The Nation Newspaper

Category: Biodun Jeyifo

  • Comrade professor, you’re caught between a rock and a hard place!

    [Being an open letter to Professor Itse Sagay]

    Comrade, greetings! You finally gave a piece of your mind to the bosses of the ruling party, the APC, this past week. The disappointments, the frustrations of serving as the Chair of the Presidential Advisory Committee Against Corruption (PACAC) finally erupted into a heady verbal and moral faceoff with the leadership of the APC. From the ruling party itself, the work of yourself and the other members of the PACAC was being undermined and “wasted” and you couldn’t take it any more. You are a man of tremendous moral energy and unstinting dedication to principle. But, obviously, the party bosses did/do not know you as those of us who have been your colleagues in the academic and legal professions know you. Dem no know say you be no nonsense man!

    •Buhari and Sagay, “Admire and respect the President, but please maintain your integrity and independence!”

    At first, you were restrained and even wily in your criticism of the party bosses. You called them “rogue elephants” who were gradually and inevitably destroying the APC. You also said they were “weak” and “unprincipled”. It is a great moral and political condemnation to be described as “weak” and “unprincipled”, but apparently, that was not what got under the skin of the party bosses in your criticism. What got to them, what angered them was being called “rogue elephants”. Now, this is rather funny because that idiomatic phrase does not mean being a thief, a rogue; it means being wild, uncontrollable and aberrant. The phrase comes from the world of nature in which an elephant or any animal that naturally and typically belongs to a herd breaks away from the group and begins to act wild in pursuit of its own impulses and desires. Not understanding this, the party bosses thought that a “rogue elephant” is a rogue and therefore you, the Chairman of PACAC, was calling them rogues! And in great umbrage, they unloaded all manner of accusations and assaults on you and your character. In particular, they said you were an opportunist who was ungrateful and disrespectful to President Buhari who had made you the Chairman of PACAC.

    I do not wish in this open letter to go point by point or blow by blow over your imbroglio with the APC party bosses. I admit that I found the exchange very colorful and indeed somewhat very close to political theatre of a high satirical order, even if it was not pre-scripted and happened in real time. “I am an accomplished man, not a ‘come and chop’ politician like you” you said in what I considered the coup de grace in your counter-attack on the party bosses. But let us leave all this aside and go straight to the main point of this open letter to you. And what was this? It is the fact that you mentioned names and took sides in what you take to be a raging internal battle within the APC for the soul, the conscience of the party. In the interest of those who might have missed this encounter between you and the APC party bosses, permit me to give a brief outline of the cast of characters and the battle lines that you indicated in your ersatz dramatis personae. I might also add here before giving an elaboration of the point at the end of this essay, that I disagree almost completely with how you characterize the internal battle within the APC.

    For now, here’s how you line up and characterize the forces in contention within the APC today. On one side, the side of the good guys, the heroes, the protagonists, are Buhari, Osinbajo and Tinubu. Of Buhari in particular you are unrestrained in your praise, your glorification: “a man of great honour and integrity and who I admire and who inspires me.” And you add, with respect to the Vice President, Osinbajo: “I took this job because of Buhari and Osinbajo, who I admire greatly.” On the other side, the side of the villains, the traitors and turncoats, the antagonists, are Bukola Saraki, the Senate President, John Odigie-Oyegun, the Party Chairman, and ‘one’ Bolaji Abdullahi. In this lineup, you cast Saraki as evil and treachery incarnate, one whose goal is to destroy the APC in the pursuit of his unbridled ambition, an ambition in the pursuit of which he is willing not only to destroy the APC but the country itself.

    To provide a resonant historical support for this stunning plot outline, you invoke the example of the wartime British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, whose appeasement policy toward Hitler led to the invasion and bombardment of his homeland by Hitler. Your point, Comrade Itse, in making this analogy is unmistakable: all the tolerance of corruption, all the broken electoral promises, all the indecisions and outright lack of moral imagination and political will that we are seeing in the APC today, all are aspects of a serial concatenation of appeasements of Saraki, the evil genius who is biding his time and will strike and destroy the APC when the time is ripe for him to do so. And for good measure, here’s what I think you’re suggesting, you’re hinting as the “moral” of this symbolic and cautionary demonization of Bukola Saraki: appeasement never works with evil and megalomaniacal power brokers; the more you appease them, the more they wax stronger and bolder in their nefarious schemes and ambitions.

    Am I fair and accurate in my summation of your vision of the internal battle within the APC today, Comrade Itse? I hope so. At any rate, based on that summation, I now wish to make a few comments that will hopefully demonstrate the relevance of the essential component of the title of this essay: the condition, the dilemma of being between a rock and a hard place. The dilemma in this condition lies not in the fact that a rock and a hard place are virtually identical; rather, the dilemma lies in the fact that you cannot not choose between them. In other words, I am arguing that if, like you, we must choose Buhari and his faction over Saraki and his gang, we must at least recognize that one side is not a soft, lush place while the other side is a hard, hard place; they are both hard, very hard, Comrade!

    Of Odigie-Oyegun and Bolaji Abdullahi, I have little to say beyond the fact that everyone who knows what is going on within the APC knows that right from the formation of the party to the present time, Buhari has had little or no respect for the Party Chairman. This is bad enough, but the matter gets even more onerous because it is also well-known that Buhari does not have much respect for the party itself. Since I cannot believe that you do not know of this fact, Comrade Itse, I must say that it surprises me that you leave it completely out of your account, your profile of the battle for the soul of the party. In other words, Comrade, APC has no soul; or, perhaps more accurately expressed, its soul is still uncreated because no political party comes into existence with its soul, its humanistic conscience, already in place. Buhari had and still has a big role to play in the creation of the soul and the conscience of the party, but how in the world can he play this role when he thinks so little of the party, never mind the fact that it finally fetched him the presidency after three previous and totally hopeless attempts?

    I suspect, Comrade Itse, that the tolerance of or for corruption of which we see so much in the APC is what troubles you the most in your critique of the problems with the leadership of the party. If your point was only and exclusively the observation that Bukola Saraki and the legislature over which he presides together constitute the most arrant manifestation of this great tolerance for corruption, I would have been totally in agreement with you. But isn’t it the case that tolerance of corruption is to be seen everywhere in the ruling party and in the federal administration that the party supervenes? Wasn’t it from the presidency itself, acting in concert with Saraki’s legislative stronghold, that opposition to the appointment of Ibrahim Magu as the substantive Chairman of the EFCC was mounted?

    What of the case of the brazen act of corruption against the suspended Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Babachir David Lawal? Did Buhari himself not tolerate it by the inordinate circumspection with which he shielded the SGF from swift and equitable justice? And the appointment of Abubakar Malami as the Attorney General of the Federation? Nothing, absolutely nothing in his experience and character gives the slightest hint that Malami has the will, the wisdom and the cunning to direct the war on corruption on the legal front, the most crucial of all the redoubts of corruption in our country. The only excuse that can be offered in exculpation of Buhari’s appointment of this man as the AGF is the probability that the President himself had little understanding of what it would take to effectively fight corruption in our judicial order. But that excuse is not good enough, Comrade!

    In bringing this open letter to you to its conclusion, let me add, Comrade Itse, that it seems to me that the real basis of your righteous tirade against Odigie-Oyegun and Saraki is the suspicion that in the coming presidential elections of 2019, Saraki will do to the APC what he did to the party in his seizure of the senate presidency in 2015, that is betray the APC by linking up with elements of the floundering former ruling party, the PDP. Most political commentators and pundits in the country think so too. As much as I think that this hunch is correct and needs the critical attention of all truly progressive and patriotic Nigerians, I don’t think that it should be the focus of our attention and energies in the months and years ahead of us.

    I shall be completely frank with you on this matter. We are between a rock and a hard place. More correctly, we only seem to be so. In reality we are between many diverse rocks and hard places. This is because there are not two but possibly four to six major factions within the APC. And not one of them is truly and genuinely progressive enough to warrant our tying our fates, our destinies with it. If I am wrong in coming to this conclusion, do let me know. You have spent most of your adult, professional life struggling for a just, egalitarian and truly democratic order in our country. I salute the humility with which you talk about those you respect and admire within the APC. But I ask you to think of those that YOU have inspired, within and beyond the APC. Please, Comrade, protect and safeguard that hard-won integrity and independence!

     

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

     

  • A savage hurricane season with origins in West Africa: reflections on natural and man-made disasters

    A savage hurricane season with origins in West Africa: reflections on natural and man-made disasters

    On the very day this past week that Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I had quite a struggle to keep my umbrella from being blown away by winds moving at 22 miles an hour as I made my way to a class I was going to teach. Luckily for me, it was a short distance that I had to go to get to the classroom in which the class was to be held. Nonetheless, I was drenched by the time that I got to the classroom, although not to the bare skin underneath my dripping-wet clothes.

    My students were already in the classroom, waiting for me. They said nothing when they saw me, but their looks of concern clearly expressed sympathy for their teacher’s rain-soaked condition, symbolized above everything else by the useless state of my umbrella, with its shredded nylon canopy on a collapsed, twisted and misshapen frame. In what I wanted to be both an acknowledgment of their sympathy and an admission that what we in Cambridge were experiencing that day was relatively very mild, I said to the students, “today, right now, things are worse, a thousand times worse, for the residents of Puerto Rico”. Then, of course, I went through the business of instruction in a session that went very well, hurricanes, storms and gale force winds momentarily forgotten. It was after the end of the class as I walked back to my office that I realized that what I had said to the students about things being far worse in Puerto Rico was deeply inflected by the fact that I am a Nigerian, an African. How so?

    As everyone knows, the likes of Hurricanes Harvey (Texas), Irma (Florida) and Maria (Puerto Rico; the U.S, Virgin Islands) with the terrible destructions they have wrought are virtually unexperienced and therefore unknown in our part of the world. True, we do have periodic coastal and inland floods that are very damaging in terms of lives lost and buildings and physical infrastructures destroyed, but nothing that we have ever experienced in these natural disasters remotely approaches what we saw these past few weeks in the wakes of Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria. In Ibadan, the occasional or periodic flooding of the Ogunpa Stream known as “Omiyale” (“Agbara wo sobu!) has been invested with mythic malevolence in local lore even though, mercifully, it typically claims lives countable in single digits, not in dozens and certainly not in hundreds or thousands.

    I am not sure about this, but not everyone, not too many people know that the hurricanes that batter and destroy human lives and habitations in the North Atlantic basins of mainland America and the Caribbean islands start as tropical cyclones in West Africa. I am not a meteorologist and neither am I an expert in climatology and oceanography, but from geography lessons in high school more than half a century ago, I remember the knowledge given to us that it is because all the land masses and the oceans of the world are connected by waves and currents that West Africa, our region of the planet, is the place from which tropical waves and cyclones begin and then move westward to the Americas and the Caribbean where they become hurricanes of dreaded impact. This does not mean that our part of the planet is the source, the “culprit” of the havoc wrought by hurricanes in the nations and cities of the North Atlantic and the Caribbean! Both beneficent and ill winds blow around and about and across all the regions of the earth. This is precisely what the term “natural disasters” connotes, as distinct from the term, man-made disasters. Natural disasters: the earth is old and “nature” had been there long before we arrived on the scene and in certain respects, it remains indifferent, if not actively hostile to our presence. Man-made disasters: knowingly and/or unknowingly, we make both the occurrence and the effects of natural disasters worse. The crisis, the dilemma that we face now is this: natural and man-made disasters are so inextricably intertwined now that we seem unable to muster both the moral energy and the collective political will to rise to the scale of the challenge, the crisis. This is the central idea that I wish to explore in this piece.

    Now if hurricanes (and earthquakes too) occur far less frequently in our part of the world than all the other hemispheres in the world, droughts and famines, with the unspeakable losses in human lives, livestock and farmlands that they cause, are by contrast more rampant in our region of the world. Since they are natural disasters, are we to blame for their occurrence? The Western world in particular but also most of the other regions of the world not only blame us for the natural disaster of drought, but they do so with mostly veiled but sometimes quite open condescension and even contempt. For quite often, behind the aid in money, food and technical support that they extend to us in times of drought and famine, behind the vocal and high-minded support of some of their artists, music superstars and humanitarian organizations and individuals, behind all of this is an Afro-pessimist paternalism that doubts whether we, Africans, will ever be able to master the technological, economic and political processes that would finally make the scourges of drought and famine in our continent rare or even manageable phenomena – as we have seen in many other parts of the world. If this is bad enough, the worst is the probability that deep down, our leaders are themselves Afro-pessimists who show in countless ways that we do not have it in ourselves and our traditions to rise to the challenges of droughts, famine and pandemic diseases in our continent. In saying this, I do not forget how in our country, we successfully rose to the challenge and the crisis of the Ebola plague, yes with support from the W.H.O. and other international and foreign donor organizations and volunteers, but primarily from our own initiatives.

    This point brings me to the most crucial of the observations and reflections that I am making in this essay. What is this? Well, think of it this way: Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria have their origins in tropical waves and cyclones off the West African coast. Well, there is nothing new in this since experts have been in possession of the fact of the African genesis of North Atlantic and Caribbean hurricanes for a very long time, in fact for centuries now and at the very least from the mid-19th century when records began to be kept. Experts have known that it takes between two to three weeks for the tropical waves on the African coast to make it across the Atlantic to the North, the great majority of them in fact never making it that far. The few that do are easily and very clearly seen by satellite imaging and their probable paths are mapped and predicted, more and more with incredible accuracy. If this is the case, why do the hurricanes still catch populations and the authorities of the North Atlantic and the Caribbean off-guard?  Why do people continue to build and settle in places that are known to be hurricane-prone? Why do people who scoff at the ominous signs of climate change and the dangerous warming of the oceans and the resultant rise in sea levels fail to see the complicity of their “man-made disasters” with the natural disasters of these hurricanes?

    Readers of this piece who expect me to indict capitalist exploitation of the earth’s peoples and resources will, I give assurance, not be disappointed! But they might be surprised by my insistence that we do not face a unified exploitative capitalist order in the coalescence of man-made and natural disasters that is at the center of the discussion in this essay. In other words, the “capitalism” that is resistant to the science and the politics of climate change in North America is of a very different order from the “capitalism” that continuously de-industrializes Africa and subjects it endlessly and mercilessly to natural scourges and plagues. Expressed differently without over-simplifying the issue, here is the breakdown of the play of forces that I have in mind here. First: in the “North” of the post-industrial or indeed over-industrialized economies, the developers, the oil drillers and the manufacturers that make super profits from products and services that worsen the effects of climate change are successfully preventing action against themselves and their activities. Second: in the “South” (especially in Africa), levels and sums of investment in human and technological capital remain negligible while the social surplus is looted, wasted and squandered by the political and economic elites. In this overdetermined context, nothing is more unnatural than the “natural disasters” of droughts and famines that are, at this stage of overall capitalist development in the world at large, eminently manageable.

    I would like to conclude these reflections and observations on the grimness of a particular detail from the devastation visited on Puerto Rico by Hurricane Maria. The entirety of the national power grid of electricity supply on the island has been completely knocked out for a long time. The estimates run from four to six months of total darkness relieved only by power from generators fueled by oil and/or diesel. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? But Puerto Rico is part of America, not an island off the West African coast. If Maria started out from West Africa, the infrastructure of power supply and distribution that it found and destroyed in Puerto Rico is not different from what it might have destroyed in West Africa had its path been inland, not outward and westward to the Americas. We all live on the same planet and have a common destiny.

    Two Haikus
    1.
    Harvey, Irma, Maria When you come this way again May unwelcome startle you into inclement impotence

    2.
    Whence cometh our salvation? Roused from ageless perplexity Nature picks itself up
    and turns itself inside out

    •Biodun Jeyifo
    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • The long, tortuous road to the impeachment of Donald Trump: a history lesson and a morality fable

    The long, tortuous road to the impeachment of Donald Trump: a history lesson and a morality fable

    L’Etat, c’est moi! [I am the state!] – Louis XIV of France

    The parasitic bug devouring the vegetable is lodged inside the vegetable – A Yoruba adage

    It is more than six months now since I first “predicted” in this column that ultimately, Donald Trump, the 45th President of the United States, would be impeached for “high crimes and misdemeanors”. Six months isn’t an unduly long time to wait for this prediction to come to pass. After all, it took close to eighteen months for Richard Nixon to be forced to resign from office rather than be impeached after the scandal of Watergate erupted. All the same, there is no equivalence between the two events. Indeed, there is a vast difference in the circumstances and behavior of the two men. For all those eighteen months before his resignation, Nixon sweated and squirmed, protesting his innocence to the whole world. He grew closer to members of his family and he searched for powerful allies within his political party. Above all else, he was absolutely insistent on his innocence. On one occasion, he infamously declared, indeed pleaded, “I am not a crook!” [By the way, I am able to recall these details vividly because at the time, I was completing my post-graduate studies in the U.S.]

    What about Donald Trump? Trump is not only not declaring that he is not a crook, he is in fact all the time demonstrating in plain sight for the whole world to see that he is a crook, the father of all political crooks to boot! Indeed, even as the evidence of his past corrupt, illegal and treasonous liaisons with Putin’s Russia mounts to the skies, evidence of new and current liaisons surface. Especially, the charge of obstruction of justice against the president is validated nearly every week by new revelations of ongoing activities in Trump’s White House. Worthy of note is the fact that unlike Nixon, Trump is taking actions and saying things that are making it more and more difficult for his party, the Republican Party, to stand with him to the end in his struggle against impeachment. To cap it all, the White House under Trump will almost certainly go down in history as being the most incapable of preventing leaks of the misdemeanors of the incumbent president from reaching the press and the American people. If all of this is true, why then is it taking so long to either impeach Trump or force him to resign before the expiration of his term? As a matter of fact, let us rephrase the question: Why will the road to the impeachment of Trump almost certainly be long and tortuous? The answer to this question, I suggest, provides all of us on planet earth a useful history lesson and a striking morality fable.

    Let us take the history lesson first. At the head of this piece, I have deployed that infamous quote from the one of last kings of France, Louis XIV: L’etat, c’est moi! (“I am the state!”) Trump has shown many signs and said many things to indicate that he sees his presidency in the light of feudal, monarchical prestige and authority. He has told the British that when he makes his first official visit to London, he must ride through the streets in the Queen’s royal carriage, otherwise the visit will not take place. In one bizarre drama that Trump televised and had broadcast to the whole nation, he had every single member of his cabinet one by one praise him to the skies and swear their loyalty to him. The scene seemed to have come straight out of a satire by a dissident playwright on the excesses of the megalomania of feudal rulers and modern dictators who equated personal loyalty to themselves with loyalty to the state. But this was a real-life drama that Trump has supplemented with many other actions and pronouncements to show clearly that personal loyalty to himself counts far more than the legal and institutional obligations and limitations of public office. This is why, in less than one year in office, Trump has fired more cabinet members and White House staff than any other American president in history. This is why he publicly and savagely humiliated the Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, for recusing himself from directing the investigation of Trump’s Russian connection when, in Trump’s opinion, Sessions should have taken control of the investigations in order to protect the embattled president’s interests.

    L’etat, c’est moi. Louis XIV made that declaration not knowing that history would record it as the last gasp of a dying, soon to become moribund social order. The answer of modern liberal democracy to that declaration has been unequivocal: no, Louis XIV, no all rulers and would-be rulers of the world, you are not the state; you and your cabinet members, you and your staff, you serve the state which is the institutional objectification of the people, all the people. It is nothing short of a great historical irony that it is in the United States, the country whose founding was greatly aided by the revolution in France that ultimately swept away absolutist, monarchical rule, that the ghost of Louis XIV would resurface in the presidency of Donald Trump, if only as a caricature, a grotesque haunting. In this connection, it would seem natural or logical that Putin and Putin’s Russia would be the inspiration, the ally of Trump. Why?

    Well, Putin’s Russia is nothing if not a grotesque caricature of the Russia of Lenin and the Soviet People’s Republics. Absolutist power erected on the foundations of an oligarchical, right-wing “Greater Russia” nationalism that is endlessly contemptuous of all forms of democracy – liberal, popular-democratic, social-democratic, socialist. That is Putin’s Russia and all Russians who reject this transmogrification of their country face draconian repression and even murder. Trump admires Putin a lot and makes no secret of his admiration. We might add here that Trump has also expressed admiration for other dictators, other “strongmen” like Erdogan of Turkey, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt, and even his supposed arch-enemy, Kim Jong Un of North Korea. Let us note here that Trump’s admiration of these dictators, these “strongmen” is not an idle one. In other words, he would, if he had his way, “rule” the United States in the ways that these “strongmen” rule their countries. If this is the case, even if he does not ultimately succeed he would very badly deform and degrade American liberal democracy if he is allowed to run the full course of his four years in office. Why then is his impeachment taking such a long, tortured path? This question is at the heart of the history lesson in this piece.

    Not to oversimplify matters here, let us note that about roughly 35% of the American people are unwaveringly with Donald Trump and for the most part, they are demographically and politically concentrated in the base of the Republican Party. They are spread throughout the country and even though the great majority among them are white people, their phobias, resentments, fears and hatreds resonate with Americans of other ethnicities. For this reason, the Republican Party is caught in a bind: it must move very, very cautiously, if at all, against Trump. If the party gives the slightest hint to the 35% demented Trumpian base that it is in collusion with Democrats and others who wish to impeach Trump or force his resignation before the end of his term, that base will turn away from the party and the Republican Party may ultimately self-destruct as a viable force in the two-party dyad running American liberal democracy. To put the matter in concrete terms, the thinking of The Republicans on this issue goes something like this: why finish off Trump now and go down with him when, in the end, he is sure to self-destruct? Yes, the Trumpian specter is very frightening, for America itself and for the whole world, but why risk loss of the party’s historic status as the alternative ruling party to the Democrats for possibly the next two, three or four decades? History after all is full of megalomaniacs like Trump that strutted about on the stage for years and even decades but eventually went into historical oblivion – Nero, Caligula, Francisco Franco, Mobutu Sese Seko, Sani Abacha.

    L’etat, c’est moi: it will always recur in history. When it does, flow with it as you would ride on a tiger’s back knowing that if you fall off, you’re finished. This is the coward’s and cynic’s view of history, but since morality is an infusion of ethical and humanistic concerns into the objective and impersonal processes of history, we need a morality fable here. Well, here goes…

    In this piece, I have been talking a lot about “Putin’s Russia”, together with the kinship between Putin and Trump. Most American commentators, pundits and activists on this issue think of this as an infection, a plague coming from Russia to haunt and ultimately destroy American and Western liberal democracy. This as a sort of revenge, a payback for the defeat of Russia in the Cold War. But what if the infection is from within? What if racism, misogyny, xenophobia, philistinism and fascism, all the ingredients of Trumpism, come from within the interstices of American society, American capitalism itself? I invoke here the second epigraph to this piece: kokoro to n je’fo, inu efo lo n gbe. [The parasitic bug devouring the vegetable patch lives within the vegetable itself]. That is our morality fable.

    The JAMB 120 cutoff mark: a short memo to Adamu Adamu, the Minister of Education

     The dust is yet to settle on the storm created by the lowering of the cutoff mark from 150 to 120 for admission to our public universities. Not surprisingly, the opponents of the decision have been far more eloquent and persuasive than the supporters. This is because everyone knows that already, the standards of both teaching and learning in the tertiary level of our national educational system have deteriorated continuously and precipitously over the years and decades. This is quite apart from the also well-known fact that examination malpractices are so rampant in our country that the integrity of results cannot be guaranteed. In this context, critics of the 120 diktat have asked for the rationale of the decision other than a politically motivated and deliberate lowering of standards to accommodate pressure from the educationally disadvantaged parts of the country, mostly in the North.
    I take note of these critical comments, Mr. Adamu Adamu. But here is my real question. Already, virtually all candidates admitted to our tertiary educational institutions need massive remediation before going on to the normal course of instruction in our universities and polytechnics – which remediation they of course do not get. Now, those of us who have for long been partisans and/or advocates for the improvement of teaching and learning conditions in our universities base ourselves on the fact that at one time in this country, significant and substantial remediation was available in many of our public universities for students admitted conditionally on the basis of inadequate or substandard qualification. The time has come to reinstate, adequately fund and consolidate remedial instruction for ALL students admitted to our institutions, most all the new set of “120” cutoff emergency students or “emergencos” as we might call them.
    No be so, Honourable Minister?

    Biodun Jeyifo
    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Of presidential incumbencies: Buhari as a primary catalyst of the calls for restructuring

    Of presidential incumbencies: Buhari as a primary catalyst of the calls for restructuring

    [Being an open letter to the Sultan of Sokoto, H.R.E. Sa’ad Abubakar III]

    Four Royal Eminence, greetings! All protocols duly observed, permit me to explain why, against common practice in our country at the present time, I begin this open letter to you by formally addressing you, not as H.I.M. (“His Imperial Majesty”) but as H.R.E. (“His Royal Eminence”). Virtually all the empires of the recent and not so recent past in the world have gone into oblivion, but still, there are dozens of “Imperial Majesties” in Nigeria, many of them “ruling” as traditional monarchs over small towns and even villages! Indeed, we live in a country and an age in which there is vast inflation of value in which the distance between what is claimed and what actually subsists is like the distance between, on the one hand, the heavens and, on the other hand, the depths of the earth and the oceans. In contrast to this, Your Eminence, you occupy an actual and symbolic position of authority and prestige, both in our country and in the Moslem world at large, that is anything but inflated.

    Also, Your Eminence, before ascending the throne of the sultanate consequent on the death of your brother, Sultan Muhammadu Maccido, you served in our country’s armed forces and in that capacity, you travelled extensively and consequently, you are very well informed about the affairs of the West African region of our continent and other parts of the world. Moreover, I heard you speak when you came to Harvard University a few years ago. I can tell you that people here still refer to that speech, so well received it was. But enough of these opening comments and observations. Permit me, Your Eminence, to go straightaway into the substance of this open letter to you: your suggestion a few weeks ago at a national colloquium on restructuring organized by the Nigerian Labour Congress, that instead of political restructuring, Nigerians should focus on and demand for economic restructuring.

    As you probably know, Your Eminence, when you talk, when you make interventions in the public discourse of our country, people listen to you! They listen politely and attentively, but they also listen critically. And that is why your intervention at the NLC colloquium on restructuring has been very widely discussed. Now, I do not know whether or not you pay attention to the responses that your interventions generate. I most certainly hope that you do! At any rate, with regards to your speech at the NLC colloquium, there has been a widespread critique of your separation of political and economic restructuring. On the whole, many have commented that we really can’t and shouldn’t separate one from the other, the economic from the political. Others have criticized the specific suggestion you made about economic restructuring, to wit, the construction of large-scale irrigation dams in the six geopolitical zones of the country to spark a countrywide agricultural revolution that would provide a basis for economic and social development far beyond our current lopsided dependence on oil revenues.

    Your Eminence, I am in agreement with most of these criticisms of your intervention at that NLC colloquium. But that is only one aspect of my comment on the exchange in this open letter to you. More broadly, I would like to add that your intervention was robust and it generated very lively and robust responses and this is good for civil and responsible public discourse in our country.  This is important because in your speech at that NLC colloquium, you did also strongly take an exception to the pervasiveness of hate speeches, insults and gratuitous vilification of entire ethnic and regional communities in the debates about and around the calls for restructuring in our country. On this, I couldn’t agree more with you. Indeed, in this column, I have for several weeks now been suggesting – and hopefully demonstrating – that we can and should have honest, robust and rational exchanges on restructuring. However, Your Eminence, politeness and civility should not prevent us from speaking truth to power as vigorously and as incisively as we can! This is particularly true when we think of the immensity of the power and the authority that high public officeholders wield in our part of the world, most especially the president, specifically the incumbent at any particular moment in time of the presidency. Your Eminence, did you have this specific point in mind when, in your NLC colloquium speech, you asked us to separate political and economic restructuring? In other words, were you suggesting that in the debates on restructuring we should leave both the institution of the presidency itself and the particular incumbency of Muhammadu Buhari out of the debates? Is this the core, the heart of your strong suggestion at that NLC colloquium that we should leave the political alone and concentrate only on the economic?

    This question is prompted by something that you may or may not have noticed, Your Eminence: with the possible exception of the late Sani Abacha, no Head of State of our country has attracted more abuse, more vilification than Muhammadu Buhari. From only the trio of Nnamdi Kanu of IPOB and Femi Fani-Kayode and Ayodele Fayose of the PDP, the cesspool of vitriolic and intemperate verbal abuse and insult heaped on Buhari is as high as Mount Kilimanjaro and as deep as the waters of the Pacific Ocean. On Facebook, twitter and other social media sites on the Internet, the number and the sheer virulence of statements of pure hatred and contempt heaped on the President, are without precedent among living and departed heads of states of our country. Sadly, we have all become used to terrible, unspeakable things and emotions being said and expressed in the highly misnamed virtual world of “social media” because it is a world that is really often aggressively anti-social. In the case of the recent long and apparently continuing illness of the President, negative comments about Buhari went completely overboard in their pettiness and nastiness, with many gleefully announcing and/or celebrating his demise!

    Your Eminence, it needs hardly be said that the President does not deserve such unalloyed and unspeakable hatred and vilification. For this reason, many of Buhari’s supporters and defenders have been placing their explanation for the phenomenon on the enemies of the anti-corruption crusade of Buhari and his administration, especially within the main opposition party, the PDP. The most insistent promoter of this view is, of course, Garba Shehu, Senior Special Assistant on Media and Publicity to the President. Undeniably, there is some truth in this, especially in light of the prominence of people like Fayose and Fani-Kayode in the extremist formations of anti-Buharism. But, Your Eminence, is it of no consequence that some of the sharpest public criticisms of Buhari have come from people as close to him as his own wife and associates and followers that had been with him for decades when he was, metaphorically speaking, in the wilderness?

    Your Eminence, let it be known that far beyond the likes of Kanu, Fayose and Fani-Kayode, people are speaking truth to power in this complex phenomenon of the critique of Buhari and Buharism. And what is Buharism, you might ask? A rousing, infectious promise of change completely handed over to brokers of power who, in their background and experience, have never shown any predisposition for change. An extremely parochial, sectionalist and nepotistic mode of governance on the heels of an electoral victory that was built on one of the widest coalition of political forces across the length and breadth of the country. A slumberous lethargy in the face of militant nation-wrecking expressions of disunity throughout the country. That, in short, is the essence of Buharism. Speaking only for myself, my surprise, my anger knows now end when I think of how inept, how seemingly uncaring Buhari has been confronted with the terrible killings and population displacements caused by the standoff between communities of herdsmen and farmers and rural folk throughout the country. Thinking of this, I say to myself: this man is of my generation; he has served in many parts of the country and has travelled in many parts of the world; but he thinks and acts like a 90-year old “Baba” that has never travelled more than thirty kilometers from Daura!

    No, Your Eminence, in the debates on restructuring that is now raging as both a portent of positive transformation and an omen of dismemberment in our country, we cannot ignore the political and concentrate only on the economic. Not when the single most important factor in the so-called “political” is the bloated and immensely powerful presidency, followed only by the particular nature of the incumbency of Muhammadu Buhari. His wife, many of his former followers and supporters, and quite a good number of members of the leadership of his own political party, the APC, have confronted him with the need for him to rise beyond and above petty parochialism and be a uniting force for restructuring for equity and fairness to all, especially the poor and workers of all ethnic and regional blocks in our country.

    Will you lend your voice to these calls, Your Eminence? Restructuring of any kind, economic or political, cannot start if the presidency and its present incumbent are so averse to the promises and possibilities of genuine, embodied unity in our country!

    Salutations to the forever young and optimistic at heart: for Iyabo Ogunshola @ 70

    I admit it: as I swayed dancingly in my seat at the party for the 70th birthday anniversary for Mrs. Iyabo Ogunshola on Saturday last week, I felt rather awkward if not exactly foolish. This feeling only increased when I rose up and actually danced my way to the group photograph that members of my class of 1967 present at the party took with the celebrant. You see, in my “old age”, I hardly dance anymore. Well, you do notice, don’t you dear reader, that I have bracketed the words, “old age” in this declaration. This is because it is not really a matter of age because all my life, I have never really been one given to spontaneous dancing. Always and forever, for me there had to be a reason, a justification for dancing! Part of the blame – if “blame” is the right word – has to go to – socialism! When I became a socialist in my early 20s, even though it wasn’t to a puritanical, killjoy socialism that I now dedicated myself and my life, I still felt that as long as the revolution did not seem to be on the horizon of the present, what was there to dance about? Next to the horrible wrongheadedness of having such a feeling was the simple but profound fact that, deep down, I knew that it was wrongheaded.

    At any rate, one could not but dance, I mean really dance at Iyabo’s birthday, given the fact that she is as close as anyone I know to the spirit, the élan of dance and dancing, even as she is also the embodiment of a grace and a wisdom that seem to go against the fact of her being probably the youngest in our class of U.I. ’67. I was on my way out of the country for the resumption of the new academic year when the party took place in Lagos, so I do not know if pictures taken at the event showed me dancing. If they did, fellow socialists and comrades, take note: your eyes are not deceiving you and I was dancing for it was at a party for no less a person than Iyabo Ogunshola, one of the best spirits in our class to whom I say on behalf of all of us: for you and for all of us, may the dance last for yet a few more decades!

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • A case can and ought to be made for a relatively strong center for Nigerian federalism – but only if…

    A case can and ought to be made for a relatively strong center for Nigerian federalism – but only if…

    [For Raufu Mustapha, R.I.P.]

    Only if the deployment and manipulation of the center for looting galore, for squandermania on a colossal scale, and for a wastefulness of national assets and resources that is without equal anywhere else in the world are all either eradicated or substantially reduced in our country. These are the preconditions, the premises on which the case for a relatively strong center can, at this point in time, not only be made, but successfully “sold” to the majority of Nigerians everywhere in the land, North and South, East and West. Moreover, I believe that this case cannot only be made but ought, as a matter of fact and necessity, be made.

    Probably, nearly everyone reading this is aware that what I am urging here is unpopular both in our country and in the world at large. In Nigeria, everyone knows that restructuring governance away from concentration of power and sovereignty at the center has been the single most dominant and persistent issue in our national public sphere for a long time now. And as I myself noted again and again in the series on IPOB in this column last month, the secessionist and devolutionary movements and organizations in Nigeria seem to be completely in accord with the tendencies around the world, not the least in Europe and indeed most of the Western world. Thus, it is most definitely not a particularly auspicious or opportune historical moment to argue for a relatively strong center for federalism in our country and our world today.

    Indeed, both politically and ethically, to argue for a strong federalist position in Nigeria today is to find oneself in lockstep with strange, unsavory fellow travelers. This is because with perhaps the single exception of those who fought to keep Nigeria one during the Nigeria-Biafra war and are extremely sentimental about the unity of the country, nearly all of the groups and individuals that are arguing for a strong center of authority and sovereignty for our country come from the ranks of those who derive extensive economic, political and symbolic benefits from the strong center that they wish to maintain in Abuja, in the presidency as well as in all the organs and institutions of federal power in our country.

    Concretely speaking, which retired general, air marshal, admiral or former senator that has been given an “oil block” does not want a strong center of federalism in our country, now and for as long as possible? Which well-connected Nigerian elite hoping for an ambassadorial appointment, possibly in London, Washington, DC or Berlin, wants to see an end to the hegemonic concentration of power and patronage at the center of governance in Nigeria? What of the thousands of contracts, appointments to plum, sinecure posts, and nomination for honorific titles and awards that come from the federal might in Abuja? Are the “patriotic” Nigerians who are hoping, indeed struggling for these perquisites and honors not powered by the knowledge that only as long as a strong center subsists and lasts in Abuja will their dreams and aspirations come true? Finally, isn’t it troubling that the loudest and most insistent voices for a strong center in Abuja as a basis for Nigerian unity come from vigorously conservative groups and individuals like the Arewa Consultative Forum, (ACF), Ango Abdullahi and Tanko Yakasai (who, by the way, used to be in the ranks of “progressives”)?

    At this point in the discussion, I should perhaps point out to the reader that the very fact that I have very carefully and indeed rather meticulously gone over these important caveats against the case for a strong center of federalism in our country means that I have in no way forgotten them nor am I ignoring them. Indeed, to the contrary, my point, my frame of reference in this piece is to argue vigorously against the kind of strong federalism represented by the named groups and individuals. In other words, my central point in this piece is that the case for a relatively – as opposed to an absolutely – strong center of a kind that is totally different from what groups like the ACF is pushing can and ought to be made. Here is another way of putting my position on this issue across: I think hard, very hard, and I ask myself: How would genuinely progressive and patriotic Nigerians like Eddie Madunagu, Bene Madunagu, Col Abubakar Umar (rtd.), Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola, Balarabe Musa, Dipo Fasina, Attahiru Jega, Issa Fage, and Kayode Komolafe make the case for a relatively strong center for federalism in Nigeria? I do not speak for any of these comrades and compatriots, but I am certainly thinking of them as I write the following second segment of this piece.

    At the risk of oversimplification, here’s the central plank of my argument for a relatively strong center for Nigerian federalism at this moment in both local and global history: in all the post-tribal societies of the world, nations and regions that have strong and competitive markets are incalculably better suited for the challenges and vagaries of capitalist modernity than those that have weak and dispersed markets; moreover, strong markets for the most part work best with and in nations and regions with relatively strong centers of political governance. Seen in this light, a large, multiethnic and culturally diverse country like Nigeria with a relatively strong center of federalism is like a common market in which borders are easily crossed; people, goods and services are easily exchanged without prohibitive and protectionist regulations and protocols; and security of life, property and personal possessions are guaranteed both within and well beyond one’s cultural and linguistic locality. In case the point I am making here is (still) not clear, permit me to make it clearer through a brief but harrowing elaboration on this metaphor of our nation as a “common market”.

    As a nation, Nigeria at the present time – and with its enormous actual and potential reserves of wealth and resources – is a grotesque caricature of a common market. The “common market” is there but it operates at a level far below the standards of most of the common markets of this world – precisely because the center does not operate even minimally in the interests of the constituent members. The most telling manifestation of this tragic and absurd situation is the seeming utter helplessness of the Buhari administration in particular and all post-1999 governments in general in ending or even substantially curbing the savage killings and massive population displacements produced by the herdsmen’ and farming communities’ standoff. Axiomatically, a “common market” protects not only property but also producers, the peoples who buy and sell and live out their allotted time in this world either as migrants or as settlers. Buhari’s administration is doing neither – protecting the “properties” and/or the lives of those killed in this almost nationwide standoff.

    If we look both closer and wider at it, we find that the herdsmen and farmers’ savage standoff is a microcosm of the terrifying failures and crises of Nigeria as a national “common market”. The manifestations are legion. There is, for one instance, the use of central institutions of the Nigerian state like the legislature and the judiciary to prevent the operation of the rule of law in the administration of justice where corruption, the nation’s number one moral and material cancer, is concerned. For another instance of the same seemingly unending crisis, there is the fact that like emergency businessmen and contractors that spend more of their operating capital on luxury consumer goods than on the business itself, all the administrations of the country, federal, state and local government, spend far more on recurrent expenditure than on capital projects. And for yet another manifestation of this pervasive and defining “anti-common market” ethic of Buhari’s and APC’s Nigeria, small and medium enterprises (SME’s), the backbone of the national economy, get far less of available investment capital from both the government itself and the financial services industry, the most profitable sector of the national economy. Perhaps the single most frightening specter of all, at least in my humble opinion, is this: all the projections of Nigeria’s population growth indicate that in about another two to three decades, Nigeria will move from the seventh to the third largest nation in the world. This, by the way, will take place whether or not we remain one united, federal nation with or without a relatively strong center. The horrors to come in the wake of this looming demographic explosion if a relatively strong center does not emerge soon to manage our chaotic internal “common market” are better imagined than prophetically spelt out in detail!

    For those who might think that my use of the metaphor or trope of the “common market” in this piece falls into the trap of an endorsement of capitalism mutatis mutandis, permit me to briefly make a clarification. Just as money, as capital, existed long before modern capitalism, so too did markets. And to say the least, it does not appear as if markets are about to disappear into the oblivion of history. What has been happening since the advent of modern capitalism is the growing and ever-expanding critique of markets, especially in their tendency to place profits and consumption far above humanity and the values that sustain both its material and non-material needs. In other words, increasingly, markets and market forces are being made subject to regulation and correction, unlike what used to obtain in both the distant and recent past when markets were pretty much unregulatable. And in this connection, let us note, compatriots, that Nigeria, Buhari’s and the APC’s Nigeria, is one of the last holdouts of unregulated and unregulatable national markets in the world.

    I find the metaphor of the national “common market” useful in making the case for a relatively strong center for Nigerian federalism because those who, in my opinion, have been making the most eloquent and persuasive case for restructuring have not deemed it obligatory or even necessary to indicate just how “strong” or “weak” the center will be in their “restructured” Nigeria. Reading between the lines, between the implicit and unspoken hints in their analyses and prognostications, I do find that some of them do want a relatively strong center in place of the current absolutely strong, bloated presidency and the associated executive and legislature. Specifically, I have not read anyone calling for the armed forces to be broken up into state or ethnic militias. I have not read anyone calling for the judiciary and the administration of justice to begin and end at state or regional borders. I have not read that each state or region should send its ambassadors to the nations of the earth and/or play separate, exclusive hosts to foreign ambassadors accredited to our country. I have read of pundits or activists asking for state police formations to replace the current national force, but as I am against this, I do not wish to comment on it here beyond noting that at one stage in this country that coincided with my early youth, we had local constabularies and the experience was almost entirely negative.

    I bring the observations and reflections in this piece to a close with the following point: just as it is necessary to note that restructuring is not secession, not a repudiation of the country’s unity and corporate existence, so is it necessary to ask of all advocates of restructuring to indicate clearly what will remain of the center in their “restructured” Nigeria. Reading between the lines, I get it that what most of these thinkers and pundits have in mind can be called a polycentric federal Nigeria. Very well. But even polycentrism has a center, no matter how small, how vestigial and so what, compatriots, would remain in the “center” in this visionary polycentric federalism of the “restructurenistas”?

     

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Restructuring is not the same thing as secession; it is the continuation of bourgeois-consumption sharing of the ‘national cake’ and the kind of ‘unity’ it has hitherto normalized

    Restructuring is not the same thing as secession; it is the continuation of bourgeois-consumption sharing of the ‘national cake’ and the kind of ‘unity’ it has hitherto normalized

    [Being an open letter to Garba Shehu and Issa Aremu]

    Dear Mr. Garba Shehu and Comrade Issa Aremu: Greetings!

    Lest I be accused of unjustifiably lumping you together when nothing of obvious political and ideological significance connects you, Mr. Shehu, as Senior Special Assistant to the President on Media and Publicity, to you, Comrade Issa Aremu, the General Secretary of the National Union of Textile and Garment Workers of Nigeria (NUTGWN), let me quickly state why I have thought it necessary to address this open letter to both of you when I could easily and more properly have addressed it to either of you. There are two reasons for this. First, both of you, in my opinion, offered the most articulate and passionate endorsement of President Buhari’s speech of Monday, August 21, 2017. Secondly and more importantly surely, it is remarkable isn’t it, that a major labour leader sees eye to eye with the President’s media publicist, so much so that the views expressed by the two of you about the speech are almost completely identical?

    Of course, a cynical Nigerian would see this congruence between both of you on the subject in question as an expression of the probability that you, Comrade Issa, is an appendage of the Presidency’s long media reach. But personally, I know you well, Comrade. I know that you would never parlay your solid reputation within the labour movement and the Nigerian Left for an actual or symbolic mess of potage from the overflowing kitchen, speaking metaphorically, of the Presidency. In other words, the thought that the unrestrained endorsement that you, Comrade, gave to the President’s “unity-is-not-negotiable” speech might represent the thinking of a segment of the trade union leadership – this is the main reason why I chose to address this letter as much to you as to Mr. Shehu, if not indeed more.

    Going straightaway to the subject of this open letter, permit me to say that the most important thing that I wish to discuss herein is, for me, the astonishing fact that both of you, Mr. Shehu and Comrade Issa, are indifferent to the fact that your endorsement of the President’s unity-is-not-negotiable speech reflects and takes sides with the “Northern” position on restructuring as distinct from the “Southern” position on the matter. Can you have been so indifferent to such a perception or is it merely the case that you do not care one way or another whether both “Northerners” and “Southerners” would automatically see you as taking sides with the “North”? For make no mistake about it: it is a “Northern” position on the issue of restructuring to lump it together with secession, just as it is also a very “Northern” position to almost reflexively see a fundamental opposition between restructuring and the unity of the country when, in fact and in logic, there is no necessarily oppositional or contradictory relationship between them.

    On that note, I move to perhaps the central proposition that I wish to make and explore in this open letter to you. What is this proposition? It is simply this: far from being antithetical to national unity, in the realms of both policy and action, restructuring has been the single most important and effective guarantor of our country’s unity and corporate existence in the post-civil war period. Both of you are probably too young to have had the benefit of lived experience to substantiate this claim, but surely you do know from common knowledge of political developments in our country since the end of the Nigeria-Biafra war in 1970, that it was on the basis of serial and sustained restructuring that the three big regions of the North, the East and the West became the thirty-six states that we have today? This is so basic, so indisputable that one cannot but wonder why both of you, reflecting and taking sides with the current “Northern” position on the subject, now see restructuring as a threat, a destructive specter haunting our country’s unity and corporate existence.

    Because so much depends on it, permit me, Mr. Shehu and Comrade Issa, to repeat, in the form of a question, the essential point that I am making here: Why has restructuring become so unpalatable to the “North”, to the extent that every and any mention of the term evokes terrifying visions of disunity and even disintegration? And conversely, why is the “South” now so hellbent on restructuring to the extent that for the majority “Southerners”, the word, the term now connotes the ultimate panacea for virtually all of our country’s crippling problems and crises? Indeed, on this crucial observation, let us not mince words at all: for the “South”, restructuring is so desirable, so totalizing in its appeal that many “Southerners” do not care in the least that the “North” and its leaders see and hear secession, hate speech and/or national disintegration anytime that the term is mentioned. Why is this happening? How did it come about that the country became so divided, so seemingly irreconcilable over a term that hitherto had been seen as a pillar of the country’s unity?

    Mr. Shehu and Comrade Issa, I have two answers to this question that I am quite happy to share with you and the readers of this column. One answer is fairly simple and uncomplicated; the other is a bit more complex. As a matter of fact, the first answer is so simple and uncomplicated that it is nothing short of an embarrassment for me to have to point it out. For what it is worth, here it is: we seem, one way or another, to have forgotten that unity comes in many forms and takes many shapes; moreover, unity is slippery both as a term and as lived experience, so much so that it constantly and forever has to be redefined and reinvented. I suggest that it is due to the loss, the forgetting of this constitutive variability of unity as a term and as lived experience that the current, respective “Northern” and “Southern” understanding of the term can be so dissimilar, the “North” seeing unity as threatened by restructuring, the “South” seeing restructuring as the ultimate guarantor of unity. Based on this fact, I confess that I for one am unable to decide which is more outlandish, more fanciful, more confounding, the view of the “North” that unity is settled for all time and is therefore not negotiable and the view of the “South” that restructuring is the panacea for all our problems, especially our continuing crises of growth and development.

    With regard to the second, more complicated answer to the question of why the “North” and the “South” are so irreconcilably divided on unity and restructuring, I suggest that what we are witnessing is the fact that with the coming to power of Muhammadu Buhari as President and the APC as the new ruling political party at the center, all the lies, all the deceits and all the delusions of our political elites in all the ruling class political parties proffering themselves as the champions and standard bearers of our country’s unity and corporate existence have been exposed in a way that had hitherto had been impossible. There is both a personal and a systemic dimension to this historic unravelling of the promises of bourgeois-consumption unity and restructuring in our country that surfaced in the wake of the electoral victories of Buhari and the APC. It is helpful to deal first with the personal dimension.

    On the personal level, without descending into insult and calumny, I cannot but say with all the emphasis that I can muster that Buhari has turned out to be one of the most parochial, sectionalist and nepotistic rulers we have ever had in this country. This is a man who enjoyed – and probably still enjoys – respect and even sedulous followership all over the country, well beyond his own regional and local neck of the woods. But now, it is an understatement to say that his blatant and even arrogant sectionalism has caused a deep crisis of credibility since even his own wife and some of his closest, longtime supporters and allies have either publicly and openly criticized him on this issue or broken with him precisely because of the regional, ethnic and cultural narrowness of those with whom he has surrounded himself. Mr. Shehu and Comrade Issa, do you think Nigerians are not aware, keenly and militantly aware, of these contradictory aspects of Buhari’s otherwise messianic presidency? Unity is not only or merely a word, a constitutional provision; it is also an embodied and lived experience. Nothing shows the hollowness of the President’s invocation of the inviolability of Nigerian unity than the great, yawning chasm between what he says and what he communicates through his actions and deeds.

    The systemic dimension of the crisis of bourgeois-led restructuring and unity in our country is nowhere more evident than in the fact that when we put the words, “North” and “South” and/or “Northern” and “Southern” in brackets, this does not in any way hide the fact we are talking of politicians within the same ruling party, the APC, as well as politicians of all the ruling class political parties. Naturally, this ought to make us pause to ask why politicians of the same ruling party and the same larger ruling class can be so bitterly divided on restructuring and unity. Indeed, we must go further and ask: are they really that divided or is it rather the case that, as they have done so many times in the past, they will sooner or later come to some agreement, some accommodation of their bitterest differences on the basis of the sacrifice of the interests of the poor and the excluded of all the regions, states and ethno-nationalities of the country? Or is it the case that we are now at a completely unprecedented historical and political juncture in which restructuring might at last usher in a “unity” that will lay its foundations on the primacy of the interests of the workers and the poor of all the regions, geopolitical zones and ethnicities of the country?

    This question is not as abstract as it seems. As I did in last week’s column, I bring this discussion to a close on the question of – production. In popular parlance, the kind of restructuring and unity – or unity through restructuring – that we have so far seen has overwhelmingly been based on sharing of the national cake – loot; public office; institutional perquisites. This is what in the title of this piece I have termed the bourgeois-consumption model of unity through restructuring: more of the share of our oil revenues; more states with their gleaming capitals surrounded by undeveloped wastelands of rural hamlets; more airports while roads and highways throughout the country go back to the state of nature; more federal and state universities while education and, especially, higher learning, go the dogs; more local governments without any significant or even visible positive impact on the lives of the great majority of our peoples.

    The “North” and the Niger Delta, these are the two poorest geopolitical zones of the country. Is it any surprise that each one respectively stands resolutely for and against restructuring, without their differing stands making any dent whatsoever in the surfeit of hardship and suffering imposed on the masses of the ordinary citizens of each region? Mr. Shehu and Comrade Issa, perhaps the presidency of Buhari and the governance of the APC will bring this absurd, terrible contradiction to an end for these two particular zones and for the rest of the country?

    We await your answer to this question. More importantly, we await the response and the action of your principal, the president himself.

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Counterintuitive and inconvenient facts and challenges for IPOB – and for all of us! (3)

    Counterintuitive and inconvenient facts and challenges for IPOB – and for all of us! (3)

    This was the concluding paragraph in last week’s piece in this column: “We cannot of course get rid of, or ignore the “Wazobian tripod”. But neither can or must we be restricted to it when the subject of discussion is the question of Nigeria’s unity and corporate existence. Are we caught on the horns of the dilemma of there being no choice between a broken tripod and a mere millipede whose status in the hierarchy of nature is well below the soaring skies of the bald eagle, our national symbol? Yes and no. This will be the starting point in next week’s concluding essay in the series”.

    Well then for starters in this concluding piece in the series, what are, respectively, the “Yes” and the “No” responses to the loaded question of the dilemma of there being no choice between a broken tripod with only two legs and a millipede whose fate is to crawl and forage for food in the undergrowth of the earth? I am of course assuming that most of the readers of this piece and of the series to which it belongs, know exactly what these metaphors stand for: the tripod as an image for the dominance of the three biggest ethnic groups on the African continent in the human and demographic composition of Nigeria; the millipede as a trope for the fact that beside the big three, the country’s demographic identity is made up, literally, of hundreds upon hundreds of ethnicities. However, given the possibility that a younger generation of readers and compatriots might not have the lived experience that would conduce to a rich and nuanced perception of what these metaphors of the tripod and the millipede stand for, a quick gloss or explanation might be useful.

    Thus, we could start from the little-known fact that Nigerian federalism dates back to the early 1950s when the three big regions of the North, the East and the West came into being. Please take note, dear readers and compatriots, that even though the Nigerian nation-state came into existence when the Northern and Southern Protectorates were amalgamated in 1914, Nigerian federalism does not date back to that event; it dates from the early Fifties of the last century when limited self-rule under colonialism began to pave the way for independence and full nationhood in 1960. Please note also that long, long before the three regions came into existence to lay the foundations of Nigerian federalism, the big three “Wazobian” ethno-nationalities of Yoruba, Hausa-Fulani and Igbo had historically been in existence, albeit in profoundly different stages of economic, socio-political and cultural formations than what we know of these groups today. At any rate, what is pertinent is that for good or ill, the spatial and demographic spread of these big three groups more or less coincided with and dominated the three big regions of the West, the North and the East respectively. They did not exclusively constitute the ethnic, linguistic and cultural complement of their respective regions; but their respective dominance in each of the three regions was indisputable.

    Of course, in the period of four and half decades since the end of the Nigeria-Biafra war, the three regions have been effectively broken up. In other words, it can be said that the tripod standing on three legs has gone. Enter the “millipede” with hundreds of legs, actual or potential. In other words, from those three huge regions of the Fifties and early Sixties, Nigerian federalism went, first, to four regions; then to twelve states; then to nineteen states; and finally, to the present thirty-six states, with possibly more to come. However, the memory, the resonance of the three regions and the ethno-national Wazobian tripod continues to haunt all discussions of federalism and restructuring in our country. No secessionist or devolutionary group or movement represents this residual metaphoric power of the three-legged tripod more than IPOB does.

    As I have stated many times in this series, for IPOB, there are only three “nations” in Nigeria: Biafra, Oduduwa and Arewa. Since IPOB is not one jot interested in Nigerian federalism, it may be argued that what the secessionist organization thinks on the matter should not concern us. But it is also the case that beyond IPOB, most groups and individuals vigorously debating the thorny and convoluted issues surrounding Nigerian federalism today also draw on the tripod metaphor, some explicitly, others implicitly; some in support, others in rejection. For instance, the regionalists and zonal advocates of both the Southwest and the so-called “core North” (Northwest and Northeast) for the most part base themselves on versions of the Wazobian tripod.

    The “rejectionists” are mostly those who never in the first place accepted either the validity or the usefulness of the tripod metaphor as an appropriate representation of where our country was and/or where it is headed in our search for a genuine, robust and equitable federalism. Their problem, their dilemma comes from the fact that if the tripod is not acceptable as a metaphor of Nigerian federalism, neither is the centipede or the millipede exactly an endearing image of a robust federalism: hundreds of tiny legs with which to stand or walk in place of three, this is not a reassuring image of national identity and robust federalism! In other words, mere numbers acting as metaphors, whether large or small, do not in themselves conduce to viable and equitable federalism. The recognition and acceptance of this limitation of metaphor – all metaphors – nudges us towards a radical critique of the (existing) politics of Nigerian federalism of which we can only provide the barest outline in this piece.

    In our construction of such a critique, we could begin by asking the simple question: who or what are the federating units in and of the Nigerian nation? The same question could be posed and is indeed often posed to other federal or confederal nations of the world. Here, let us restrict ourselves to Nigeria. For the great majority of all the groups and individuals writing about and/or struggling for true and just federalism in our country today, the answer to this question is unequivocally this: the federating units or entities are the ethnic groups or nationalities that were there, that have been there long before “Nigeria” arrived on the scene of history as a multi-ethnic supra-nationality of many peoples, languages and cultures. Without in the least bit questioning the validity of this view, we must nonetheless question its adequacy. Why? Because in the modern world, in all post-tribal societies of the recent past and the contemporary present, federating units and entities include workers representing themselves as workers; businessmen and women representing their trades and enterprises; professionals representing their professions; students representing themselves as students whose interests must be protected; farmers representing themselves as the ultimate guarantors of nation’s food needs. There is indeed a philosophical or “theoretical” basis for this expanded view of the representation of federating units in all the nations in the modern world and it is this: the fundamental, irreducible units and entities that come together to “federate” in all the societies and nations of the modern world are human beings as they produce both the means of their own survival and the surplus they need to assure the survival of generations of their progeny yet unborn. Permit me to briefly expatiate on this idea, especially in the Nigerian context.

    It almost seems absurd to say this, but all the same, it needs to be stated that just as, short of war, no ethnic or language group can and will be expelled from the physical space that it currently occupies in the Nigerian land mass, so is it also indisputable that all groups in contiguous physical and economic proximity will engage in trade and exchange of goods and services, within Nigeria or in any other arrangement of joint, associated nationhood. In other words, our peoples are not only “federating” as speakers of certain languages and bearers of certain ethno-national cultures, they are doing so as producers and consumers of goods and services; and they are doing so necessarily and inevitably. Who has not heard of trade and commerce across the bloody, tragic battle lines of the Nigeria-Biafra war? Which adult, literate, thinking Nigerian does not know that all our peoples, North and South, East and West, face physical, environmental and production challenges that can only be resolved in cooperation, whether within the current Nigerian nation-space or another? The regions and zones that are completely landlocked, will they not always need access to the seas and the ports of the coastal regions? The regions and zones that face great, daunting pressure of scarcity of land in relation to high population densities, will they not travel and migrate outwards, whether the land they travel within or into is the present-day Nigeria or other nation-states altogether? And the regions and zones that depend on the movement of capital, goods, services and peoples, will this imperative not be there whether the nation be what we have now or a successor nation-state brought into being after the last talks, the last plebiscites may have ended the life and times of the country we now have?

    If these questions seem to indicate that I am either dispensing with or downplaying the significance of language(s), ethnicity and indigeneity as representational or “federating” vectors, let me quickly dispel that idea. Nigerians are no different from the rest of humanity: we draw our identities from the language(s) that we speak; our hometowns; the places where we were born and have made our permanent residences; myths, legends and symbols of ancestry, cultural achievement, civic pride and breakthroughs in moral and intellectual insights. These will endure and for as long as they do, we will be locked into the competing metaphoric struggle between resonances of the Wazobian tripod and the centipede or the millipede. But the time has come to considerably broaden the terms, the vectors of the representational or “federating” units and entities. We must, I argue, now add the vector of production. I could add other indices like gender and age, but for now will limit myself in the present discussion only to – production. In particular, I wish to end with a brief discussion of how an emphasis on production, side by side with ethnicity and language(s), would substantially reduce the exclusion of suffering and poverty from the central place that it ought to occupy in current debates over federalism in our country.

    Very briefly then, let us begin with the well-known fact that we waste and mismanage our national wealth and resources on a monumental scale. The looting, the squandermania is colossal and probably without equal in the whole world. Absolutely without any exception, the elites of all the ethnic groups, big and small, of the “tripod” and the “millipede” formations, are involved in these monumental acts of dispossession of our peoples in every inch of the land. Where “ethnicity” is the basic and perhaps the only basis of determining the “federating” entities, in the name(s) of their ethno-nationalities, these elites primarily if not exclusively, represent themselves and their own interests. This is why, dear readers and compatriots, the poverty and the suffering of the masses of our peoples have not, so far, featured prominently in debates and struggles over restructuring and true and just federalism in our country. The inclusion of production as a vector of federalism will not automatically bring this about. But it will be a beginning move of potentially decisive impact.

    A strong center with a bloated presidency that is reproduced in the executive governorships of the thirty-six states; or a loose center with a presidency with vastly reduced spheres of sovereignty, authority and influence? Compatriots, which vector of federalism and “federating” entities, is more suitable to the realization of the resolution of this question than production?

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Counterintuitive and inconvenient facts and challenges for IPOB – and for all of us! (2)

    Counterintuitive and inconvenient facts and challenges for IPOB – and for all of us! (2)

    I ended the discussion last week with a promise to start this week on the vital need for both the Buhari administration and IPOB (and all separatist movements and organizations in the country) not to ignore rational, convincing ideas and arguments in making their respective cases to the nation and the world. Well then, here goes: why this emphasis on reason, on rationalism?

    This question arises at all because, as is well known, both in the making and the breaking up of nations, reason or rationalism plays a weaker, secondary role to emotion and sentiment. As a matter of fact, it is usually long after a nation has been created or, conversely, broken up, that the reasons, the justifications are found and provided, often long after the event has taken place. Indeed, our country is a very apt illustration of this fact, this truism of political history all over the world. More than a century after our country was created by Britain in 1914 through the amalgamation of the Northern and Southern Protectorates of Nigeria, we are still hard pressed to find powerful and inspiring ideas and arguments for the nation’s united existence. The emotion and the sentiment, the dream and the hope are there, but very few Nigerians know of the fact that there are written and published ideas and arguments for the existence and the unity of the country.

    The same thing is true of those who have struggled for either total or partial separatism in our country: the emotional and symbolic expressions have been loud and clear, but little is known by the public of the fact that powerful reasons and arguments have been advanced for its realization. In this respect, IPOB stands as a telling illustration of the divorce between emotion and reason in the experience of separatism in our country. How so? Well, as far as I know, IPOB has made little or no references at all to the Ahiara Declaration of June 1969, even though this is unquestionably one of the finest documents providing rational ideas and arguments in justification of secession within Nigeria itself and from any nation-state in Africa and the modern world.

    Please note that this document was produced barely six months before the end of the Nigeria-Biafra war. This means that it was produced long after the declaration of secession, precisely because by that time, Biafrans had discovered that they had to rationally rearticulate to themselves the justness of their struggle for survival and the validity of their claims to being a democratic and responsible member of the comity of nations. Indeed, this is why the Ahiara Declaration was/is such a magnificent historical document: it carefully lays out what was wrong with Nigeria with a promise, a vision that those “Nigerian” errors and blights would not be reproduced in Biafra. Of course, whether the vision would have been fulfilled if Biafra had not been defeated, whether in fact the vision had already been compromised before the defeat of the secessionist new nation is another matter entirely.

    Fortunately or unfortunately for IPOB, it cannot wait for long before producing its own “Ahiara Declaration”. This is because in the months ahead, especially as its push for a referendum gathers momentum, IPOB will have to provide powerful and convincing rational arguments that would be equal, if not superior to the achievement of the Ahiara Declaration and of relevance to the contemporary situation in Nigeria and the world. This is assuming that IPOB intends to achieve its goals and objectives through a referendum, a plebiscite and not through war. In a plebiscite or a referendum, you have to win both the hearts and the minds of the people of “Biafra” and also of the world. That being the case, it remains to be seen whether or not the federal government itself – specifically, the Buhari administration and the APC – deems it necessary at all to provide rational and convincing ideas and arguments to counter what IPOB and other separatist or devolutionary movements and organizations are saying at the present time.

    This is the heart of the matter because so far, nothing that has come from the government on this issue has shown that it has the ability, the will or the good faith to meet this crucial obligation. Indeed, I contend that the time has come for Nigerians and the whole world to ask the Buhari administration and the APC to provide the rationale, the ideas, the arguments and the vision for the continued existence and unity of our country. In very concrete terms, beyond the empty and almost meaningless abstraction of the inviolability of Nigerian unity, what do the government and the APC have to say to those who want to make an exit from Nigeria and those, like the “Arewa Youth Forum”, that have ordered Igbos living and working in the North to leave the region by a certain date? Do the government and the APC themselves have a unified position, a rational and convincing vision for the unity and continued existence of our country in the modern world around which all the members of Buhari’s cabinet and the leaders of the APC can be united?

    The answer to this last question is, as most Nigerians either know or suspect, a ringing “No”. Beyond routine invocations of the unity and indivisibility of Nigeria, the Buhari administration and the APC have, so far, had nothing of substance to tell Nigerians and the world. On what basis am I making this very alarming claim? Well, in the first place, I take it that if there was indeed a vision, a rationale for Nigeria’s continued existence and unity, the government and the APC would be only too eager to share it with Nigerians and the whole world. To keep Scotland in the United Kingdom, the British government had to campaign hard, it had to convince the Scots that it would be much better for them to stay with and in the United Kingdom than to leave. But the Buhari administration and the APC feel no such obligation, no such pressing need, even in the face of mounting waves of disunity in the country. Far more crucial, far more disturbing is the fact that we know that between different or diverse elements and forces within the government and the ruling party there are substantial differences on the question of Nigerian unity and continued corporate existence, even if there has never been any concerted efforts by politicians in office or power to address these differences or contradictions within their ranks.

    At this stage in the discussion, let me pause, dear readers and compatriots, to confess that as I write these words, I desperately wish that what I am stating here, what I am declaring loudly is wrong or mistaken. In other words, I am hoping that perhaps sooner or later, perhaps sooner rather than later, someone influential and authoritative in the government and/or the ruling party will step forward and issue a comprehensive statement that would demonstrate to Nigerians and the whole world that Nigeria’s rulers have a powerful and convincing vision for the country’s unity and continued existence in the modern world. I look and look and look to find a single member of the administration or the APC leadership to whom Nigerians and the world can turn for an articulate and inspiring expression of the basis of Nigerian unity and I cannot think of a single person! In great trepidation but not without any hope at all, I turn to the known differences and contradictions on the question of Nigerian unity within the ruling party in particular and the country’s political elites in general. What do I find? In answering this question, I plead: let reason be our guide.

    I find that the government, the ruling party and the political elites, from all four corners of the land, are unwilling and unable to stop the wanton looting and wastage of the nation’s wealth, assets and resources, a fundamental causative factor of disunity in our country. I find that the broad division within the ruling party itself and the political elites in general between those who are for a strong center and those for a loose center is more imagined than real, that everyone is in government and in politics for personal self-enrichment, not for their “people”, their “tribe” or their “nationality”. Most pertinent of all, I find that though in general the North is for a strong center and a strong presidency while the South is for a loose center and a presidency with greatly reduced spheres of authority and sovereignty, our politicians vigorously pursue these positions only when they are not in office or power; as soon as they become part of an incumbent administration or ruling party, they considerably tone down their avowed views and positions.

    Let me express this particular trait in concrete and graphic terms. Thus, of the politicians from the North, I say that only when they felt the specter of being kept away from the presidency for a long time on account of the death of Umaru Musa Yar’ Adua did they finally accept that a national conference was necessary; now that a northerner is back in power in the presidency, they are considerably chary of calls for “restructuring”. What of the politicians from the Southwest? Their calls for restructuring and genuine federalism are not typically made by those in office; and if they are made at all by such politicians, they are made not thunderously but with a whimper. Finally, the politicians of the Southeast: their charges of marginalization, of a “Wazobia tripod” that has had only two legs since the end of the Nigeria-Biafra war are made not as matters of principle but as bargaining positions for the spoils of power and office.

    Of course, since Nigeria is bigger than the two-legged “Wazobia tripod”, the contradictions and challenges of Nigerian unity are multiple and diverse. In other words, we are talking not of a geopolitical centipede but a millipede! As I observed in last week’s piece, IPOB thinks of Nigeria in terms of three “nationalities” only: Arewa, Biafra and Oduduwa. Indeed, although he is not completely silent about the fact of Biafra’s multi-ethnic identity, only very rarely does Nnamdi Kanu talk of the other “nationalities” within the Southeast and South-south zones, the geographical and demographic focus of his ambitions and desires. In this, in being so hegemonically “Wazobian”, Kanu is being quintessentially Nigerian.

    We cannot of course get rid of or ignore the “Wazobian tripod”. But neither can or must we be restricted to it when the subject of discussion is the question of Nigeria’s unity and corporate existence. Are we caught on the horns of the dilemma of there being no choice between a broken tripod and a mere millipede whose status in the hierarchy of nature is well below the soaring skies of the bald eagle, our national symbol? Yes and no. This will be the starting point in next week’s concluding essay in the series.

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • A few counterintuitive and inconvenient facts and challenges for IPOB – and all of us! (1)

    Nnamdi Kanu and the flag of IPOB

    Far more than Boko Haram or the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), indeed far more than any separatist movement in our country, the Nigerian state faces now and will in the foreseeable future ahead of us face a far more intransigentand resilient insurrectionary enemy in the Nnamdi Kanu-led Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB). This is not because IPOB is better organized, better financed or more battle-tested than any other irredentist movement in Nigeria. It is because more than any other similar organization or movement in the country, IPOB has clearly demonstrated that the popularity that it seems to enjoy in the country’s southeast, apart from being on its own profoundly troubling to the powers that be, is perhaps an indication that separatist populism has a much wider spread in Nigeria than we know or suspect. In other words, is IPOB symptomatic or is it not? That is the question.

    Frankly, I do not know the answer to this question. All I know, all I can say is that I suspect that the federal government fears that IPOB is indeed symptomatic of wider currents of separatist populism in Nigeria. Definitely, this is a claim about which IPOB itself is loud and insistent. I can also say that many of the members of the newspaper “commentariat” that have been calling for restructuring or re-federalization implicitly accept IPOB’s claim that it represents a tidal wave of undercurrents that run deep below the surface of political normality in our country. So again, is IPOB symptomatic?

    I remain uncertain about the truth or falsity of this claim, at least for as long as I am yet to see hundreds of thousandsof Nigerians running to the banner of other separatist organizations in the country in the manner in which they have responded to the clarion call of IPOB. If this is the question that IPOB poses to the Nigerian state, what of the questions that can or indeed ought to be posed to IPOB, questions indeed that beyond IPOB, can and ought to be posed to all of us? That is the subject of this piece. And it is indeed what I call counterintuitive and inconvenient facts and challenges to IPOB and all of us in the title of this essay.

    To provide a useful discursive context for this set of facts and challenges – of which there are five – let us assume that sooner or later, the Buhari administration will accede to IPOB’s number one demand, this being the holding of a referendum in the Southeast and the South-south zones of the country on whether “Biafrans” want to stay in or exit from Nigeria. The government has not shown the slightest inclination toward such a decision, but let us for the sake of argument assume that this happens later this year or early next year. Let us furtherassume that “Biafraxit” wins in the referendum, narrowly or by a wide margin, it does not matter. It is within the framework of such assumptions of such events that have not yet happened and indeed may never happen that I wish to pose the following five inconvenient facts and challenges mostly to IPOB but also to all Nigerians.

    One: There are no secure and impregnable borders against irredentism, separatism and self-division. This is so basic a fact of history and politics that even mono-ethnic nations and societies are not immune to its operation, Somalia being one of the most tragic examples of this principle in contemporary African affairs. Moreover, as everyone knows, “Biafra” is not mono-ethnic; it is multi-ethnic. I mention this fact regardless of any longstanding historical claims of “Igbo domination” by militants of minority ethnic groups in the Southeast and the South-south. I neither forget those claims nor lay any particular emphasis on them. My point is simply this: every society and nation in the world is prone to centrifugal tendencies based on both real and invented ideas of national belonging and otherness. IPOB’s “Biafra” is not exempt from this principle.

    Incidentally, IPOB likes to divide Nigeria into three “nations” only – Biafra, Oduduwa and Arewa. This is extremelyarbitrary and simplistic; and moreover, it will not stand up to rigorous scrutiny by historians of Nigerian colonial and postcolonial politics. But that is beside the point. What is important is that IPOB in particular and the existing Nigerian state in general cannot evade the operation of this principle, this law that holds that there are  no borders that can keep any nation in the world from centrifugal, separatist forces and tendencies.

    Two: We live in a post-colonial and perhaps post-imperial epoch in which anti-globalist,irredentist “nationalisms” based on xenophobia and demagogy are rife. As a consequence of this development, we are seeing the resurgence of popularand widespread expressions of hatred, fear and the use of violently degrading language against both local and foreign “others”, the likes of which many had thought humanity in general had transcended. In this historic context, IPOB is in the “good” company of movements and organizations like the Front Nationale in France; the Law and Justice Party of Poland; United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) of Britain; Jobbik, the Movement for a Better Hungary in that country; right-wing Zionism in Israel; and the make-America-strong-again “white nationalism” of Donald Trump within the Republican Party in the United States. Every one of these parties, movements or organizations has been remarkable in the successes it has achieved through the use of deliberately vile, intemperate and offensive language and ideas to consolidate support among its followers, to gain visibility and even notoriety in the world, and to intimidate its actual and potential opponents. As a matter of fact, this is precisely why Nnamdi Kanu and IPOB have expressed open admiration for the Israel of Benjamin Netanyahu and the America of Donald Trump.

    Some commentators have noticed that of recent, IPOB has been downplaying the diatribes and insults that “Radio Biafra”, its main media outlet, had been spewing out against the Oduduwa and Arewa “nations”. This is completely consistent with tendencies that have been observed among all the right-wing, irredentist movements of the contemporary world: as they grow more successful, as they leave the extremist fringe of society and enter the mainstream and/or actually become ruling parties, they begin to temper their rhetoric of demagoguery and xenophobia. For the most part, this is more a matter of tactics than of sincere moral and ideological convictions. At any rate, from now on, IPOB faces the considerable challenge of convincing both its supporters and the world at large that it is not a movement, an organization whose driving force derives from hatred, xenophobia and intolerance. This is quite a tall order because in and out of power, not a single one of the separatist populist parties of the contemporary world has succeeded in engaging this challenge, Trump and the French Front Nationale being particularly telling example of this failure.

    Three: There are compelling and even positive ideas and arguments on each side of the competing claims and counter-claims of integration and separatism, of the “stay” and the “exit” positions. In concrete terms, staying in or exiting from, say, Europe, Britain, Nigeria or any country in the world,each has its irrefutable considerations that are often extremely difficult for many people to decide one way or the other. But neither IPOB nor the Nigerian government seems aware or mindful of this fact. For the Buhari administration, it suffices simply to invoke the abstract principle of the inviolability of the unity of the country, especially as putatively stated in the Nigerian Constitution of 1999, as if constitutions are emanations of natural law and are not revisable documents that nations constantly and perpetually have to revisit, finetune or completely rewrite.

    On its part, IPOB has more or less declared a bitter internal feud against all Igbos and peoples of the Southeast and South-south that disagree with its views and projects. This feud is apparent in the war of words and actions between IPOB chieftains and the governors and ruling class politicians of the Southeast. But at a deeper level, radical and progressive activists and pundits from the region are more and more cornered and put on the defensive by the spectacular mobilizational successes of IPOB. I advise that all who care about and are temporarily confounded by IPOB and what it stands for in Nigeria and the African continent should look into how, in other continents and regions of the world, the challenge of separatist populism has been successfully engaged.

    Four: Justice, fairness, dignity and respect are indivisible; if they are withheld from or denied of any people, humanity in general is thereby diminished, especially human communities and individuals in close physical and socio-economic contiguity. In other words, you cannot demand justice, fairness, dignity and respect for your people and withhold them from other peoples. This is both an ethical absolute and a matter of enlightened and pragmatic self-interest: what you do to others, they will do to you. IPOB seems totally unaware of or even contemptuous of this principle. The Nigerian government is not itself a particularly shining example of awareness or observance of the principle, except in so far as it treats all the poor people of the country from all the regions and states with equal (in)justice, (un)fairness, (in)dignity and (dis)respect!

    Five:The explosive antagonisms between integration and separatism can only be positively and beneficially resolved through rationalism, decency and fairness. But there are no guarantees that this will take place. As a matter of fact, the odds are heavily in favour of irrationalism, dogmatism and overinflated and narrowly defined self-regard. The manifestations of these traits in Nigeria at the present time are legion: we hear talk of the Yoruba or Igbo “race” where not too long ago the term referred to the three or four “races” of the Black, Brown, White and Yellow peoples of the world; there are literally thousands of “HIM” (His Imperial Majesty) in Nigeria today, this in an epoch in which virtually all the empires of the past have gone into historical oblivion; and every ethnic group in the country today is a “nation” or a “nationality”. Irrationalism in particular seems to be on amoral and psychic ascendancy that knows no bounds, from the secrecy and militant ineptitude with which Buhari’s sickness has been handled to the neo-medieval religiosity that reigns in all areas of our public sphere including those who control and run our tertiary educational institutions.

    I end on irrationalism in this first installment in the series that begins with this week’s columnfor a reason. What is this reason? Well, though rationalism does not provide any guarantees that good judgment and fairness will always prevail in the antagonism between integrationism and separatism, it is at least helpful to have it, if only in influential pockets or segments of the citizenry. This is an advice that is badly needed by both the Buhari administration and IPOB and its supporters. It will be our starting point in next week’s continuation of the series.

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Obamacare versus Trumpcare: health care and the wealth and poverty of nations

    Obamacare versus Trumpcare: health care and the wealth and poverty of nations

    If you want to know what the Lord God thinks of money, look at the people to whom he gives it.   Thomas Guthrie

    For truth in disclosure, let me start this essay with the declaration that all my adult life, I have been a fervent advocate of socialized medicine. This means that I believe that every person in our world, rich or poor, old or young, in the rich or the poor countries of the planet, everyone should have access to free and qualitative health care. In other words, I believe with thousands of other writers and thinkers that access to health care is a human right which, in the years and decades ahead will eventually become a fact, a reality of social existence everywhere on our planet. To call this by a term – socialized medicine – in order to deny its implementation is, in the long view of human social development, a retrograde act. But what does this have to do with the subject of this essay?

    Well, in the current war raging between Obamacare and Trumpcare in the United States, socialized medicine is known as the so-called “single payer” option and neither Obamacare nor Trumpcare would have anything to do with it. Indeed, with the exception of a tiny minority of leftist politicians like Senator Bernie Sanders who came close to clinching the nomination of the Democratic Party for the presidential election of last year, nobody is thinking about socialized medicine, let alone talking about it. If this is the case, the question arises as to why there is such a bitter, seemingly irreconcilable difference between Obamacare and Trumpcare. Welcome to the extreme absurdity that is the world, the ethos 21st century American medicine!

    In case this last declaration seems gratuitous and unwarranted, let me say that as I write these words on Friday, July 28, 2017, the latest attempt of the Republicans in the U.S. Senate to ram Trumpcare through the legislative process for instant ratification into law by president Donald Trump has just been defeated. This defeated bill tells us a lot about the essence of Trumpcare. In the first year alone, it would have taken health insurance away from16 million Americans covered by Obamacare. Additionally, it would have immediately increased payment for premiums by 20%, making health insurance unaffordable for millions of Americans not included in the 16 million who would not be covered under the terms of the defeated bill. What is perhaps worse, what is simply unbelievable is the fact that this defeated bill was the mildest, the “kindest” of the three bills proposed by the Republicans to repeal and replace Obamacare. If these words that I write seem an exaggeration, readers are welcome to view YouTube videos of demonstrators and protestors in the US Congress this past week shouting slogans like “Kill the Bill, Don’t Kill Us! Kill the Bill, Don’t Kill Us!”

    At this point in the discussion, a word or two is perhaps necessary to provide some contextual and discursive clarifications about the opposition between Obamacare and Trumpcare. Concerning the former, perhaps the most pertinent thing to say about Obamacare is that it is not socialized medicine, not in the least! Rather, it is a structural package of market-driven forces in combination with subsidies provided by the American government intended respectively to help the old (Medicare) and the poor (Medicaid) get health insurance coverage which they would otherwise find too costly and out of reach for their meagre economic circumstances. In other words, Obamacare for the most part leaves the organization and running of the American medical system to powerful private economic and financial forces concentrated in the pharmaceutical, insurance and health care delivery industries. In this respect, most analysts calculate that the American medical system constitutes about one-sixth of the country’s national economy.  Within this sector of the economy, government subsidies for the costs borne by the poor and the elderly are way behind the profits, the surplus value derived from payments made by wealthy individuals and private and public employers.

    In other words, Obamacare essentially constitutes a minimum of protection for poor people and old retirees against market forces that respect only those who can pay, without reference to the ability to pay. As a matter of fact, long before Obama became president, many national and local leaders of the Republican Party had advocated programs similar to Obamacare as a means of keeping socialized medicine completely out of the equation. Indeed, it was Mitt Romney who was defeated by Obama in the presidential elections of 2012 and who, as Governor of Massachusetts, first introduced the model of mixed heath care delivery system that would later become Obamacare. Against this historic and political background, the question that arises is this: why are the Republicans so hellbent against Obamacare to the extent that they are willing to take away health insurance coverage for tens of millions of poor, elderly and young Americans? Are Republicans so inhuman, so evil, so blinded by the inviolability of market forces and money that they care not one jot for the health, the lives of the poor and the elderly who cannot meet the dictates of the market? Are they the kind of people that Thomas Guthrie had in mind when he wrote the words of the epigraph to this essay? Here’s the epigraph: If you want to know what the Lord God thinks of money, look at the people to whom he gives it.

    To give a useful response to this question, please think of the following facts, dear reader. America is not Nigeria; it is not a developing country whose health care delivery system is so undeveloped and inefficient that its elites have to be flown abroad if and when they fall dangerously ill. America not only has one of the best physical infrastructures for medical practice in the world, it is ahead of most of the nations of the planet in research and development in medicine in virtually all the fields of the profession. Here in the part of the state of Massachusetts in which this article is being written, there is a concentration of first-rate medical hospitals and institutions that is perhaps second to none in the world. Well, so much for the good part, the rosy picture because, dear reader, this is not a place where you want to fall sick if you are poor and elderly and without insurance coverage. Why? Because the only condition in which you will get treatment if you suddenly and dangerously fall sick is if you’re rushed to the emergency section of a nearby hospital. And even then, beyond immediate treatment or service to stabilize your condition, you will not get the services, the care you need to restore you to full health. Obamacare was/is the minimum that the United States as a nation, as a society has been able to do to alleviate this mother of all scandals of the 21st century. And it is this Obamacare that the Republicans are hellbent to completely do away with. Why? What is their reasoning, their justification?

    In responding to this question, let us briefly and summarily dispose of one obvious but rather tangential factor, this being the appellation “Obamacare” itself. As is well known, the name, the prefix, Obama in the term is the sign, the trope for everything that the base of electoral support for the Republican Party deems not only unamerican but also anti-American, especially with regard to race, ideology and social policy. I have stated earlier in this piece that Obamacare is not socialized medicine, that its essential contents were first put in place by Mitt Romney, a Republican. Thus, as absurd as it may seem, for the Republicans what is wrong with Obamacare is the fact that it is Obamacare and not, say, “Romneycare”. Had it been the latter, they would in all probability simply have tinkered with it, not completely reject it. In this respect, the Republicans are caught in the trap of their own discursive totalitarianism: since they have driven themselves into a prison house of language in which anything having to do with the name and the term “Obama” is anathema, they would rather send millions of Americans into the emotional and psychic wilderness of uninsured and uninsurable patients than do anything at all to salvage the workable, beneficial parts of Obamacare.

    But that is not the heart of the matter. This is because beyond discursive and linguistic reification, the Republicans are caught in a social contradiction in which they find themselves making a last-ditch defense of health care delivery as a commodity and not a right. The absurdity of their position can be grasped by the deployment of the following syllogism: all commodities are for sale, not for distribution as a right; like food, health care is a commodity; ergo, health care is for sale as a commodity, not for distribution as a right. Of course, this is only in the world of abstractions, the universe of reifications; in the real world, health care is both a commodity and a right. Indeed, as many of the demonstrators and protestors have been saying in their descent on the Capitol this past week, all the members of the US Congress, the Senate and the House of Representatives, enjoy very generous health care benefits paid for by taxpayers as a right that cannot be taken away from them!

    The reader may have noticed that in the title of this piece I use the phrase “the wealth and poverty of nations”. As a matter of fact, the phrase is borrowed from what is generally regarded as the bible of modern capitalism, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith. In that classic outline and defense of modern capitalism, Smith persistently talks of both the wealth and the poverty of nations. This is because he saw quite clearly that as wealth is created in all modern nations, so also is poverty created in its wake or at it flank. In other words, Smith saw quite clearly that capitalism is not only a terrific productive machine for generating wealth on a colossal scale, it is also a whale of a structural contraption for distributing wealth unfairly – that is if unrelenting social engineering is not done to alleviate the effects of this fundamental contradiction.

    We are of course far from the time and the world of Adam Smith when his analyses and warnings about the consequences of not reducing or alleviating poverty and its effects were routinely ignored. But not for the Republicans in the U.S. and not for the barawo pseudo-capitalists in Nigeria! In the most progressive and liberal nations and zones of contemporary 21st century capitalism, socialized medicine has been solidly put in place, usually after turbulent social and political struggles by the poor and those who stand with them. This is true, for instance, of Canada which is just across the border from most of the northeastern and northwestern states of the United States where, incidentally, drugs and medications are generally much cheaper than in the U.S. To see the Republicans’ war against Obamacare in the light of this long view of capitalism is to see that that they are on the wrong, losing side of history. Whether they like it or not, Obamacare has come to stay, if not in its current incarnation, then in other improved and expanded versions.

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu