The Nation Newspaper

Category: Biodun Jeyifo

  • Plot and plotlessness in the “Buhari script” of politics and history: reflections (1)

    Let’s get the formal elements of dramatic theory and cultural criticism out of the way of easy, enthralling comprehension of the reflections and observations in this essay. Only in conventional or “classical” dramas is plot a clearly discernible feature of a play. In more daring or more experimental plays, there are usually no discernible plots, so much so that such plays are said to be plotless. Plays with plots are easier to write and understand than plays without plots. That’s because plots make it easy for the playwright to divide the action of the drama into acts and scenes whose unfolding or development readers and audiences can easily follow. In contrast, scripts or plays that are plotless pose significant challenges of understanding and emotional connection for readers and audiences because they show no pattern of logic and plausibility to readers, audiences and sometimes even the actors performing the plotless script. All the same, plotless plays have one great philosophical advantage over plays with plots: they seem closer to life as it is lived and experienced by individuals and collectivities. This is because until the day a woman or man dies, the “plot” of his or her experience is known to nobody, least of all to herself or himself.

    One day, someone will write a play or a novel about the life and times of Muhammadu Buhari. Or a historical novel. Or a work of biographical non-fiction. In all probability, this will take place after all of us of the present living generation are gone. But it is also possible that this may happen sooner than usual, perhaps a few years from now in the script of a Nollywood film. All the ingredients for such a script are there aplenty: a charismatic professional warrior and politician with acts, declarations and controversies to fill the plot of a play, a novel or a non-fictional work full to the brim; membership of a very small group of men (no women; they are all men) who rose to dominant, hegemonic positions as both military and civilian rulers; dedicated, passionate followers and supporters ready to die for him and equally passionate enemies and opponents who think that his rule now and in the past presented our country with some of its most frightening crises; a personality as inscrutable and enigmatic as it is also as easy to confront and perhaps understand as a book written for children in a kindergarten class. Yes, Muhammadu Buhari is a fascinating subject for a play, a novel, a non-fictional biography. Indeed, already such a work has been written, but since it was written and published before the “second coming” of the president, it leaves out a lot that will undoubtedly great influence a future “Buhari script of history and politics”.

    In this column this week and next week, I provide an outline of plot and plotlessness in this imagined “Buhari script” of the future. On the basis of the explanation that I have given above on scripts with plots and those without plots, the outline that I provide herein will have a strong plot, together with its constitutive acts and scenes. All the same, I will not entirely leave out plotless forces and tendencies, if only because such aspects seem to constantly emerge from nowhere to complicate the drama of Muhammadu Buhari and Nigeria. Please note that the observations and reflections I provide in this column this week and next week around this “Buhari script” are carefully selected parts or segments of a whole, a totality that is simply impossible to ever effectively cover in any work of drama, fiction, or non-fictional biography. In other words, since both literally and philosophically we can never fully or exhaustively apprehend or represent the fullness and the totality of one life, all one can do is be extremely careful and felicitous in what one selects and/or leaves out in the totality that is life. With this caveat in mind then, here is an outline of the “Buhari script” broken down into its components: one prologue, three acts and one epilogue.

    Prologue: December 1983 – August 1985: the Rise and Fall of an Enigma

    For about twenty months, Buhari is absolutist military dictator unlike no other dictator in Nigeria up to that time and since then, to go by the distinctive acts and expressions of his rule. These include but are not limited to an announced intention to abolish usurious capitalism in Nigeria through the institution of “Islamic banking” principles as the normative center of the financial services industry; rejection of tutelage under the IMF and the World Bank, primarily through a disciplined and rapid repayment of the country’s foreign debt; declaration of war against indiscipline and corruption in public life, governmental and non-governmental; Decrees No 2 and 4, unequalled as the most draconian military decrees in the country’s legal and political history, one decree dismissing “truth” as a factor in any published account or report of the activities of the regime that shows it in a bad light and the other decree backdating prosecution and punishment for a crime that was not a crime when it was committed.

    There is great stuff for drama and irony here: Buhari is immensely popular; Buhari is immensely unpopular and always. Forever unsmiling in his public appearances, he gives the impression that he does not care whether he is popular and/or unpopular. In all probability, in time his unpopularity would have far overshadowed his popularity; but we will never know for sure because he was deposed before any of his decisive “Buharist” ideas and principles could become dominant or even regulative. Outstanding scandal: the 53 suitcases smuggling embarrassment that involved Buhari’s personal ADC and for which no one was punished, disciplined or held accountable.

    Act One: I985 – 2015: Decades in the Wilderness and the Origins of the Buhari Myth

    Without any precedent before him, Buhari stands as a candidate in nationwide presidential elections three times, losing badly in each of these elections. With each loss, his bitterness increases, his threat of Armageddon escalates. A distinct regional and religious colouration marks this threat, reaching a climax in the infamous “baboon and the dog will be soaked in blood” speech of April 2015. These are dog days for the former military dictator, days in the wilderness in which only his most ardent supporters and followers remain with him in a political party – the CPC – that was quite easily the most parochial and unimaginative of the country’s ruling class political parties. But precisely because of these very factors, Buhari’s political profile becomes somewhat legendary, if not mythical: he comes to signify and embody an untested anti-establishment populism, and he stands out as the one military ruler who cut a completely different figure from the seeming normative decadence, emptiness and imposture of the other former military rulers and leaders.

    Meanwhile, the enigma in our Prologue continues: Who really is Buhari? Would the country have been in much better circumstances if his military rule had not been cut short by the pro-IMF, pro-World Bank, barawo regime of Babangida and the forgettable reigns of Abacha and Abdulsalami? Have the years and decades mellowed him, or is he still the absolutist hegemon for whom even the truth shall not set his opponents and his critics free?

    Act Two: May 2015 – October 2017 – The Second Coming and the Destruction of a Myth

    Buhari returns to power as civilian ruler on the wave of a massive popularity that seems to be built on his almost mythical renown for incorruptibility, steadfastness and willfulness. On top of these qualities, his popularity becomes solidified nationwide, far beyond his enduring, restrictive location in parochialism and regionalism. His circle of ardent admirers, supporters and followers grows immensely and there arises an almost beatific hope that in Buhari the country has at last found the messiah for whom it had been looking for so long. The romance, the euphoria lasts for about eighteen months.

    In this 18-month period the plot thickens, as the popular saying puts it. The “plot” extends to the international community that massively buys into the Buhari legend, promising him all the help he would need to fight corruption to a bitter end. Politically and electorally, the replacement of the CPC with the winning mega-party, the APC, brings Buhari into an institutional setting that he had never cared to really understand, let alone master: coalition building and disciplined, effective party-formation. And also, for the first time ever, his war against indiscipline and corruption is put to the test as it had never been when he was a military dictator and a voice crying in the wilderness. Corruption fights back tenaciously, primarily in the law courts but also in the arena of the country’s national and state legislatures. Buhari and his Attorney General seem grievously unprepared and unskilled in comparison with the bastions of corruption in the judiciary and the legislature. As cases of breathtaking stealing and looting are revealed, so do the dozens of cases of stealing and looting that defy Buhari, his AGF and the anti-graft agencies multiply. But worse was still to come.

    The coup de grace, so to say, came when it began to be apparent that Buhari’s war against corruption was directed primarily, if not exclusively, at past misdeeds by opposition politicians and that corruption in his own party and administration was not only tolerated but openly condoned in some cases. The effective date of demystification when the Buhari myth or legend suffered its fatal blow was October 2017 in the “Mainagate” scandal. Before or simultaneously with Mainagate, there were the cases of the former SGF, Babachir David Lawal and the former Director General of the National Security Administration, Ayodele Oke. And others known, rumoured and unknown.

    Is Buhari’s capitulation to the “superior” power of corruption – as symbolized in the Maina, Lawal and Oke cases – only a setback or is it a more fundamental symptom that his 20-month military rule didn’t and couldn’t have revealed? My own honest and frank answer is: it is not a mere setback, it is a constitutive, defining aspect of his rule. I admit that this is not so much a statement of fact as it is an interpretation of history, my interpretation of history. I wish I was wrong or that time and events will prove me wrong; but deep down, my instincts tell me that only now are we, at last, beginning to see the real as opposed to the legendary or mythical Buhari.

    Act Three: November 2017 -: Back to the Future – the Party, the Polity, the Economy

    Right on the heels of the Mainagate scandal, the third act in the unfolding drama of the Buhari script of history and politics started with the spate of massacres of farmers and their communities by well-armed herdsmen toward the end of last year into the first few days and weeks of the new year. Fortuitously, it so happened that this development almost exactly coincided with both open and surreptitious launching of the reelection campaign of Buhari for the presidential elections of 2019. The slowness, the unpreparedness and the clumsiness with which Buhari himself, his administration and the security agencies responded to these killings have left most Nigerians stunned and fearful of the forebodings thrown up by these spectral massacres. Either Buhari does not know Nigeria or Nigeria does not know Buhari. Is this the man we elected with a massive mandate in 2015? Has he changed? Or has he always been the same man hidden behind the encrustation of larger-than-life myth and legend?

    Famously, in the very first remark that he made upon assuming office in May 2015 Buhari uttered the then enigmatic words that constitute the second epigraph to this piece: “I belong to everybody; I belong to nobody”. You belong to everybody, Mr. President? To big cattle ranchers and to itinerant cattle rearers? To farmers and herdsmen? To those who voted for you in 2015 and those who did not vote for you? To the North and the South? To unitarists and federalists? To those who want devolution of power and those who don’t?

    Really? You belong to both farmers and herdsmen, Mr. President? To the cabal and the nation and its millions of talakawa?

    • To be continued.

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

     

     

  • The lice of poor performance in government – is the Obasanjo-inspired CN movement likely to be truly reformist and progressive?

    When I was in the village, to make sure that lice die, you put them between two fingernails and press hard to ensure they die and they always leave blood stains on the fingernails. To ensure you do not have blood on your fingernails, you have to ensure that lice are not harboured anywhere within your vicinity. The lice of poor performance in government – poverty, insecurity, poor economic management, nepotism, gross dereliction of duty, condonation of misdeed – if not outright encouragement of it, lack of progress and hope for the future, lack of national cohesion and poor management of internal political dynamics and widening inequality – are very much with us today. With such lice of general and specific poor performance and crying poverty with us, our fingers will not be dry of ‘blood’. Olusegun Obasanjo, “A Clarion Call”

    The quote above comes from the first few paragraphs of Obasanjo’s widely discussed but grossly misnamed “letter” to Buhari. As I tried to show in last week’s column, Obasanjo’s document was not addressed at all to Buhari; it was addressed to the whole nation. Moreover, Obasanjo’s indictment went well beyond Buhari and his administration to embrace and implicate the entire political class and the ruling class political parties. This is why the former president was so scathing on both the PDP and the APC in his “clarion call”. Also, this is why Obasanjo placed great emphasis, great passion, on the need for the creation of a movement of Nigerians from below and across the length and breadth of the whole country. But will politicians decamp en mass from the APC and the PDP and from the other ruling class parties to join the movement of “Concerned Nigerians” (CN) that Obasanjo envisions as the nemesis of our bankrupt political class? More importantly, if this happens, how likely is the Obasanjo-inspired movement of Nigerians to be truly effective against what the former president, in the quote that serves as an epigraph to this essay, the “lice of poor performance in government”? These are the questions that I address in this piece.

    It is a grotesque and shocking metaphor, “the lice of poor performance in government”. But it is a poor or unsatisfactory metaphor with which to try to invoke the current dire state and frightening future prospects of our country. This is because on the whole, lice do not kill their human victims, though of course they do cause great physical discomfort and unwanted social embarrassment. But most of the evils that Obasanjo lists under the “lice of poor performance in government” kill and they kill in astronomical numbers: poverty, insecurity, poor economic management, gross dereliction of duty, condonation of misdeed, poor management of internal political dynamics and widening inequality. Insecurity of life, limb and property alone accounts for hundreds of thousands dead while poor economic management, poverty and poor management of internal political dynamics place the lives of millions of Nigerians in great danger and a slow, festering despair that has seen the rise of suicides in our country. No, the crisis, the tragedy of poor performance in government in Nigeria goes well beyond the discomforts and the shame that lice cause their victims.

    Literally and physiologically, the problems that lice cause are skin deep; they do not get to the inner recesses of the great internal organs and tissues of the human body. From this, I deduce the following point: Obasanjo’s passion and born-again angst about the terrible crises and tragedies caused by poor performance in government in Nigeria are skin deep, they are not life-changing or even personality-changing. I say this not with or in anger or outright dismissal of Obasanjo’s motives and intentions, but with a desire to warn Nigerians to be wary of whatever may be the former president’s conscious and unconscious motivations. At the very least, I am asking Nigerians to carefully and critically examine present and future developments surrounding the former president’s call for the formation of this movement of Concerned Nigerians. Permit me to give a short elaboration of this observation.

    In the slightly more than a week since it was made, perhaps the single most noteworthy development pertaining to Obasanjo’s call for the formation of this movement is the number of reported or hinted defections to the movement of politicians from the PDP and the APC, most of them past and present members of the National Assembly. Of these, many are allegedly defecting to the Obasanjo-inspired “CN” because they are fearful that they may not get their party’s nomination for the 2019 general and state elections. As a result of this development, Obasanjo’s CN has more or less merged with or morphed into a so-called “Third Force” that had been in the news long before Obasanjo issued his recent “clarion call”. This so-called “Third Force” is “third” to the numbers 1 and 2 spots in the Nigerian political landscape occupied by the APC and the PDP respectively. Thus, if Obasanjo’s CN is morphing into or merging with this “Third Force” it means that Obasanjo’s movement is no more or less than a realignment of forces among the political class. Nigerians, please don’t be fooled – the same politicians responsible for the “lice of poor performance in government” in the APC and the PDP administrations are heading to Obasanjo’s CN with a view to capturing it!

    In fairness to Obasanjo, he did have something to say in his “clarion call” about the possibility of the CN becoming a political party fielding candidates for elections. This is what he said: “But if at any stage the Movement wishes to metamorphose into a candidate-sponsoring Movement for elections, I will bow out of the Movement because I will continue to maintain my non-partisan position”. This seems to be a noble gesture. But I suggest that Obasanjo is being disingenuous here. This is because the woman or man that inspires a movement is its spiritual godmother or godfather, its symbolic and honorific head, with enormous influence over it. Indeed, without having inspired or created such a movement, in and out of office, in the military or the civilian dispensations, Obasanjo has always aspired to be this sort of figure in the affairs of the Nigerian political class: the Godfather, the Boss of Bosses. And in this role, he has presided over his own quota of the “lice of poor political government”. All the same, from the projected Concerned Nigerians movement, will a new, born-again democrat and populist emerge from the Obasanjo that we all know, the Obasanjo who, perhaps more than any other head of state in our country’s history – with the possible exception of Sani Abacha – hated and feared the actual and potential power ordinary Nigerians?

    Many parts of the “clarion call” seek to indicate that this is an altogether new and reformed Obasanjo that is sincere, idealistic and focused on the ability and willingness of ordinary Nigerians from all walks of life and every corner of the country to take their individual and collective destinies into their own hands. Perhaps the most eloquent of such passages in the “clarion call” is the following segment that I am quoting in full: “Democracy is sustained and measured not by leaders doing extra-ordinary things, (invariably, leaders fail to do ordinary things very well), but by citizens rising up to do ordinary things extra-ordinarily well. Our democracy, development and progress at this juncture require ordinary citizens of Nigeria to do the extra-ordinary things of changing the course and direction of our lackluster performance and development. If leadership fails, citizens must not fail and there lies the beauty and importance of democracy. We are challenged by the current situation; we must neither adopt spirit of cowardice nor timidity let alone impotence but must be sustained by courage, determination and commitment to say and do and to persist until we achieve upliftment for Nigeria. Nothing ventured, nothing gained and we believe that our venturing will not be in vain. God of Nigeria has endowed this country adequately and our non-performance cannot be blamed on God but on leadership”.

    In power, Obasanjo hated workers’ unions and their leaders with passion, especially the most radical and genuine among them. He hated student activists, especially the most courageous and outspoken among them. He couldn’t stand civil and human rights organizations and their spokespersons. He it was who, as military head of state, sent paramilitary forces into some universities to shoot and kill students. He sacked militant lecturers and those he couldn’t sack he hounded mercilessly. He had absolutely no use for the power of the masses of Nigerians to either elect or vote out of office their leaders and this was why he presided over the worst cases of election rigging in our country’s history since the return to formal civilian rule. The only concentration of ordinary Nigerians that Obasanjo loved and embraced were the crowds of bought and manipulated supporters in PDP rallies; any other assemblage of Nigerians other than for religious purposes terrified him and he had them closely monitored and controlled. Popular democracy, even populism of any kind from the pen of such a political hegemon as Olusegun Obasanjo is like saintly beatitudes from the mouth of a perjurer and a murderer.

    I admit it: no man or woman is beyond redemption, in this case the redemption of political and historical redress against injustices and the misdeeds of the past. There is the ghost of a probability that Obasanjo in particular and the whole political class in our country in general, are seeking just such a redemption from their long, long breeding of the lice of poor performance in government. The first step in this direction is for them, Obasanjo and the political class, to admit to, and take personal and collective responsibility for the evils and misdeeds they have perpetrated, again and again. Let Olusegun Obasanjo take the first step in this act of redress and redemption: let him be man enough to confess his “sins”, let him admit that he, too, bred a lot of the lice of poor performance in government. Perhaps then, we may realistically hope that the movement he wants to create might just be reformist enough to make a historical and political difference.

  • Buhari pleads in the name of God; his Defence Minister talks of remote and immediate causes

    On Monday this past week, President Buhari surprised many Nigerians with a plea for farmers and their communities, in the name of God, to be accommodating to their herdsmen countrymen. He could have directed a plea to the herdsmen communities, also in the name of God, to stop using mass carnage as a means of forcing their farming compatriots to be accommodating towards them. But he didn’t. A few days later his Minister of Defence, Mansur Dan-Ali, gave a press conference right after a meeting of the National Security Council which was presided by Buhari himself. Like the president just a few days before him, Dan-Ali’s plea was made on behalf of the predicament of herders and their interests. In essence, here is what the Defence Minister said at the press conference: the remote cause of the killings of farmers is the blockage of the routes that herdsmen have been traversing all over the country for a long, long time. As for the immediate cause of the killings, Dan-Ali was unequivocal: it is because of the anti-grazing laws that some states have enacted, with more states about to follow their example.

    The one-sidedness of the President and his Defence Minister is too obvious to warrant any comment here. What I wish to point out, in great chagrin, is the seeming powerlessness of Buhari and Dan-Ali to stop the killings and/or use their credibility and influence with the herders and their communities to persuade them to embrace the path of peaceful resolution of the conflict. How can one get the President and his Defence Minister to understand that to most Nigerians, they are not powerless men; on the contrary, they are enormously powerful men at the helm of the security apparatus of the country. A great inversion: tremendous power hiding its force behind the mask of clueless powerlessness!

     

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • For the dead of Logo and Guma LGAs of Benue, warnings of their coming massacre were loud and clear, but the government failed them – why?

    For the dead of Logo and Guma LGAs of Benue, warnings of their coming massacre were loud and clear, but the government failed them – why?

    “The report is about 70 pages. I gave a breakdown which is from 1999 till date, of places where a Fulani man or herdsman pointed a finger at a farmer and vice versa and what followed. I gave the analysis state by state and local government by local government and Guma and Logo was (sic) part of my report”. Alhaji Sale Bayari, Member of the Board of Trustees, Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders Association, The Nation, Sunday, January 14, 2018, Page 4
    “The documents are here, I will hand them over to you. I wrote to him (Buhari) on the planned attack by Fulani herdsmen because these threats were on the streets. I intimated Mr. President and it was put in writing. On the same October 7, 2017, I wrote the Inspector General of Police. I told him of a planned attack on our people when there was no response (from the President).” Governor, Benue State, Samuel Ortom, to Visiting Senate Ad Hoc Committee on Security Infrastructure, as published in Sunday Telegraph, January 14, 2018, Page 3

    As the reader will easily perceive, the two quotations above are respectively from representatives of the two opposing sides in the tragic killings of farming communities of the Logo and Guma local government areas of Benue state on New Year’s Day, January 1, 2018. On one side – the side of the herders – is the Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders Association. And on the other – the side of farmers – is the Benue State Government. Incidentally, Governor Ortom is from Logo, one of the two communities about which representatives of both the herders and the farmers had warned the Buhari administration that things were so far beyond boiling point that, sooner or later, deaths on a mass scale could happen anytime.

    From the surfeit of accounts, speculations and commentaries on the killings of the farming communities by armed, rampaging herders, I am drawing special attention to these two particular accounts for two very closely connected reasons. Here’s the first reason: the government was warned – desperately and passionately warned – by representatives of both herders and farmers that killings were about to take place in specifically identified communities. Please take note: the warnings came from both sides. And here’s the second reason: the warnings were driven by an astonishing attentiveness to details of where killings would or could take place, together with the number of very highly placed government security and administrative personnel to whom pleas for saving intervention were addressed.

    In this essay, I wish to explore these two factors because, in my opinion, they go to the heart of the crisis that we face now and in the months and years ahead in the aftermath of this tragic standoff between herders and farmers. In what follows, this is the bottom line of the discussion: why did the government not act in time and with determination on the warnings it received thereby condemning the communities of Logo and Guma of Benue to needless deaths? And across the length and the breadth of the country in diverse states of the federation, those that may be consumed by failure to resolve this crisis, what must we do to prevent them/us from dying the deaths of the doomed and the foretold?

    In an article published in Premium Times on January 17, 2018 and titled “How to end violent clashes between farmers and herdsmen”, Femi Falana, SAN, with his usual thoroughness and perspicacity, gave some very thoughtful suggestions on how to resolve this crisis to the satisfaction of all sides and for the survival of the nation. All well and good. And moreover, there are many other articles like Falana’s outstanding piece in Premium Times, all brimming with ideas for the resolution of the crisis. I have no quarrel with these articles or their authors. Indeed, I applaud and endorse most of their ideas and suggestions. However, I do have a fundamental question for them, based on the complete nonchalance with which the administration and the security agencies treated the warnings that representatives of both herders and farmers gave to the government about the looming massacres of Logo and Guma. This is the question: why would the government and the security agencies listen to you and follow your advice when they did not heed the warnings of representatives of herders and farmers? I repeat: why did the government ignore the warnings, why?

    These questions arose in my mind and have remained as gnawing, even terrifying fixtures on my consciousness because the two warnings from the representatives of herders and farmers are extraordinary in the desperation with which they tried to get the government, the security agencies and personnel to act to avert the deaths in Logo and Guma in Benue and other communities in other states in the North. Dear reader, if you think I exaggerate in making this observation, this claim, please go and read the accounts of Governor Ortom and Alhaji Bayari of Miyetti Allah and judge for yourself; I have given the citations where their accounts can be found. To their credit, the two men did everything humanly possible to pique the conscience, the humanity and the patriotism of the president and many other highly placed officials, to no avail. As a matter of fact, to underscore the point I am making here, permit me to quote briefly from the account of each man.

    First, from Governor Ortom: “I intimated Mr. President and it was put to writing. On the same October 7, 2017, I wrote to the Inspector General of Police. I told him of a planned attack on our people when there was no response (i.e. from the president)…Of course, I wrote to the Senate President for (his) information and   the Speaker. On the 7th October when I was to the Acting President and the Inspector General of Police, I also wrote to the National Security Adviser on this planned attack against Benue people. I also wrote to the Director General of the Department of State Security (DSS). And when there was no action, I followed it up with a reminder on 27th of October. There was no response. Of course, the National Security Adviser invited us for a meeting two times but it was put off”.

    Secondly, from Alhaji Bayari of Miyetti Allah: “I did (warn) him since May 2015 before he (President Buhari) was sworn in. I took it to his office in Maitama when the present Comptroller of Customs, Hameed Ali, was his Chief of Staff, and after one year when I didn’t get a response, I wrote another cover letter and went to submit that one in the Villa and it was acknowledged and nobody replied till date. Even as at that time, because of the series of crises, I suggested that government should start looking at the creation of a ministry of livestock and associated services so that these problems would be addressed and if they had heeded, this problem would have been addressed long ago. I gave him (the President) a breakdown of likely explosive areas that we have in terms of herdsmen and farmers’ restiveness. Yes, in 21 states and about 75 local governments. The places include Oye Local Government Area and two other local governments in the northern part of Ekiti, I gave him a breakdown of the problem there; in Oyo State like Shaki area, Akwa Ibom, Cross River, Rivers, Delta, Edo, Bauchi, Gombe, Yola. I treated them and gave the breakdown because they are the boiling spots… I gave the analysis state by state and local government by local government and Guma and Logo was (sic) part of my report”.

    Against the background provided by these testimonies, I suggest that until we know the reason or reasons why the government and the security agencies completely failed to respond to the detailed, dire warnings given to them about the killings in Guma and Logo, we cannot realistically expect that this crisis will be resolved soon or at all before, heaven forbid, far worse things happen to other communities and, indeed, the nation itself. Since we cannot know for certain why the government did not act but can only make intelligent guesses fueled by a genuine desire for a just, equitable and honourable solution to this crisis, it is important for me to emphasize the fact that in the following closing paragraphs of this piece, I am narrowing down the answers to our question to three possibilities, only three out of at least half a dozen answers or explanations that one could think of.

    First of all, it is probably the case that President Buhari’s now quite legendary slowness or laziness in responding to any and all crises has infected the entire edifice of governance and security in our country, so much so that this indolence, this sloth has become systemic. This means that the presidency in Nigeria being so enormously powerful and influential, it follows that the whole apparatus of governance depends on the character, will and disposition of the incumbent. That being the case, it means that whatever the president is the government will be and there is no way of getting around this fact. Remember, dear reader, that in medieval Christianity, sloth was one of the seven deadly sins. Islam, the President’s religion, also frowns on sloth, considering it a disease of the spirit and the psyche that prevents the faithful from the mental and psychological agility needed both to strenuously observe the injunctions of Allah and his prophets and to attend to the great demands and exertions that human life makes on rulers and the elite. Indeed, in the Yoruba language, there is a mental and psychological ailment known as “oledarun” which roughly translates into English as “laziness has become a disease”. This means that, with a few exceptions, the administration of Muhammadu Buhari is an “oledarun” government. In the refracted light of this “explanation”, the people slaughtered in Guma and Logo would be alive today if we did not have this “oledarun” administration controlling the conditions of our lives and the security of our individual and collective existence.

    Beyond the “oledarun” factor, it is possible that the administration, together with the security agencies, did nothing about the warnings because the looming specter of mass killings pertained more to farmers than it did to herders. I wish to be absolutely clear and unambiguous about this point: the warnings indicated that the victims of the killings would be farmers and their communities, rather than the communities of herders; and because of this, the administration was content to do nothing at all. As a matter of fact, if you read between the lines of the testimony of Alhaji Bayari of Miyetti Allah, you will find the unmistakable intimation that herders were going to strike and strike all over the country if their grievances were not addressed, in particular the grievance of the anti-open grazing law of Benue State that seemed about to be duplicated in other states of the country.

    Our third and final probable explanation is the worst, the most unconscionable of our three conjectures: the administration and the security agencies deliberately ignored warnings because they intended to “use” the killings in Guma and logo as a wake-up call to farmers and farming communities everywhere in the country to the determination of Fulani herdsmen not to be economically and existentially wiped out by laws and practices inimical to their survival. I have no evidence for this scenario and I do admit that there is an element of paranoia about it. But this is Nigeria, Buhari’s Nigeria where the dream, the hopes that brought him to power have in many respects turned into a nightmare for millions of the Nigerian masses.

    Which of these three “explanations” – or a combination thereof – seems the most plausible? I leave the answer to this question to you, the reader!

  • First, disarm the herdsmen (and famers); then work for a just and honourable peace between them

    First, disarm the herdsmen (and famers); then work for a just and honourable peace between them

    Yes, first of all, the killings must stop immediately. The only sure way to bring that about is effective disarming of the armed herdsmen, together with those among farmers and farming communities that resort to arms, either offensively or in defense from the armed, rampaging herders. Then, secondly, the government and all stakeholders must secure a just, honourable and lasting peace. The first task should be relatively easy, on the condition that the Buhari administration has the will, the foresight and the humanness necessary to accomplish the task. The second task – the task of winning and securing peace – is considerably more daunting, at the same time that it is the more necessary or obligatory task. In this piece, I will discuss both of these tasks, but with more focus on the first. Before getting to the details of each of the two tasks, permit me to state with as much emphasis as possible that the second task – winning and securing peace – cannot and will never be accomplished without first accomplishing the first task, that of voluntary and/or compelled disarmament of the herdsmen. For this reason, let us turn, first, to this first task.

    It is nothing short of astonishing to the highest degree that, as far as I am aware, neither the current administration, nor any other federal or state administration before it, has ever expressed the need to disarm the herdsmen (and farmers), let alone act on that need. And yet, it is one of the cornerstones of the theory and practice of governance in all the modern states of the world that the state must have and exercise a monopoly over the means and instruments of violence. The only exceptions to this universal principle of monopoly of the modern state over access to the instruments and means of violence are, compositely, special cases where private companies and individual citizens are allowed or licensed by the state to carry arms for self-protection. Behind this principle is the idea that all citizens and groups agree to give up their right to possessing arms in the expectation that the state, to which monopoly over the means of violence has been ceded, will provide protection for all. And behind everything about this principle is the Hobbesian philosophical idea that since as a species, human beings are extremely prone to violence, only the state can protect us all from violence by maintaining a monopoly over the instruments of violence.

    Of course, we do know that in Nigeria as in many other modern states of the world, both open and clandestine groups buy and use deadly weapons. But such groups do so illegally and for only as long as the state concerned does not move to disarm them. Bearing this in mind, we must recognize here that to date in post-independence Nigeria, only the armed Fulani herdsmen have gone unchallenged by the Nigerian state. Every other group that has resorted to arms in pursuit of their declared and undeclared interests have been confronted with the organized violence of the state, based on that theory and practice of the monopolization of the instruments of violence by the modern state. Permit me to give a concrete historical and anecdotal elaboration of this observation, this claim.

    Thus, I recall here many cases from the first decade of independence to the present period: Isaac Adaka Boro and revolutionaries of the Niger Delta that took up arms against the Federal  government in the early 1960s and were ultimately diverted from their rebellion by the outbreak of the civil war in which they then fought on the federal side; the villagers of Ugep in Cross River State and the rural insurgents of the Agbekoya uprising in the West both of whom took up arms against the state and the military during the civil war and were met with the counter-violence of the state; the Bakolori peasants of Sokoto state against whose bows, arrows and machetes the Shagari administration used maximum state violence; the Niger Delta militants from the 1980s to the present, many of whom have been disarmed and some of whom still remain armed and totally opposed to the Nigerian state; Ibrahim El-Zakyzaky and the Shiites who, against the claims of the Nigerian state that they have resorted to arms, claim that they have never used weapons in their campaign for religious, social and civic rights; Boko Haram; dozens of armed bandits, kidnappers, extortionists and marauders who, from the late 80s to the present have been waging wars of terror, mayhem and extortion in diverse areas of the country, in the rural areas as well as the urban centers. All of these groups and individuals, without exception, have been engaged by the Nigerian state and its police and military institutions. But there is a single exception and it is the Fulani herdsmen.

    The question we, the Nigerian people, must now ask the Buhari administration is why its treatment of the armed Fulani herdsmen is or should be different from all the other cases of the resort to arms by individuals and groups, from the first decade of independence to the present. This is the same administration that in Zaria, in 2015, deployed the full force of the Nigerian military against protesting and demonstrating Shiites, killing more than 300 of the demonstrators and marchers. To this day, against the government’s claim that they were armed, the Shiites claim that they were unarmed. Significantly, the claim of the Shiites has been backed by many independent Nigerian and foreign observers and Human Rights groups. And what of the Nigerian army’s “Operation Python Dance 11” directed against IPOB which, for all its violent and hateful rhetoric and utterances, remains an unarmed group? Why hasn’t there been an “Operation Camel Dance 11” against the herdsmen, why?

    I mention the case of IPOB and “Operation Python Dance 11” for one particular reason which is this: in spite of the ferocity and the triumphalism of the Operation Python Dance, no one was killed. IPOB and its sympathizers of course claim that there were deaths, but these have not been independently verified. That being the case, I wish to lay emphasis on the fact that it is always possible for the Nigerian or any other state in the world to disarm insurgent or recalcitrant groups and individuals without murdering their leaders and members. In other words, voluntary disarmament is everywhere in the world the normally desired or preferred method. Apart from the significant factor of avoidance of destruction of people, there is the added perspective of giving insurgents or aggrieved groups a chance to settle their claims peacefully by laying down their arms and negotiating peacefully. As a matter of fact, this method or approach has been tried in the Niger Delta, with a measure of success. Why shouldn’t the method be tried with the herdsmen? At any rate, why has virtually nobody, the government and/or the people, raised the necessity of disarming the herdsmen?

    The very idea of disarming the herdsmen immediately raises many important issues. Here is one these issues: there is a possibility that the project will split the ranks herdsmen and their defenders into at least two camps. On one side, there would be those who agree to disarm on the condition that the Nigerian state will provide adequate security for herders from the menace of cattle rustlers; on the other side, there would be those who will on no account whatsoever accept disarming the herders. Your guess is as good as mine: will Miyetti Allah, the powerful cattle breeders association to which Muhammadu Buhari has very strong organizational ties, support or refuse the project of disarming herders?

    A second issue raised by the prospect of disarming herders is the fact that it is about the only guarantee that we have that Buhari is capable of dealing with the standoff between herders and farmers in the same way that he has dealt with El Zakyzaky and the Shiites and Nnamdi Kanu and IPOB. To say the least, the attitude and the pronouncements of the President and his spokespersons on the standoff have been extremely dilatory, if not exactly confusing and    disappointing to most Nigerians. If he and his surrogates keep silent on or dawdle about this demand that the herdsmen be disarmed before any further action and discussion on the matter is launched, then it will become as clear as daylight that Buhari and his administration have no real interest in dealing fairly and even-handedly with the crisis, one of the two or three most urgent and pivotal crises that the president and his administration face at the present time.

    Thirdly and finally, there is the fundamental issue of the Nigerian state and its putative claim to monopoly of the means and instruments of violence. The greatest justification of this principle is the claim that ultimately, the state uses violence primarily to keep in check the violence that can be done – and is often done – by individuals and groups on other people – as individuals, groups or entire communities. Miyetti Allah and sympathizers of the herdsmen’s interests have argued that killings by herdsmen are done as reprisals against cattle rustling, not as aspects of a territorial war for grazing lands and fields. Well, if the state offers effective protection against cattle rustlers as the justification for the herders to disarm, herders who refuse to lay down their arms and surrender their weapons would be demonstrating that punitive action against cattle rustlers is not the real or primary objective of their resort to arms; rather, it would mean that genocide against farmers with the intention to seize and control their lands is the real objective.

    The reader may have noticed that I also say that farmers and farming communities must be disarmed, although I have placed this in brackets in the title of this essay. I am sure that the reason for this is clear, this being the fact that even though some of the farmers are armed, their arms are for the most part primitive weapons like dane guns, bows and arrows and cutlasses. These are dangerous arms, regardless of the fact that as weapons, they are extremely inferior to the AK-47 assault rifles of the herders. But precisely for this reason, everyone knows that it would require far less force to disarm the farmers than the herders. At least for the time being and until the farmers and their supporters and defenders begin to buy and use assault rifles to defend themselves and their communities. For let there be no doubt about the likelihood of this development if the herders are not disarmed and the killings continue. At that point, heaven help us, “Operation Camel Dance” will not be enough and will be too late; the Nigerian armed forces would need combined “Operations Tiger and Lion Dances”.

    As indicated at the beginning of this piece, I bring my observations and reflections to an end with a very brief commentary on the second of our two identified tasks – the task of winning and securing a just, honourable and lasting peace between the communities of herders and farmers. The Fulani (or “Peul” in French) are one of the greatest peoples of Africa, especially in our sub-region of West Africa. It is a great irony that to many Nigerians of diverse ethnic and regional communities, the Fulani today are seen mostly or indeed only in the light of the horrific accounts and stories of the savagery of itinerant herders who are refusing to embrace modernity beyond the AK-47 assault rifle. Many of the Fulani are now more or less permanent settlers and indigenes of diverse states in the North and the South and many are urban sophisticates that cannot be reduced to the caricature of marauding murderers. Let the efforts to find solutions to this crisis embrace and reflect these facts, if only because failure to do so would make a lasting and just peace impossible.

    But first of all, we must disarm the armed, rampaging herders. Without taking this first primary step, all else is deceit, bad faith and treasonous conspiracy against the Nigerian nation-state

     

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Yes, Mr. President, our problems have to do with process, wuruwuru process, and you’re the greatest embodiment of it!

    Yes, Mr. President, our problems have to do with process, wuruwuru process, and you’re the greatest embodiment of it!

    My firm view is that our problems are more to do with process than structure. President Muhammadu Buhari, New Year Speech, January 1, 2018

    If there was a theme, an idea that stood out above all others in President Buhari’s New Year speech to the nation this past week, it was the idea captured in the quotation that serves as the epigraph to this piece. This is the idea that structure is not the problem, process is. Based on this idea, in my profession of literary criticism and cultural theory, one could say that the president is a realist, not a structuralist. A fair explanation of a realist in comparison with a structuralist would posit that, unlike the structuralist, the realist is concerned, not with structures, forms or systems of thought, speech or behaviour, but with the realities, the processes, the nitty gritty of life itself as it lived and experienced.

    It was in perfect consistency with this realist inclination that the president in the speech chided Nigerians for thinking that structure determines everything, that if one structure does not work, get rid of it and either find a new one or go back to the old structure. Not so, the president insisted; you have to be patient, you have to be willing to give the new or current structure or system time to be tested and perfected, all the time paying attention to process. Listen to the president in his own words: “We Nigerians can be very impatient and want to improve our conditions faster than may be possible considering our resources and capabilities. When all the aggregates of nationwide opinions are considered, my firm view is that our problems are more to do with process than with structure”.

    All this sounds fine and plausible. But in reality, the president is merely and only opportunistically playing with words and language. This is because in the best of circumstances, structure and process work together. Since “the best circumstances” are rare, it means that most of the time, nations and peoples have to try their best not to set process against structure; or widen the gap between them into a chasm. But in the worst of circumstances, process trumps structure and vice versa. This, I suggest, is what we have been having in our country for a very long time. And now, it has taken a bizarre and ominous turn with the presidency of Muhammadu Buhari. Let me explain with a series of examples that, hopefully, will demonstrate to the reader that I am not myself merely using words and language to unfairly and irresponsibly attack the president. Please, bear in mind, dear reader, that my basic contention is that what we confront in president Buhari is a series of malformation and perversion of process in a situation where structure itself is clearly dysfunctional and crying for creative renewal. The result? Either no process at all; or undue process; or wuruwuru process; or all of the above.

    Let us take first, Mainagate in which, as we may recall, a felon on the run from justice who had pilfered billions of naira of pension funds was allowed back into the employment of Buhari’s administration and with a promotion to boot! This man was on the Interpol list of internationally wanted criminals. In most of the other countries of the world, he would have been arrested as soon as he came out of hiding and paraded himself in public. But not in Nigeria, not in the very country in which his crimes had been perpetrated. He came back; or he was brought back in plain view and rather triumphantly as a hero by elements within the Buhari administration. Thus arises the question: by what notion of “process” was Maina not only allowed back into the country but actually reintegrated into the administration of the president? Take your pick: is this an instance of “no process” or of “wuruwuru process”?

    But that is not the end of the story because as soon as a public outcry was raised all over the country about this unspeakable abuse of process, Maina was not arrested but was instead allowed to disappear again! And worst of all, as I write these words on January 5, 2018, not a single person in Buhari’s administration has been held accountable and dealt with within the letters of the law for this monstrosity of the perversion of administrative due process. This raises many issues, all of them profoundly unsettling for all of us. Because of limited space, I can deal with only one of these issues. This pertains to the probability that “Mainagate”, on account of its scale and its brazenness, is the tip of an iceberg most of whose mass lies well below the surface. In other words, one wonders how many small and medium sized perpetrations of “Mainagate” have happened since the new administration came into office in 2015 and how many may be happening right now. Simple logic and the law of averages both imply that you don’t do a big “Mainagate” if you haven’t done and are not doing small and medium sized “Mainagates” most of the time!

    And what of the case of the former Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Babachir David Lawal who stole huge sums of money from funds intended for the rehabilitation of persons displaced by the Boko Haram insurgency in the Northeast region of the country? By what concept and practice of “process” did it take the president more than six months to finally fire Lawal from office, and then only after unceasing public outcry? As I write these words, the former SGF has not been arrested, let alone prosecuted. Indeed, we have it on good authority that when the EFCC moved to arrest him, together with Ayodele Oke, the former Director General of the National Security Administration (NSA) in whose rented rooms in Lagos the sum of $43 million dollars in cash had been found, the administration sent security agents to prevent the arrest of the two men.  Pray, what kind of process – or absence of process – is operating in these two cases of the former SGF and the former Director General of the NSA, both very high-placed public officeholders in Buhari’s administration?

    What of the case of the Minister of State for Oil Resources, Emmanuel Ibe Kachikwu, who wrote a letter to the president himself alleging gross violations of procedure and rampant corruption in the NNPC? NNPC is directly under the Ministry for Petroleum Resources of which Buhari himself is the Cabinet Minister. Even though Kachikwu’s letter was leaked in full to the public, the president did nothing about allegations made by his own Minister, absolutely nothing! Kachikwu went so far as to name the chief culprit in the deep and widespread incidence of improprieties and corruption in the NNPC: Maikanti Baru, Group Managing Director of the NNPC who reports directly to the president himself.

    Maina’s crime adversely touched the lives of tens of thousands of pensioners; Lawal’s thievery visited great hardship on hundreds of thousands of displaced persons; we can only conjecture how many lives are affected by the $43 million dollars recovered from the rented rooms of Ayodele Oke; and of course, since the NNPC is the biggest revenue collecting agency for the nation itself, the lives of the great majority of Nigerians are affected by Kachikwu’s allegations about which the president has been silent and non-committal. Seen singly in isolation and/or together as a pattern, these and other cases that we could mention leave us three options on what to think on the subject of Muhammadu Buhari and the subject of this piece, process. In my closing observations in this piece, I will write briefly on these three options.

    First, it could be argued that undue or wuruwuru process is so endemic to the Nigerian economic and political order that Buhari is simply overwhelmed by it. This is the most “sympathetic” reading one could offer of the president’s mysterious and annoying silence and inaction on scandals like Mainagate, the NNPC debacle reported by Ibe Kachikwu and the former SGF’s theft of funds intended to rehabilitate tragically displaced Nigerians in their hundreds of thousands. On this reading, before assuming office as a civilian president, Buhari makes a lot of noise and many promises about war on corruption, change and decisive action. But once he gets into office, he discovers that though his power and authority are considerable, there is little that he can do: wuruwuru process cannot be easily contained. I have little to say on this reading beyond the point that I do not buy it.

    Secondly, it could also be argued that in spite of his no-nonsense and tough guy image, Buhari is actually a weak and indecisive ruler who lacks the courage, the will and the integrity to deal with erring or corrupt people who are his friends, his former associates or his followers. On this reading, his tolerance for wuruwuru process seems quite high, as long as those concerned are not political opponents. Definitely, the case of former SGF belongs in this category. Speaking for myself, I think there is some truth in this view of the president’s otherwise inexplicable tolerance for wuruwuru process.

    Thirdly and finally, there is the possibility that wuruwuru process is a fundamental constituent of Buhari’s worldview with regard to Nigeria and its diverse peoples and communities in relation to the tasks of nation-building in a fiercely competitive world. It was only on the fourth time that he stood for the presidency that Buhari won and then only because he made strategic alliances beyond his own zonal constituency of the Northwest. On the three previous occasions when he lost, he had been considerably unsuccessful in breaking out of that zonal fortress. The people closest to him are either those who have always been with him or who share his narrow worldview. And he has shown that he is willing to tolerate or even deploy wuruwuru process where and when associates and supporters from these groups run foul of due process and the law.

    I end on a note that goes beyond Muhammadu Buhari. What I have called wuruwuru process in this piece did not start and will not end with the presidency of this particular president. This is because it is endemic to Nigerian capitalism, one of the most corrupt, wasteful and unjust capitalisms in the world. But in Buhari we seemed at first to have been presented with a chance to break with wuruwuru process without a popular social revolution. Buhari happens to enjoy a certain degree of credibility as a populist politician, especially in his current civilian incarnation of power. But his primordial, sectionalist allegiances far outweigh his nationwide populism. As long as this continues to be the case, his brand of wuruwuru process will prevail. We must have no illusions about this.

  • A blond, blue-eyed, Nordic Jesus in the iconography of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church?

    A blond, blue-eyed, Nordic Jesus in the iconography of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church?

    I was startled beyond words when I saw it: a picture of the icon of Jesus that served as a visual accompaniment to last week’s piece in this column, together with the caption under the picture. The picture of the icon: a very White Jesus, with blond hair and the bluest of eyes. The caption: “An icon of Jesus Christ from the Ethiopian Orthodox Church”. Obviously, something was wrong in that juxtaposition, very, very wrong. This is because in the iconography of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, Jesus is not White, let alone being blond and blue-eyed; he is Black in the way and manner that Ethiopians are black.

    As a matter of fact, the iconography of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church is world-famous for the distinctiveness of its iconography: not only Jesus but Mary, his mother; the three Magi; the twelve disciples of Christ; the saints; angels; throngs of worshipers and the faithful in diverse formations and expressions of suffering, mortification, rapture or beatification; they are all Black. Needless to say, God himself is Black in this extraordinarily distinctive iconography of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. Indeed, for the most part, virtually all the divine and human personages in the iconographic tradition of this formation of Christianity all look like present-day Ethiopians. [By the way, this is hardly surprising since it is not yet a million days since the real, historical Christ lived and walked on this earth, this planet]. If all this is indisputably true, why then had last week’s picture and its caption got the facts, the referents so wrong?

    First of all, let me state that the error probably has its circumstantial roots in a fairly simple and innocent mishap, this being the frustrating but relatively benign pressure of deadlines on the production of newspapers and their contents. For instance, like all the other columnists in this newspaper, I work with and around a deadline. In my case, it is every Friday at 6 p.m. In turn, my Editor and his staff also work with deadlines that the printing and production departments of the newspaper impose on them. Now, I testify that on the basis of my experience with both The Nation and The Guardian, everybody tries to make as few errors as possible within the great rush or pressure of these deadlines. But we are all human and once in a while, errors do occur. Let me explain.

    Sometimes, I read over what I have sent off for publication in my column and to my dismay, I discover errors too late for them to be corrected. For one instance of this kind of experience that is thankfully rare, I declared in an “Erratum” at the end of the column three weeks ago, that I had twice substituted the word “complementary” for “complimentary” the previous week. And indeed, two weeks ago, in the pictures of the two candidates in the Senate election in Alabama, the name attribution was wrong, the name Doug Jones appearing under the picture of Roy Moore and Moore’s name appearing under the picture of Doug Jones. On the basis of seeing this kind of error as a manifestation of occupational hazard, I can well imagine that working under the tyranny of deadlines, someone in the Editorial Division, Layout Section, last week simply reached for the first available icon of Jesus and simply superimposed the caption I had indicated on it. And that may have been why we had that garish juxtaposition in last week’s column: A Nordic-White Jesus where we should have had a Black Jesus from the distinctive iconography of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church.

    But there are also other probable causes of the error. Let me identify a few of them. What if the page editor or the layout person who searched for and chose the White, Nordic Christ is unaware of the existence of the iconographic tradition of representing Christ as Black in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church? What if he or she knows but prefers anyway to use the Nordic image? What if the impulse was in fact consciously or unconsciously sardonic: to jar readers’ sensibilities with the extreme juxtaposition of a snow or milky White Christ with the specific racial or epidermal designation of Blackness in the words, “Ethiopian Orthodox Church”? Indeed, as I discussed these various possibilities with my friend, Femi Osofisan, last Sunday, he was much inclined to this particular cause of the error. This is because in my friend’s opinion, out there in the phantasmal world of contemporary Nigerian and African Christianity, there are probably hundreds of thousands of the faithful to whom a Black Christ is disturbingly anti-normative.

    Whatever might have been the conscious or unconscious cause of the error, the following facts and circumstances of the diversity and heterogeneity of Christianity’s visual and iconographic traditions are very pertinent to this discussion. First of all, there is nothing normative at all about what I am calling the Nordic-White Christ; it is only one out of many traditions of icons of Christ as Messiah and Son of God. In other words, just as there is a different Pope for the Eastern Orthodox Church than Pope Francis of the Roman Catholic Church – the People’s Pope – the iconographic representations of Jesus in these two main branches of European Christianity are different.

    Secondly, since Christ was an actual historical person from a particular community of human beings (Palestinian Jewry), we are not without a sense of what he must have looked like. Nonetheless, at this point in time, what Christ himself must have looked like is completely irrelevant to the icons and statues that have been created to represent him. In other words, our Christian brothers and sisters must realize that what they think of as the representation of divine godhead when they see icons of Jesus is not an emanation from God Herself or Himself; it is a derivative of specific ethnic, racial and cultural segments of the human race. And thirdly, please check out the iconography of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church for its elegance, its disarming grace and its distinctiveness, especially given the historical fact that this African tradition of Christianity actually predates the Roman Catholic Church, the oldest Western heritage of Abrahamic religion.

    Of the three Abrahamic religions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – Christianity in particular has a great love of icons. In contrast, Islam, historically the “youngest” of these religions, has an equally great disdain for icons. Which is why there are no icons of either Allah himself or of Muhammed, his Prophet. For this reason, in the representation of God as Omniscient and Omnipotent – the ultimate idealist conception of Perfection – Islam has an advantage over Christianity. This is because it does not present the Godhead in the image of any particular race, epidermal hue, ethnicity or gender. As we have seen, to the Ethiopians, God, Christ and his Mother are all Black while to historic European Christianity, God has been and continues to be White. But the universality, the Oneness of the Divine that Christianity’s iconographic traditions greatly undermines is compensated by its central theological message of there being no difference between Jew and Gentile. In other words, the icons of Christianity may declare all they want about which human group really represents God; however, the narrative traditions of the religion – as purveyed through symbolic tales, parables, proverbs, psalms, epistles and diverse other media – say something else, this being the central catechism of the essential Oneness of humanity.

    I write these words as one who stopped being a religionist more than four decades ago. In that case, why am I so interested, so passionate about these matters? The answer is simple and uncomplicated: religion is too important to be left to the religionists. I have stated again and again in this column that my central view of religion is not whether one is a believer or not a believer, it is what your belief or unbelief makes you think and act or conversely, fail to think and act. For a very long time, European Christianity taught the idea, the belief that Black people, being supposedly unalterably inferior to Whites, could in no way be deemed to be a valid human incarnation of God. To this day, that idea lingers still in pockets of Christian belief, worship and practice in parts of the Western world. But we know that Christ himself was a revolutionary who believed in justice, equality and peace for and between all women and men. This particular heritage of Christianity survives – admittedly precariously – in spite of the diverse, particularistic and ethnocentric iconic representations of Jesus.

    A White, blond and blue-eyed Jesus? It belongs mostly to the movies and the popular branding of Jesus in the marketplaces of Pentecostal neo-capitalism!

    Shuffering and shmiling through the petrol crisis: a plague on the houses of both the government and the marketers!

    Since the main item in this week’s column is about religion, it is meet and proper that I invoke God as my witness in recounting an experience that I had at a petrol filling station on Boxing Day at Eleiyele in Ibadan. Please ignore my declaration that I am a non-believer; since you are a believer, please accept my invocation of God as my witness. Well, what happened at this filling station? I had almost driven past it when I observed that an SUV truck was being attended to. Counting myself lucky for finding a station that was selling petrol without a long queue, I pulled into the station, only to be immediately told that “there was no petrol”.

    “No petrol?”, I asked the attendant. “How can you say there is no petrol when I am watching you sell petrol!”

    “I say there is no petrol! Please, don’t trouble me; there is no petrol!”

    In total surprise at being told to disbelieve the evidence of my own eyes, I continued, “Mr. Man, is that not petrol that you are selling? Or you want to tell me that it is pure water that you are pumping into the tank of this truck?”

    The attendant’s response to this was instantaneous: “Well, since I say there is no petrol and you say there is, why don’t you come and sell it to yourself?”

    At this point, the message that the attendant was trying to convey to me by his absurd declaration that there was no petrol when he and I could clearly see that he was pumping petrol into the tank of a truck hit me: he was not talking about a factual or phenomenological absence of petrol; he was talking about an imaginary or phantasmagoric absence that had absolutely nothing to do with objective reality. In other words, in material terms and by the physical laws of sight, movement and flows, there was petrol. But by another law, another logic that exists in a hermetic universe known only to the attendant, there was no petrol. So, therefore, there was no contest and the attendant won the battle of what you see is not what you get.

    I drove away from the filling station “shuffering and shmiling”, in Fela’s immortal words. Needless to say, the attendant was not smiling. And I don’t imagine that he was suffering either. He and the whole brood of oil marketers, filling station attendants and emergency Black Marketers that line the streets of the Sabo area in Ibadan. And the government. None of them is shuffering and shmiling. A plague on all their houses!

     

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Christmas will come and Christmas will go, alas

    Give us this day, our…/

    Give us this day, our…/

    Give us this day, our

    daily mmanya!  From a rousing

    drinking song of the Pyrates Confraternity, U.I., circa

    AD 1969-70

    NO, this epigraph from one of the songs in the repertoire of dozens of drinking songs of the Pyrates Confraternity was not sung exclusively or even primarily around the festive season of Christmas. We sang it lustily fairly regularly, before, during and after Christmas. But because of the song’s inversion or subversion of the famous second sentence of the Lord’s Prayer – Give us this day our daily bread – by the substitution of the word, “bread” with the Igbo word for palm wine – mmanya – we found this song to be the very essence of what Christmas, or more appropriately, Christmastide, meant to us – unrestrained, life-affirming festivity. And it pleased us, I remember, to note that far beyond the circle of our Confraternity, many young people like us also regarded Yuletide or Christmastide, as a time for great feasting, merrymaking and, yes, carousing. What we did not know then, what it would take most us years and even decades to find out is the fact that this feasting, partying and jollification that we associated with Christmas had deep, historical and cultural “pagan” roots. This is the theme of this piece that – need I remind the reader – will appear the day before Christmas, i.e. Christmas Eve, 2017.

    In a literal sense, by the time that this article appears on December 24th, like all Christmases before it, indeed like all of Time, the Christmas that will be celebrated this year will already be on its way to having come and then gone into the sands of time. Thus, in terms of factual happenstance, all Christmases come and go. But that is not what I have in mind in the title of this essay. What I have in mind is, shall we say, more thoroughly saturated by the complex and fascinating processes of culture-making and culture unmaking. In other words, the marking and celebrating of Christmas changes, shedding old forms and taking new ones, many of them of questionable cultural value and significance. That is what I have in mind when I say that Christmas comes and, alas, it also goes. Let me spell this out carefully but also clearly through a discussion, first, of big changes that have taken place in the way(s) in which Christmas is celebrated in our society in my own lifetime.

    Even before I was out of my early teens, the kind of Christmas that I knew as a child, the kind of Christmas that we celebrated was already on its way into the depths of historical oblivion and cultural disapprobation. It seems quite unbelievable now – in the context of the contemporary uncontested dominance of Pentecostalism in Nigerian Christianity – that while eating and drinking were the things we loved the most about Christmas, for us the essence of its celebration was the donning or mounting of secular forms and idioms of Egungun masquerades. On Christmas Eve especially, one of us was completely clothed in an “eku” – is the special ritual garb of an Egungun masquerade from head to toe. Acting as our leader and chief celebrant, this “masquerade” led the rest of us around all the major “quarters” of the city, singing, drumming, dancing. Since we were kids, the masks and mummeries that we enacted were children’s versions of the adult, sacred Egungun masquerades. They were known as “Tombolo”.

    Tombolo? Well, this word was meant to indicate the fact that as much as we tried to mimick the dreaded ritual powers of adult Egungun masquerades, we were not the “real” thing. In my memory, the thing that we enjoyed the most was, compositely, the songs that we sang – songs of blessings to those who gave us gifts of money and/or culinary delicacies; but also ribald, satirical songs of ritual curses and maledictions to adults who, unimpressed or irritated by our performances, chased us away with ridicule or, sometimes, with cudgels! One song especially stands out in my memory: “Olopa ko le mu wa; odun t’ode la n se! [No policeman dare arrest or harass us; our festivity honours Time itself!]  Dear readers, please take note: we were mimicking adult, “pagan” Egungun masks and masqueradery in what was supposed to be a Christian festival, but absolutely no one questioned the validity, the positive, identity-forming nature of these performances. Why? Well, because we were African Christians drawing on pre-Christian traditions of Nigerian/African peoples and cultures to mark and celebrate Christmas.

    At this point in the discussion, it is important for me to state that I am not a cultural conservative. In other words, it is not my intention in this piece to argue for the restoration of the forms and idioms through and in which Christmas was marked and celebrated in my childhood. I suffer no delusions on that score: what is gone is gone and if it is brought back in any form at all, it can only be brought back in a form that is in no way a reprise of what used to be. And neither am I an opponent of, or a crusader against how Christmas is now celebrated in our society. That said and duly acknowledged, I wish to argue that we should not take for granted any emergent, historical form of its observance and celebration, most especially when so much seems to be at stake in the changed forms.

    I look at the observance and celebration of Christmas today and above all else, I see a massive and pervasive merchandizing element, a great social and cultural bourgeoisification of most people as celebrants and communicants in the festivities of Christmas. The signs and markers of this development are legion: the visit with the kids to the malls to meet Santa Claus and receive gifts from him; the sending and receiving of upscale or “haute couture” cards and packaged gifts; the family holiday to a resort within or outside the country; pilgrimages to Jerusalem and the other sites of early Christian history and culture in the Middle East; youth jamborees and carnivals supervened by DJ’s belting out canned pop music through gigantic, deafening amplifiers; even floating Christmases on ocean cruisers on the high seas. The sense of thankfulness and joy for the blessings of the year, together with fervent, prayerful hopes for the future that were big aspects of Christmas in the past are still there, still palpable. But who can deny the obvious and not-so-obvious changes?

    In my childhood, we did know of Santa Claus, but only from what we read of him in books or saw of his fairy-tale generosity in films. As children do now, we also exulted in popping off bangers and firecrackers. But we spent nothing remotely close to the hefty amounts children spend these days buying and setting off these pyrotechnic, arson-inflected aspects of the celebration of Christmas. Sometimes, you got a new set of clothes and pair of shoes – those were the heaviest outlays of expenditure to parents, especially as the new clothes and shoes were calculated to serve you for the coming year in its entirety! At any rate, this much is clear: while for us “Tombolo” symbolized the essence of the celebration of Christmas, his place has been taken by Santa Claus. And the merchants, the money-changers, are smiling all the way to the bank – and the Church on Christmas day. From “Tombolo to Santa Claus”: this could validly be seen as the title, the broad theme of the outline of cultural evolution that I am exploring in this essay. There is a great historical irony in this development that I think goes to the heart of what I am arguing in this piece.

    To get at the import of this history, think of the following facts concerning the origin and consolidation of December 25 as Christmas Day. The first recorded instance of this was in AD/CE 336 and it was instituted by the Roman Emperor, Constantine, the first Christian Roman Emperor. Thereafter, Emperor Julius 1 who succeeded Constantine officially consecrated that date, December 25 as Christmas Day, the emperors and popes who followed Julius merely cementing that date and, more importantly, the forms and modes of celebration that Constantine and Julius had appropriated from pre-Christian “pagan” traditions for the first set of celebrations of Christmas. In other words, December 25 was not the actual month and day on the birth of Christ. Nobody knows of the exact or real birthday of Christ as there is no mention of it at all in the Bible. More important than even the complete arbitrariness of the date, December 25, is the fact that the form, the idioms, the ritual and the symbolism of the celebration were all modelled on approximations from pre-Christian, “pagan” Roman gods and the rites and symbols associated with them. Let’s look at this closely but briefly.

    Before its adoption as a state religion of the Roman Empire by Constantine, Christianity had been a religion of not only the poor and the downtrodden, but of Middle Eastern peoples that were colonized subjects of the Roman Empire. For good or ill, it did not fall on these peoples of the hot, desert cultures of the Middle East to institute and consolidate on a global scale both Christianity in general and Christmas in particular as one of its most important festivals of the year. It fell to the Roman Empire at the southern tip of the cold climates of the North. And this is why Christmas historically emerged as a mid-winter festival very close to the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year between sunrise and sunset. Now, the Winter Solstice occurs usually between December 22 and 23. And as soon as it has come, the days start getting longer and longer, symbolizing birth and renewal from the “death” symbolized by winter. Which was why Emperor Constantine figured that since theologically and liturgically this new “God”, Jesus Christ seemed, like many “pagan” Roman gods who, like Nature itself, go through cycles of birth, death and resurrection, the best time to fix for the celebration of his birth was a couple of days after the Winter Solstice. And without exception all the festivals, all the revels of mid-winter in Constantine’s Rome were rollicking feasts and performances dedicated to the gods, the most important being Saturnalia, the festival of Saturn, the Roman name for Cronos, the head of the Titans in Greek mythology. For almost a thousand years, what Christians knew and revered as “Christmas” was actually the cultural offshoot of Saturnalia.

    I readily acknowledge it: this all sounds rather “professorial”. I give assurance that I do not intend this piece to be a “lecture”. And most important of all, I am not arguing as a disputant, an adversary of Nigerian Pentecostalism and its doctrinal prophets and popular messengers. That can and probably will come in another context, another essay. Meanwhile, I am more interested in exploring the indisputable historical fact that what we know as Christmas has changed a lot from its roots in both the Western world itself and in Nigeria and Africa. In both of these historic cultural spaces – the West and Nigeria/Africa – Christmas was for a very long time marked and celebrated very closely on models and forms of celebration that the bulk of Nigerian Christians now regard as “pagan” and idolatrous. But “paganism” and “idolatry” are very rife, very pervasive in Nigerian Pentecostalism. Who knows? Perhaps we shall see them resurface again in future evolutions of Christmas in the country? Remember, Christmas comes and goes, comes and goes.

    Merry Christmas!

     

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Red is the colour of blood; it is also the colour of revolution: fresh winds from Alabama

    Red is the colour of blood; it is also the colour of revolution: fresh winds from Alabama

    One of the most astonishing things about the just concluded elections for a single seat in the American Senate from the southern state of Alabama was the fact that the world press, so speak, was present in full force to witness and report the result of the election. I don’t know if any segment of the Nigerian press was represented, but in some bemusement, I heard on television that elements from the presses of countries like Moldavia and Kazakhstan were present. And of course, presses from the “heavyweight” countries of the world from both the global North and South were present: the European countries; Turkey; India; Japan; China; Brazil; Mexico; South Africa. Since Alabama is one of the poorest states in the United States, why was an election in such a state deemed of such significance that the “world press” was present in full force to bear witness and to report whatever “tidings” emerged from the elections? And in the event, what “tidings” have they been reporting since the conclusion of the elections with the victory of the candidate of the Democratic Party, Doug Jones?

    There is both a very simple, unambiguous answer to these questions and a more complicated response to them. Here’s the simple, straightforward answer: Alabama is the “reddest” state in the United States where the colour red stands for the Republican Party (blue for the Democrats); and in the last presidential elections last year, this state gifted Donald Trump with one of the richest hoard of votes among all the states of the country. And moreover, in spite of the serious moral and social baggage that Roy Moore, the Republican Party candidate carried into the elections, Trump campaigned vigorously for him, thereby putting the prestige and authority of his office on the line. In other words, to the presswomen and men of virtually the whole world, the Alabama elections represented the first significant “referendum” on the presidency of Donald Trump. If Roy Moore won, then both Trump’s controversial election last year and his even far more controversial actions, words and behavior since assuming office would be vindicated, whether the rest of the world liked him or not. And based on this line of thought, Trump’s “legitimacy”, if not his moral authority as the most powerful political leader in the world would be confirmed, heaven help us! In effect then, it was Trump and his presidency that brought the whole world to Alabama last Tuesday: apparently the entire planet is deeply interest in, or anxious about Trump’s occupancy of the most powerful and consequential political office on our planet.

    But of course, Trump’s candidate lost; he lost in the reddest state of them all. And from this fact comes the more complicated response to our two questions: Why was an election in a very poor, Southern state like Alabama considered of such significance to the world press? And with the defeat of Trump’s candidate and surrogate, what “tidings” will the world press take to the rest of the world? Obviously, the complication that is involved in any attempt to address these questions rests on the premise that nobody, least of all the doyens of the world press, would complacently think that what happened in Alabama last Tuesday night will happen in every election in America from now on till the end of the first and perhaps only term of Trump in office. All we can attempt is to read the portents carefully: what was the balance of forces during revealed in the elections and what political calculations and ethical logic from the result of the Alabama election can now be expected to shape national and public affairs both at home in America itself and abroad in the world at large. If this is not a complicated matter, then I don’t know the difference between what is simple and unambiguous and what requires of us careful and perhaps inspired reflection. In other words, if it is the case that what happened in Alabama on Tuesday cannot be expected to be simply replicated from now on everywhere in America and the world at large, what are the underlying patterns, the unique but teachable aspects of the defeat of Trump and Moore, his surrogate this past week? This is the enigma that I wish to briefly explore in this piece, especially as it is is implied in our title: Red is the colour of blood; it is also the colour of revolution.

    At the bottom of the world’s fear and anxiety about the immensely baleful and portentous advent of Donald Trump’s presidency is the fact that it is this man who has the code, the key that can unleash the awesome, life-destroying power of the nuclear armaments of the United States of America on any country or region of the world. And nearly everyone in the world, including Trump’s supporters, knows that he is unstable, erratic, megalomaniacal; in less than one year in office, he has both vaguely and explicitly hinted that he can and will, if he feels like it, unleash that awesome nuclear power. If he does that, blood will not literally flow; but that is only because within minutes, human beings in blood flows will be incinerated in their millions, perhaps dozens of millions.

    But even on the literal plane of an actual flow of blood, there is this fact to think about: since Trump came into power, bloody-minded White supremacists and fascists deeply interested in precipitating a race war in America have become emboldened. This is indicated in their many marches and demonstrations, arrogantly shouting their slogan that is drawn from the rise of the German Nazi movement of the early 1930’s, “Blood and Soil!”. And in this connection, it is important to note here that both Trump and Roy Moore, the Senate candidate who lost in the Alabama election, have openly expressed sentiments very sympathetic to the worldview and folklore of White supremacists around the world.

    And then, there is this: it is a well-known fact that Trump and thousands of his most fanatical supporters have links with the White supremacist movements and parties of Europe – much to the trepidation of the liberal-democratic governments and movements of Europe. Indeed, it was only a month ago that Trump angered the British Prime Minister and the entire political establishment of both the Conservative and Labour Parties when he re-tweeted a ranting, Islamophobic internet post of “Britain First”, a far-right, hate-mongering White supremacist group on the extreme fringes of British politics. Red as the colour of blood: against the actions, words and behavior of Trump and his most fanatical supporters, the Republican Party’s establishment is doing all it can to disassociate this connotation of redness with the traditional colour of their party. Good luck!

    But red is the colour of roses of that particular hue, perhaps the most enchanting in the family of roses. And please permit the seeming frivolity in this context: red is the colour of Man United. (I do admit that I am partial to the gamesmanship fortunes of this club, but not as a fanatical supporter). Above all, red is the colour of revolution. Something of a minor revolution happened in Alabama this past week. I have stated that Alabama is one of the poorest states in America. I have also stated that it is, electorally, the “reddest” state in the Union, given the fact that Republicans not only control every statewide political office in Alabama, this state also gave Trump and the Republican Party their largest victories in the federal and presidential elections of 2016 – as it had been doing for decades now. As a matter of fact, with regard to the Republican redness of this state, it is one of the few states in the United States that record margins of electoral victories typically associated with North Korea – 95% and without an opponent from other parties.

    This is the state in which Doug Jones and the Democrats won this past week. And most important of all is the fact that the victory came as a result of the electoral alliance of Black voters and White suburban women, though it must be clearly acknowledged that it was Black women that constituted the most solid and effective bloc in this victorious alliance. The ideological significance of this alliance is as unmistakable as it is indisputable: supremacist racism and misogyny are at the core of the advent of Trump and Trumpism, followed closely by economic warfare against the working and non-working poor. For this reason, the leadership of the peaceful revolution against the misrule of Trump that is silently gathering force all over the country will come mostly, if not primarily, from women and people of colour. Labour and middle-class politics will be a necessary ingredient of this peaceful revolution, but the main flank will be drawn mostly from women and people of colour, especially Black people. That is what the whole world, as represented by the presses of many nations and regions of the planet that converged on Birmingham, the state capital, saw in Alabama this past week. In the closing paragraphs of this piece, permit me to make a short elaboration on this observation.

    With regard to the nexus of poverty, racism, and misogyny that served as the general context for the ideological alliance that I am discussing here, Alabama is not unlike many of the nation-states of our world, especially states in which extreme religious conservatism combines with neo-capitalism to forge a unique form of modernism that draws its self-images from the past. Pakistan, India, Iran, Saudi Arabia, parts of our own country and continent, Nigeria and Africa, and growing demographic segments within Europe and the Americas, the stories are the same: on one side, child-marriages; the feminization of poverty; violence against women in forms as diverse as sexual slavery, honor killings of daughters, sisters and nieces by fathers, brothers and uncles, and predatory sexual harassment and rape of women at the workplace and the home; on another side, widespread promotion of hatred and fear of racial, ethnic and religious others. Trump and Moore, the defeated candidate, were/are openly racist, sexist, homophobic and xenophobic. As recent as the week in which the election was held, Moore expressed admiration for the time when slavery was still legal in the United States stating that the American family was better and happier then than now. And it was in this same week that Trump issued one of his most sexist insults to date to a woman, the junior Senator from his own home state of New York, Kirsten Gillibrand. You see, God intended men to be lords and masters over women, just as he decreed that the darker races, the sons and daughters of Ham, should be slaves to true, Chosen People. No state in the United States was/is in the grip of this ideological and theological claptrap as Alabama. But, as we have shown in this piece, one shade of red replaced another tint of the same colour: blood-red by revolution-red.

    At the very least, there is a hopeful portent, if not a message of final deliverance, in this good tiding from “red” Alabama this past week.

     

    Eni rere lo: For Segun Adelugba (1942-2017)

    Just as I was readying myself to write this piece, news came to me of the death of Mr. Segun Adelugba, a veteran but retired journalist and brother of the late and revered Professor Dapo Adelugba. Segun’s practice of journalism embraced the standard hard, solid facts of life and experience and what, for lack of precise words at this moment of deep sadness, I can only describe as speculative and introspective cultural journalism. He and I discussed this form or mode of journalism endlessly when I was both a postgraduate student and a young lecturer at the University of Ibadan. He had the good-natured mischievousness of the Adelugba brothers, Dapo, Segun himself, Siji, the eternal Teenager, and Gbenga (Reverend), but Segun was essentially a gentle spirit, a man of deep, grounded convictions. I spoke with him last about six months ago by phone, promising that the next time I come to Lagos for more than one day, I would make sure that I get to see him. A great pity that I am now deprived of the chance of making good on that promise! Seventy-five years is not exactly a very long life, but you were here and we that survive you will always cherish your presence here, Segun

     

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

     

  • A political ‘tribalism’ beyond race in America: what kind of crisis does this pose for our world?

    A political ‘tribalism’ beyond race in America: what kind of crisis does this pose for our world?

    Ah, political tribalism! Its most recognizable feature is the absolute unwillingness to vote for any candidate that is not from one’s own tribe. Beyond this, it extends to the perception, rightly or wrongly, of political parties and public officeholders as extensions or indeed incarnations of the interests of particular tribes. Further along the path of its full elaboration, political tribalism involves the extreme polarization of a nation between parties and politicians deemed to be representing “tribes” whose present circumstances and future prospects cannot be integrated or reconciled. Thus, at the end of the line, political tribalism connotes two nations in one body politick on its way to dissolution. Seen in these various refractions, conventional wisdom in our world has it that the developing nations, the global South in general, constitute the unhappy location of the great majority of the political tribalism that exists and thrives in our world. The Kikuyu versus the Luo in Kenya; The Hutu versus the Tutsi in Burundi and Rwanda; the Sinhala versus the Tamils in Sri Lanka; the Buddhists versus the Rohingya in Myanmar; the Catholics versus the Protestants in Northern Ireland.

    This general profile should prepare us for an unprecedented development in the United States of America in which, nowadays and almost on a daily basis, we hear the word “tribalism” applied to the seeming absolute polarization between the two main political parties, The Democrats and The Republicans, together with their supporters. In its simplest form, this “tribalism” is easily perceived in voting patterns in the two Congressional chambers, the Senate and the House of Representatives in both of which members do not cross party lines on most issues. When a few of them do, the number is negligible in terms of the expected legislative impact of the issue. On very big issues like the confirmation of the President’s nominees for judicial appointment for life and important cabinet posts, the tribalism is more than palpable; it is compelling. I was greatly bemused when I first began to notice the regularity with which the term, “tribalism”, was being used on television roughly during the second term of Obama’s presidency. But with the advent of Donald Trump’s presidency, regularity became invariant constancy: political tribalism had reached its apogee in America.

    At this point in the discussion, it might be useful to briefly reflect on the historical anthropology of this term, “political tribalism”. Strictly speaking, most of the collective groups or peoples in the contemporary world that are designated “tribes” are not tribes; they are ethnic groups or, indeed, ethnic nations. Relatively speaking, a “tribe” is a small collectivity living close to the land and united by language and claims of common ancestry, with a history in which long-distance trading, large towns based on commerce and/or industry have not yet emerged. When these have emerged and moreover are accompanied by substantial increase in population numbers, great variation in economic production leading to the clear emergence of classes of workers and owners, rich and poor, powerful and marginalized, the term “tribe” becomes anachronistic, often deployed as a deliberate act of primitivization. To this day, this primitivist tradition survives in our continent such that where ethnic groups should be, people still talk of tribes – with or without the complicity of the peoples so constituted as the surviving “tribes” of the modern age. However, sometimes, this primitivizing impulse is intended deployed as a rebuke, as a critique in periods when extremely retrograde and primordial sentiments irrupt into the midst of completely modern polities and societies. This brings us to the present “Trump moment” in American political history in which political tribalism reigns supreme – at least almost.

    The “tribalist” elements in Trump’s America are legion. Let me identify some of the more astonishing, more bizarre among them. For instance, Trump himself has expressed racial insults or denigrating innuendos against just about every racial group in the country with the exception of Whites. As a consequence, white supremacists have been tremendously emboldened to come out of the woodwork in militant expressions and acts of hatred and bigotry that harken back to the days of the attempted genocide of Native Americans; chattel slavery for African Americans; and peonage for Asian Americans and other Non-White peoples. Also, something identified as white resentment and/or anxiety about decreasing demographic dominance of Whites has surfaced in open expressions of an impulse to “make America white again”, linking this with the slogan of “making America great again”. And perhaps most important of all, Trump and his supporters are vehemently insisting that they have a right, not only to have their own opinions and versions of reality, but indeed have a right to their own “facts’ different from the facts that all other people can objectively collect and measure. The “tribe” of fake news; the “tribe” of real news: that is what Trump and his supporters have created in a phantasmagoric inversion in which they, the inventors and purveyors of fake news, are calling the other “tribe” the manufacturers of fake news!

    The true “tribe” of fake news: this is the heart and soul of the political tribalism of Trump and his supporters, mainly in the United States but also throughout the rest of the world. White racial supremacy is essential to it; but it goes well beyond race. For in essence, it is an alliance, a comingling of white nationalism with extreme right-wing Christian fundamentalism. Those who are astonished that many Non-Whites in America and other parts of the world like and support many of Trump’s policies, actions and declarations should bear this point in mind. In Trump, all deniers of climate change and its effects throughout the planet have a found champion, a hero in Donald Trump.

    In Trump, conservatives throughout the world that are against abortion and the rights of women to control their own bodies in matters of biological and social reproduction have found a superhero. In Trump, those who think that biology is destiny and one must live out one’s allotted time on earth in the body in which one came into it have found a bedrock of opposition to the rights of transgendered individuals and groups. In Trump, Christian conservatives and literalists of Biblical texts that have long clamored for Jerusalem to be declared the capital of the State of Israel and the “Mecca” of global Christianity have found a messiah. Finally, in Trump, the rich and the poor, the powerful and the powerless of all nations with substantial Christian populations have found global fellowship as God’s own Chosen People. At least, this is what Trump and his supporters believe.

    It would seem that race and racism are the weakest links in the chain of Trump’s global political tribalism. After all, the Non-white supporters of Trump’s project of building physical and symbolic walls between the Chosen and the Damned are profoundly troubled by the fact of being in the same camp, the same tribe with the hordes of White nationalists and supremacists that have flocked to the Trump standard. And the embrace of Nazi and fascist slogans (“Blood and Soil!”) and symbols (the Swastika and the Burning Cross) by these white supremacist supporters of Trump hasn’t helped matters at all for Trump’s Non-White supporters. But race and racism have not (yet) served to open a breach among Trump’s supporters. For this, we have to look beyond race – but without forgetting the racism – to the inordinate nature and scope of Trump’s own limitless greed, corruption and mendacity in all matters financial and economic. This is why, in my opinion, the slogan that has emerged as the key to all of Trump’s calculations and stratagems is – Follow the Money! This is the key to uncovering the answer to the crisis that Trump and his national and global movement pose to our world: follow the money. Let me explain what this implies in the closing paragraphs of this piece.

    In the last few weeks, three separate but related things have been happening to Trump in his POTUS incarnation. [POTUS: President of the United States]. First, the Mueller investigation is closing in on his association with Putin and Russia during and after the presidential elections of last year. At the core of this development is the wide and cumbersome economic and financial entanglements of Trump’s businesses with Russian state and private (mafia) enterprises. Secondly, Trump and the Republicans are about to enact legislation that would provide unprecedented tax cuts to corporations and the richest 1% of the American population, at the expense of the poorest segments of the society, not leaving out substantial cuts in benefits enjoyed by the middle class. Thirdly, the lies, the falsehoods that Trump and his supporters have been spewing out since he first emerged as a leading presidential candidate of the Republican Party are being systematically exposed. Indeed, it is not an understatement to say that we are about to receive information and knowledge of wrongdoing by Trump and members of his inner circle that will dwarf any other scandal in the political history of the United States. If and when that happens, the present alliance between white supremacy and right-wing Christian fundamentalism that is at the core of the Trump phenomenon will crack and fracture, big time. That is my “prediction”. In bringing this essay to its conclusion, let me briefly dwell on this point.

    In order for political tribalism to be effective in the world – our contemporary world – many things have to be hidden from the people. This is because tribes in the historic sense survive and exist only in very few places in the world. For tribes and tribality, what has emerged is ethnic groups and ethnicity. But there is still a lot of talk, a lot of discourses on tribalism, as if all the members of ethnic groups that are profoundly differentiated by a wide range of social identities and interests act primordially as one indivisible group facing the same perils and possibilities. One way to look at this issue is to take stock of the historic fact that it is ethnic groups, ethnic nations and not “tribes” that strive for and sometimes achieve breakaway from multi-ethnic nations. Indeed, who has ever heard of “multi-tribal nations”? Thinking of the ramifications of all these factors, we are compelled to declare that political tribalism is not an anachronism, not a primitivist holdover from the past that haunts only the poor nations and societies of Africa and the developing world; it can and does erupt even in the most advanced and richest nations of the world.

    This is what we have been seeing in recent times in Europe in particular and the Western world in general, Trump and his movement being the apogee of it all. But this apex is crumbling, thanks in part to the fact that its rotten economic foundations are being exposed, not only factually but potentially electorally. I am not predicting the end of a convergence between White nationalism and apocalyptic Christian conservatism. What I see coming is Trump either driven out of the White House through impeachment – against the reluctance of the Republicans who hold voting majorities in the two chambers of Congress; or most definitely a one-term presidency at the end of which White supremacists will once again recede into political and ideological wilderness. No doubt they will attempt to regroup again and regain entrance into the political mainstream as they have done under Trump. Will we be ready for them if and when that happens? That is the question, not for now but for the future.

     

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu