial and ethnic diversity that were going on in tennis when he was the undisputed superstar and grand icon of the sport. I did not stop enjoying watching him play when I made this discovery; but neither did I remain content to separate his prowess on the court from his conservatism in politics.

In the two pieces to which this essay is a prologue, I focused much, if not exclusively, on the politics of class, race and gender in competitive tennis. If my intention in those two initiating pieces had been to cover all the major external forces acting on tennis, I would also have written about branding commercialism and the capitalist profit drive as inextricable dimensions of race and gender in tennis. This is because, at the present time and beginning with the transition to the Open Era, tennis has become more and more driven by monumental capital flows across the whole planet in ways that were unimaginable before the inception of the Open Era. Of all the individual sports in comparison with team sports, tennis stands alone as the one sport that can compete with the gaudy emporiums of the likes of Hollywood, the global music industry and the fashion and cosmetics industry. Like all these other formations of global capitalist trade in brands, tennis has an internal class and status differentiation that hides the depth of impoverishment behind and underneath the most visible and successful brands. That, for me, is the most important dimension of the Being-in-the-world of global competitive tennis. You hear of the Williams sisters, of RF (Roger Federer), of Rafa, of Djokovic and about a dozen or so other superstars, other brands. You hardly ever hear of the thousands in professional tennis who live, quite literally, from hand to mouth.

I am a fan of the Williams sisters because they have always sought to bring together the Being-in-itself of tennis with its Being-in-the-world. That’s partly because they came from Compton and have never forgotten from whence they came. That’s also partly because their father, the visionary Richard Williams, rigorously prepared them to be both outstanding tennis players and be ready for the racism, the sexism and the class and status paternalism they would face in tennis. Venus especially has been the leading voice for gender equality in the sport among the current generation of active players. And in her activism, she has combined an acute intelligence with gritty determination and uncommon grace. Serena has not been silent but has been more focused on the game itself, on her matchless skills and talents. Of recent, she has been showing more off-court advocacy for egalitarian issues. I think she has been hit by the revelation that becoming the GOAT has opened up for her a moral and political agency that she did not know that she has always had, for at least the last decade and half.

I look at Naomi Osaka, who has twice now defeated Serena, her childhood idol, the one person above all other tennis players from whom she derived the greatest inspiration to become a tennis player. I confidently expect that she will also become, like Serena and Venus, a multiple grand slam champion. But will she, like the Williams sisters, bring tennis-in-itself into cross-fertilization with tennis-in-the-world? She will not be in want of the circumstances and the motivation for this because she is half Black and half Japanese and plays under the flag of a country in which interracial biological and cultural heritage still faces great denial and prejudice.