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Category: Biodun Jeyifo

  • A book I would love to write in the near future, inshallah (3)

    A book I would love to write in the near future, inshallah (3)

    As I come to the concluding piece in the series that I began two weeks ago in this column, I think it is only fit and proper that I make a confession concerning the subject whose conversation with me provided the impetus for my reflections in the series. This is of course none other than Monday Electrician. What is the “confession” that I need to make about this compatriot? Well, simply this: if the conversation had occurred in the other place apart from Ibadan, Nigeria, in which I also live, it would have been totally different. This other place is Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.A. Though I have had workmen come to make installations or repairs in my apartment in this location, I have never needed the services of an electrician. For that reason, for our “Monday Electrician” I would have to substitute any of the workmen I have encountered in Cambridge, Mass.

    In doing this, I must say that I cannot imagine any of these American workmen telling me that a stricken sibling is the victim of evil, malefic relatives or neighbors that operate through witchcraft, through “spiritual attacks”. Similarly, I cannot think that my imagined or putative interlocutor in Cambridge, Mass, would have been so incredulous as to be rendered completely speechless if I expressed the observation to him or her that we are both on a planet that is constantly moving, constantly rotating on its invisible axis – as Monday Electrician was when I made that remark to him. No, Monday Electrician was encountered in Ibadan, Nigeria and there is no way in the world that I could have encountered a technician like him in America. And that’s my “confession”.

    Are things so cut and dry in the difference between what ordinary workmen and folks in Ibadan, Nigeria know, believe and think about the world, the universe in which we live compared with what obtains in Cambridge, Massachusetts? Dear compatriots, if you expected the answer to this question to be a resounding yes, I hate to disappoint you because this is not the case at all, at least if we stick to the subject of this series and the book that I am thinking of writing, this being the relationship between rational and testable knowledges and beliefs that most people have in comparison with those that cannot be tested or proved – or disproved for that matter. In other words, what I am saying here is this: in matters of rational and non-rational knowledges, or of testable and untestable ideas and beliefs, the differences between the individuals, peoples and cultures of our world are not so fundamental, so unbridgeable that what we have is a divided humanity. Indeed, this observation is so crucial to my reflections in this series that I would go so far as caution that nothing could be more unhelpful in these matters than to fall into the trap of dividing our world and its peoples into those that live and die on the altar of rationality and testable knowledges and those that cling tenaciously to the age-old, non-rational, non-tested (and non-testable) knowledges and beliefs of their cultures. Things are far more complicated than that! To illustrate this observation, I would like to briefly discuss a “Lagosian” joke that I initially heard from a denizen of that city after which I will narrate a version of the joke that I have sometimes told as a revisionary form of the original. First then, the original version of the joke before I give my revisionary version of it.

    To an invitation from an Inspector of secondary schools from the State Ministry of Education to name the first flying object or thing that came to their minds, the following collective responses from pupils were recorded at each named location: Victoria Island: airplanes! Surulere: mosquitoes! Agege: witches!. In each area that represents a known demographic constellation of the city’s population, the expected or not so surprising though funny answer was given. Thus, the class or status bias of the joke is unmistakable and is heavily weighted against Agege and the response of witches as the first object that came to mind with regard to flying things. It was this fact that prompted me to revise the joke so as to either reduce or neutralize the bias.

    On the basis of this decision, I came up with the following expanded and revised responses: Victoria Island: airplanes, drones and UFO’s (unidentified flying objects). Surulere: mosquitoes, birds and bees. Agege: witches, demons and angels. For an explanation, here’s the rationale for my revisions: For the Victoria Island children of the elite, drones and UFO’s show, I hope, that when they think of flying things they are as much influenced by fanciful ideas as their counterparts in Surulere and Agege. Similarly, the inclusion of birds and bees for the children of the denizens of Surulere implies that they can and do think of pleasant objects apart from mosquitoes (and flies) if they are invited to think of flying things. Finally, for Agege, the inclusion of demons and angels in my revised version of the Lagosian joke places the kids of that mini city of working class and underclass folks squarely in the mainstream of contemporary Nigerian evangelical Christianity that cuts across all classes, all status groups. For indeed, with the exception of atheists and secular humanists, who in our country today isn’t thinking of demons and their archenemies, angels? Isn’t the epic war against Satan and his hordes the grand theme of countless sermons, hymns and tracts?

    My revisionary version of this Lagosian joke is not of course intended to imply that there are no differences at all between pupils at elite neighborhoods and schools and those in poor and greatly disadvantaged areas. Rather, my point is that these differences are not written in stone, they are not unalterable. In other words, what I am arguing is that when it comes to what individuals and entire peoples know and believe, the line between the rational and the non-rational is not like the line separating day from night, the high heavens from the earth down below.

    This is precisely the same point that I am making in the comparisons I made earlier in this discussion between Ibadan, Nigeria and Cambridge, Mass. In Cambridge in particular and America in general, you may not find workmen or technicians like Monday Electrician who will swear that witches and witchcraft are active parts of their reality, their world, but you can and will find people who still believe that the story of creation as told in the Book of Genesis is a literal fact and the world was created in only six days. You will find climate change deniers who vigorously disparage solid scientific evidence for climate change. You will find people who not only think that there are aliens from another planet living secretly among us, but swear that they or people they know have seen UFO’s. To this day, and against overwhelming evidence to the contrary, there are hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of Americans who still think that Barack Obama was not born in America and is a Moslem, not a Christian. To this day and against overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary, there are thousands upon thousands of Americans and Western peoples who still believe that Africans in particular and Black people in general belong to a different or subspecies of humankind than themselves and their kind, their “race”.

    Against the backdrop of these observations and declarations, I come to perhaps the three central ideas and themes of what I have been arguing in this series and what I have in mind with regard to the contents of the book that I plan to write sometime in my post-retirement future, inshallah. What are these ideas?

    First, is the fact that frankly speaking, knowledges and beliefs that are rational, testable and tested interest me considerably far more than non-rational, untested and untestable ones, though I am not in principle and in habit uninterested in non-rational ideas and beliefs, especially those pertaining to religious mysticism. Secondly, I believe that the marvels, indeed the achievements of rational, tested knowledges and beliefs are infinitely more interesting and more beneficial to humanity than the heritage of non-rational knowledges and beliefs. Thirdly and lastly and coming to our own country and continent, there has been a longstanding practice of under-appreciating the heritage of rational knowledges and beliefs that come both from our own traditions and from other regions of the world.

    Unfortunately, I cannot in the present context write about each of these three ideas. This being the case, I can perhaps only give assurance to the readers that in the book that I am planning to write, they will be fully and joyously elaborated. For now, what I can or should perhaps do is give a short preview, a succinct account of the third of my central ideas, this being my assertion, my claim that in our part of the world we have to contend with a long history of disregard and/or under-appreciation of the vitality, the achievements, the poetry even of rational, testable and tested knowledges and beliefs. What do I have in mind in making this declaration as a cornerstone of both my reflections in this series and the book that I plan to write?

    To answer this question and for the last time in this series, let us once again invoke the figure of our enigmatic interlocutor, Monday Electrician. At this late stage in this series, let me now reveal to the readers that even though my conversation with him took place entirely in Yoruba sprinkled with, now and then, English words or terms from scientific and technological modernity, Monday Electrician was of the unspoken but fiercely held opinion that much if not all of what I was arguing were the ideas of the white man. I mean, to him the idea that we were all on a planet that was always and forever moving was the white man’s idea!

    Even when I spoke specifically of electricity as a phenomenon, Monday Electrician was stolidly determined to hold on to the belief that that topic too could be of interest only to an African, a Nigerian who was the dupe, the intellectual slave of “white” knowledges and beliefs. When I told him of the wonder of once watching on a television monitor images of all that was going on in my own stomach through the technology of ultrasound resonant imaging made possible by electromagnetic waves of the frequency of x-rays, Monday Electrician saw, indeed could only see a man who was the mental captive of the Western world and its knowledge bases and belief systems. And yet, this is a technology that is being used, developed and mastered in many parts of our world, many of them outside the West. How can I turn this around, how can I make Monday Electrician a subject, not the object of a technological and scientific modernity that belongs to all of humankind? That is the task I face in the book I hope to write someday soon, inshallah.

     

    • Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • A book I would love to write in the near future, inshallah (2)

    A book I would love to write in the near future, inshallah (2)

    The answer to the question with which I ended last week’s column is both very simple and profoundly complex. The question is: why does a phone call to China go to the particular phone number called and not to any of the other billion-plus cellphone users in that country? Before briefly dealing with both the simple and the complex answers to this question, I should perhaps reveal here the fact that it belongs to an order of questions known as “trick questions”. How is this the case? Well, by using China, the most populous nation in the world as our example, I had deliberately focused reactions to the question on the weight of numbers, that is to say on a country and a world in which the users of cell or mobile phones are legion. However, in reality, the radio frequencies upon which China’s 1.5 billion (and the world’s 4.8 billion) cellphone users are organized and grouped are limited. In other words, the networks and the providers that make the whole vast, global phenomenon of cellphone usage work are very, very limited. And that’s because the radio frequencies are limited and shared resources rooted in phenomena and processes that modern science and technology have mastered and converted to our use as a species, a global or planetary community.

    Here’s another way of putting this observation across: the number of cellphone users in the world is truly awesome and moreover, it is still growing; however, instead of fragmentation and isolation, connectedness and community are the hallmarks of cellphone usage in our world. And that’s thanks largely to the fact that the laws or principles through which sounds and images can be converted to electromagnetic signals and sent and received throughout the world are limited, known values. From this observation, we can deduce the simple answer to our question: every cellphone and its user is customized to send and receive the electrical signals to which our voices (and images or pictures) are converted when we use the gadget. One mark of the customization is the SIM (Subscriber Identity Module) card. Another is the phone number. In other words, it doesn’t matter how many cellphone users in the world there are as long as we recognize that every single one of them is indeed customized. But that is not the end of the story for we also have to deal with the more complex answer to our billion-users question.

    From the bulky telephones of the past to the small, portable cellphones of the present, and from landline phones to wireless, mobile phones that you can take everywhere with you, the modern technology of communications has taken extraordinarily amazing strides. If we take the conversion of human and natural sounds to electrical signals as the starting point, the real wonder is that as this phenomenon or operation has been brought, at least potentially, within the reach of every human being on our planet, the products or gadgets have become smaller and smaller, while at the same time fulfilling more multiple and complex tasks and functions. No landlines, no direct connections and the sending and receiving agents of the basic, foundational electromagnetic signals get smaller and smaller and yet, yet the phones get smarter and smarter! At a crucial stage of the development or unfolding of this fascinating process, communications satellites enter the picture, bringing the universe outside our terrestrial home on earth into a significant part of the epic story.

    I perhaps digress. The book that I have in mind and that am writing about in this series is not about the marvels of modern telecommunications technology, though of course it will not avoid that topic. No, what is central to my projected book is the fact that every single one of the marvels of the i-phones and smartphones of the new millennium is based on knowledges and ideas that are testable and are, indeed, tested. Moreover, any literate person in the world can, with some application, educate him or herself on the knowledges and beliefs from which smartphone gadgetry operates. As a matter of fact, this was what I tried to do with Monday Electrician in our conversation on Thursday last week, the conversation that led to this series of articles in my column:  I tried to spark his curiosity in the rudiments of scientific knowledge about the universe in general and, in particular, about electricity as a phenomenal entity. From the account that I gave of that conversation in this column last week, I failed woefully in that endeavor.

    This was largely due to the fact that Monday Electrician seems unaware of – or resistant to – the order of knowledges and beliefs central to modern science and technology – even though he is a trained electrician who doubles as a contractor in the business of installing electrical circuitry in dwelling houses and factories. He found the idea of he and I being on a moving planet in our infinitesimally small corner of it in Oke-Bola, Ibadan, so absurd as to be beneath his commentary. And beyond the learnt, practical and repeated things that he knew about electricity, he had little interest in it as a phenomenal entity that does far many more things than lighting up houses and powering labour-saving appliances. He absolutely could not wrap his mind around the idea that sounds and images are converted to and from electrical signals during a phone conversation. Indeed, to the extent that it can be said that my “failure” with Monday Electrician was what instigated my desire to write this series as well as the book that I have in mind, to that extent is the “failure” the motive force of this discussion. Permit me to briefly engage this observation.

    The careful reader of this piece would, hopefully, have noted that I place a bracket around the word, “failure” in the present discussion. This is because “failure” is perhaps not the right word to use. For how could the appropriate word be “failure” when there was not the slightest chance of success in the first place? One proof of this assertion is the fact that Monday Electrician was willing to go so far as to claim that a disbelief in witches and witchcraft was a white man’s duplicitous proposition for which any true Nigerian, any true African should show nothing but disdain. To this, add the fact that he vigorously asserted that “we” (Africans) have no obligation to prove what we “know” to them (the Western world)! They have their “science” and we have ours, that is all!

    One of the most shocking claims of Monday Electrician in our conversation was an assertion that our Babalawos, Dibias, Marabouts or Sangomas traditionally did not deal in testable and tested knowledges and propositions. Herbs, the bark or sap of trees, the claw or tooth of a leopard, the ground powder of the testicles of a tiger and many more things beside these, all have their “names”, their “essences”, Monday Electrician proudly proclaimed! This of course is total nonsense, as anyone knows that has ever met and conversed with a herbalist that is not a charlatan.

    I place brackets around “failure”, compatriots, because I suspect that there are many Monday Electricians out there, hundreds of thousands of them, perhaps tens of millions, including many who not only have university education, but actually teach in our tertiary educational institutions. If this is the case, it would be very mistaken, very wrongheaded to think that Monday Electrician or any of the hundreds of thousands of people like him out there can be singly and separately “corrected”. For we really are talking of the conditioned and determinate creation in our region of the world of widespread unawareness or lack of curiosity about the scientific and technological bases of modernity. Our agbero or kalo-kalo mode of capitalism is content to import and not produce any of the commodities and gadgets of up-to-the-latest-minute modernity, leaving both the masses of the citizenry and the political and educational elites largely ignorant of or indifferent to the knowledge bases of the “modernity” that we so enthusiastically and massively consume.

    In a way, modernity is only a symptom, and not the root cause of the problems and crises I am discussing in this series. The struggle to attain and preserve rational, testable knowledges of the universe that we live in predates modernity. Indeed, long before the successful institutional advent of science to pride of place among humanity’s knowledge bases, all human social organizations had struggled to obtain rational, experimental knowledges of the world and its physical and environmental coordinates. What modernity did was to tremendously intensify, expand and shorten processes of the widespread distribution of rational, testable and experimental knowledges that had taken an aeon of time to consummate – but only in some societies and nations of the world and not in others. Ours happens to be one of the regions and nations of the world where the pace has either slowed down considerably or has stopped altogether. Hence Monday Electrician’s severely limited knowledge of electricity as a phenomenal force and hence our country’s longstanding and presumably insoluble problems with the generation and distribution of electrical power.

    Ina monamona – the “fire of lightning”. That is the term in wide usage for electricity in the Yoruba language. Lightning is only one of the phenomenal instantiations of electricity, one that is naturally occurrent. Does this exclude modes of deliberately and purposively generated and distributed electrical energy? Frankly, I do not know. In private conversations between us, my friend, Femi Osofisan, has long argued that legends of Sango’s affinity with lightning and thunder reveal or encode the theocratic king’s “experiments” with electrical energy, experiments that ended in a tragic accident that destroyed the god-king. This argument seems to me apocryphal, the sort of after the event or the fact rationalizations that followers or devotees of an anthropomorphic god or avatar periodically provide to humanize and rehabilitate their hero or champion. Nonetheless, I must admit that it is plausible: experimental, testable knowledges did not start with the historic advent of science but had always existed in nearly all human cultures and civilizations.

    I had planned to conclude the series with this week’s piece. But there remain some more issues to discuss. The astute or careful reader would have noticed that so far, we have hardly talked about untested and untestable knowledges and beliefs. Are they all of one and the same kind? Are human beings and societies divided into those with and those without untested and untestable knowledges and beliefs? What is the mix of these orders or categories of knowledge and belief in our own part of the world? And Monday Electrician, what is it about him and people like him that make them the ideal readers of the book that I have in mind to write? These and other similar questions will provide the starting point in next week’s conclusion to the series.

    • Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

     

  • A book I would love to write in the near future, inshallah (1)

    A book I would love to write in the near future, inshallah (1)

    Yes, there is a book that I would love to write in the near future. This will be a book the like of which I have never written. Also, it will be addressed mainly to a class or category of potential readers who have never read anything I have ever written, including even the journalism that I practice in this column. This book will be about the range of both the inherited and the accumulating knowledges that we have about the universe in which our species live, die and reproduces itself. At the heart of the contents of the book will be the clash between rational, scientific and testable knowledges of the universe and knowledges which, in being untested and untestable, vigorously resist proof and disproof, especially with regard to fortifications against the forces and phenomena that make human life miserable, insecure, fearful, lost. How did I come about the desire, the determination to write this book?

    Let us call him Monday Electrician. He and people like him in our country and our continent will be the targeted or ideal readers on this book that I would like to write soon after my retirement at the end of the academic year 2017/18. I have slightly changed the name, the appellation by which I call this person and have him down in my phone list. He does bear one of the names of the days of the week, but it is not Monday. By profession he is an electrician and more generally, he is a contractor that deals in setting up the wiring circuitry and grid of new homes and businesses. We met because he was recommended to me by a friend who is an architect and master builder who has recently been supervising a major reconstruction of my house at Oke-Bola, Ibadan.

    For several days earlier this week, Monday Electrician neither showed up for work nor responded to my phone calls. When he finally showed up on Thursday, he was in a state of great emotional distress that was underscored by a deep spiritual crisis. The cause of this was a strange and rather bizarre medical condition that had struck his younger sister: in the last one year, a sore that refused to heal, a sore that gradually extended to her entire lower lip had assailed the poor woman in her early thirties. The sore was found not to be cancerous – which was a relief. But then, neither was it showing any signs of healing and closing up anytime soon. As Monday Electrician narrated this story of his sister’s travails to me, I noticed that his emotional agitation was extreme, as if he and not his sister was the sufferer, the victim of this bizarre affliction. When I probed into this, though what was revealed to me was not totally unexpected, the emotional charge that it carried astonished me considerably: Monday Electrician and all the members of his extended family knew the persons behind their sister’s strange ailment!

    It is impossible for me in this writing to faithfully and accurately render the emotional force of this “knowledge” of our man and his family regarding the identity or identities of the evil persons allegedly responsible for the nonhealing, disfiguring sore. But this much I can at least render or convey here: Monday Electrician was shocked and disappointed to find me unresponsive, indeed unbelieving and unsympathetic to his “revelation” of the identity of the persons “behind” his sister’s ailment.

    His challenge to me on this score was as uncompromising as it was startling: is it because I am a professor, a man educated in “Western” knowledges and belief systems that I was scoffing at his knowledge of and belief in how some people, some forces operate in human life and the universe itself? It was this question that prompted a long conversation between me and Monday Electrician the like of which I have not had in a long time, a conversation indeed that led me to the decision that I would one day have to write the sort of book that I indicated at the beginning of this piece.

    In the present context, I can only give a brief account of that conversation. I did not of course take the position that witches and witchcraft don’t exist, even if that is not only what I think now but what I have believed for most of my adult life, beginning from the years of my secondary school education. No, the position that I took, elaborated in three or four propositions, was/is this: First, on the one hand, there are rational, testable knowledges and beliefs and, on the other hand, there are knowledges and beliefs that are neither testable nor provable.

    Secondly, it is important to recognize the existence of these two orders or categories of knowledges and beliefs. Thirdly, at a deeper level, each category or order of knowledges and beliefs has its uses and misuses, its valid and invalid truth claims. Finally – and rather alarmingly – in our society, there is a vast unawareness of both the existence of and the need for rational, testable orders of knowledge and belief. More specifically, there is in our society a widespread unawareness or lack of appreciation of the centrality of rational, testable orders of knowledge and beliefs to the organization and successful implantation of modernity and the myriad amenities, products and services that it makes possible, together with its informing ethos. How did all this emerge from my conversation with Monday Electrician? That is the question!

    Here I should explain that Monday Electrician has secondary school education, but not a high-order technical education, the sort that one gets in a polytechnic or a college or institute of electrical engineering in a university. I found this out indirectly, by basing my discussion with him on the rudiments of scientific or technical knowledge. It was on the basis of this approach that I found out that though our man can put in place a complex and safe grid or circuit of electrical power in a house or a factory, he knows next to nothing about how electricity as a phenomenon, a force, can be and is frequently used for purposes as diverse as powering a simple household blender; transforming images, words and graphics to waves and pulses that a computer or a television set can render as moving pictures, sounds and messages; or how as a stored reservoir of power in a small dry cell or a gigantic battery, it can sustain life in a machine used to preserve life when all the major organs and tissues of the human body have collapsed. Indeed, Monday Electrician had never once thought of electricity, the medium of both his professional training and occupational earnings, as an invisible force, one among a number of phenomena that though we can’t see them with our eyes, the effectivity of their presence in the universe is everywhere palpable. As a matter of fact, Monday Electrician did not know that we are on a planet that is constantly and forever moving, this on an axis that though it is invisible, it is more real and lasting than me, BJ, that is writing these words.

    Here, I must confess my own sort of ignorance. For what else but ignorance could have made me so astonished to discover that there are still, in this day and age, people who, like Monday Electricians, are “flat earth” believers? I will never forget the look that he gave me when I asked him if he knew that we were both of us on a planet that is moving all the time, moving even as we were having our discussion in a small and insignificant part of the universe in Oke-Bola, Ibadan, Nigeria. He said absolutely nothing, but his look said all that he left unsaid. And the core of what he left unsaid is, I think, the idea that even educated people, even professors can be fooled into believing anything as long as the idea comes from the white man!

    I think I completely lost Monday Electrician in our conversation when I asked the following question: why is it that if you or I called a phone number in China, a country of 1.6 billion people, the call will go to the ONE number called and not to any of the other billion-plus phone numbers in China? It was not that this question did not interest him at all. To the contrary, it was tremendously exciting to him, being apparently the sort of question that he had neither ever been asked before nor posed autonomously to himself. But still as far as I could tell, the question did not spark any curiosity in him about what, as a species, we do know; what we do not know; or what we can or should know about the universe in which we live.

    The book I have in mind would deal with these issues, and it would do so on the assumption that though humanity as a species is one and indivisible, the orders of knowledge and belief of the different regions and societies of the world are multiple and diverse. And then there is the question of language, or more precisely languages and translations and relations between them. For an illustration of this last point, consider the following fact. In Yoruba, the term in general usage for electricity is “ina monamona”. Literally, this means “the fire of the thunder”. But we know that thunder is only or merely one of the phenomenal incarnations or instantiations of electricity, especially in its natural occurrences compared to its deliberate, purposive generation and distribution by humankind. If we continue to render electricity as “ina monamona” we perpetuate a linguistic obfuscation of useful knowledge about electrical power and how best to generate and use it for beneficial purposes.

    Above all else, there is this factor to consider: though nearly all the peoples and cultures of the world for the most part quickly adopt new techniques, artifacts and products of scientific and technological modernity, popular, widespread knowledge(s) about them are vastly unequal in the regions and nations of the world. At the risk of oversimplification and to put this observation in rather blunt terms, knowledge about the laws or principles of mathematics, physics and the motion of the planets, the oceans and terra firma itself are far better disseminated in Europe and Asia than in our continent. We use all the gadgets, all the products and all the paraphernalia of modern industry and technology but are remarkably incurious about how they are made and what scientific knowledges make their production possible. In the book that I have in mind, this observation would be the point of departure.

    Why does a phone call to China go to the single, particular number called and not to any of the numbers of the other billion-plus cell phone users in the country? We shall start with the answer to this question in next week’s concluding piece in the series.

    • Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • The president’s illness: combining the existential and social dimensions

    The president’s illness: combining the existential and social dimensions

    This is one of the toughest pieces I have ever written for this column. First of all, in this moment of what appears to be a grave health crisis for president Buhari, I write from a sense of deep solidarity with him, a sense of solidarity that is nothing short of existential. I have never met him and must indeed confess here that from all I have read and heard about him, the president is not a person for whom I have any strong inclination or desire to personally meet – as is the case with virtually all the heads of states we have ever had with the single exception of Murtala Muhammad. But president Buhari and I belong to the same generation, we belong to the same stage in life when existential issues begin to loom large in one’s life.

    Of such issues, none are more harrowing than a health crisis that pertains to wellness in general and life and death in particular. For this reason, I hope with all my heart that the president gets well soon and lives a long life that is free of health crises – relative only to those conditions in which each and everyone of us must and will eventually confront the final processes of ageing and living out one’s allotted time in this life. Thus, at this moment as I write these words nothing, absolutely nothing, would please me more than the return of the president in restored health. I know that whatever reservations and criticisms that they have about his administration and/or his personal style of governance, most Nigerians feel this way too – with the exception of the small number of Nigerians that seem so besotted with a psychopathic hatred of Buhari that they have taken to the Internet to announce and celebrate a demise that has not happened and hopefully will not happen any time soon.

    But existential issues are not the only ones that I am thinking of as I write this piece. I am also and to the same degree thinking of social issues surrounding the president’s health crisis. I know no better way of expressing my sense of these social issues surrounding the president’s health crisis than to say, simply, that for most of its peoples, our country, Nigeria, is one of the worst places in the world in which to live – and to die.

    This observation would seem to be contradicted by many facts and realities. Who in this country and in the world at large does not know that Nigerians are some of the world’s most energetic, driven and optimistic people? Who does not know that even in the midst of so much poverty, hardship and insecurity, Nigerians are the African continent’s most dynamic, restless and irrepressible people? Didn’t Fela Anikulapo-Kuti say we are “shuffering and shmiling” through it all?

    But who does not know that in our country, what you see is quite often not what you get, that what you get is almost always very different from what you expect and/or deserve? Who does not know that virtually all areas and aspects of life have been so devalued that on those rare occasions when things actually work or are done in a timely and appropriate manner we ask, we wonder if we are (still) in Nigeria? Who does not know that these conditions of great anomie and alienation are at their most harrowing in matters pertaining to wellness, quality of life and health care delivery?

    Nigeria is by no means the only poor country in Africa and the world and some have argued that ours is a middle-income economy. So, if we say that ours is one of the worst places in the world in which to live or to die, this is not inherently due to poverty in and of itself. There are poor people that mange to eke out relatively valuable and dignified terms of life for themselves. Same with some countries in this world: with little or not much in material possessions or conditions, they manage to manage to give their citizens conditions of life that are on the whole bearable if not exactly paradisiacal. But ours is not one of such places. That is the question that I seek to explore in this piece with regard to the president’s health crisis.

    Most Nigerians do not know this or think much about it, but ensconced in the palatial opulence that is Aso Rock, the president actually has health care delivery facilities that are far beyond what most Nigerians have now or will ever have in several lifetimes. This includes very rich Nigerians. In other words, most of the wealthy Nigerians who, because of the state of the health care delivery in the country, fly out either for routine medical checkups or for major procedures do not have available to them the facilities and personnel available to the president in Aso Rock. But lo and behold, what is available in Aso Rock is inadequate and even the president himself has to be flown out for a routine medical checkup. The implications of this fact are quite sobering and for this reason I would like to spell them out carefully.

    The first implication is that Nigerians are all in the same boat when it comes to matters of health care delivery, matters of life and death. For everyone rich and poor, the rulers and the ruled, Nigeria is one of the most difficult and trying places in the world in which to live and to die. The president in Aso Rock; very wealthy Nigerians who can and often have to go abroad for routine medical checkups; ordinary folks in their tens of millions who have nowhere to look other than what’s available in the extremely parlous general pool of medical facilities in the country: for everybody the conditions, the facilities are inadequate or are stretched beyond limits and life is very precarious, especially when it faces a grave health crisis. This idea becomes even more disturbing if we take into account the fact that it was at first stated by the presidency that Buhari was going out on an annual vacation that would include a routine medical checkup. I take this to be an unwitting admission by the presidency of the fact that even with all the facilities and personnel available to the president in Aso Rock, he perforce still had to go abroad for a “routine medical checkup”. In other words, there is nothing in the installed medical infrastructures of the country to assure the president that he could or would get what he apparently desperately wanted in terms of medical checkup.

    If, as I am arguing in this piece, all of us are in the same boat, it behooves us to reflect on the nature of that boat. For in this notion, I am not invoking any of those existential or metaphysical categories in the light of which all human beings or all Nigerians can be said to be in the same boat. No, the categories that I have in mind are social. For it is not a metaphysical fact but a social datum that life expectancy at birth in Japan, Ghana and Nigeria are, respectively, 83, 60 and 52. It is not due to the things that all human beings share in common that when you get admitted as an in-patient in many Nigerian hospitals, you are as likely to be made worse than when you came in as to be cured of your ailment. And neither is it an issue of existential inevitability that although many medical personnel in both public and private hospitals and clinics in our country try their best for their patients, they generally work in an institutional and infrastructural setting of great inadequacy and near primitive conditions as far as modern medical practice and its ethos are concerned. I repeat: this is one of the worst countries in the world in which to live and to die. This is not due to natural or existential conditions; it is due to social conditions that are not only changeable but must indeed be changed.

    I do not wish to be seen as being either indifferent to or willfully minimizing the existential aspects of both the president’s individual predicament and the tragedies of the general quality of life in Nigeria. We are all born; we go through life in all its variety and permutations; we age if we are lucky and did not die young; and we go into the long night of infinity after the end of the time allotted to us. I recognize and acknowledge these universal existential coordinates of life, of all of life, human, animal and even vegetal.

    Definitely, the existential dimension of the president’s health crisis is made worse by the fact that we do not even know how really ill he is and/or what ailment it is that he is confronting. A picture showing him and Ahmed Bola Tinubu and Chief Bisi Akande, former National Chairman of the APC, shows the president as being very frail and more gaunt than his normal very lean physical build. If the handlers had told us what it is that ails the president, maybe we would have had some explanation to contain the alarm generated by this and other media images of the president in his present redoubt in London. In choosing to be silent on this matter, the handlers have only made things worse by inadvertently encouraging rumors and rumor mongers, many of whom have allowed their imaginations to run riot in a negative, indeed sociopathic direction.

    I would like to end the observations and reflections in this piece on this issue of sociopathy. In doing this, I seek to bring together the existential and the social dimensions of the president’s ill-health. In this, my point of departure is the fact that the Nigerian presidency is founded on an extreme individualization and personalization of power at the topmost level of governance. This tradition not only generates widespread abuse; it also oversees the massive transfer of our collective wealth to a few among the political and economic elites. And when we say that Nigeria is one of the worst places in the world in which to live, this is one of the pillars of the predatoriness and injustice endemic to the system. All Nigerian rulers in the last three decades have not only inherited this tradition of extreme personalization of power, they have willingly and extensively incarnated it. His own incarnation of this tradition is still unfolding but already, Muhammadu Buhari has shown that he will probably go down in history as one of its most aloof, distant and patrimonial exemplars.

    I urge everyone reading this piece to please take note of this Buharian incarnation of presidential power, with special regard to what happens in the weeks, months and years ahead of us as the president’s health crisis is resolved one way or another. At a human and existential level, we must express our solidarity with the president – may he recover completely and have a long life! But as I have argued vigorously in this piece, we live in a country that is one of the worst places on the planet to live and die in. Remarkably, only a few commentators have linked this monumental social fact of our collective existence as a nation to the president’s health crisis. There is no better time than now, when we are so focused on the president’s ailment, to raise this issue and make it a fundamental aspect of the discussion. For if not now, when, compatriots?

    • Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Buhari and the Senate on SGF Babachir D. Lawal: between the devil and the deep blue sea

    Buhari and the Senate on SGF Babachir D. Lawal: between the devil and the deep blue sea

    Although the two idiomatic expressions basically mean the same thing, it didn’t take me long to know that “between the devil and the deep blue sea” is far more appropriate for the things I want to talk about in this piece than the phrase “between a rock and a hard place”. Both are meant to indicate a choice between two very undesirable situations that are equally so dire in their probable consequences that one really has no choice in either of the two prospects or entities. This in effect means that with these two expressions – “between the devil and the deep blue sea” and “between a rock and a hard place” – one is confronted with a condition worse than that invoked in the phrase, “a choice of the lesser of two evils”. In my opinion, “between the devil and the deep blue sea” presents us with a far more troubling specter than “between a rock and a hard place” and that is why I think it is more appropriate to use it in talking about the standoff between president Buhari and the Senate in the matter of allegations of rank corruption levelled against the Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF) Babachir David Lawal. Before making the case for this proposition, it is perhaps useful to very briefly go over the allegations against SGF Lawal, although the case is currently a leading item in the news coming screamingly out of Abuja.

    The specifics don’t concern us in this context; the general features will do. Thus, in general terms, here is the case against SGF Lawal. From funds intended for the rehabilitation of internally displaced persons (IDP’s) created by the Boko Haram insurgency in the country’s Northeast, SGF Lawal awarded contracts worth hundreds of millions of naira to companies in which he has/had controlling interests. Moreover, the contracts were for the most part unrelated to actual rehabilitation of the IDP’s; and they were extremely poorly executed.

    If true, these allegations would make SGF Lawal one of the most heartlessly and despicably corrupt public officeholders we have ever had, this in a country in which there is a surfeit of such execrable public officials. In the quantitative order of the magnitude of the crime, the corruption, the relative sums or figures that separate the case of SGF Lawal from that of former National Security Adviser (NSA) Sambo Dasuki are colossal: hundreds of millions of naira with Lawal; billions of dollars with Dasuki. But in the moral order of the magnitude of the crimes levelled against both men, there is a complete equivalence in the heinousness of the corruption: out of terrible calamities wrought on the lives of millions of their fellow citizens by the Boko Haram insurgency, in the manner in which predators in the animal kingdom see their preys, both Lawal and Dasuki saw only a chance to enrich themselves while leaving the communities reeling under the reign of terror in the Northeast with and in their devastation. Thus, while Lawal-gate may not involve as huge a sum as Dasuki-gate, it is as morally repugnant as the crime, the corruption for which Sambo Dasuki is now quite justifiably facing the music in the law courts – even if the music seems to be a slow, never-ending apala, not a quick and decisive martial drumroll.

    In almost any other country in the world worthy of being regarded as democratic and “civilized”, SGF Lawal would by now have been suspended from office and placed under interrogation for probable prosecution. The outrage caused by his retention in what is one of the two or three most powerful and authoritative posts in the Buhari administration is second only to the outrage caused by the extremely poor, almost laughable defense put up for him by the president himself in his recent letter to the Senate that has been made public. Since the accusations against SGF Lawal originated in the Senate and indeed have not gone beyond the halls of that chamber of the National Assembly to any other institution(s) of the country’s anti-corruption or law enforcement agencies, this case stands as squarely a confrontation between the Senate and the Presidency, that is to say, between some powerful senators and Muhammadu Buhari. If seen in isolation without reference to any other cases of high crimes and mega-corruption, without reference indeed to the whole ethos of the impunity and nation-wrecking effects of corruption in Nigeria, there is no question that with regard to this specific SGF Lawal case, the Senate is right and the President is wrong. If this is the case, we cannot then be said to be caught between the devil and the deep blue sea as intimated in the title of this piece. But this is not the case at all!

    The case against SGF Lawal does not exist in isolation; it is part of a vast structural and systemic deployment of corruption as a mode of predatory oppression of the vast majority of our peoples everywhere in the country, most especially in the North and the Niger Delta. And moreover, it is an extremely backward and unregenerate form of capitalism, precisely of primitive accumulation within the peripheral capitalism that Buhari and the APC inherited from Jonathan and the PDP. Nothing would be more deleterious to the prospects for the successful prosecution of the war against corruption in Nigeria than to see the spotlight on SGF Lawal and any other case in isolation.

    But that is what both Buhari and his Senate opponents want us to do, that is, to see and react to the case in total isolation! We must completely reject this. We must demonstrate that it is not beyond our capacity to simultaneously see every single case of corruption in its concrete, circumstantial peculiarities and in its connections to the general and overwhelming reality of a country, a society, a whole people being slowly and relentlessly disinherited by conscienceless corruption. Such a holistic and critical perspective would enable us to see that in some cases, Buhari and the Presidency are in the right, if not in the manner of prosecution at least in the inherent moral authority of the evidence mounted. In other cases, the Senate in particular and the National Assembly in general have shown themselves to be fortresses of greed and corruption on a colossal scale.

    Seen in this light in which not one but all corruption cases are critically reviewed in our observations and analysis, it becomes quite easy to see that in this case of SGF Lawal that is being vigorously prosecuted and defended by the Senate and the Presidency respectively, we are truly caught between the devil and the deep blue sea. In shielding or indeed, “protecting” SGF Lawal (and other members of his administration and party that have been accused of rank corruption), Buhari is sending frightening signals about both his moral clarity and his will in the war against corruption. And the Senate? Why has it suddenly become so sanguine about the corruption of one man – albeit a man of great power and influence – when for a long time now it has implacably condoned the corruption, the greed and the mendacity of many of its own members? Truly, unhappy is the land that is caught between the devil and the deep blue sea!

    Before bringing the discussion to its conclusion by showing why I think this expression more apt than the surrogate expression of “between a rock and a hard place”, permit me to briefly expound on the symbolic resonances of the expression itself, “between the devil and the deep blue sea”. There are many recorded (and contested) origins for the expression. Most come from the vast and diverse lore of many lands on harrowing experiences of sailors in the oceans of the world with specific regard to instances when there is no choice between staying aboard a ship that has become, for one reason or another, a floating mass coffin and a desperate plunge into the perilous sea. There is one claimed biblical source for the origin of the expression that is quite fascinating in its metaphoric possibilities. Here it is: Moses and the Israelites are being pursued by Pharaoh and the Egyptians in more than 600 chariots; they get to the edge of the Red Sea and are thus faced on one side by Pharaoh and his armies (the devil) and, on the other side, by the real and historic Red Sea (the deep blue sea). As we know from the biblical story, the day was saved when God parted of the waters of the Red Sea, thus enabling the Israelites to run into safety and freedom on dry land. The fact that it took nothing short of divine intervention to save the Israelites proves that the confrontation was far more fraught than being caught between a (mere) rock and a hard place. In other words, when you are caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, nothing short of the inscrutable order of God’s grace can save you. That is the religious or other-worldly vision. What of the secular, human-centered and, in the present case, Nigerian-talakawa vision?

    Without necessarily foreclosing or rejecting God’s grace, deliverance is in our own hands, the people’s hands. For the truth is that if you take the conditions of life and living for the great majority of Nigerians as your benchmark, as a nation we are already in the clutches of the devil and in the depths of the deep blue sea! Just as SGF Lawal lined his pockets with hundreds of millions of naira while the IDP’s of the Northeast still languish in the hell on earth created by the Boko Haram, Dasuki-gate and all the other cases of mega-corruption unresolved in the law courts make restitution from predation by mega-looters impossible for tens of millions of Nigerians. This much is clear: the Senate is part of the order of predation through mega-looting and legalized greed. The jury is still out on the president and his war on corruption. But we must ask: are not Buhari and the presidency also part of this order of predatoriness? That is what the SGF Lawal case shows. We are not only caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, we are already in the clutches of the one and in the bosom of the other. Only our own struggles will free us. If God’s grace intervenes on our side, we will take it too.

    • Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

     

  • Less can be more, less can be generative: a counter-memory from nature, mythology, science, technology and art (2)

    Less can be more, less can be generative: a counter-memory from nature, mythology, science, technology and art (2)

    Oro p’esi je [The answer, the solution, is beggared by the discourse, the story] A Yoruba adage, typically invoked to indicate an epistemological conundrum

    Some aspects of our national obsession with number, size and scale can be engaged by the straightforward argument that since it is well known that a reduction in size and numbers often leads to greater efficiency and savings on costs, it is in our national interest to substantially trim down on the size of many of our institutions and publicly financed utilities and parastatals. Unquestionably, this argument applies to such things as the number or size of governmental cabinets in Nigeria and officeholders on the public payroll, compared to much bigger and more populous countries like India and the United States both of which have much smaller ministerial cabinets than we have. Indeed, in the early, euphoric days of Buhari’s presidency when Nigerians and the whole world expected much from Buhari and the APC, this was precisely the advice given to the president by the so-called Transition Committee chaired by Ahmed Joda. Mr. Joda and members of his committee were chosen by Buhari. But as we all know, Buhari completely ignored that recommendation of the Transition Committee. Similarly, the boast that we often hear about Nollywood being a producer of more films than any other country in the world with the exception of America’s Hollywood, this boast would be well served by the critical observation that the cultural health of our national film industry would be greatly improved if we produced a lesser number of films of much greater quality than what presently defines the typical Nollywood film at the present time.

    But then, what of aspects of our national craze for numbers and size that cannot be queried by considerations of functional efficiency and/or cultural or artistic merit? Churches and mosques are the fastest growing and ever expanding institutions in this country. Indeed, the head of one of our biggest evangelical Christian ministries, Adeboye of the RCCG, has called for Nigeria to be so saturated by and with churches that there will come a time when there will be a church within five minutes’ walking distance everywhere in the country. Whatever anyone thinks of this idea, it cannot be interrogated by considerations of cost efficiency. Millions of churches as compared with a few hundred thousand? Who is to tell Adeboye and the fraternity of our warrior evangelists how many churches are needed for the battle with Satan and his devilish hordes? The same limitation applies to the bragging rights that we Nigerians have established about the size of our population throughout our continent and the African diaspora worldwide: these bragging rights cannot be subjected to the scrutiny of efficiency or logical rationality. For if you make an exception for the periodic geo-ethnic verbal and political skirmishes that we have on the results of our national censuses, it is a moot point whether Nigeria would be better as a small nation that is no bigger than Gabon or a huge nation that is inching ever closer to the 200 million population mark.

    I make these qualifications in this concluding piece to the series that began in this column two weeks ago in order to underscore the crucial fact that my main concern in the series is not really the usual one of the vital need to substantially reduce or even end the waste, the mismanagement and the squandermania that are endemic to governance and public affairs in our country. By this, I do not mean to suggest or imply that this criticism has been so bandied around that it is no longer useful. Far from such a complacent acceptance of things as they are rather than striving for things as they could or ought to be, I actually believe that the battle against mismanagement and squandermania must be continuously and tirelessly fought in our country. Which is why, on the pages of this column, I have seized every chance that comes my way to remind Nigerians of the outrage in a declaration made by Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the former Finance Minister under President Goodluck Jonathan, that she would be satisfied if by the end of her tenure she would have managed to reduce waste and mismanagement in the Nigerian system by as little as 4%. No, no and no, compatriots, the battle for cost effectiveness and functional rationality in the corporate affairs of this country has not ended nor is it about to end soon!

    But that is not what is central to my observations and arguments in this series. Nigerians of all socio-economic levels, geo-ethnic identities, ages and religious backgrounds are obsessed with size and number – that is what concerns me in this piece. This takes many forms and expressions: the number of new churches and mosques always and forever springing up; the number of films churned out by Nollywood every week; the number of new public and private universities coming into existence every year; the number of states and local governments already in existence and those being vigorously and ceaselessly canvassed; the number of totally redundant officeholders paid for and maintained on the public payroll. The list seems endless and sometimes assumes quite bizarre manifestations such as when – for a telling instance – the lanes of drivers and cars on our city streets or country highways suddenly balloon from one or two to half a dozen or more when something has caused a temporary blockage on the street or roadway. What am I saying about this extraordinary Nigerian proclivity or indeed, mania, for number and size? And what is the explanation for why it takes so many diverse forms?

    If I told you that I have a completely satisfactory answer to these questions I lie and the truth is not in me, dear compatriots! I think and ask you to think also, dear reader: What is the connection between Adeboye and his dream of a Nigeria in which there will be a church within five minutes of walking distance everywhere in the land and the uncontrolled and perhaps uncontrollable mushrooming of public and private universities and tertiary educational institutions? And the number of Nollywood films made every month, what relationship, causal or speculative, do they have with the uncountable number of ministers, senior special assistants, personal assistants and administrative aides to be found in every state in the federation? In our country, it is not an exaggeration to say that a new pastor or evangelist hears and answers the “call” every day! What does this have to do with the equally startling fact or statistic that mountains of uncollected garbage appear every day on the streets of most of our cities and towns?

    Oro p’esi je: the answer, the solution, is beggared by the discourse, the story. So goes the epigraph for this week’s essay. This would seem to be where we are in the present discussion. Typically, in the epistemological branch of philosophy, when you come across a paradox or a conundrum, the way out is often provided by and through, not a logical answer, but the invocation of another paradox, another conundrum. In the special topic under discussion, this means that we must bring the overwhelming absence of habits and expressions of moderation, modesty and appreciation of smallness in the public affairs of the country into the conversation in order to present our obsession with huge size or large numbers with its reverse image. If this is the case, the question to ask is why Nigerians of all socio-economic groups and identities tend to think and behave on the assumption that moderation, modesty and discrete smallness have no place in our corporate, collective existence as a nation or a society. This is why, in the first essay in this series, I focused extensively on the argument that less is not only paradoxically more, it actually is a pervasive feature of the state of things in nature, science, technology and art. If I am to be completely open about my intention in this series, I should admit that it is my hope that the readers will be prompted to reflect on aspects of life, nature, society, technology and art they know and are aware of in which the smallest units of measure yield the greatest harvests of pleasure, contentment, security, personal satisfaction or public good.

    Why did Buhari reject the recommendation of the Ahmed Joda Transition of a much smaller ministerial cabinet? Why do all lovers, promoters and aficionados of Nollywood continue to argue that the significance of the national video film industry lies in as many trashy films as can be and are made? Why do the evangelical and Pentecostal warriors for Christ believe and act on the assumption that the more churches there are, the more barely trained pastors come forth every day the better? Why does the looting of our national coffers excite the interest and concern of Nigerians only if the numbers run into billions, not (just) millions of naira or even dollars? Compatriots, these questions have no easy, logical answers, especially when set into a relationship with one another. But as soon as you bring moderation, modesty and smallness into the picture, an illuminating clarification appears on the horizons of the mind and the psyche. One small church; one single university; or one Nollywood film: each one can offer more than what a hundred churches, universities or films if the potential that exists in even the tiniest of things is maximized. In other words, this Nigerian obsession for huge sizes and large numbers exist and endure because it keeps our country and its affairs in the present state in which waste, mismanagement and squandermania enrich and benefit the few at the expense of the vast majority of our peoples.

    We must continue to invoke principles of cost effectiveness and rational management of resources and capacities in the face of the monumental corruption and squandermania that make life a hell for the majority of Nigerians in the midst of the plenty enjoyed by our political and economic elites. But far beyond this, there is the rediscovery of the counter-memory of how in nature, science, technology and art the smallest and tiniest units of time and space are often used to enrich life for the benefit of all. Start with and within yourself, compatriots. Forget the numbers and the sizes that obsess the multitudes; think only of small kernels and seeds that can germinate and multiply, endlessly. Nourish them; protect them; spread them; celebrate them.

    • Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

     

  • Selflessness in a strong moral personhood: for Comrade Dipo Fasina, aka “Jingo”, @70

    Selflessness in a strong moral personhood: for Comrade Dipo Fasina, aka “Jingo”, @70

    Tomorrow, Monday, January 23, 2017, Dr. Dipo Fasina, aka “Jingo”, will be seventy years old. He looks so much younger than his real age that some people think that the reported or recorded age is not the real thing. What you see is what you get, isn’t that the case? Fortunately, we have two reasons to disbelieve the evidence of our eyes in the matter of Comrade Dipo’s age. One reason is circumstantial and the other reason is substantive. Here is the circumstantial reason: in Nigeria, people do not revise their ages up; they revise them down in a practice, a habit that is legendary in the scale of its perpetration. For the substantive reason, we have nothing other than the witness borne by many of Dipo’s classmates at Kings College where he had his high school education and the Government College, Ibadan, where he went for his two-year higher school certificate education. In looks and appearance, many of these former classmates of Dipo seem decades older than “Jingo”, but they all remember him as a beloved former classmate either at KC or GCI.

    As both a moral philosopher and a teacher of philosophy, these opening, playful musings about circumstantial and substantive reasons not to believe the illusory evidence of our eyes would, one imagines, delight “Jingo”. At the Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU), Ile-Ife, where it was both my privilege and my honour to be his colleague and comrade, one of the greatest accomplishments of “Jingo” was to so popularize and demystify philosophy that nearly every student wanted to take his courses. At one stage, the classes got so huge that the only space large enough to contain students registered for his introductory philosophy class was the university’s outdoor sports complex, complete with rigging for mass amplification to make him audible to everybody. I should say audible and personal to everybody among the hundreds of students present at this modern-day revival of what philosophy had meant to the entire polis in ancient Greece: a practical guide to life and action in pursuit of the collective good. I have the personal evidence of one former student of “Jingo” present at this mass studentship of philosophy, Miss Nkolika Anyadike, that like everyone else in the multitude, she felt that their beloved teacher was talking to her, even though she knew that the register of address was pitched to a mass audience.

    Jingo’s retirement from service five years ago was nothing short of momentous, increasing the substantive documentation that we have that he is indeed now a septuagenarian, youthful looks notwithstanding. In the size and the variety of people present, the festive gathering that graced the occasion was absolutely without precedent in the history of that university. I was personally unable to be present at the event, but news reached me of its magnitude. Although in number and sheer physical presence students and university academic and non-academic staff were the most notable category of festive communards at the occasion, dozens of representatives of labour, professional associations, civil society organizations and rank and file members of associations of market women and men were also present at the mammoth gathering. Of the pictures and news reporting of the occasion that came to my notice, nothing moved me more than the almost reverential nature of the respect, the esteem universally accorded to Jingo during that phenomenal retirement celebration. This calls for a special commentary.

    In a country in which reverence, when real and not fake, is given only to men and women of God before whom all bow in worshipful idolatry, Jingo is about the only man I am aware of that is not a born-again pastor about whom a deep reverence bordering on hero worship, or indeed secular idolatry, has been expressed. I wish to make this observation the pivot around which to arrange the things I wish to say about and to Jingo on this occasion of his making it to 70 and beyond. My central or essential point will be this: in order to so completely put the needs of others before one’s own needs as Jingo has done all his adult life, you have to have a profound belief in the moral personhood, the moral agency of not only yourself but also of others. Before coming to this crucial point, first, a few important and exemplary details of Jingo the teacher, the activist, the comrade, and one of the moving spirits of the struggles for justice and equality in our country at the present time.

    At OAU, Ife, when we both taught and lived in that foremost among the progressive university communities of not only Nigeria but the entire African continent, the popularity and respect that Jingo enjoyed among students was matched by the popularity and respect that he enjoyed among his fellow lecturers and professors. Although this was and still is uncommon, the reason for it was fairly simple: Jingo was such a profoundly selfless, decent and fair-minded person that he won the admiration of even those who did not agree with him in matters both great and small. He was a model teacher and mentor to his undergraduate and graduate students, as well as his younger professional colleagues in the Philosophy Department and the Faculty of Arts. I used to marvel at the depth of loyalty and dedication that he inspired in his students and young acolytes. The truly remarkable part of this observation is that among our own small group of Marxists and socialists in the Socialist Forum Collective (SFC), Jingo was about the only one that enjoyed the trust and the respect of all the members and the undeclared factions within the group! The same thing is true of the myriad other crucial positions that Jingo has held: as National President of ASUU; as Chairperson of the Committee for the Defense of Human Rights (CDHR); as National Coordinator of the Joint Action Front (JAF), the body responsible for linking all the progressive struggles in the country, from the labour movement to students and the unemployed, and from women and youth affairs to the rights of internally displaced peoples in hotbeds of war and rapine in the country.

    Since nothing works better than stories and accounts from actual experience to illustrate the sorts of observations and assertions that I am making here as a tribute to Jingo’s integrity and the universal admiration that he commands within and beyond the Left, permit me to briefly relate a story about a little known but highly pertinent fact concerning Jingo’s role in the origins of ASUU as Nigeria’s and Africa’s most radical and progressive association of university teachers. In mid-April 1980, to my own as much as to everyone else’s surprise, I became the National President of ASUU. Though the Union had just been re-registered and had just changed its name from the old Nigerian Association of University Teachers (NAUT), it was still very much cast in the mold of the NAUT: conservative, unpopular even among academics and so badly run that it had very little active support or following among its own members. I had gone as a member of the OAU-Ife delegation to the 1980 annual delegates’ conference of the union at Port Harcourt not to become its president but to persuade the national body to more actively to advance the cause of radical and progressive lecturers that had been unjustly dismissed from service by the military dictatorship at places like UI, Unilag and Unical. I apparently was so successful in that mission that a good number of delegates from other institutions felt that only under my leadership could the Union be expected to effectively take up the cause of our dismissed comrades. Reluctantly, I accepted to stand for election and won by a majority of – one vote!

    Back at Ife, the news of my election as ASUU president was received almost as an anti-climax or non-event, especially by many members of our group, the Socialist Forum Collective. There were about three factions: one neutral or indifferent; one supportive but only mildly and cautiously so; one very vigorous in its opposition. This last group was numerically and vocally the most dominant. Its leading proponent – who has since become a renowned, beloved and storied “elder statesman” among ASUU’s older generation of past local and national leaders – poured his scorn and disapprobation, not on me, but on the Union and its entire membership. Quite correctly at that time, he said that NAUT/ASUU was a union without backbone or spine, a union that had constantly betrayed its members in the past and would do so again, regardless of its leadership under me/us. Of me, this comrade asked what had happened to our longstanding practice of maintaining a distance to conservative, bourgeois organizations that we knew we could never change from within? Why had I unilaterally departed from this practice and had gone and accepted to be ASUU’s national president?

    The day was saved by – yes! – Jingo, ably supported by Dr. Segun Osoba. Among other reasons, this is why, if you go to the Foreword to my book on all the writings of Wole Soyinka, Politics, Poetics and Postcolonialism, you will find that I pointedly mentioned their two names as the colleagues and comrades with whom I had felt the greatest political, ideological and moral affinity in my years at OAU-Ife. At any rate, it was on the basis of Jingo’s visionary support that our group accepted to do everything possible and necessary to transform the old NAUT to a new vibrant and ideologically radical ASUU. At that crucial moment in time and history when the glory days of ASUU was still in the future, while some chose to believe only the evidence of their eyes, Jingo looked deeper and saw not what was there but what could be there. More accurately in my opinion, this was not so much a case of what was not there; rather, it was a matter of what was there but was hidden from plain or ordinary or jaundiced sight. For want of a more adequate or precise language, I would describe this “thing” that was there but was/is hidden from plain sight as the moral agency or personhood, actual or potential, of every human being, old or young, rich or poor, conservative or progressive, bourgeois or proletarian, religious or irreligious. More than many other comrades that I personally met and was greatly influenced by in the Nigerian Left, Jingo stands out as the one to whom this issue of the moral agency and personhood of all human beings is a fundamental article of faith and action. What exactly does this mean? Permit me to offer a brief answer to this question in my closing comments in this tribute.

    He puts the interests of others before his own interest – this is one of the most constant things you hear said about Jingo by just about everybody who has ever met him, especially the poor, considered as either the working or unemployed poor. The notion of selfhood is central to this constant comment that is made about Jingo, even though paradoxically, this is selfhood as selflessness, the sacrifice of the self and its (own) interests. A man who is not pursuing the things that other men, other comrades are pursuing – promotions, girlfriends and concubines, contracts, houses, cars, titles –  has only his selfhood to offer. The poor and the looted of our society, like the poor and the dispossessed of all societies, are extremely discriminating in the selfhood that they will accept on the altar of the self-sacrifice of upper middle class revolutionaries and progressives. As his friend and comrade, I am in great awe of the sacrifices that Jingo has made for the people’s cause. For in him and only a few others in our society lies the hope that belief in the moral agency of the downtrodden and the oppressed will not ultimately be wiped out in our lifetime.

    Congratulations and welcome to the club of senior citizens, Jingo! A luta continua; victoria a certa!

    • Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Less can be more, less can be generative: a counter-memory from nature, mythology, science, technology and art (1)

    Less can be more, less can be generative: a counter-memory from nature, mythology, science, technology and art (1)

    Esu sleeps in the courtyard, it is too small for him/Esu sleeps in the bedroom; it is still too small for him/Esu sleeps inside the kernel of a palm fruit; now he has space large enough for him to sleep in From praise chants to Esu, the trickster god of fate, contradiction and paradox
    Less is more Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

    If, as the well known saying goes, too much of anything is bad, too little of everything is worse. Who prays for less of health, wealth, life, beauty, luck or fortune? Between abundance and scarcity, every woman and man alive in the world will gladly choose abundance. It seems a universal trait, doesn’t it, that we all pray for abundance and give thanks for it if it comes our way. Between having one child or two children and having five to eight, most of us would choose the latter, including people who do not have the material means to raise their children in comfort or in adequacy and security of life’s many necessities. As a matter of fact, and at least in our society and many other developing nations of the world, the poorer the man or woman, the larger the number of children desired. There is no doubt about it: most people alive now and that have ever lived almost always prefer/preferred abundance to scarcity, more to less.

    Postcolonial or neocolonial Nigeria seems to have taken the application or realization of this truism much further than possibly any other society on the planet, with the possible exception of America. Thus, like the Americans, our obsession, our delight in number, size and scale is extreme to the point of being self-defining. The manifestations or expressions of this observation are legion. The previous ruling party, the PDP, used to boast that it was the biggest ruling party in Africa, even if it was also probably the worst and most decadent ruling party in the African continent and possibly in the world. Now, ideologues and opportunistic and sedulous supporters of the new ruling party, the APC, have taken up and appropriated that boastful and empty claim of being the biggest party of all. We have thirty-six states or mini-countries and against the charge by many concerned patriots that this number is too large to be sustained by the pressure of our population size, there are loud and clamant demands for still more states to be created. Too often we read smug, self-satisfied accounts claiming that Nollywood, the national video film industry, now produces more films per annum than any national film industry in the world save Hollywood. But this claim leaves out the fact that we also produce more trashy films than any other country in the world. We have far many more universities now than any other country in the African continent, and yet in the same period that we consummated this “achievement”, the ranking of our universities has taken a nose dive not only in the world at large but also among the universities of or in Africa.

    Perhaps at this point in the present discussion, dear reader, it is important for me to let it be known that it is not a platitudinous jeremiad about Nigeria’s obsession with number and size that I intend in this piece. This obsession is certainly worthy of critique in its own right, most of all in its most debatable expression in the boastful claim that we are “the giant of Africa” simply because we are the most populous nation in the African continent. But far beyond platitudes, what I have in mind in this piece is a conversation in which size, number and scale might be put into conversation with their opposites – smallness, littleness and even minuteness – so as to show that our national obsession with size is not a “natural” or logical effect of our peculiarity as an African nation but is part of an ideological system that our political and social elites deliberately promote in order to run our society as their fiefdom, their modern day slave plantation or makeshift refugee camp.

    There are many discursive steps to take toward a convincing demonstration of the veracity of this claim. The first step is show, in line with the two epigraphs to this essay, that in many aspects of nature, society, mythology, science, technology and art, less often leads or conduces to more; indeed, it is far more generative than gigantic or super scale and size. Moreover, it is precisely because even though it is little known or talked about, this idea that “less is more” or “small is big” pervades so many areas of life and society that I am calling it a “counter-memory” of humankind. The idea is “counter” to the apparently universal belief that abundance and bountifulness are always to be preferred to scarcity and want. Precisely what do I have in mind in this act of reclaiming this counter-memory that we may simply call “less is more”? To answer this question, we must go to our two epigraphs, one at a time.

    First of all, I readily admit it. For a long time that lasted over about a decade, although I was greatly fascinated by the paradox, the enigma of the first epigraph to this essay, I did not really understand the profound meaning of the idea of Esu at last finding a space large enough for him to sleep in inside a palm nut kernel when much larger spaces like the bedroom and even the courtyard had been too “small” for him. This “meaning” is of course the idea of germination in human life in particular and all existence in general: inside the infinitely small space of a kernel or a seed, life can and is often regenerated on an almost limitless scale. Thus, in a literal and rather trivial sense, the space inside a kernel is small; but in a metaphoric and extraordinarily consequential sense, this same space is vast beyond measure.

    A similar notion of infinitely small spaces and their inverse vastness is the founding basis of a large sub-discipline of the science of physics, especially so-called “particle” or subatomic physics. The spaces and entities studied and tapped for their powers in this branch of physics are so small, so minute that they cannot only not be seen by the human eye, they can be apprehended and explored only by super-microscopes powered by high-speed electron magnifiers. Moreover, this process has led to what is now known as “nano-fabrication”, a process that measures and uses possibilities made available by spatial and temporal measurements of one billionth of a second or of a meter. To normal or “ordinary” human sensory and temporal perception, a hundredth of a second or a meter is already mind-boggling. But a billionth? Yes, that is what “nano-fabrication” and “nano-technology” have now made not only possible but a vital part of scientific and technological modernity or even postmodernity. The mapping of the human genome and indeed, cloning and other spectacular forms of gene splicing in use in fields as diverse as agribusiness in the production of super harvests from genetically modified crops; resonant imaging that makes it possible to probe into the innermost recesses of human organs and tissues; and the digital revolution in the production, storage and reproduction of words, images, texts and sounds endlessly in 21st century Information Technology (IT): all these fields and processes are made possible by “nano-fabrication”, the ultimate scientific and technological realization of the mythology of Esu’s preference for infinitely small spaces that generate bountiful harvests that are not limited by time and space. Germination and regeneration through and by small seeds is for all time and all places, including seemingly desolate regions like arid deserts and frigid arctic zones.

    Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the man from whom comes the second epigraph to this piece, was a world famous architect who was a leader of a so-called “minimalist” movement in modern art and architecture. To the baroque splendors and ornate excesses of feudal and early modern bourgeois architectures, van der Rohe and his followers substituted an austere minimalism that in form, style and function placed emphasis on as little as possible in materials, space and decorations used in the construction of both public buildings and individual dwellings. In modern African drama and literature, the greatest practitioners of minimalism are South African playwrights who were forced by the rigors of apartheid censorship and repression to use as few actors and performers as possible so as to be able to quickly disband and escape when they were raided by the regime’s goon squads. What arose from necessity became a great artistic achievement when opponents of the regime in theatre and performance created two- or three-character plays that used techniques of plays-within-the-play and role-switching to create the impression that many characters, many performers were on the stage when the actual number of the cast was one or two.

    One of my personal favorites in the many expressions of this minimalist principle of “less is more” in the domain of philosophy and theory is the idea present in fields of knowledge and ideas as diverse as semiotics, structuralism and poststructuralism that the generation of reference and meaning takes place through a very limited set of rules and procedures whose combinations are however endless. On this account, if you know and can “play” astutely with the few rules and procedures, you can generate reference and meaning endlessly. What is particularly exciting about this “theory” is the contention that though experts may be able to expound on its operations more than laymen and women, by the very structure of our brains and minds as human beings, we are wired to create, change, play with, revise and renew meaning and reference as much as we like or are compelled by circumstances and/or intention. In other words, every woman and man is a potential activator or beneficiary of this principle of “less is more”. Halleluiah!

    It is necessary at this point to say with as much emphasis as possible that these reflections are not limited to and by ultramodern, millennial scientific, technological and artistic developments. Thus, I do declare that the idea that less is more and can be regenerative, that life can be enriched and or renewed by wanting and consuming as little as possible has always been around in nearly all the cultures of the world. Nearly all the great thinkers, visionaries and moral reformers of the world made it a habit, an obligation on themselves and their followers, to want and own as little as possible. And there is a saying, an adage that is found in almost all the folklores of the world that says that the only real and true way to be “rich” is to want, need and own as little as possible. The late Ulli Beier used to say that the real “Babalawos” or “Dibias” of our traditional precolonial societies never made accumulation of wealth their passion or mission in life. Jesus famously asked of all those who wished to follow him and be his disciples to sell off all their belongings and like him, take the vows of poverty.

    I am not romanticizing poverty and condemning wealth and abundance as values in and of themselves, compatriots. It is the worship, the idolatry of money and wealth that I identify as an obsession foisted on all in our society by our political, social and religious elites that I condemn and unmask in this piece. More specifically, it is the perpetration and perpetuation of this idolatry of money and wealth through our national obsession with number and size that I explore and condemn. We do not deal in small, modest numbers and scale, compatriots. Looting that is countable in millions and not in billions does not get our attention and concern. With us, wastage and squandermania that do not astonish in their scale do not cause outcry and outrage. In next week’s concluding piece in the series, we shall link this obsession to the hegemonic ideology of a demographically and socially tiny elite that sees the country as its fiefdom.

    • Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Leave it at home, compatriot, leave it at home!

    Leave it at home, compatriot, leave it at home!

    Oro po ninu iwe kobo [There are innumerable words (even) in a cheap tabloid]
    A popular saying dating back to the beginnings of newspapers in colonial Nigeria
    What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are small matters compared with what lies within us Ralph Waldo Emerson

    How many of those who will read this piece will follow the advice, the injunction in the title of this week’s essay? Probably close to zero. At best, a number countable only in single digits. Leave one’s cellphone or smartphone at home when one goes out? What a futile and even cranky proposal, most would say. So why am I in all seriousness making the suggestion? Well, that is the question. However, before we get to this underlying question, we have first, to ask another question and this is: how, in the first place, did it arise, my advice, my plea that people should leave their cellphones and smartphones at home every time that they go out? Oro po ninu iwe kobo!

    For the answer to the question behind the underlying question that prompted the idea for this piece, I have to start by telling readers about what normally should be a quite unremarkable fact: for the first time ever, I bought a smartphone last month. Incidentally, this fact reveals as a blatant lie my friend, Femi Osofisan’s “revelation” that my cellphone is a very cheap and primitive Nokia. This “revelation” was made in a tribute that FO recently wrote to mark my 71st birthday anniversary. Up until about a month ago, what FO said about my Nokia cellphone was absolutely correct. But that is no longer the case, alas! For years, even for decades, FO with the active collaboration of my other great friend, Yemi Ogunbiyi, had done all that he could to get me to replace my old phone with a “proper phone”, a “real phone” as they put it. Yemi’s shaming teasing of me on account of the beloved Nokia cellphone was merciless. In the company of people I barely knew and/or who barely knew me, Yemi would display my discarded cellphone for all to see with the cutting commentary of, “look at his phone, a whole Harvard professor”!

    FO’s “strategy” for shaming me into discarding the redoubtable Nokia contraption was less dramatic than Yemi’s, but it was no less spirited. In his case, he was in addition deeply affronted by the loudness of my ancient Nokia phone, as if the very fact that something so cheap would dare to be so offensively loud was a great and insufferable outrage. This feeling of FO was worsened by the fact that, as he has now informed the whole world in his recent tribute to me, I had and still have a habit, a tendency not to answer phone calls, no matter the decibel of the loudness of the ringtone. [More on this later]. Once, without my permission and my knowledge, FO went so far as to take it upon himself to reduce the loudness of the phone’s ringtone to a buzz that was closer to a whisper than a muffled whistle. Of course, when I discovered what my friend had done, I restored the ringtone of the phone to its lordly decibel and secretly enjoyed my friend’s frustration. My phone is my phone is my phone, if you please!

    But strange and powerfully affecting is the unrelenting war of friends like mine to rid one of habit(s) deemed unworthy! To this day, I can offer no explanation other than Femi’s and Yemi’s conjuration for what happened one day last month when I accompanied a friend to a SLOT franchise outlet – and suddenly, on an impulse I had absolutely not anticipated, I decided to buy a smartphone and did so on the spot. The rest, as the saying goes, is history, a tantalizing or confounding history. Where I never once lost or misplaced the old Nokia, in less than a month that I have had the new smartphone in my possession, I have on three occasions had to run or drive back like a madman to a place where I had absentmindedly left my new smartphone. The most recent episode of this drama took place only yesterday, Thursday, January 5, 2017. So far, I have been lucky and have recovered the phone before it was picked up by a “lucky” finder. But how long will the luck hold? And how can I drill into the nerve cells of my memory or my mind the fact that I no longer own a Nokia contraption but a real, ultramodern smartphone? Or, as a matter of pragmatic reasoning, why not leave the smartphone at home every time I go out? That is the underlying question of this piece, compatriots.

    You see, dear reader, it had never been my habit or practice to carry the old Nokia phone around with me everywhere I went. As a matter of fact, even in my own house, I neither had it with me all the time nor made it habit to have it on my person in one of the pockets of my clothing. Indeed, quite often, it was the ringtones of a phone call that enabled me to locate where the phone was in the house. And then, I buy this expensive smartphone and old habits collapse and things begin to fall apart, so to speak! I begin to take the smartphone with me everywhere I go. And I begin to absent-mindedly leave the phone in some places – three times in one month, the first month of my possession of the phone! Consequently, I am forced to think back to why I had for so long stuck to the Nokia phone and resisted all the spirited stratagems and efforts of my friends to shame me into buying into the world and the habits and the rituals of those who have smartphones and/or iPhones. And I discover, to my amazement, that the first law, the first obligation of smartphone owners and users is that you do not ever, ever leave the phone at home when you go out. Nobody told me of, or formally inducted me into the rigid operation of this “law”. I had seen it operate, silently but implacably, and had internalized it, absolutely without being conscious that I had done so. That is the central problem in this discussion, compatriots: internalization of habits and dispositions of which one is barely conscious.

    In the last one month that I have had this new smartphone – and lost and found it three times – I have rediscovered why, for a very long time, I had stuck to my old, ancient, even antediluvian Nokia phone in complete rejection of smartphones and the protocols and rituals that they seem to impose on their owners and users. Permit me to put this rediscovered aversion to the social universe of smartphones and their uses in the simplest manner possible: I hated it that one had to spend so much time with and on the phone at all times of the day, absolutely without any exception. Another way of putting the matter is to say that I found smartphones massively intrusive in the daily, even hourly sociality of my fellow citizens. The “worst” cases pertain to those who have two or three smartphones and rather punctiliously and/or happily attend to the demands, the impositions of their multiple smartphones.

    Yes of course, they have no problem with having and using many smartphones, so what is my own business in the matter, you might ask. It is a fair question. But so also is it fair for you, dear reader, to accept and affirm my own right not to have to be with and on the phone at all times of the day if that is what I choose. That was my choice when I had the Nokia cellphone. The most consequential of the expression of that right was my habit of not taking the phone with me everywhere I went and not answering all or even most phone calls that I received. [Let me qualify the actual workings of this “right”: during the day, I get a great deal of missed calls; later in the course of a day, I try to return as many of the missed calls as I can] When I bought that smartphone in early December 2016, this right was put under severe pressure. This essay is a first attempt, admittedly prompted by FO’s tribute on my 71st birthday, to reflect on what this experience means, for me in particular but hopefully for all of us.

    FO in that tribute correctly says that I am very jealous of my privacy and often resent any and all attempts to break down or into my privacy. [Actually, he expressed the idea in much stronger language, saying that I am often “fanatical” in the protection of my privacy. This is true, but why should my friend be the one to reveal my “fanaticism” to the whole world?!] To privacy, I would add “interiority”, this being the inner space of thoughts, feelings, introspections and imaginings that we all constitutively have as human beings and ought to take every step possible to cherish, nurture and protect. In an often quoted statement that serves as the second epigraph to this essay, here is what Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of the great American neo-Romantic writers had to say on the significance of this space of human individual and collective interiority: What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are small matters compared with what lies within us”.

    The past history of our planet and our species is vast beyond measure and so is the infinity of the future that lies ahead of us. And yet Emerson avers that they are small matters in comparison with what lies inside of us. There is no doubt that this claim is hyperbolic. But it is deliberate and exemplary hyperbole. What Emerson is arguing is the idea that if we do not know what is inside of us, we cannot really know what lies ahead of us. What does this mean?

    All societies and cultures of the past in all the regions of the world to varying degrees recognized that human beings have a vital need to know and be in connection with the inner life of their psychic, emotional, intellectual and spiritual selves. It is necessary to emphasize the common human dimension of this point because, ordinarily, it is a select group of thinkers, artists, visionaries and psychics that are credited with the will and the capacity to cherish and protect the interior spaces of their personalities and identities. There is also this: this inner space of Being, this interiority that all human beings have, is morally neutral; it is filled with and by both good and evil, both the impulse for creation and that for destruction. We can direct or channel it to the good, the beneficial only if we stay in touch with it. It is impossible to overstate the need for this in a society like ours that is so full of needless hardship, suffering and despair.

    Compatriot, it may seem like a mad injunction, but for heaven’s sake, leave your smartphones at home, unless of course you are a barber, a tailor, a bricklayer or the CEO of a big business enterprise who, in order to stay on top of things, has to have your cellphone or smartphone with you all the time. For the thousands or even millions among us who do not belong to any of these groups, leave your phones at home when you go out and you will once again have the chance to connect with your inner life. I promise you a liberation that will astonish you. And who knows, you/we may even start a movement!

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Cleansing the Augean stables, Nigeria, circa 2016 CE (6) Conclusion: epic corruption and Buhari’s Nigeria – please think counterintuitively!

    Cleansing the Augean stables, Nigeria, circa 2016 CE (6) Conclusion: epic corruption and Buhari’s Nigeria – please think counterintuitively!

    In this concluding piece in a series that began in this column a month ago, I would like to draw the reader’s attention to a little detail that might escape notice if I didn’t draw attention to it and, indeed, make a brief elaboration on it. What is this little detail? It is the fact that throughout the previous five essays in the series, I have been repeatedly using the phrase, “Buhari’s Nigeria”. Ordinarily, the import of this phrase would be merely literal or indeed factitious: we are in the period of Muhammadu Buhari’s incumbency as the President and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Nigeria. This incumbency will, at the very least, last for four years if, as we all hope, he lives and enjoys good health well beyond the current mid-septuagenarian stage of his personal and existential life cycle. Indeed already, very strong and unmistakable signals are being sent out by the president’s inner circle of supporters that he intends to run for reelection in 2019. If he does and he wins, he would have been in office for eight years. This reality, this possibility has definitely been on my mind as I have repeatedly used that phrase, “Buhari’s Nigeria” in this series. But the matter goes much deeper than that!

    In the matter of an all-out nationwide war on corruption, we are in “Buhari’s Nigeria” because, quite simply but also profoundly, Muhammadu Buhari is like no other previous head of state of our country, with the single exception of Murtala Ramat Muhammad. Without exception, all Nigerian heads of states have declared both their abhorrence of corruption and their determination to curb it substantially, if not root it out completely. But again, with the exceptions only of Muhammad and Buhari, none of the other heads of states ever had any iota of credibility as would-be warriors against corruption, least of all Olusegun Obasanjo who, paradoxically, has been the most self-righteous head of state of our country. Thus, only Muhammad and Buhari stand out as credible, inspired and inspiring anti-corruption warriors. But in the matter of the phrase under discussion here and its implications and ramifications for the topic of this series, there are significant differences between the two men. What are these differences?

    First, Muhammad’s rule was far too short to have qualified for a comparable phrase like “Murtala Mohammed’s Nigeria”. In other words, as decisive as Muhammad was, his assassination fatefully prevented him from leaving a lasting legacy on the moral character or ethos of our country beyond wisps of anguished nostalgia for and about his brief time in office. Secondly and far more portentously, Muhammad actually never made a formal declaration of war on corruption; in place of a loud and formal declaration, he chose action, concrete, decisive and absolutely unambiguous action. To put it mildly, Buhari, both as military dictator and as elected head of state, has been long, very long, on the formal declaration and short, indecisive and ambiguous on the action front. Thirdly and most significant of all, where Muhammad carried his war against corruption right into the heart of the festering swamps of corruption in his own constituency of the military top brass, Buhari has been remarkably unable and/or unwilling to carry his war on corruption to the inner chambers of the opportunists, cynics and turncoats within his administration and party. Indeed, to all Nigerians who fervently pin their hopes for a Nigeria substantially rid of life- and nation-destroying plague of Augean corruption, it has been very confounding to register the silence, the inaction of Buhari on allegations of rank corruption within his administration, in particular the allegations against the Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF), Babachir David Lawal. As a matter of fact, SGF Lawal’s case provides a good opportunity to critically examine what lies ahead of us in the president’s war on corruption if, as every patriot wishes, it is a war that will be won decisively. What do I have in mind in making this observation?

    The phrase “Buhari’s Nigeria” surely embraces the men and women, the officials and the well-wishers, in short the world of the president’s own administration and party, doesn’t it? This question is pertinent because so far at least, neither Buhari nor a single member of his corps of spokespersons has given any indication that the president intends to include his administration and his party as a theatre of operations in the war against corruption. As a matter of fact, please note, dear reader and compatriot, that exposures of super-scale corruption within Buhari’s administration and the ruling APC have come without Buhari’s knowledge, prompting or blessing. To this observation, add the fact that SGF’s Babachir Lawal’s accusers are not embittered and disgruntled PDP desperados; they are chieftains of the APC Senate leadership caucus who themselves stand accused of corrupt greed and graft of the highest order. By the simple logic of addition as an objective mathematical process, what you get from this additive moral algorithm is the bracing recognition that as far as the president’s war on corruption is concerned, “Buhari’s Nigeria” is the rest of us minus his administration and his party. We cannot and must not accept this extreme circumscription of where “Buhari’s Nigeria” begins and ends in the war against corruption. Let me put this in very simple and very concrete terms: if the war on corruption is now, at this moment in time in Buhari’s Nigeria, we cannot and must not accept a “postponement” of the battles against corruption in the president’s own administration and party to some future date after Buhari’s reelection in 2019 or after he is his succeeded by another declarant of a war against corruption a few years from now.

    For readers who might tend to see this last observation or assertion by me as a sort of desperate ultimatum, I hasten to say that it is not an ultimatum at all. I am not by temperament averse to giving ultimatums if and when I find them necessary and full of possibilities. However, an ultimatum, any ultimatum, is as good as the moral force and physical action available to back it up. Unfortunately, I look around me today and I do not see any group of Nigerians, of the Left or the Right, the camp progressives or of conservatives, that has the moral capital and the mobilizable physical action necessary to force the issue at this critical juncture in the war on corruption. I am not absolutely sure of the veracity this particular observation and indeed, there is a part of me that hopes that I am wrong, at least as far as the camp of progressives and civic-minded patriots are concerned. But I ask myself the following question: Which group today will ask of President Buhari that he must not keep silent in the case of SGF Lawal, that he must show that he is concerned by, and will do something about the greed, the graft, the obscene self-engorgement of the APC-led National Assembly on the harvests of our national assets and resources – and Buhari will listen and act?

    But there is something wrong with this question, something that goes to the heart of all that I have been writing and reflecting about in this series. Permit me to express it as carefully as possible, with all the nuances that the thought requires. This thought is captured in a phrase that is logically and semantically counterpoised to the phrase “Buhari’s Nigeria”. It is – Nigeria’s Buhari. “Nigeria’s Buhari”? Yes. But what does this new phrase mean?

    Buhari, especially in his intentions, his propensities and predilections about power is as Nigerian as the rest of us. Unquestionably, there is a very personal, idiosyncratic and perhaps even quirky dimension to his use of and disposition towards power. I am not sure of this, but I personally see the president’s silence on the case of SGF Lawal as the reflection of an obdurate mule-headedness that wrongfully and myopically thinks that to be forced by one’s opponents to get rid of a member of one’s inner or “kitchen cabinet” is to be weak – even if the dismissal of the errant official is the right thing to do. But fundamentally, Buhari is as much a product of his class, of his generation and of the constellation of ideological and symbolic forces in dominance in Nigeria today as say, Olusegun Obasanjo, Theophilus Danjuma, E.K. Clark, and Donald Duke. In effect this means that in order to break with or from the normal or instinctive ways of thinking and acting of the class and the constellation of forces from and to which Buhari speaks and acts, we must at the very least think counterintuitively to the set ways and perspectives of this class, this alignment of interests, biases and worldviews to which Muhammadu Buhari belongs.

    Why have not Nigerian lawyers risen up in their hundreds, if not in their thousands, to protest and rise up against the bastions of nation-wrecking corruption in their profession? Why do we have only a single, lone whistleblower in the National Assembly and not dozens of outraged, patriotic lawmakers sickened by the endless graft and corruption in the salaries, bonuses and allowances of the rest of the throng of self-authorized looters among our legislators? Why do we not hear thousands upon thousands of lecturers, professors and even students themselves say loud and clear for the nation and the whole world to hear that if the potential employers of the products of our tertiary educational institutions are sick and tired of having “unemployables” foisted on them, so also are the teachers, professors and students themselves sick and tired of being forced to produce “unemployables”?  And why do we not have multitudes of Christians and Moslems clerics and congregants marching, demonstrating and protesting against the idolatry of money and wealth that defines and dominates Nigerian religiosity today in Buhari’s Nigeria? Why, why and why? Because these are counterintuitive responses to the terrible plague of corruption in our country, that’s why!

    When you see danger, you run away from it, not towards it. That is the intuitive, expected response. But to run towards the danger, to think that the best way to deal with it is to actually move to it and engage it, that is the counterintuitive response. In our institutions of higher learning, teaching, learning and research are grossly underfunded, thanks in large measure to the sovereign reign of corruption in our country. But isn’t life itself, especially the lives of the vast majority, greatly underfunded? And if our national assets and resources are being relentlessly looted, isn’t it because the lives of the tens of millions are also being looted?

    Dear reader and compatriot, set your gaze far beyond Buhari’s Nigeria. Think, think counterintuitively of Nigeria’s Buhari, as if life itself depends on it because, actually, it does.

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu