Category: Biodun Jeyifo

Inclusive of all the members of his immediate family, there were ten of us at his bedside at the Beth Israel Hospital in Boston. It was Sunday, July 1, 2017 around 5:55 p.m. The doctors having earlier informed us that the end was near, a Roman Catholic “last rite” had been expeditiously arranged. It was conducted by a Nigerian priest. When Father Chris had gone through the first stage of the profoundly moving ceremony, he invited any of us who so desired to speak our farewell to him after which he, the priest, would bring the order or proceedings of the “last rites” to a close.

Members of the family went first, turn by turn. And then, we, friends of the family, each had her or his turn, each woman and man moving close to the still warm and living body and addressing him as if he could hear us though, scientifically speaking, all cognition had gone from him. As I waited for my turn to say my last words to him, an incredible riot of thoughts and emotions raced through my mind, undergirded by an overwhelming sadness. He was still here, on this side of the great divide; but I, we, all knew that he was slipping away into the night of Time and Being. The work of mourning him had already begun.

I swear that even as I approached him to say my farewell, I had not yet chosen the words to say to him. Unlike him who, with his matchless rationalism and towering intellect, was a believer, I am not a believer, at least not in the sense of organized, formal religion. But at the very moment when I got to his side and laid my hand on his arm, the words came of their own. I felt, I knew that I was addressing his spirit, addressing Spirit itself which binds all of us, the living, the dead and the unborn, together. Both the real and the factitious, trivial line separating “believers” and “unbelievers” had vanished as I said the following words to him, simply:

“Egbon, we shall not forget you. I testify that you have left us a prodigious legacy, a bountiful bequest that will never perish. I testify that you crossed many borders, the you are the greatest border crosser of your generation. The innumerable borders that you crossed enabled me and other members of my generation that you inspired to do the same. In the course of those border crossings, you lived life to the fullest. You are now at another border. On behalf of all who are not present here, I ask you to go across this last of all borders gracefully. Go gently and courageously into the shade, Egbon”.

Why did I suddenly have that intuition that in addressing his spirit I was also addressing Spirit itself? I do not know. But I have a conjecture: in moments of extreme, ineffable loss and sadness, intimations that we never ordinarily have come to us. We never really know how wide and deep a hold someone who has passed had on us until they’re no longer here. I thought I had learnt this lesson with the passing of my mother in 1992, but there I was on Sunday, July 1, 2017, at that bewildering space of grief again. With that level and space of grief, all that Egbon had meant to me, all that members of my generation had deeply cherished in him was telescoped into one blinding flash of illumination or revelation. What was this revelation? Here it is: only he who contained so vast an accumulation of the profoundly enriching emanations of Spirit as Abiola Irele did could have been a teacher and mentor to so many and also could have been the exemplary and consummate border crosser that he was. Is this an extravagant claim produced by the rush of powerful, confounding emotions like loss, grief, mourning? I don’t think so. At any rate, here are my thoughts on the matter, first gleaned at that numinous moment at his bedside just before his transition but now fleshed out several days after the initial moment of spiritual and cognitive eureka.

At the centre of Irele’s work and accomplishments as a scholar, teacher and critic is Negritude. Indisputably, he is the world’s greatest scholar on Negritude. He worked on all areas of modern and traditional African arts and humanities and of all the constitutive regions of Africa and its Diasporas. But Negritude is at the centre of it all. He started his career with and on it and at the end, he was still working tirelessly on it, revising previous work and planning new revaluations. He knew very well that Negritude had and still has many critics, many intellectual detractors, some of them the most brilliant scholars in the field for whom Irele had nothing but great respect. So why did he stick so tirelessly, so immovably from the defence, the promotion of Negritude, especially of Leopold Sedar Senghor and Aime Césaire?

It is no secret that both Senghor and Césaire are considered two of the greatest modern poets in the French language, just as everyone knows that the two men’s Negritude was based on their love of the French language, culture and civilization. Though Césaire’s Francophilia was more tempered, more critical than Senghor’s, it was nonetheless as constitutive of his Negritude as Senghor’s. We know that Francophilia is a subset of a passionate love affair with European civilization, perhaps the most presumptuous of all the subsets of Western culture. Like Senghor and Césaire, Irele was completely at ease with his Francophilia, his great love of Western culture and civilization, right from the Greek and Roman classics to the great books and men of modern European letters and thought. And music and wine and cinema and cuisine.

But then also, Irele was a passionate lover and connoisseur of the classics of traditional and modern African art, music, performance and verbal arts. In other words, his Negritude, perhaps unlike Senghor’s and Césaire’s, was based, not on an abstraction, but on lived expressions of a truly cosmopolitan personality. He applied for and won many prestigious awards and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) in the U.S. to direct summer research and teaching programs in classic African linguistic and poetic traditions like the Zulu Izibongo and the Yoruba Ifa and Ijala. As much as delighted greatly in classical and contemporary European symphonic music, he had a passion for the masterpieces of Dun-dun and Bata drum idioms, old and contemporary hits of West African highlife music, and the trailblazing creations of the likes of Afropop stars Angelique Kidjo, Baba Mal and Yussouf N’dour.

Those who did not know at all, or knew very little of these “Negritude” expressions of Irele’s life and work may find his unapologetic, indeed very passionate love affair with French language and culture in particular and Western civilization in general confounding, especially as this sometimes takes a quite extraordinary or indeed spectral quality. One memorable instance of this comes to my mind and I find it both strangely consoling and revealing. We were in a restaurant in a village in the Medoc, a wine region of France near Bordeaux. We were the guests of Alain Ricard who himself passed away last year. The food and the wines were excellent and the company in an agreeable and infectious state of discreet bacchanalia. In such circumstances, Irele usually gets possessed by the spirits of Ogun and Ayan or, if you like, of both Bacchus and Orpheus combined. Spontaneously, he broke into song, into a long, spellbinding rendition of the central aria of Gaetano Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor”. Everyone inside the restaurant stopped eating, mesmerized by Irele’s flawless, mellifluous singing – in the Italian original of the opera. People walking by in the street outside the restaurant stopped in their tracks and came to the door and the windows wondering where this music, this voice was coming from. When Irele finished singing, the place erupted into spontaneous, wild and prolonged cheering. When the applause ended, one old man, apparently still in the grip of the performance he had just heard, asked no one in particular, “he was singing in Italian, wasn’t he?” “Yes”, someone answered. “Where is he from?”, the old man continued. “Nigeria”, Alain responded. Silence for a long while. Then the old man said, “only in the Medoc, only in the Medoc can you hear a Nigerian singing heavenly Italian opera!” I could have said to him, “no, not only in the Medoc but also in Ibadan, in Dakar, in Port of Spain, Trinidad”.

You could say of Irele that he was one of kind. And indeed, I found myself involuntarily muttering these words to no one in particular as we all sat on that fateful day last Sunday as we waited for the doctors to tell us words we were terrified of hearing from them. You would be correct in saying that about Abiola Irele that he was one of a kind, but you wouldn’t be cutting deep enough into the heart of the matter. I have said that I addressed my farewell, my last words, to his spirit and to Spirit itself. I admit that this smacks of a metaphysics of Being, but it is perfectly explicable in terms with which nearly everyone, “believers” and “unbelievers”, can agree. Thus, Spirit here connotes the universal yearning and will to enlightenment, to liberating knowledge, to humanizing generosity, to genuine solicitude and fellowship between all women and men. Irele’s spirit was completely at one with this universal Spirit.

It is constantly and quite correctly stated that Irele was at home in virtually all the disciplines of the arts, the humanities, the human sciences. His love of the great works of Western learning and civilization was absolutely unapologetic, was indeed as open as it was never flaunted. But he also had a consuming passion for the arts, the knowledge systems of Africa and other regions of the world. One of kind, yes. But more precisely, a prodigious containment of diverse expressions of Spirit. For those wondering why he chose Negritude as the pivot around which virtually all his work revolved, I suggest that this is one clue to explore.

I do not wish to end this tribute on a bitter, carping note. The trope of a “renaissance man” is often used for Irele’s personality and scholarship. This isn’t mistaken. All the same, it ought to be remembered that the great Western scholars, writers, artists and thinkers either from whom the trope was derived or to whom it is applied were/are almost without exception, knowledgeable and versatile only in Western languages, traditions, and knowledge bases. But Spirit finds its habitation or location everywhere, the West and the Non-West, the North and the South. Abiola Irele’s brand of Negritude, beyond Senghor’s and Césaire’s, is the most powerful reminder that we have of this liberating truth.

I have not suddenly and with the passing of Irele become a convert to Negritude. Or to the metaphysical and theological universe of “believers”. We had our disagreements, our quarrels and I am not, in my grief at his passing, idealizing him. I am celebrating his life, his achievements, his example. One achievement or example leaves me in great awe and gratitude: more than any other mentor or, later colleague, Irele continuously and unfailingly attracts new flocks of younger generations of scholars to his work, his interests, his perspectives and his projects. Thus, it is safe to declare: as time passes, the bands of mourners and celebrants will grow, Egbon. You will not be forgotten.

Go gracefully into the night, Egbon, mentor, teacher.

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

ON any scale of measurement and value, the current American president, Donald Trump, is a despicable human being and a nation-wrecking head of state the like of whom we find only in the poorest, most exploited and excessively repressive nation-states of the world. Six months into his presidency, this profile of Trump is so manifest that only the most fanatical of his supporters would deny it. Indeed, Trump is so extraordinary in the scale of his unfitness for leadership of any nation-state in the world that among the targets of his unconscionable misdeeds are not only foreign heads of states but also leaders of his own political party. Moreover, as President, he has sunk to levels of under-performance that nobody can recall in living memory. So, given this background or context, why is the Republican party still sticking with him? Why are they doing everything they can to prevent his impeachment, why? Is there a lesson for us all in our world to learn from this?

In responding to this question, I would like, first, to observe that nothing much would be gained from starting from the over-generalized premise that human beings are the same everywhere and politics is politics whether you are in the liberal democracies of the richest nations on the planet or in the barawo “democracy” of a pseudo-capitalist nation like our country, Nigeria. This is because, like diseases of the human person, diseases of the body politic only partly come from given, inevitable or natural conditions. For the most part, they are caused by the vagaries of the local environment and the things we do and/or don’t do. In other words, and with regard to the subject of this piece, we must look wide and deep into the American political and economic order at the present time to unravel why the Republicans are trying everything they can to save Trump from impeachment, regardless of the fact that he is political bad news for them nearly all the time and regardless also of the fact that the proof of his impeachable crimes and misdemeanors is already clearly established.

To get to the heart of the matter in these highly complex and intricate matters, we must, I suggest, first recall the fact that most people, including both the leadership and the rank and file membership of the Republican Party, expected Trump to lose in the American presidential elections last year. As a matter of fact, we know also that the Republicans were fearful of losing control of the Senate and expected to retain control of House of Representatives only by a very narrow margin. Indeed, at the height of the electoral jitters that gripped the Republicans before election day last year, a formation of elites within the party tellingly dubbed the “Never Trump” movement sprang into existence with heavy financial and ideological backing from a powerful constituency within the Republican party itself. In effect, Trump’s victory handed his party a gift it hadn’t expected: control of all arms of the American government for the first time in decades. To place this in terms comparable to a hypothetical Nigerian political calculus, this is like Goodluck Jonathan, against all expectations, not only defeating Buhari in the 2015 presidential elections but also handing the PDP control of both the Senate and the House of Reps. So, is this why the Republicans are sticking with Trump? Yes, but that is only a small part of the equation because, after all, if Trump is impeached the line of succession to the presidency still solidly lies with the Republicans. So, what is going on? And how does all this “American wonder” affect all of us on planet earth?

A clue to where the bodies are buried comes from the current titanic battles over the Republicans’ legislative efforts to repeal and replace the so-called “Obama Care” health law with a legislation that would substantially affect nearly every aspect of American life by the size of its redistribution of wealth in favor of a very tiny minority of the population. As I write these words on Friday, June 30, 2017, only 16% of the population supports the bill being desperately rammed through the American legislature in the certitude that it will be signed into law by Trump. But how in the world can you get away with passing such a toxic, unpopular legislation into law if you allow impeachment proceedings to start now and unsettle everything, perhaps irretrievably? That is the dilemma that the republicans face, compatriots.

Remember, the trial of an American president for impeachment, whether successful or not, is like a political earthquake of the magnitude of category 7: it shakes the American political order to its foundations.  Only twice has it ever been tried and on both occasions, the effort didn’t succeed in unseating the incumbent president. In one case – that of Richard Nixon in 1974 – it did lead to the resignation of the president, but only after nearly two years of trauma to the entire body politic. So, is this it? Is this why the Republicans do not want Trump either successfully impeached or forced into resignation through the threat or possibility of impeachment proceedings? How, in fact, do we know that the Republicans do not want Trump impeached, regardless of how much they find him objectionable and embarrassing to the presidency itself and the nation as a whole?

In responding to this last question, we come to the heart of the matter. On this, let us proceed carefully. Apart from the Republicans themselves, let us note that the other parties or groups that have a vital role to play in whether Trump is impeached or not are, respectively, the Democrats; the Press; and the intelligence and investigatory agencies of the American state. Of these three groups, we can rule out the Democrats as a credible and effective force not only because they have no control over any of the three arms of government but because they are, as I have stated many times in this column, quite spineless even in the pursuit of their own interests. This leaves the press and the intelligence and investigatory agencies of the state as the two composite forces that can reasonably be expected to do what is right and proper in the ongoing project of determining the bases and grounds for impeachment proceedings against Trump.

Moving very gingerly now in this discussion, we can observe that the press, though highly motivated and energized, is seriously challenged by Trump and the Republicans. More precisely, the Republicans have long perfected the tactic of impugning the freedom and impartiality of the press with the charge of a “liberal bias”. This accusation against the press was a significant theme of Trump’s and the Republicans’ campaigns in the elections last year. They have now taken up the charge again and have indeed raised it to the level of an endless, rowdy cacophony, much to the approval and delight of the base of the Republican party. Though the press is undaunted, it is intimidated and finds that it constantly has to be on guard against unrelenting assaults from Trump and the Republicans – as CNN recently found out when it committed a minor error in its reportage on Trump’s activities. In effect this leaves only the intelligence and investigatory agencies as the only real force on whom we can count to do what is right and proper in the matter of probable impeachment proceedings against Trump. This takes us into the most critical juncture in our probe into the molten core of these matters.

Please take note, dear readers: at this moment in time, Trump and the Republicans have control of the three arms of the American government. Moreover, they also have control of an overwhelming majority of the state legislatures and governorships of the country. But they do not and should not have control of the independent agencies of the American state. As a matter of fact, they are supposed, like all Americans and the country’s political parties, to vigorously defend the institutional impartiality and professional reliability of the intelligence and investigatory agencies of the state like the FBI and the CIA. This is in theory. In practice, attempts have been made in the past to compromise or subvert the impartiality of these agencies in furtherance of the interests of party politics or ambitious politicians. But to date, no attempt has been more insidious, more fraught with irreparably damaging the functioning of American liberal democracy than current attempts by Republican legislators to question and ultimately demoralize the intelligence and investigatory agencies of the American state with regard to the slow but inexorable move toward uncovering the details of the illegal and impeachable Russian connection of Donald Trump. This has just started but there is every indication that top leaders of the Republican Party now think that the only way they can save Trump from impeachment is to call the independence, the impartiality and the professionalism of leaders and operatives of the FB and the office of Special Counsel Mueller into doubt. I make bold to declare the indisputable conclusion from this development: only at the cost of severely damaging the integrity and independence of the state intelligence and investigatory agencies can the Republicans avert the impeachment of Trump. If they succeed, America and Americans will pay dearly for their fatuous “success”. How so?

For most of the world, the “American wonder” of the case for impeachment against Donald Trump lies in the fact that every crime and misdemeanor was done and is being done completely in the open. For instance, members of his campaign team that met with the Russians were as close to Trump as one could think of – Jared Kushner, his son-in-law; General Flynn, perhaps his most ardent supporter among retired generals and National Security Advisor; Jeff Sessions, his Attorney General; Paul Manafort, his campaign manager. And after the elections, Trump himself met with the Russians at the Oval Office and disclosed to them that he had fired James Comey, the former FBI Director, precisely because of Comey’s pursuit of the Russian connection. Every day, indeed almost every hour, the evidence mounts. If Trump gets away with it all, what will remain of the institutional corpses of the intelligence and investigatory services of America?

Ask Nigerians the same question. What remains of the judiciary, the security services, the police, the churches when, with complete impunity of corruption, confidence has been thoroughly eroded in their probity, their usefulness as institutions and estates of the realm? Ask the many other countries of the developing world where impunity of corruption is king. The answer that you will get, compatriots, is the same: corruption is the symptom, not the disease itself. The disease or diseases? Untold suffering, insecurity, confusion and disunity of the many at the expense of the wealth of the few.

Mark my words about this, compatriots: if the Republicans pass any version of their obnoxious and toxic healthcare bill into law, this will come about only at the cost of not impeaching Trump and it will be only the first step in what will be a massive redrawing of the lines of class, racial and gender inequalities in the land, together with the great and violent social turbulence that will come in their wake at home in America itself and abroad in the wider world. This is the ultimate lesson of Trump’s non-impeachment for all of us.

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

I stand to be corrected, but as far as I know, in the postcolonial era, no socialist or workers’ and farmers’ parties in our country, campaigning primarily as socialists or Marxists, have ever won elections at any level and for any office: local, state, federal, gubernatorial, senatorial or presidential. This is so stark as a historical and political fact that most Nigerians do not know that this is not what happens in many other countries of the world, including countries on the African continent. But then, there is another fact of an equally astounding historical and political significance: mass movements openly and powerfully led by socialists and Marxists have been much bigger and more consequential in Nigeria than in most of the other African countries with the exception of countries like Egypt, Ethiopia, Sudan and South Africa. The juxtaposition of these two seemingly contradictory historical and political facts is the basis of the brief discussion in this column this week on relationships between political parties of the Left and mass movements in our country. First, a few words of clarification of this contradiction before getting into the main body of my observations and reflections in the piece.

Please note, dear readers, that I am restricting myself in this piece to post-independent, postcolonial Nigeria. In the colonial period, especially in the run-up to independence in 1960, with the exception of the Ahmadu Bello’s Northern People’s Congress (NPC), all the other main political parties had socialists who campaigned primarily as socialists or Marxists and won elections. This was as true of Malam Aminu Kano’s Northern Elements Progressive Union (NEPU) as it was of both Nnamdi Azikiwe’s National Council of Nigerian Citizens (NCNC) and Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s Action Group (AG). Indeed, up to the end of the first decade of independence and the outbreak of the Nigeria-Biafra war, socialists who openly based their political actions, rhetoric and ideology on socialism were very prominent, very influential in these three ruling class parties.

Eventually, it was the civil war, especially in combination with the long period of the political interregnum of military dictatorship in our country that put an end to this pattern. The reason for this is simple, if quite chilling: with the exception of only the brief reign of Murtala Mohammed, military rule in Nigeria was politically and ideologically extremely right-wing, anti-people, anti-leftist and fascist. But, comrades and compatriots, this is not where the bodies are buried: it was not military repression of socialists and progressives that accounts for why socialists have performed so woefully in elections in postcolonial Nigeria while occasionally performing brilliantly in mass movements of our peoples across the length and breadth of the country. Thus, we must look elsewhere for helpful and probable explanations.

One explanation that we can quickly discuss but dismiss as a useful “explanation” is the fact that socialists neither have the money nor the inclination to spend it if they have it to compete with the ruling class bourgeois parties. This is because as everyone knows, electoral politics in our country has been increasingly over-monetized in the last two decades, climaxing with the use of dollar bills in place of the naira notes to buy votes by Goodluck Jonathan and the PDP in the 2015 national and presidential elections. This “explanation”, though literally true, is doomed as a useful explanation on account of the self-enclosed circularity of its inner logic: in order to have the quantum of money needed to win elections in Nigeria, you have to have looted massively as incumbents of state or federal offices; but as socialists, you have never had incumbency of public office and hence have never been able to loot; ergo, you will never have the quantum of money needed to win and you will never win. In effect, this gets you right back to where you started: in your beginning is your end and the cycle can never be broken in this circular universe of abstract rationalization of the real-world challenge of electoral politics for socialists, leftists and progressives in our country.

We have to be absolutely clear on this point. This is because the challenge couldn’t be more unmistakable, more stark: as socialists, as progressives, we must win on grounds that make socialism and progressivism, not monetization of politics, the foundation of our victory. Thus, the basic challenge is to make socialism and progressivism winning, unstoppable forces in our country. Not realizing this – or forgetting that this has been done in Nigeria outside and beyond the framework and context of electoral politics, many socialists have often joined ruling class political parties on the basis of the rationalization that since you can never beat them, the only way to successfully challenge their dominance is (1) join them; (2) infiltrate their ranks and (3) transform them from within. Of course, as well all know, step (3) in this abstract and opportunistic triad has never happened and will perhaps never happen.

Going on a completely different trajectory, compatriots, I think it is time for socialists and progressives to ask the following question that, in my opinion, has never been asked before: why have ruling class political parties – including the “party” of our military despots when they have seized power – often found it expedient and serviceable for their interests to appropriate socialist and progressive ideas and even policy platforms? In other words, while many socialists and progressives have often argued that the thing to do is for us to join them and beat them at their game, they in fact have often found that the only way they can retain power and credibility is to imitate us and appropriate our ideas, policies and worldviews!

Here are a few examples: Item: Murtala Mohammed’s foreign policy and aspects of his domestic policies that pertain to anti-corruption and the accountability of public officeholders to ordinary Nigerians in their tens of millions were openly influenced by socialist anti-imperialism and Leftist class politics. Item: Babangida’s famous phrase, “a little to the right and a little to the left” in the formation of the two parties, the National Republican Convention (NRC) and the Social Democratic Party (SDP) that contested the fateful June 1993 presidential elections won by M.K.O. Abiola, was appropriated from socialist political economy. Item: when in 1985, he formed the so-called “Political Bureau” and set it the task of mobilizing the entire country for a referendum on which ideology, which political direction to follow, IBB was openly and unapologetically borrowing from socialist and Marxist revolutionary history and rhetoric.

And indeed, in that referendum, didn’t Nigerians from all four corners of the land choose socialism over capitalism? How many people, especially comrades of the younger generation, know of that referendum and its unequivocal choice of socialism as the ideological and policy guideline for our country? How many remember that Edwin Madunagu was a member of that “Political Bureau”? How many know or remember that in the course of conducting that referendum, socialism and its basic ideological and philosophical ideas were translated into many Nigerian languages and carefully explained to the Nigerian masses in their tens of millions? How many know that this was at the time almost without any precedent on the African continent? Finally, how many today think of that referendum, if they know of it or remember it at all, as a sort of “election”, a contest between socialism and capitalism that neither involved monetized politics nor politicians ready to start a looting frenzy on our national coffers?

Bringing these ruminations close to the present and inserting it in the framework of mass movements as opposed or contrasted with electoral politics, I would suggest Buhari and the APC, though overwhelmingly outspent in monetized electoral politics by Jonathan and the PDP, were still able to win because of the mass movement of Nigerians that had slowly but gradually built up since 1999 and the return to civilian rule in the country. These mass movements were of course of many diverse ideological, geo-ethnic and social currents, but at the bottom of it all is the fact that it was the Left, it was progressives in general that were in the driver’s seat. This was why Buhari, hardly credible as a “progressive” himself, was able to successfully adopt the slogan of “Change!” as his and the party’s mantra.

There are many factual details available to substantiate this claim: the defeat of Obasanjo’s “third term” bid; the defeat of the cabal that tried to prevent constitutional change of power when Umar Yar’ Adua was dying and finally died; the fuel subsidy removal protests and marches of January 2012; the very struggle to prevent Jonathan and the PDP from stealing the presidential elections of 2015: all were in part due not to money spent but popular energies mobilized and guided by socialists, progressives and patriots.

As I write these words, it so happens that far beyond whatever might happen in the looming elections of 2019, we are badly in need of a countrywide progressive mass movement that seems to many of us the only bulwark that we have against violent social upheavals like inter-communal, inter-ethnic hot and cold wars, the terrifying insecurity of life, liberty and possessions that trouble many parts of the country, the drift to despair and nihilism that is gradually but inexorably pushing many of our young people to acts of destructive lawlessness, the reversals in the war against corruption in the law courts and the judicial order. To take only one of these challenges that only a mass movement and not electoral politics can provide a basis for its resolution, what if hundreds of thousands of young men and women, market women, trade union leaders and their rank and file members began to march and protest about the government’s inaction or incapability to respond meaningfully to the killings by and of “herders” and “farmers”? Wouldn’t this change the temper and contours of the 2019 elections? Wouldn’t it, compatriots?

This last question may seem counterintuitive, but I assure the reader that as a matter of fact, it comes from revolutionary history around the world, especially on our continent. As electoral cycles come and go, the truly revolutionary and consequential political parties of the Left must always ask themselves how elections relate to or, conversely, do not relate to ongoing mass movements for change, progress, justice and peace. If the mass movement is absent or weak or ineffectual, nothing that the political party does can win it an election, unless of course it resorts to the ultimate tactic of the ruling class parties – stealing votes by “buying” the voters. Build the movement and let the party or parties take its or their directions from it.  Comrades and compatriots, please let the discussion on these issues begin NOW, long before 2019!

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

These were the closing sentences of last week’s piece in this series: “As far as I know, no existing bourgeois political party in the country has any program or manifesto remotely dealing with this predatory alliance between politics and religion in our country. And yet it must be engaged; it must be transcended. Perhaps then, a political party of the Left for 2019? My answer to this question is an unequivocal no! This will be our starting point in next week’s conclusion to the series”.

Well then, as promised, I start from that concluding declaration last week. And I say, compatriots, we will need far more than a political party – even of the Left – to powerfully and successfully challenge the deadly, extremely predatory alliance of religion and politics in our country. More pointedly, I say that we will need not a political party but a broad mass movement that combines the best traditions of the anti-capitalist humanism that exist in politics and religion. Since this is the bottom line in this concluding piece in the series, permit me to explain what I have in mind here as clearly and concretely as possible.

What do Nigerians in general feel about politicians and political parties, beyond the common factor that they come from and have their ethnic and regional bases in certain parts of the country? Hasn’t APC, the new ruling party that replaced the old one, the PDP, lost all credibility as a force for change? Isn’t the PDP itself now a spent force beset by insurmountable internal and external fault lines? And the other ruling class parties, the ANPP and APGA? Beyond the certificate of registration that they have from INEC and the dwindling followership that they enjoy in certain parts of the country, who sees any future, any political weight in them? And that other unregistered, nameless ruling “party” rooted in the armed forces – who wants it back in power, who? What of the non-ruling class political parties, especially of the Left? Are they not too small, too insubstantial in membership and visibility? How many blocs and formations of Nigerians know of their existence, know what they stand for, know who their leaders are, and have the confidence that in office they will think and act differently from the bourgeois parties?

I am of course presuming that the reader implicitly recognizes that in asking these questions so tendentiously, I am deliberately suggesting that most people reading this piece share my view that the moral and ideological capital of politics and politicians in our country is at an all-time low in the opinion of most Nigerians. I don’t know if most readers also share my view that the best indicator of the abysmal state of politics and politicians in Nigeria at the present time is our political parties themselves. Dear reader, think of this observation by reflecting on the open secret of how little the President, Muhammadu Buhari, apparently thinks of his own party, the APC. Think, think also of what Olusegun thought of his party, the PDP, of how crudely and disrespectfully he dealt with the party’s national officers, constitution and even other members of party’s Board of Trustees (BOT) of which he was the Chairman.

The upshot of these observations is as clear as it is inescapable: beyond floating them as vote-getting machines, our politicians have such little respect for their own political parties that it is a wonder that at least every four years, they have the effrontery to come and regale us with stories and propositions that these parties can be instruments for a just, civilized and vibrant democratic order. This is as fatuous, as delusionary as the idea that most of the hospitals and health centers in the country are places where sick men, women and children in their millions get proper, life-saving and enhancing treatment! Indeed, this telling analogy between the state of our hospitals and health centers throughout the country and the abysmal state of all our political parties brings me back to the instigating ideas of this series of articles: why I have never voted and why I am not a religionist. What do I mean by this observation?

I don’t think about it consciously but all the same, I know that deep down, I make every effort not to have to go to any hospital clinic or health center. Certainly, the fact that for part of the year I live and work in America helps a lot, but this habit goes all the way back to when I lived and worked entirely at home in Nigeria. On the surface, this may seem to be a universal phenomenon: most women and men everywhere hope fervently that the need for them to have to go to a hospital would be as few as possible. But the Nigerian variation of this common human factor is significant and has been growing bigger and bigger over the years and decades to the extent that, as everyone knows, India has now become the thirty-seventh state of Nigeria – as far as going to hospitals for dear life is concerned. Mercifully, at least so far in my life and in about the four to five months in the year that I am in Nigeria, the need to go to a hospital has been infrequent. However, ultimately, like everyone else in the country, the need does arise for me now and then to go to a hospital and be seen by a specialist or be treated by general, non-specialist staff and/or auxiliaries.

Analogically, this profile of my attitude toward hospitals and health care centers in Nigeria is pretty close to my attitude toward elections, political parties and religion. As I have said repeatedly in this series, I myself don’t vote, have in fact never voted, but I do not sit by in idleness and indifference during elections. As regular or dedicated readers of this column know, in every election cycle that comes around, I participate in vigorous debates about the parties, the candidates and the officials conducting the elections. In some cases, I have been fierce in my advocacy of a candidate and/or a party, but in very limited, very specific instances. One instance that I hope some readers will recollect clearly is the contest between Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola and Iyiola Omisore in Osun state in August 2014. Similarly, in the presidential elections of 2015, I wrote passionately in support of the gallant efforts of my old comrade, Professor Attahiru Jega, then Chairman of INEC, to conduct free, fair and credible elections in the face of the relentless, proto-fascist efforts of Jonathan, Dasuki and the military chiefs either to steal the elections outright for the PDP or postpone the elections indefinitely and rule the country through a duplicitous “government of national unity”.

Though of a completely different order of the investment of my hopes, aspirations and what remains of the idealism of my youth, my attitude toward religion and the church is similar to how I relate to politics and elections: I go to church – about once or twice a year – when important milestones in the lives of very close friends and relatives are consecrated in special worship and celebration. I do confess that sometimes, on such occasions, the power and beauty of hymns and organ music as I used to experience them when I was a religionist, comes back to me in ineffable moments of uplift of psyche and spirit. But no, I am not returning to the church, to religion! Like political parties, like hospitals and health centers, churches, mosques and religion in general play vital, irreplaceable roles in our individual and collective lives. I not only accept this fact, I go further than mere acceptance of unavoidable aspects of life to assert that in fact, politics and political parties and churches, mosques and religion in general can be – and have many, many times been – invaluable reservoirs for the best aspects of the things that make us human, the things that could make us better and more fulfilled Nigerians and Africans. As a matter of fact, it is this conception of politics and religion that lies at the root of why I have never voted and why I stopped being a Christian, a religionist. Let me explain what I mean by this observation and in doing so bring this piece and the series of which it is a part to a close.

For the most part and for most of recorded history, only very rarely do we see politics in its noblest, most honourable and respected aspects: a Nelson Mandela; a Mahatma Gandhi; a Martin Luther King, Jr.; the Euro-American suffragette movement for the rights of women to vote and be voted for; idealist revolutionaries throughout history who, against all the odds, launched waves and tides of revolts against tribal, feudal and modern slave-owners; the nationalist revolts against Western colonialism and imperialism in virtually all parts of the world at stages when their leaders were yet to be compromised and corrupted by taking over the reins of power from the departing Western overlords. At this level, politics is higher and more valuable than any other human institution and practice. I say this, I should add, without having suffered an amnesia about the contending and formidable claims of religion, science, technology, law, art, music, poetry. At its noblest, politics, in my opinion, is higher and more valuable than each and every one of them! With a whisper and not a shout, compatriots, I say that it is this conception of politics that has kept me from ever voting or be voted for in electoral politics in our country or any other country in the world.

I do not need to say as much about religion and the role it can and has played in directing the affairs of our humankind toward the best part of our nature. One role, one achievement that is not often remembered is the role that religion played for centuries in the advancement of knowledge and human understanding, both of who we are and our physical and intergalactic environment. Perhaps the most moving and astonishing aspect of this story is the moment when, after a period of great recalcitrance and obstructionism, religion gracefully stepped aside and allowed science to flourish unimpeded, even if this was not without a terrible struggle!

Religion has also sometimes been a powerful ally of the oppressed, the forgotten, the wretched of the earth: liberation theology and its activist priests in Latin America; the Revd. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Baptists of the Southern Leadership Christian Conference (SLCC) in America; the Anglican Church under Archbishop Desmond Tutu in apartheid South Africa.

Can politics and religion in Nigeria at the present time be brought closer to these sorts of historic and exemplary developments. I think so and, indeed, I hope so! But is any of the existing political parties of the Left positioned to be the catalyst for this development? I don’t think so. In that case, why not create a new party from the existing ones and put everything we have in it? I disagree. What is needed now, I think, is a mass movement or, rather, the recreation of movements in this country that have enabled progressive, left-leaning parties and candidates to win and win big. In one case, the victories were at the level of the state governments of Kaduna and Kano, two of the most politically influential states in the country. In another case – June 12, 1993 – the victory was at the highest level of the political order. In every one of these and other cases, the critical factor was not the parties; it was the mass movement, compatriots. This mass movement for justice, genuine unity and peace: we do not have to wait for 2019 for it; and beyond that date, we will still need it!

The series is now concluded. But in a next week’s column and under a new title, I will briefly address crucial theoretical, ideological and historical issues pertaining to the relationship between mass movements and political parties of the Left, especially in our country and our region of the world.

Biodun Jeyifo                                                                                                                                           bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

I swear it: only in thinking and writing about this piece did it occur to me, for the first time in my life, that it was around the same time that I arrived at the age when I could legally vote and be voted for as a Nigerian citizen that I stopped being a religionist, specifically a Christian. At first, the roots of the temporal and existential closeness between these two major aspects of my life were very baffling, even inscrutable to me. But not for long. For as soon as I began to think carefully about the matter, the nature and source of the relationship between the two became clear to me almost immediately. What is this?

Quite simply, it is the fact that with these two changes in my life, I began the long, arduous but also enormously exhilarating journey into moral, psychological and spiritual adulthood. In other words, among the many issues that began to dominate my thoughts and feelings as a young person moving into early adulthood in my late teens and early twenties, the two issues that held pride of place in my mind were these two questions of, on the one hand, politics, with reference to citizenship rights and obligations and, on the other hand, religion, especially as it pertains to a deep worry or angst as to what could and would replace formal religion in my life. Well, so far, so good. But the question arises: why am I returning to these issues today, at this moment in time in the eighth decade of my life and two years before another round of elections in our country? More concretely and specifically, what does the fact of my not being a religionist have to do with the fact that I have never voted nor been voted for within the institution of electoral politics in our country? These are the questions that I wish to explore in the series that begins this week in this column.

My answer to these two related questions will perhaps surprise many readers of this piece, especially those who know of me only through this column. The answer is this: of all the areas of public life and culture in our country today, politics and religion are the two domains of our collective existence as a nation that I feel deeply regretful that I do not belong to a community; a fellowship; a congregation; a party. Most Nigerians belong to and are active in a religious congregation; an old boys’ or girls’ association; a social or recreational club; a hometown or tribal “improvement” organization; a voluntary association engaged in charitable and philanthropic activities; or a nameless, informal and “free” collection of souls that meet regularly to talk, joke and commune around life and the current state of things over beer, soft drinks and snacks. Now, I do not belong to any of these kinds of groups; and neither do I, for that reason, feel that something important is missing in my life, something that would give a richer and more fulfilling meaning to my existence. But that is not the case with groups and collectives associated with politics and religion. What do I mean by this?

To put the matter as simply and unambiguously as possible, I wish that a political movement of the Left was in existence to which I could devote all the time, resources and acts available to me at this stage of my life; and I deeply miss the fellowship, the sense and reality of community that I once experienced when I was younger and belonged to the Christian faith. Indeed, as I look with deep anger, worry and fear at the state of affairs in our country and our world today, nothing would please me more than the opportunity to work voluntarily and tirelessly in a political movement that is equal to the tasks that must be done to set things right in our country, our continent and our world. And equally important, there is almost nothing I wish now more than to once again be able to meet and gather with others in a profoundly cherished experience of fellowship and community as I did from about the age of fourteen to twenty, the years at the summit of my membership in the Christian fold that started at birth and ended on the eve of my entrance into young adulthood. If this is the case, the question that arises is this: what is stopping me from realizing these yearnings if they are indeed as fervent as I declare them to be?

My response to this question may shock many readers of this piece, but it shouldn’t, in my opinion. And the response is contained in a twofold answer that states that (a) today, politics and religion are the most degraded and confounding areas of our public and associated existence as a nation and (b) this is so because nowhere else in the world are politics and religion so intertwined in a mutually reinforcing predatoriness as in our country at the present time. Because this view is so central to the issues I am exploring in this piece – and the series of which it is a part – permit me to restate the point that I am making here in simple English: politics in our country today is so single-minded in relentlessly looting and wasting the nation’s resources and patrimony primarily because it is tremendously aided by religion; and religion on its own part is so obsessively devoted to money-making because it is closely aligned to politics. In other words, and simply put, one is the other side of the same coin of exploitation and ideological mystification based on the enslavement of the vast majority of Nigerians of all faiths, all political persuasions and all ethno-regional communities. If this is the case today, it needs to be stated with as much emphasis as possible that things have not always been like this in politics and religion in Nigeria. This observation leads me back to the point in time at which, simultaneously, it became legally possible for me to vote and be voted for and I stopped being a Christian, together with how this relates to the present period with the elections of 2019 looming ahead of us.

So, I repeat: about fifty years ago, I stopped being a Christian and I did not participate in electoral politics at any level when it became both legal and “civic-minded” for me to do so. As I have remarked earlier in this piece, these were both momentous and linked occurrences in my life. However, I absolutely did not feel then the void, the angst that I feel now in 2017. This assertion may surprise some readers of this piece, especially those younger than fifty. But the fact is that fifty years ago, I could not and did not feel a void because there was a genuine and extremely vibrant mass movement for radical and progressive change in this country that was more nationwide and influential than in any other country on the African continent, with the probable exception of South Africa. Certainly, many in that movement felt that we should form a mass party of workers, farmers and the oppressed and though I did participate in many attempts to form such a party, personally this was not a matter of great significance for me. The movement itself, that was the main thing for me. And that was largely because that movement recreated for me the sense and reality of a profoundly enriching and fulfilling community of spirit and idealism that I had felt in and with Christianity. As a matter of fact, I must say here, admittedly with a sense of nostalgia and sentimentality that I find embarrassing, that the sense of community and fellowship that I felt in that mass movement of progressives, radicals and revolutionaries in my young adulthood was deeper, wiser and more self-critical than the sense of community that I had felt as a member of the Christian fold.

Without the nostalgia and the sentimentality, permit me to briefly write about that community spirit in very concrete and graphic terms. I/we traveled everywhere in the country and met in countless meetings where the discussions, the plans were about what to do to save the country and our continent from foreign and local exploiters. The message, the hopes that we carried with us everywhere we went in the country were the same as the ones we discussed at “home” in the localities where we taught, worked or lived. We did not say one thing to “our people” and something else to Nigerians in other parts of the country. Indeed, when we met and discussed with total “strangers” in other parts of the country who spoke different languages from us and worshipped other gods and avatars than the ones we did, it was the same thing: a message of struggle, dedication and faith based on the belief that we could and would win not necessarily because our cause was just but because we directed our critical gaze at everything including ourselves. Let me put this in very concrete terms, drawing directly from my own experience: the things that I discussed as National President to rank and file members of ASUU at our Sokoto branch were not different in essence from the things that I discussed with farmers and rural dwellers at Ode-Omu near Ife where, for a short time, I had been part of a commune.

Have I said enough in this profile to make it understandable to the reader why the exclusion of electoral politics and religious community from my life as a young adult left no void in me and created no angst in my mind and consciousness? I certainly hope so. If not, here’s one other consideration to bear in mind. Imagine for one moment anyone in the period asking me something like the following question: “You mean that you are not going to vote; you reject all the bourgeois parties; and yet you are not giving serious attention to the need to create and build a mass party of the Left?” My answer would have been yes and yes and yes! Now, in 2017, this would still be my response to the same question. However, this time around, the reason for this is profoundly different from what it was fifty years ago. This will be the starting point next week in our continuation of the series. As we shall see, politics and religion combine together at the present time in a manner that would have been completely unrecognizable fifty years ago.

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

My response greatly startled her. “Do I know you and what am I to you that you should care how pleasant my flight had been”? That was my response to the question she had asked me, the question that supplies the title for this piece: “How was your flight, sah”? The “she” that I refer to here was a uniformed policewoman who was on duty with a male colleague at the first checkpoint for motorists as you approach the arrivals section of the Murtala Mohammed Airport at Ikeja. I had just arrived from a flight from London and having collected my luggage and exited the main Arrival Hall of the airport, was waiting to be picked up and driven to Ibadan as pre-arranged. It was in this context that the policewoman had thrown that question to me in the most affable manner imaginable, as if she was a relative, a friend or the very essence of good breeding or etiquette: “How as your flight, sah?”

“Ah ha”, oga, she had replied to my response to her “greeting”, “are you not a Nigerian? What is bad in asking about you flight as a fellow Nigerian”?

“I am a Nigerian but you are not the first to have asked me this same question since I arrived about an hour ago. As a matter of fact, you are about the fifth or sixth “Nigerian” to ask me the same question. Moreover, the question was addressed also to non-Nigerians on the same flight with me.”

I could see that with that response from me, she began to get the intent of my slightly angry, perhaps even quarrelsome mood. But still, she stuck to her guns and made one last attempt to keep up the pretense that her opening question to me had had nothing but goodwill and friendly sociability behind it: “Ha, oga, you know that we don’t discriminate against foreigners, now. The greeting, the welcome that we express to our own countrymen, we extend it to non-Nigerians too!”

At this point in the short but rapidly ramifying conversation, I decided to come completely “clean” with the intent of my disagreeable mood, deciding that Nigerian Pidgin would be the most appropriate idiom for the turn in the conversation that I wished to precipitate.

“So, my countrywoman and fellow Nigerian, as you done greet me and welcome me back home proper, proper, if I come give each of una, you and your fellow “officer” 500 naira, you no go take am, you no go say, “oga, thank you very much but I go take de money you give me though na greet I just dey greet you, no be say I dey ask you for money at all, at all o?”

At this, she herself decided to come “clean”: “Ha, oga, you too much o! Make you no vex now! We your picken, na una work we dey do here o! Wetin we go take do weekend? Abi, make we no do weekend?”

Hearing this “confession” from her, I went stronger on the offensive but in a slightly more controlled and even pleading manner telling her that as a Nigerian, I was sick and tired and deeply ashamed of seeing and hearing my countrymen and women begging – actually demanding – for money from all travelers, Nigerian and non-Nigerian, at almost every point in the process of being formally allowed to enter the country. I told her that in all my experience of traveling in many parts of the world, I had never seen this shameful, smarmy and corrupt behavior of both uniformed and plain-clothed officials as pervasive and aggressive as I have seen it time and time again in my country. Does this present a good image of Nigerians and Nigeria to foreigners visiting our country, this pervasive and open act of begging for and even extorting money from travelers, I asked her? Forging ahead with my onslaught, I told her that at the Customs checking point in the Arrivals Hall inside the airport, I had been delayed from exiting the building with my luggage in a timely manner because I had refused to respond to the same “greeting” addressed to me by a Customs official: “How was your flight, sah?”.

Silence, total if also temporary silence. That’s what came from this Ikeja Airport policewoman when I confronted her and virtually all airport officials with the charge of “extortion” through affability, through “friendliness”.  On the cusp of her temporary silence, I continued my “civics education” onslaught. I told this policewoman who had unwittingly become the target of all my anger, frustration and shame regarding the impunity of extortionate behavior at this airport that the Customs Officer who accosted me in the Arrivals Hall went painstakingly through every single item in my luggage. And this was all because through my refusal to respond to his “greeting”, I had given the man direct and unambiguous indication that I wasn’t going to allow him to extort a kobo from me and he could go ahead and delay me with as slow a search of my luggage as he wished. And he did!

At this point, with the continued silence of my unwitting conversationalist in this unplanned and unexpected lesson in civics, I relented somewhat from my deliberately offensive tactic and told her that I perfectly understood that all uniformed, rank and file “officers” in our country are extremely poorly paid. I told her that she, like me, like all “big, big people”, was entitled to something with which to “do the weekend”. But why should I and other travelers be the ones to bear the burden of the poor pay packets, the miserly treatment that she and other uniformed officers receive from the Nigerian state, I asked.

When the voice of my unwitting conversationalist finally came back, it was totally different from the demeaning, ingratiating tone with which she had asked me that opening question: “How was your flight, sah?” “Ha, oga, na true you talk! ‘E no good make all these foreigners begin to think say our country na country of beggars. But how man for do now? How can big, big people like you make gov’ment pay us better-better salary and emolument? Abi de country no be for all Nigerians, na for only una big, big people?”

My response: “Ha, that na de big one hundred million-naira question! Who go make gov’ment pay una wey dey work for all of us well-well, that na de question, my sister! No be simple question to answer, but make you no believe for one second say na big, big people go helep una get better-better pay and working conditions o! Abi, you wan’ tell me say you no know say na most of de big, big people in our country de thief all de money wey gov’ment get, all the money supposed to be used to pay workers and make the country better for everybody? You no know this? At any rate, make I tell you one thing – if police, army, navy, air force and all uniformed workers in Nigeria no fit go on strike to demand better-better pay because gov’ment say it is illegal, at least una fit do peaceful and lawful demonstration now and then, instead of making all Nigerians, rich and poor, for airport and for inside, inside de country, to pay you de money wey gov’ment supposed to pay una”.

That should have been the end of the encounter, but it wasn’t. In retrospect, I would like be in the position to end the story, the conversation with an account of how I went away feeling satisfied that I had made a dent, no matter how small, in the vast infrastructure of the extortionate affability operating with impunity at Ikeja Airport. But that would be untrue since that is not what happened. This is what happened: after all the talk, after all the brief but sincere soul searching, I went ahead and gave the policewoman and her colleague 500 naira each. And right there, before the car that was to take me to Ibadan arrived, these two representatives of uniformed petty officialdom in Nigeria had repeated that same greeting that had started our conversation to three other travelers who, like me, were waiting to be met and driven away: “How was your flight, sah; how was your flight, ma?” It does not matter in the least that as they expressed this alms-collecting, ritual greeting to other travelers, they winked at me with a look that said, “How for do? Abi, you expect say we go change, things go change now-now, dis very second?”

Away from the borderland of the nation’s airspace at Ikeja, the same extortionate drama continued as I was driven to Ibadan on the expressway and also within the city of Ibadan itself, when we finally got there: police checkpoints at regular intervals and at each point, a variation of the ritual greeting such as, “Ha, oga, wetin you chop remain?”; “We your boys dey here for inside de hot, hot sun, wetin we go take do weekend now?” The same drama but with a slight but quite remarkable difference: the deference, the ingratiating smile that accompanied the “greeting” at the airport was for the most part gone, to be replaced by a truculence which let you know quite clearly that you had to pay up or face an interminable delay at the given checkpoint. And the more you and your vehicle looked “ordinary”, the more implacable, even unfriendly the demand, expressed now as a command.

The rationale for this difference between extortion at the airport and in the hinterland is interesting to consider. Clearly, this lay in the fact that in extorting elite, globe-trotting Nigerians and foreigners, the uniformed men and women on the prowl at the airport had to be careful, they had to be polite, they had to be affable. But in the hinterland, the masks are taken off and extortion wears its coercive, malign face openly, indeed sometimes menacingly. I testify that sometimes when I am behind the wheel of my car driving myself and when it is perceived that I am, as I obviously look, a “senior citizen”, the attempt at extortion is benign. And at the first sign that I give that I will give nothing, they let me go. But on occasions, I have met diehard desperadoes who subject me to delays to “punish” my recalcitrance, my refusal of extortion.

A form of forcible taxation on the poor, the hardworking Nigerians who make their living on the roads and highways. It is also a form of looting. If someone were to do a study of the quantum of money involved, it is certain to be colossal, given how pervasive it is in all parts of the country. Clearly it must end. It will end, but just don’t ask me when!

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu