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Category: Biodun Jeyifo

  • Cleansing the Augean stables, Nigeria, circa 2016 CE (4) Religion and the occult economy: religiosity working in tandem with epic corruption

    Cleansing the Augean stables, Nigeria, circa 2016 CE (4) Religion and the occult economy: religiosity working in tandem with epic corruption

    Religion is the opium of the people; it is the soul of a soulless world. Karl Marx  Jesu ko gbowo/Jesu ko gbowo/Jesu ko gbowo lowo enikan/Halleluiah! [Jesus demands no money/Jesus demands no money/Jesus demands no money of anyone, halleluiah!] Lines from a popular anti-capitalist evangelical hymn.

    A few years ago, when a chieftain of the PDP who had been convicted for rank corruption came out of jail, a high-profile thanksgiving service was held in his honour at one of the most prestigious cathedrals in the city of Lagos. All the bigwigs of the then ruling party were present, as were socialites and prelates of the highest official and non-official pedigree. When news of the event hit the Nigerian public, all hell broke loose in outrage. The condemnation was so “universal” that Olusegun Obasanjo who had been at the event and, indeed, had read the lesson, publicly expressed his regret for having attended the service. If my memory serves me right, he went on to state that he had been tricked into attending the service. But try as hard as he could, Obasanjo could not erase from the public mind the thing that the event had powerfully animated for all who heard or read of it. What is this thing? It is the close and intimate association that most Nigerians perceive between wealth – particularly loot and pillage from public coffers – with religion. If this is the case, it would appear that our work in this last essay in our series is cut out for us. And so why don’t we simply declare that just as senior lawyers provide legal cover for those who get rich from looting our national assets and resources, so do senior clerics and prelates provide them with spiritual cover, thus making it easy for us to move ahead with full steam in this discussion? Unfortunately, things are not that easy and straightforward when it comes to religion and corruption in Nigeria, Buhari’s Nigeria. What does this mean?

    Dear reader, let us carefully consider the problem with the following proposition in which an equivalence is presumed between the judiciary and the clergy with regard to their separate and distinct relationships with corruption. Here is the proposition. If the judiciary makes it legally possible to loot the country’s assets and resources with impunity and in plain sight, we might add that the religious clergy makes it possible for the looters to find favour with God. That is what the high profile thanksgiving service for the convicted PDP chieftain was purported to have achieved. It is what the notorious case of a very well-known prelate who received tens of millions of naira stolen from the Sheraton Hotel in Lagos by one of its employees was supposed to have achieved: no matter how much, where and from whom you loot, you will find favour with God if you come to him.

    The problem with this proposition is that there is no equivalence between the two, none at all. To put the matter rather bluntly, there is a vast difference between, on the one hand, keeping looters not only from going to jail but also preventing the Nigerian state and people from recovering the loot and, on the other hand, finding divine favour with God. Of the many differences between the two, the most important for our discussion is the fact that the service that lawyers and judges provide for looters is codified, secular and measurable while the service rendered by the clergy is non-material, ineffable and infinitely resistant to ordinary logic, ethics and even pragmatics. Welcome to the imaginative universe of contemporary Nigerian religiosity, the spiritual and psychic abode of one of the most heartless and unrepentantly evil forms of corruption in the contemporary world!

    The alert reader would have noticed that I did not say “Nigerian religion” or “religion in Nigeria” in the immediately preceding sentence; I said “Nigerian religiosity”. This is quite deliberate. Linguistically speaking, the difference between “religion” and “religiosity” is like the difference between what is abstract and what is concrete, “religiosity” being the concrete forms and expressions that “religion” takes in any given local, national or regional community. More narrowly, religiosity is also used to describe expressions of religious belief that are so zealous, so excessive and often so hypocritical that they go far beyond recognizable norms throughout the world. On this premise, when Nigerians say that we are the most “religious” people on the planet, what they should instead be saying is that we are a nation and a people driven by a religiosity that has no equal on the planet. To this observation, add the fact that the line between “religion” and “religiosity” is not always clear and in fact often crisscross in confounding ways. Nowhere is this more in evidence than in the subject of this series, mega-scale corruption. Permit me to carefully lay out the premises undergirding this central idea of the present discussion.

    It is now widely recognized that religion in the present epoch of global history has not only been commercialized beyond levels seen in all previous ages, but also that this commercialization of religion includes both milking the poor and “softening” them for exploitation and manipulation by ruthlessly opportunistic political elites. This generalized situation is best captured by the reciprocal link that now pervasively exists between “praying” and “preying”. Thus, for everybody but especially the poor, fasting, vigils, marathon prayer sessions all the time; simultaneously but only for the evangelists of wealth and opulence, there is the “preying” as they smile all the way to the banks. As a matter of fact, the operations are generally very sophisticated and are closely linked with the financial services industries of not only Nigeria and the West African sub-region but virtually the whole world. In other words, through this interpenetration of “praying” and “preying”, religion has simultaneously become a mode of doing business in the most ultra-modern, up-to-date manner in existence at the present time and an “occult economy” that radically defies rational logic and human-centered concerns and values. Unfortunately, we have space in the present discussion to capture both the outrage and the complexity of this state of affairs in only a couple of paragraphs.

    Since everywoman and everyman is equal before God, all or most of the people that flock to the churches and mosques to “pray”, either to consolidate what they (already) have or to get what they do not (yet) have come from all economic and social backgrounds. Thus, all the people, rich and poor, wealthy and in dire straits, are “praying”; all are supplicants and “clients” of the imams and prelates. As a consequence, there is so much “praying” going on, so much religiosity thriving everywhere in the land. New churches and mosques spring up much faster and in greater number than the factories and small and medium sized enterprises that open for business. Correspondingly, an infinitely greater number of man-hours are spent praying than working in productive employment since, as a matter of fact, the jobs seem always to be disappearing or are not opening quickly enough to absorb the ever-growing ranks of the unemployed. Moreover, no one can or is expected to complain about or resent the fact that churches and mosques are springing up everywhere or the fact that every day of the week and every hour of the day is now considered available for “praying”. The churches, the mosques, the prayer grounds and the “holy” spaces of spiritual retreat are bursting with record-breaking multitudes – that is all that counts. That, and the fact that the most successful churches and mosques are raking in monies at historically unprecedented levels.

    At a far more complex level, there is the growing and ever more decisive role of the miraculous – together with those deemed capable of harnessing its forces – in the political, economic, commercial and intellectual affairs of the nation. At the top of the grid are the men and women of God who command not only the attention but the devotion of all cadres of the political elites, from the head of state and executive state governors to ministers and chairmen and women of local authority administrations. Worthy of special note in this respect are the growing numbers of professors who are pastors and invest far more attention and energies to their spiritual calling than their professional intellectual obligations. As a matter of fact, this phenomenon itself that entails the capture of so many in our professoriate by this tidal wave of religiosity is a major problem that requires a series of essays in its own right. Seemingly innocuous but of great significance is the practice of naming and organizing business and commercial enterprises around religious themes, discourses and symbolism: “Amazing Grace Shopping Mall”; “God Is Great Pharmacy”; “Jesus Is King Hospital and Clinic”; “There Is No God But Allah Bakery”; “God of Suddenly Traders”; “Immaculate Conception Private Tutorial College”; “Prayer and Fasting Internet Café”. Why is there so much scamming, so much fraud, so much cheating in Nigerian business, politics and higher education in the very presence of this pervasive religiosity? Although this is a good question to ask, it is not the appropriate one to pose in the present context.

    I think it is more profitable in the present context – no pun intended! – to pose the sorts of questions that many ordinary Nigerians in their millions are beginning to pose with regard to the profoundly disturbing links between “praying” and “preying”. These are questions that reveal the crises of a religiosity that is inextricably tied with money-making on a colossal scale at a time of widespread poverty and hardship for the majority of the Nigerian talakawa masses. “Jesus demands no money/Jesus demands no money/Jesus demands no money of anyone, halleluiah!” So goes the second of the two epigraphs to this essay that comes from a powerful and popular hymnal critique of the extreme money-mindedness of contemporary Nigerian evangelical Christianity. Where does this critique come from?

    At the heart or the molten core of the occult economy of Nigerian religiosity is a growing rejection of the extreme idolatry of wealth, especially as manifested in the belief that supernatural forces that are good or evil can be, and are often invoked to either bring and sustain more wealth or avert poverty and hardship. For the most part, a great deal of the expressions and manifestations of this belief are benign: “God of Suddenly Traders”; “Prayer and Fasting Internet Café”. However, the occult economy also has its well-known extremely bizarre expressions, perhaps the most notorious of which is the trade in human body parts for the purpose of bringing or enhancing wealth by cultic ritualists and their clients among both the rich and the poor. Where do we place highly educated and influential prelates who, based on the belief that they have special access to the supernatural, have our political, economic, judicial and even academic elites in their pockets?

    “Religion is the opium of the people; it is the soul of a soulless world”. So goes the first epigraph to this essay. Concerning this famous quotation from Karl Marx, most people remember only the first, “opium” part, completely ignoring the second, “soul” or “conscience” part. Nowhere in the contemporary world has this second part been as completely buried as in Nigeria, Buhari’s Nigeria. In next week’s concluding essay in the series, we shall explore some ways in which we could begin to reinvent this forgotten tradition of religion with a humane, just and egalitarian conscience.

    Biodun Jeyifo                                                                                                          bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Cleansing the Augean stables, Nigeria, circa 2016 CE (4) Higher education and a different kind of corruption, a different order of corruptibility

    Cleansing the Augean stables, Nigeria, circa 2016 CE (4) Higher education and a different kind of corruption, a different order of corruptibility

    A mind is a terrible thing to waste.  Famous United Negro College Fund slogan                                                                                             

    Compared with Law, Politics and Governance and Religion, the other institutional locations of epic corruption that I have either been exploring or will explore in this series, Higher Education (HE) presents us with a relatively much “cleaner” profile than the perceptible “norms” of corruption in Nigeria. Dear reader, please do not get me wrong, for I am neither saying that corruption is rare in our universities and polytechnics, nor am I arguing that lecturers and professors are more honest than lawyers, judges, politicians and our fraternity of jet-set evangelists of wealth and opulence. Nothing could be further from the truth and I would be the first to admit that there are aspects of corruption in higher education in Nigeria that are pretty close to the scale of the corruption that we more commonly associate with the mega-looters now facing the music in the law courts on account of Buhari’s war on corruption. If this is the case, what exactly do I have in mind in pressing this claim that higher education has a relatively “cleaner” profile than what we see in many other institutions in Nigeria?

    Well, the exceptionalism that I associate with higher education with regard to corruption has two very specific and, as a matter of fact, quite ordinary or banal features. Here they are. Firstly, compared with Law, Politics and Religion, there’s not much money to loot and plunder in our higher institutions, since in fact, universities in Nigeria are typically greatly underfunded. Secondly, historically speaking, mega-scale corruption is a very new, a very recent phenomenon in our tertiary educational institutions. Indeed, in comparison with the outsize, super-scale corruption that has been in existence in politics and governance and in the Bar and the Bench in the Judiciary for a long time now, mega-corruption in higher education in Nigeria is a late arrival. Thus, what we confront here is a different kind of corruption, indeed a different order of corruptibility. This is the central idea in this week’s contribution to the present, ongoing series. Permit me to briefly explain what it means as the idea is crucial for enabling us to see how, on the one hand, corruption in higher education is like what we see in other institutions in our country while, on the other hand, it is different and in certain respects, much bigger and more alarming than corruption among lawyers, judges, public officeholders, politicians and evangelists of “holy” greed and graft.

    Though “corruption” and “corruptibility” are both nouns, they are very different orders of nouns. “Corruption” implies a thing that is in society and the world as a completed or consummated act; “corruptibility” on the other hand, implies a thing that exists in nature, society and the world as a never-ending process or possibility. To give a rather dramatic illustration of the difference between the two terms, think of the following proposition, dear reader: “corruption” is a thing, an act for which one is liable for arrest and prosecution, but no one has ever been arrested or will ever be arrested and prosecuted for causing or effecting “corruptibility”. Presented in this way, it seems that the difference between the two terms is marked by a chasm, but this is actually not the case and therein lies the challenge that corruption in higher education in Nigeria poses to us. I will now give an illustration that should considerably clarify what I am arguing here.

    Perhaps the single most outrageous manifestation of corruption in higher education in our country is the fact that though everyone knows that our tertiary educational institutions are grossly under-funded, cases of big and unconscionable looting and mismanagement of budgeted or allocated funds are becoming more and more common. Right now, as of this very moment, there are several high-profile cases being investigated by the anti-graft agencies, the EFCC and the ICPC. Indeed, it is common knowledge in our universities, polytechnics and colleges of education that to be appointed as Chairman of Council, Vice Chancellor or Rector is to be given a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get very rich.

    Of course, there are exceptions to the rule, the norm, but the degree to which people within and outside our higher educational institutions struggle to get appointed to these positions is universally and correctly regarded as an indication of the state of things, the depth of corruption in higher education in the country. So common, so systemic has this pattern become that it now operates as a sort of a recurring cycle: when a new Pro-Chancellor, Vice Chancellor or Rector is appointed, a new team arrives on the scene to make the most of the cash cow that is an institution’s meager budgeted or allocated funds. This is the most familiar or notorious face of corruption in our higher institutions and it is very recognizably “Nigerian”. What is perhaps a little un-Nigerian about it is the fact that, thanks to the unions and professional associations in our universities, it attracts more whistle blowers and more opposition than in the other institutions in the country’s public or corporate existence. If this is the essential face of “corruption” in our higher educational institutions, what about the face or faces of “corruptibility”? Prepare yourself for a confounding and simultaneously “national” and “universal” tale, dear reader!

    A university, a polytechnic is not a primary school or a high school; it is a place of higher education. As a matter of fact, for most of its more than a thousand years’ history, the university as we know it has been a place where learning was severely restricted to a very tiny proportion of the population, far above those whose education would never go beyond, at first, primary schools and later, secondary schools. Indeed, for more than the first 800 years of the evolution of the medieval and modern university, most of the populations of the countries of the world did not have education beyond primary school, not to talk of university. The idea that as many people in a national population who desire to have university education should have it is a post-Second World War social and cultural development. This is the “universal” dimension of this tale and the United States and India are two of its greatest national exemplars. In the last three quarters of a century, each has set up universities as briskly as primary schools are set up. However, fortunately for these two countries, the older, more established universities have been able to absorb the deleterious impact on quality and value that this rapid expansion of the national tertiary educational system has caused. The Nigerian “national” variation of this universal tale presents us with a more tragic narrative, a narrative whose immensely depressing theme is – corruptibility.

    A state or a private university is set up with a declaration that the intention is to make the newly founded institution a “world class” university within a decade or even less: I have lost count of the number of times that I have come across this phenomenon in reports and profiles published in our newspapers and magazines. “World class” universities need a long, long time and tremendous outlays of financial investment to emerge from the “ornery” level of the vast majority of the world’s universities most of which, for the most part, are content to be functional, user-friendly places of instruction and learning rather than self-important and elitist institutions. As a matter of fact, since Nigerian universities currently rank very lowly not only in the world at large but on the African continent, how could any newly founded university in our country realistically aspire to be a “world class” university? To this question, we can and indeed must add the following question: wasn’t the extremely rapid expansion of the number of universities one of the most crucial causes of the lowly ranking of Nigerian universities in Africa and the world?

    These two preceding questions lead us right into the heart of the crisis of “corruptibility” in higher education in Nigeria in the last three decades. Let it be noted that “corruptibility” indicates not a completed and finished act of corruption but a process in which value and quality are gradually but inevitably diminished, often with incalculably destructive consequences. At the core of the phenomenon is not the populist or even egalitarian though non-meritocratic idea of more and more universities; rather, it is the practice of creating more and more universities with absolutely minimal human and financial capital investments in them, turning the great majority of them into no more than glorified high schools. The great swindle, the extremely unconscionable scam is to have convinced parents, students and apparently the whole country that “universities” without the most elementary facilities for higher learning are universities. Lest the point I am making here be missed or underappreciated, let me make it absolutely clear: any place at all will become a “university” in our country once such a place has been declared a university; parents will send their children to it; professors and lecturers from the older and more established universities will help to get it accredited and “teach” in it for negotiated remunerations; and it will produce both “graduates” with impressive-looking certificates and diplomas and “professors” who will in time circulate around and within the entire Nigerian university system.

    A mind is a terrible thing to waste, so goes the epigraph to this piece. It was and still is the fund-raising slogan of the United Negro College Fund. Its historical resonance goes all the way back to the early 20th century when many advocates and champions of African American economic, social and intellectual emancipation felt that higher learning was a critical arena of struggle. Then and now, in the African diaspora as well as on the African continent itself, higher learning remains a valid and crucial arena of struggle for the expansion of the human and civil rights of our peoples. But glorified high schools turned by declaration and swindle into “universities” are the very antithesis of these rights. How do we know this? Well, think of this fact, dear reader: Nigerian universities are some of the most lowly and poorly ranked universities in Africa and the world and yet Nigerians in the Diaspora in Europe and North America consistently outperform most of the indigenes or citizens of other African countries in higher learning institutions. And there is also this fact: potential employers of the products of our tertiary educational institutions constantly and perennially complain that our graduates are so poorly educated and trained that they are “unemployable”. Only glorified high schools proclaimed as “universities” through swindle produce “unemployable” graduates!

    Here is the ultimate and profoundly confounding question that we face in this crisis of “corruptibility” in higher learning in Nigeria at the present time: are we really producing “unemployable” lawyers, engineers, doctors, chemists, architects, agronomists, scientists, mathematicians, journalists, teachers, etc., etc.? And are our universities producing women and men with well above average in quality of mind and discernment necessary for a modern democratic state that is built on justice, equality and dignity for all? If your answer is no, please have the arguments necessary to secure the truth of your opinion. If yes, what do you think we can and ought to do about it? I shall be giving my own response to this question at the end of this series next week.

    Biodun Jeyifo                                                                                                        bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

    • Next week: Religion as an institution and an occult economy
  • Cleansing the Augean stables, Nigeria, circa 2016 CE (3): politics and governance in consumption without limits

    Cleansing the Augean stables, Nigeria, circa 2016 CE (3): politics and governance in consumption without limits

    Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances but under circumstances existing already… Karl Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte 

    Muhammadu Buhari set a trap for corruption and his trap caught Law. He is still reeling from the shock of the experience. That was the main organizing idea of last week’s essay in this series on the major locations of epic, miasmic corruption in our country. For this week’s organizing idea, consider the following observation: the trap that Buhari set for corruption should have caught not only Law, but also Politics and Governance; but it didn’t or at least so far, it hasn’t. Please don’t get me wrong. Quite sensationally, very senior lawyers, high court judges and even an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court have all been indicted and arraigned for super-scale corruption. But so have politicians at the highest levels of governance. So, obviously, Buhari’s war on corruption has nor spared politicians. But consider the following two facts. One: overwhelmingly, the indicted and arraigned politicians have been politicians of opposition political parties, with only one or two coming from the president’s own party, the APC. Two: even as Buhari continues to wage his war on corruption, allegations and evidence of corruption within all levels of government are surfacing, in states, local governments and legislative constituencies controlled by all the ruling class parties implicated. The conclusion from these two facts is irrefutable: Buhari’s war on corruption has not remotely come near, not to say touched Politics and Governance in the way in which it has rocked the institution of Law. This is the main focus of this continuation of the series that began two weeks ago in this column.

    To give a clear outline of what is involved in this failure or unwillingness of Buhari to carry his war on corruption into the heart of the institution of politics and governance, I would like to draw the reader’s attention to a set of astounding similarities – with a few differences – between Olusegun Obasanjo and Muhammadu Buhari, especially with regard to our theme of corruption on an epic, Augean scale. First, the two are the only men to have ever served as both military rulers and elected civilian heads of state and government, with each man parlaying reputations for no-nonsense toughness gained as military dictators in the performance of their duties and responsibilities as democratically elected rulers. Thus, it was no mere coincidence that as civilian rulers, it was these two men who took up the war of corruption as veritable expressions of their toughness, their determination to instill discipline and probity in public office and public coffers in our country: Obasanjo brought us the dreaded anti-graft agencies, the EFCC and the ICPC; Buhari launched the ongoing war on corruption, especially in the theatre of the Law and its organs. So far so good.

    But then consider the following set of facts. Both men directed the firepower of their battle against corruption against either political enemies within his party (Obasanjo) and/or politicians of opposition parties (Obasanjo and Buhari). With both men, even as their wars against corruption intensified and caught the nation’s and the world’s attention, allegations and evidence of corruption in the legislative and administrative institutions over which they presided surfaced to both embarrass and compromise their claims to total intolerance for corruption. As a matter of fact, there are very personal dimensions to these contradictions or even negations of Obasanjo and Buhari as completely clean and untainted warriors against corruption. For instance, in his bitter political quarrel in 2003 with Atiku Abubakar, then his Deputy in the Presidency, both men gave very extensive and very sordid evidence of their graft, their free-wheeling acts of looting and pillage of the national treasury, with enough material to condemn both men to impeachment from office. Moreover, Obasanjo infamously emptied the national treasury in his ill-fated third term bid, as he sought to buy the allegiance and the votes of legislators with the sum of N50 million per legislator. How does this contradiction apply to Buhari?

    In 1984, as military dictator, Buhari had been greatly embarrassed by the scandal of the 53 suitcases that his ADC, one Major Mustapha Jokolo, forcibly got past Customs at Murtala Mohammed Airport uninspected, this at precisely the time that this was forbidden by a decree promulgated by Buhari himself on account of widespread currency smuggling. Did the suitcases contain smuggled currency? Buhari’s enemies and the general public at the time thought so and said as much, but Buhari and his supporters had a slightly plausible explanation in the form of subordinates who act without the knowledge of, and against interests of their bosses. We shall never know the truth of the matter, but it was so scandalous at the time that its distinct intimation of acting corruptly against laws and protocols one is sworn to uphold and defend has haunted Buhari over the last three decades.

    Certainly, it didn’t help Buhari’s case then that his ADC, Major Jokolo, was never disciplined, just as now it provides no help to the credibility of his war against corruption that the president has seemed completely unable to do anything at all about the myriad of manifestations of corruption, graft and decadence in his party, the APC. These include budget padding to the tune of billions of naira and insistence on continuing to draw humungous salaries and allowances by legislators at a time of severe hardship and austerity for the majority of Nigerians; former governors on pension benefits whose scale and size are unequalled anywhere else on the planet; First Ladies around the country who are unconstitutionally and corruptly usurping the functions and parts of the budgets of ministries and parastatals; and the widespread incidence of vote buying dubbed “dibo kosebe” (“vote for me and receive money to have stew in your empty cooking pot”) in the recently concluded Ondo State governorship elections.

    As far as I know, there was not a single Party Conference or Congress on corruption in the sixteen years of the reign of the PDP. And if there was an official, implementable Party Paper or Document on corruption, it lies buried in the unmarked grave of the PDP’s uncreated moral conscience. In other words, to Obasanjo belonged the beginning and the end of the Party’s policies and actions on corruption. Slowly but seemingly inevitably, the same pattern is emerging with Buhari and the APC. Outside of Buhari’s personal charisma and credibility as an anti-corruption warrior, the current ruling party has nothing at all to show Nigeria and the world as the Party vision, the Party programme on corruption. This is both a cause and an effect of the failure and/or unwillingness of Obasanjo in his time and Buhari at the present time to take the war on corruption to the heart of their respective parties. Here’s another way of saying the same thing: the war on corruption in Nigeria would have come of age and become really consequential the day Buhari and the APC deal with corruption, looting and graft within the leadership and the rank and file membership of the ruling party itself.

    The central question, the tantalizing conundrum of these observations and reflections is this: with the well-deserved reputations for no-nonsense toughness they brought from their time in office as military rulers, why have politicians and the political ethos in Nigeria proved far too strong, if not virtually insuperable, for Obasanjo and Buhari in their respective wars on corruption? The conundrum is less baffling in Obasanjo’s case: the man was himself not only prone to corruption, he was and still is completely self-righteously blind to his personal corruption and corruptibility. To this day, he still insists that his endlessly wasteful and corrupt third term bid did not happen and that we, the Nigerian people, imagined or invented it! Buhari, on the other hand, presents us with a more complex case. Unlike Obasanjo whose setting up of the anti-graft agencies, the EFCC and the ICPC, was done in obedience to the dictates of the Western powers acting through such organizations as the IMF, the World Bank and Transparency International, Buhari took up the mantle of anti-corruption warrior on his own volition and will. Moreover, even if at this stage his intellectual grasp of the scope and the challenge of corruption is clearly very limited, the genuineness of his intentions is (still) unquestionable. But having said this, we must now assert vigorously that in history and the affairs of humankind, intentions alone are not enough. What do I mean by this?

    “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past”, so goes the epigraph for this essay. It is taken from a monograph by Karl Marx in which the revolutionary philosopher was reflecting on the role of individuals in history, with special reference to the very intricate relationship between the individual and his or her class. Applying this epigraph to our reflections in this piece, we could say that whether or not Buhari is more credible than Obasanjo as an anti-corruption crusader and warrior, both men are equal in their total incapacity to deal with their class and its endless propensity for corruption, especially with regard to the fraction of their class with whom they share(d) membership of the ruling party. Let me make this very clear: like Obasanjo in the PDP, Buhari has so far proved unable or unwilling to take on corruption among politicians and administrators in his own party, the APC. This is not to say that the dozens of indicted and arraigned judges, politicians and public officeholders amount to nothing significant. What I am saying, what I urge the Nigerian masses and those who stand with them in their hardship and suffering to demand is that Buhari must also deal with corruption, graft and looting within the APC itself. Above all, I am saying that the time has come to demand of the new ruling party to produce a programme on corruption that will include far-reaching house-cleaning within the APC itself.

    And if this does not happen and Buhari remains unable or unwilling to extend the war on corruption to his own party? Expect, compatriots, that his war on corruption will either ultimately fail or the success that it achieves will be so miniscule that it would not have made the slightest dent on the sovereign reign of corruption in our country and the terrible suffering it is hourly and daily causing the vast majority of our peoples in every corner of the land. What is particularly troubling is the fact that Buhari and his handlers are already focused on his re-election in 2019 and for this reason, the last thing the president and his men would do now is extend the war on corruption to house-cleaning within the APC. Consumption far in excess of production; consumption without limits: that is the basic “programme” of the class and the government in power in our country at the present time. Olusegun Obasanjo and Muhammadu Buhari present us with two contrasting masks of the same avatar of a particular form of capitalism that is one of the most unregenerate and unjust in modern social and economic history. Obasanjo and the PDP are gone from the historical scene, almost. Let us therefore concentrate on what we confront in Buhari and the APC.

    Next week: Education, especially Higher Education (HE)

    Biodun Jeyifo                                                                                               bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Cleansing the Augean stables, Nigeria, circa 2016 CE (2): the lawyerly institution

    The thing caught in Nte’s trap is bigger than Nte. Chinua Achebe, Arrow of God

    As quiet as it is kept, Muhammadu Buhari as a would-be Hercules who set out to drain the monumental pit latrine of corruption in Nigeria, has met his match in a small but enormously influential number of men and women of the lawyerly profession and institution in our country. For those who have not taken due notice of this development, here are some eloquent indications showing clearly that Buhari has now taken to heart the fact that he confronts a powerful, almost invincible foe in the LAW(capitalized) in his declared war on corruption. One: the president has stopped the whining complaint of obstructionism that he used to periodically lodge against senior lawyers and judges aiding and abetting corruption. In other words, he has stopped parading his feeling of impotent helplessness before the LAW’s seeming awesome powers. Two: under his direction, operatives from the offices of the Attorney General of the Federation (AGF) and the EFCC have been striking “mosafejo” plea bargains with looters in deals whose details have not been made public with regard toboth the amounts recovered individually and collectively and the identities of the plea bargainers. [“mosafejo”: ludic Yoruba term meaning, “make I run commot from de wahala of court litigation!] Three: the most sensational cases – like those of Sambo Dasuki and Bukola Saraki – have been quietly consigned to complete silence as to when and if ever they will be resolved in favour of the national treasury and the good people of Nigeria.

    We might add a fourth and rather provisional indication of Buhari’sseeming capitulation to the invincibility of corruption in our country, at least as declared by Mr. Buba Galadima,a member of the APC’s Board of Trustees (BOT) who used to be very close to the president. In that widely circulated and discussed declaration, Galadimahad stated bitterly if also blithely that under Buhari’s watch, the corruption, the looting frenzy has continued unabated. This declaration has given much bite to an accusation that the ruling party’s political opponents have for a long time now been trumpeting to the nation and the world that Buhari’s war on corruption has for the most part been waged against opposition politicians. This is an accusation that got a tremendous boost last week from Olusegun Obasanjo who said of the majority of the membership of thepresent-dayAPC-led National Assembly that they are a piddling, remorseless gang of unarmed robbers.

    The thing caught in Nte’s trap is much bigger than Nte – so goes the epigraph to this week’s essay. This epigraph is taken from Chinua Achebe’s great novel, Arrow of God. It pertains to perhaps greatest man in the land, Ezeulu, who takes up a moral and psychological crusade whose outsize dimensions prove too big for his larger-than-life personality and charisma. Nothing that we know of Muhammadu Buhari gives the slightest indication that he has the maniacal drive and passion of Ezeulu, the protagonist of Arrow of God.Nonetheless, I find the analogy with Ezeulu and the trope of the thing caught in Nte’s trap very suggestive: a victorious, post-election Buhari catches “corruption” in his “trap” and what he finds there proves much too big for him. And what did Buhari find in the trap that he set for “corruption”? Law, the father and mother of all corruption in Nigeria, possibly more than any other nation on the planet. To refer back to the myth of Hercules and the cleansing of the Augean stables with which we began the discussion in last week’s column, this analogy of Nte and the thing caught in his trap is comparable to Hercules discovering that the waters of the two rivers whose normal courses he diverted to cleanse the Augean stables were themselves so filled with sewage and filth that, instead of cleaning the stables, the waters added to the monumental filth and stench in the land. This, in essence, is what Buba Galadima is forcefully and bitterly arguing; and it is what, with specific regard to the National Assembly under the domination of the APC as the new ruling party, Obasanjo is not too subtly suggesting. What do I personally think of the suggestion?

    I think the jury is still out on what the ultimate outcome of Buhari’s war on corruption will be. For many months now, nearly every day and every week, the EFCC has beenmaking new and sensational announcements and arraignments of looters and their accomplices. As usual, the sums involved are mind-boggling. Then, there is also this: vast sums of money are reported by the government of the “recovery” of loot through plea bargains whose details we, the Nigerian people, are given little or no information and facts concerning the identities of the apparent confessed looters. Indeed, in the last month or so, the president’s war on corruption has raised the notch on the exposure of the depth of the Law’s collusion with looters and corruption though theannouncement of arrests and arraignments of many senior members of the Bar and the Bench, with the reach of this extraordinary move going all the way up to the Supreme Court itself, confirming deep suspicions that Nigerians have always had that the tentacles of miasmic corruption covers every inch of the space of Law in our country.

    I think that taken together, all these developments prove that it may be too early to write off Buhari’s war on corruption as a failed or even failing war. What I think we should now recognize is that Buhari is not Hercules and he cannot and will never win the war on corruption by the action and the vision of himself and his agents alone, unaided by the Nigerian people, acting in very decisive ways to now step forward to “own” the war on corruption. To use the analogy of Nte and his trap again to throw light on this observation, we might say that Nte’s only chance of mastering and finishing off the thing caught in his trap is to run back to the community and corral the assistance, the intervention of his neighbors, especially other hunters experienced in trapping dangerous quandaries among the animals of the forests. This is the heart of the matter in Buhari’s confrontation with the Law as the principal and seemingly invincible foe in his war on corruption. Let me explain what I mean by this claim with some rather startling observations whose overall intention is to spark a big debate on Law and the monumental, Augean scale of corruption in Buhari’s Nigeria, even as the president continues to do battle with it.

    If Law is to be rid of corruption so that it can in turn rid our country of corruption, the war on corruption must (now) be waged within the lawyerly profession and institution itself, inclusive of the Bar and the Bench. This is because at all times and in all places, reform of corrupt, rotten institutions always comes both from within and without. Now, I happen to know that there is indeed a battle has been going on for some time now for the soul of the lawyerly institution and profession in our country. I know this partly because I make it my business to find out and know as much as an outsider can of the facts, the realities and the personalities involved on both sides of this battle. I should perhaps add that I know of this battle because many concerned, patriotic and concerned members of the Bar have been sending emails to me in response to the innumerable articles that I have written in this column on law and corruption. [Let me add that I am yet to receive a single email from a member of the Bench!]

    But how many normally well informed members of the Nigerian public know of this battle for and against corruption within the legal profession and its many organs, institutions and associations? Other than perhaps Femi Falana, the People’s Advocate and one or two other outspoken and courageous lawyers and retired judges, how many members of the public know that there is a group within the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) in particular and the legal profession in general that is resolutely opposed to the not-so-secret collusion of the past and present leadership of the NBA with the status quo? How many Nigerians know that in the report of the special judiciary committee of the Jonathan National Conference of 2014 chaired by Justice George Oguntade, JSC, the members of that committee, all of them members of the lawyerly profession (Bar and Bench) unanimously voted for the setting up of a special tribunal to try cases of mega-looting of the public purse and national treasury, a tribunal whose trial procedures would do away one and for all time the many obstacles still working to this day to delay and frustrate the trial of the mega-looters?

    Ordinarily, one should logically conclude that it is because the efforts of reform-minded, outspoken and courageous members of the lawyerly profession are weak, sporadic and ineffective that their efforts are largely unknown to the Nigerian public. This explanation is true but I think it does not explain much and must itself be explained. I have thought long and hard on the issue and have come up with two plausible “explanations”. One: I suspect that deep down, progressive and reform-minded members of the legal profession are so aware of the depth of corruption in their profession that they expect that true reform cannot, indeed will not come from within their profession and institution. Two: as I have argued many times in this column, corruption in the LAW in present-day Nigeria is the legal superstructure of an extremely retrograde and unjust form of capitalism, a capitalism built not on production but on unlimited, wasteful and decadent consumption. Most, if not all, reform-minded lawyers in our country know this defining or constitutive feature of their profession; they know that organized corruption is a major source of the food chain and the pecking order of status in the Bench and the Bar in Nigeria; but they do not know what strategy and tactics to adopt to take on the monumental challenges that this poses to them, individually and collectively.

    Am I wrong in making these admittedly controversial suppositions? I do not think so. What I know with an unshakeable certainty is that genuine, long-lasting and transformative reform to LAW will come from a combination of minds, wills and forces from within and without the lawyerly profession and institution. Will those who will take the first steps towards this development please identify themselves and get to work? The progressive and courageous caucus within the NBA; the CDHR which has been doing a great job organizing protests against corruption in politics and the law; NLC; ASUU; Joint Action Front; the Campaign Against Corrupt Leadership (CACOL); organizations and associations of market women and many other patriotic and civic-minded bodies, please get together in this great cause!

    Next Week: Politics and Governance

    Biodun Jeyifo                                                                                                   bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Cleansing the Augean stables, Nigeria, circa 2016 CE (1)

    Cleansing the Augean stables, Nigeria, circa 2016 CE (1)

    Augean: a place or condition marked by a great filth or corruption Dictionary.com (online)

    There will be no “Dogon Turenchi”, no “Igilango Geesi”, no big, big grammar in the series of articles that begins with this week’s column. The main term in the title of the series, “Augean stables” comes from ancient Greek mythology. As a child in primary school, I was deeply fascinated by the story behind the term. Here it is: a mythical king of one of the Greek islands, Augeas of Elis, set Hercules, one of the greatest of the superheroes of Greek and world mythology, the task of cleaning out his stable. Well, nothing out of the ordinary in this, except that for more than thirty years, the dung of about thirty thousand horses had not been cleared from the stable, leading to a monumental pile up so vast that only by diverting the waters of two large rivers through the stable was Hercules able to achieve the task and rid the island kingdom of the filth, the rot and the smell that had overwhelmed the land for decades. The scale of the filth and the smell in the land boggles the mind: crap and ordure of thirty thousand horses in an accumulation that spanned thirty years!

    This mythical story – which I must have come across in Primary Three or Four – had such a powerful hold on my imagination that over the years and decades of my growth and development, I not only never forgot it but always tried to find symbolic or analogical equivalents to the miasmic filth and corruption depicted in the myth. Here are some places and times where and when I have found or detected aspects of “Augean stables” in our world in the last four decades: IBB’s years in office as Nigeria’s first military president; the tenure of James Ibori in office as Delta State Governor; the second term of Olusegun Obasanjo in office, especially in the run-up to his failed bid to obtain a third term in office; the four decades of the absolutist and deliberately dysfunctional reign of Mobutu in the DRC; the second term of George W. Bush as the 43rd American president, especially the last two years leading to the worldwide recession of 2008. In every one of these cases, the stench of corruption in the respective land(s), the terrible impact on lives, morality and the psychic health of the populace was unspeakably monumental precisely because it was “Augean”.

    For Nigerians, it is particularly important to remember the endlessly “Augean” scale of the corruption in the financial industry in particular and the economy in general in the last years of Bush or “Dubya” in office, if only because we are understandably so heartsick with the scale of corruption in our country and our continent that we do not pay attention to and seek to learn lessons from how monumental corruption has been either dealt with and/or “tolerated” in other lands, especially in the rich nations of the global North. So, before we come to Nigeria, circa 2016 of the present Common Era (CE) as our main locus of interest in the series that begins this week in this column, let us briefly go over what happened in the so-called “sub-prime” loan mega-scandal that led to the meltdown of the financial services industry of the whole world in 2008. This is unquestionably one of the very worst cases of corruption on a gargantuan scale since capitalism became the reigning economic order of modern society in our world. Greatly and deliberately simplified, here’s what happened.

    Hundreds of thousands initially, but ultimately millions of mortgage loan packages were given to people who not only could not afford the magnitude of the loans they were given but were actually expected to default on the loans and thereby lose their investments and assets through foreclosures.As a matter of fact, this is precisely why these loans were called “sub-prime” – they were deliberately and cynically intended to be so far below standard regulations and protocols of mortgage loans that they could lead to no other end than defaults and foreclosures. As absurd as it may seem to anyone reading this piece in Nigeria, a “sub-prime” loan is akin to lending N100 million naira to a mechanic, a tailor or a welder whose total business turnover isless than N5 million naira per annum; the only reason you would make such a loan is that you are absolutely certain that the mechanic, tailor or welder will default and all his or her assets would then be forfeited or “foreclosed” to you, the lender. Please note, dear reader, that in the American context, we are talking not about “mechanics” and “welders”; we are talking about the whole gamut of the members of the country’s fabled middle class: teachers, nurses, clerks, postal workers, salesmen and women, policemen and women, the mid-level administrative staff of universities, colleges, high schools and primary schools, and the phalanx of full and part-time workers in the hospitality and service industries, all in their millions. All were deliberately targeted, given loan packages they were neither qualified for nor could afford; all were eventually completely wiped out by defaults and foreclosures that were actually intended as the source, the driving engine of the super profits of the “sub-prime” loan bonanza.

    If that had been the end of the story of “sub-prime” loans in Bush’s America, the impact of corruption on such a scale would have been bad enough, but the worst was yet to come to destroy the whole structural edifice of the American national economy and ultimately, the global economy. This is because these toxicand “Augean” sub-prime loans were then “securitized” meaning, in layman’s language, that they were bundled together as “securities” and sold to investment banks, financial services institutions and hedge funds across the whole world. For about five years, these “securitized” loans portfolios were the “hottest” and the most “profitable” products in world finance, these same loans that were initially sold to millions of borrowers expected to default on the loans they were given. Vast quantities of investment capital all over the world were diverted away from economic and business activities in the real economy to these toxic “securitized” sub-prime loans. Perhaps the most horrific of these diversions was the transfer of assets in the pension funds of millions of senior citizens in the rich countries of the world away from government bonds, food, beverage and pharmaceutical companies and heavy industry to the securitized sub-prime loans. How did it all come crashing down and who paid the price? The answer to this question is remarkably simple: as millions upon millions of homes that had been foreclosed and forfeited increased exponentially, there were no buyers left for them precisely because actual and potential buyers had all been financially wiped out! As to the question of who paid the price, the answer is everybody, every tax payer in America and the other rich countries, all except the operators of the whole scheme!

    I have gone in such detail over this terrible financial debacle for millions of Americans in the last years of the “Dubya” presidency in the United States partly to underscore the fact that we in Nigeria and Africa have no monopoly of Augean corruption and its monumentally destructive impact on human lives. But more importantly, I wish to draw the attention of the reader to the fundamental problem in the ancient Greek myth of Hercules and his heroic cleansing of the Augean stables at Elis. What is this problem? It is the apparent belief that obstacles and challenges of epic proportions that human beings sometimes face can be successfully met by heroes endowed with superhuman powers. I have said that I first encountered this myth of Hercules and the Augean stable in Primary Three or Four. For a while, I was totally taken by the imaginative power of Herculean heroism, by the sheer breath-taking wonder of diverting the waters of two large rivers from their natural courses to wash away the mountain of ordure and stench in the stable. I do not remember now for exactly how long I held on to this Herculean fixation, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some day, I came across evidence showing that it lasted throughout the years of primary school!

    But of course, and inevitably, as I grew older, I came to the realization that in the real world, human beings and human communities successfully overcome “Augean” challenges not through the super-heroism of one man but through the careful, determined, civic-minded and collective action of many members of the community. Let me give a rather blunt illustration of the point I am making here: I very much doubt that there are any readers of this piece who (still) believe that Muhammadu Buhari, like Hercules will, by the moral example and the charisma of his personality, clear away the Augean corruption that we face in this nation, but who does not know that the vast majority of Nigerians thought of Buhari as a modern-day Hercules when he first arrived as the new occupant of Aso Rock?

    Now that we know that Buhari is Buhari, that he is a mere mortal and not superhuman and if the First Lady, Hajia Aisha Buhari is to be believed, the president has surrounded himself with opportunists and cynics who are blocking the successful implementation of her husband’s “change” mandate, how do we successfully engage the challenge of Augean corruption in our country? That is the question that I will be addressing in this series over the course of the next four weeks.

    Four weeks? Yes, because corruption is not one single monolith that Buhari and the APC can and will tackle alone, all by themselves as if they are a composite formation of many incarnations of Hercules in the Party and the Government. Corruption is hydra-headed and is not confined to one stable from which it can be washed away once and for all. At any rate, here are the areas of the public sphere of Buhari’s Nigeria in which I will be focusing in this series with the aim of sparking a debate on what we, the people, the citizens, are doing or, conversely, not doing to “kill” or contain corruption before it kills off what’s left of our collective wealth and patrimony: the law; governance, as institutionally set up in the legislature and the administration; education, especially higher education; and religion and affairs of the moral and spiritual health of the nation. Which Nigerian does not know that corruption, Augean corruption pervades and infects each and every one of these spheres of our public and collective existence? And if we cannot, indeed mustnot expect a Hercules to come and save us, what are we to do?

    Biodun Jeyifo                                                                                              bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • ‘Post-truth’ and the anti-globalization of the Right: reflections on language, bigotry and power

    ‘Post-truth’ and the anti-globalization of the Right: reflections on language, bigotry and power

    Post-truth: Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.
    Oxford University Dictionaries’ definition of the word of the year for 2016
    You are entitled to your own opinion; you are not entitled to your own facts.
    Daniel Patrick Moynihan

    In the prison house of language. In the wide open and free spaces of language. Or in the convoluted labyrinth of language. All are metaphors for the great variety of things we make language do for us and/or against those we hate, despise and wish to dominate, if not wipe off the face of the earth. These were the thoughts that crossed my mind earlier this week when I got the news that the custodians of the evolution of the English language at Oxford English Dictionarieshad settled on the compound word, “post-truth”, as their choice for the word of the year for 2016. I think it is safe to say that to nearly everybody who read of this declaration from the etymological gurus of the OED, the first thoughts were about the American presidential elections, especially with regard to Donald Trump and the new word that his advent has given the English language, Trumpism. [Generally, it is still capitalized; when the capital first letter is dropped to give us “trumpism”, it would have achieved its full normalization or even apotheosis] Now, though Trumpism means or implies many things, at its core is the complete indifference, the total and amoral antipathy to facts. Literally, there are hundreds of examples to give of this Trumpian disregard for facts and truth, but the one that I personally found the most annoying and confounding during the campaigns was the president-elect’s stereotype that all African Americans live in inner city ghettoes that Trump considered a war zone worse than Afghanistan. In this Trumpian construction, the millions of African American middle class and upper middle class professionals who live in suburbs did not matter, did not count; all he could see, all he wanted his overwhelmingly white and conservative audiences to see are African Americans whose conditions of life, in Trump’s opinion, are close to what they were right after the abolition of slavery.

    But this essay is not about Trump and Trumpism. It is about language in general, with special reference to the OED’s disturbing choice of “post-truth” as the word of the year 2016. Many decades ago, the highly respected American Senator from the State of New York, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, expressed the words of the second epigraph to this essay: You are entitled to your own opinion; you are not entitled to your own facts. This shows clearly that the phenomenon of substituting opinion for facts has been around in American politics for a long time. One can even go back in time and to other countries and cultures to establish the long, perhaps even ancient roots of this phenomenon of substituting opinions – very often extremely wild, improbable and dangerously untruthful opinions – for facts and truth. Thus, I think here of Aristophanes and his play, The Clouds, written and staged in ancient Greece more than seven thousand centuries ago but still incredibly relevant in our age in its dramatization of how, among the Sophists, it was considered much better to have clever opinions than truth or wisdom on one’s side in an argument or struggle. Closer tin time, I think of George Orwell’s novel,Nineteen-Eighty-four(1949),and the neologism that it gave to the English language, “newspeak” which denotes use of language that manufactures facts from mere opinion and then declares the new “facts” the very essence of truth. And still much closer in time to the present moment in history, I think of the American presidential elections of 2012 when Mitt Romney’s campaign manager made the following loud declaration: our campaign will not be dictated by Fact-Checkers! This was made in response to the many, many lies that were found in the Romney campaign’s lies about the welfare policies of the Obama administration. Indeed, I think here of the use of the prefix “post” with some key words to produce terms that are then liable to mean different things to different peoples, terms like “post-feminist”, “post-racial”, “post-Marxist”, “post-historical”, “post-political” and even “post-contemporary”. “Post-truth”, I contend, comes in the wake and wears the composite mask of these “postist” terminologies. What does this mean?

    In the present discussion, we have room or time to consider only “post-racial” and “post-feminist”. In both cases, there is a doubleness and an ambiguity in the suggestion that while racism and patriarchy seem to have respectively been transcended, those who have been the historic victims of racism and patriarchy cannot afford to rest on their oars, secure in the knowledge that racists and misogynists can never again accede to power and authority in the country or the world. In other words, the prefix, “post” suggests in these two terms that the world is beyond racism and patriarchy, at least in their old and consolidated forms; but the most astute and effective anti-racists and anti-sexists insist that racism and misogyny are still very much around, sometimes in their most backward and recalcitrant forms and expressions. As a matter of fact, in the campaign of Donald Trump in the recent American electoral cycle, racism and misogyny of the most pernicious types reared their heads and struck viciously once again. So much for talk of the post-racial and post-feminist as mobilizing, energizing terms and slogans for radical and progressive women and men!

    So far in this discussion, there has been a rather indirect or muted suggestion that terms coined from the prefix, “post” are ideologically and politically neutral, subject to use or deployment by both the Right and the Left. In general, this is factually correct, though I would argue that on balance, more leftist radicals and progressives use the terms than do right-wing ideologues. In other words, you generally cannot tell whether a pundit or an analyst is left-wing or right-wing simply by the use or deployment of any of these terms, “post-racial”, “post-feminist”, “post-political”, post-ideological” etc., etc. I think the philologists of the OED probably intend the same kind of ideological neutrality in their definition of “post-truth” though, of course, they do not seem to withhold moral critique from their definition. If that is the case, the question arises as to why I am in this essay applying the term, “post-truth” exclusively to the right-wing anti-globalists of the present period, as implied in that part of the title of this piece that talks of “the anti-globalism of the Right”. Is this an expression of ideological bias on my part?

    My answer to the preceding question is, quite frankly, I hope not. Although as a Leftist, I am not ideologically neutral, I do not however claim superior moral rectitude or sanctity for the Left. In my personal experience of intellectual and ideological struggles within the Left both in Nigeria and internationally, I have found as much opportunism and as much cynicism as can be found in the general population of all the countries of the world. If this is the case, it seems to me that there is a special reason why “post-truth” is far more in evidence among the Right than the Left in contemporary history’s anti-globalism. This observation leads to the concluding thoughts of this piece in which I address this central thesis of why “post-truth” is almost exclusively a feature of Right-wing demagoguery of European and North-American nations, with perhaps the possible exception of the Right-wing jihadists of the Middle East and its European diasporas.

    At this point in the discussion, it is perhaps useful to give a few concrete examples of the most volatile and “active” of the “post-truths” of the Euro-American anti-globalist Right. One of the most infamous is their claim, expressed as a “fact”, that global warming and climate change are nothing but hoaxes invented by globalists to keep American and European workers as perpetual victims of ever faltering levels of industrial production. There is also the feeling greatly touted as a “fact” that the United Nations is a “World Government” in disguise whose real aim is to ultimately subjugate America to the dominance of a cabal of bankers, financiers and hedge fund manipulators. The so-called “clash of civilizations” between the East and the West, between Christianity and Islam, is another major item in the obdurate “post-truth” of the worldview of these new ideological armies of the Right in America especially but also in Europe. Is this construction also an item of “post-truth” which states that the end of the world is near, that things are about to change worldwide into patterns of new alliances of friendly and enemy nations and regions of the world? I think it is. One of its strangest expressions has been the persistent belief of close to two-thirds of the American Right that Barrack Obama is not an American; that he is a Moslem whose mission in America was or has been to weaken the country so decisively that its enemies can then easily finish off the rump that remains of the once-hegemonic and exceptionalist global superpower.

    We end these sobering reflections on a note that brings all our observations in the essay to a consideration of the links between language, bigotry and power. We started by identifying and affirming the many metaphors that we have of language: as a prison; as free, open spaces of light and freedom; and as a labyrinth in which one can get lost irredeemably. In none of these metaphors is there a real or strong hint of the play of power. This is all well and good, at least nominally. Any individual, any group can play with and in language, as long as the effects, for good or ill, are confined to the self/selves and its/their immediate circles of friends and associates. But once the link is made or forged with the interests or fates of millions, of hundreds of millions, once we are talking of the survival of entire peoples or indeed of our planetary community, we are talking of language as a basis for the actualization of our worst fears and nightmares. Look carefully, dear reader, at each and all of the items in our profile of the “post-truths” of the American Right and think on this observation: with Trump in the White House and with many of similar leaders of “white nationalism” on the cusp of gaining power in forthcoming general elections, all these “post-truths” are about to become state policies of a segment of the world that has economic and ideological power far beyond any other region of the planet.

    It is not my intention to end this piece on a note of pessimism and despair. For this reason, I shall end with the following crucial observation: there was and still is an anti-globalism of the Left and the progressive forces of the diverse regions of the world that did not and does not base itself on “post-truths”. Let us hope that its ideological and moral force will be more than equal to the oncoming policy onslaughts of the anti-globalism of the Right.

    Biodun Jeyifo                                                                                                 bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Trump and bitter memories of Abacha: rubbishing liberal democracy at home and abroad

    Trump and bitter memories of Abacha: rubbishing liberal democracy at home and abroad

    Last week, I made a prediction that Hillary Clinton would win the 2016 American presidential elections. Technically, the results confirmed my prediction: Clinton did win the popular vote by getting  about a quarter of a million votes more than Trump received from the American electorate. But as I am not a charlatan or a sophist, I must admit that though technically or literally accurate, in essence my prediction was wrong. Clinton, as the whole world knows, lost to Trump. In America, you do not win by and through the popular vote; you win only if you are the victor in the battle inthe so-called electoral college. In the overwhelming number of cases in American political history, the candidate who wins the popular vote also wins in the electoral college. But in a few instances, there has been a divergence between the two. Significantly, in those few instances when this has happened, American democracy has been thrown into a profound crisis. The last time that this happened was in the year 2000 in the contest between Al Gore, the Democratic candidate who won the popular vote by a huge landslide victory, and George W. Bush, the Republican candidate who won the contest in the electoral college by a very slim majority. This crisis has reappeared again in this year’s contest between Clinton and Trump. In this last installment in my series exploring similarities between elections in Nigeria and America, this unusual crisis that is engendered by a divergence between the popular vote and the electoral college will serve as a springboard for reflections that will focus on chilling reminders of Sani Abacha that I perceive in the profoundly troubling advent of Donald Trump.

    Abacha and Trump? Yes, even though Abacha did not come to power through the electoral process but through a military putsch that violently aborted an election that everyone regarded as the freest and fairest presidential elections ever conducted in Nigeria. I should perhaps even add that through the influence of his father, Fred Trump, Donald Trump succeeded in avoiding being drafted for military service when most young men in his generation had to compulsorily serve their country in uniform and in battle. So, on the surface, no two men could be more dissimilar than Trump and Abacha. However, within the framework of the interconnection between personality and politics and between individuality and the exercise of rule over hundreds of millions of people, no two persons could be more similar than Sani Abacha and Donald Trump. This is why, as I hope to show in this short piece, Americans in particular and, with a few notable exceptions, the whole world in general, is in great shock and fear in the victory of Trump, just as we in Nigeria, the rest of Africa and many parts of the world, were greatly dismayed when Abacha seized power in 1993. Indeed, the similarities are nothing short of being uncanny.

    At the most obvious level of comparison, think of the following fact, dear reader: Trump won, but to the very last day of the electoral campaigns, he was shouting to the rooftops of his country and the whole world that the system of American democracy was so rigged that he would accept the results of the elections only if he was the winner. Moreover, he openly threatened his opponent, Hillary Clinton, that if he won the elections, he would have her sent to jail. [And indeed, on Thursday this week, Rudy Giuliani, the man everyone expects to become Attorney General in Trump’s cabinet, warned President Obama not to grant preemptive pardon to Clinton in the remaining two months of his presidency]And throughout the campaigns, Trump repeatedly declared that he would be a “law and order” president; that he had the support of most of the organizations of policemen and women; that the majority of serving and retired generals, border guards, and veterans preferred him over Clinton. Moreover, throughout the campaigns, Trump constantly and consistently expressed a surfeited hatred, fear and suspicion of the press the like of which had never been seen or heard in American political history. Does not all this remind you, dear reader, of our own Sani Abacha? No dictator in the tragic experience of military autocracyin Nigeria was more fearful, more contemptuous of democracy and its institutions than Abacha, just as no civilian president (or president-elect) in America has ever expressed the level of disdain for liberal democracy and its institutions and values than Donald Trump.

    The similarities between Trump and Abacha assume even more alarming portents if we compare the particular elections that brought the two men into power in their respective countries. In each of these two cases, the plurality of votes won respectively by M.K.O. Abiola and Hillary Clinton was demographically the widest in each country’s political history and democratic experience. Of course, we must not ignore the fact that as with Abiola, Clinton was a deeply flawed candidate. Those who supported Abiola and to this day still cherish his memory must not lose sight of the fact that many patriotic and progressive Nigerians in the public sphere were opposed to him, no one more so than the late Fela Anikulapo-Kuti. On the Left, many were at best lukewarm in their support of Abiola, the basis of which was the suspicion that in office, M.K.O. might place the interests of global capitalism and its powerful agencies and forces above Nigerian national interests and the interests of the poor and the downtrodden.These reservations, these suspicions also substantiallyapply to Clinton and her campaign. But that is not the end of the story.

    This is because with both Abiola and Clinton and in spite of the deep reservations they engendered, they went on to cobble together the greatest and widest coalition of demographic and ideological forces in the respective political histories of their two countries. Permit me to express this observation in concrete terms: America and Nigeria being both extremely diverse and plural countries, the ultimate challenge is to forge unity across the length and breadth of the country, not a contentless unity but a robust unity that would both work to the benefit of all and protect the interests of the poor, the exploited and the marginalized. We will never know if, in office, Abiola and Clinton would have gone on to achieve the great expectations that their pluralities intimated. In Abiola’s case, we know that history has been extremely harsh in its judgment of Abacha, the man who sent him to jail and consummated the theft of his mandate that was initiated by Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida. In America, Rudy Giuliani has indicated that Trump intends to act on his threat of sending Clinton to jail. But that is not the essential moral of this story; that moral lies elsewhere, it lies precisely in the probability that Trump’s presidency will, like Abacha’s rule in Nigeria,sow seeds of disunity, fear, and hatredamong people at home and abroad that may take generations to undo.

    You wake up one day and you find that an Abacha or a Trump controls the reins of power in your homeland precisely at the time when it seemed that things were/are on the brink of a breakout of cooperation, peace, justice, and solidarity between diverse groups and communities in the land and between all men and women, at home and in the world at large. Abacha and Trump: if there is an ideal personality type for the values and practices associated with liberal democracy, these two men were/are the ultimate antithesis, the final negation of those values and practices. Abacha shrouded his endless capacity for cruelty, his arbitrariness and wanton disregard for due process and decency with his trademark dark glasses. Perhaps because he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and had a father who was openly a racist and a bigot, Trump has never felt that he had to hide who and what he is. Like Abacha among and within the Nigerian military establishment, Trump subjected all contenders for power within his own party to suspicion, insults, derision, and if possible, humiliation. Thus, what he said and did to Hillary Clinton in the general election he had said and done to virtually all his opponents in the Republican Party’s primaries. Like Abacha, Trump is completely unforgiving and is vengeful to the extreme. These character traits indicate deep psychological insecurities that seem to need compensation or assuagement by hurting and damaging others. Abacha was probably more psychopathic than Trump, but the American president-elect is not that far behind the late Nigerian military despot as a narcissistic sociopath. Claiming or pretending to act on behalf of their constituencies – Abacha: the North and the military; Trump: whites forgotten by economic prosperity and increasingly sidelined by non-white racial groups – each man fundamentally acted/acts for his ego and its insatiable needs for self-inflation.

    Incidentally, in response to the other articles in this series on comparisons between American and Nigerian elections, I received many emails from African evangelicals whose support for Trump is close to fanaticism, so much so that they actually perceive the will of God in Trump’s electoral victory. One of this group of respondents to the series actually tried to persuade me to embrace Trump since, in his view, the will of God and its ways of manifestation in human affairs are inscrutable to human understanding. I make reference to this experience not to mock such people but to, in fact, engage them in a dialogue. So, I ask them and others reading this concluding piece in the series to ponder the following facts and observations.

    Already, Trump has caused considerable damage to respect for the strength and value of American democracy in the world, especially among its allies in the West. Only his most fanatical supporters and those blinded by formulaic biblical quotations and conservative theologies of divine collusion with bigotry can fail to see that if Trump carries out many of the things he promised his supporters during the campaigns, in the months and years ahead, America and the world will be dominated by the worst instincts, fears and prejudices known to our species. Already, even before his formal inauguration, and emboldened by Trump’s victory, racial supremacists, bigots of all kinds, xenophobic vigilantes, homophobic extremists, and petty-minded bullies among the young have all come out swinging and attacking special targets in their exultant certitude that under Trump the time has come for them to reclaim America for themselves and their kind. But the picture is not all bleak: all good, decent, progressive and humane people will fight back; indeed, they are already giving every indication that they will fight back.

    Biodun Jeyifo                                                                                                       bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • A tribalism of the hunter-gatherer age in the American elections – what could thispossibly mean?

    A tribalism of the hunter-gatherer age in the American elections – what could thispossibly mean?

    Every document of civilization is also a document of barbarism.  Walter Benjamin, German Marxist philosopher

    Last week, I wrote in this column that until the end of the American presidential campaigns of 2016 next week on November 8, I would focus on the strange similarities that I have been noticingin these campaigns with the Nigerian presidential elections of 2015. This week, I am afraid thatI will have to widen my frame of comparison way before the campaigns of Jonathan and Buhari in 2015and go all the way back to the Nigerian regional and federal elections of 1964. In my opinion – and the opinions of many other commentators and historians of the period – the elections of that year in Nigeria rank above every other election before and since then as the worst, the most divisive, the most bitter and violent in our country’s political history.

    Of course, the majority among the readers of this piece were either not yet born then. Of the relatively few that were already born,they were too young to have been in a position to retain the lasting memory of those portentous campaigns of 1964 that members of my generation carry with us to this day. All the same, such readers can perhaps get a sense of theextreme ugliness and nastiness of thecampaigns in that season of anomy in a declaration made on radio and television byChief Remi Fani-Kayode, aka “Fanny Power”, Deputy Premier of the Western Region, on the last day of campaigns before the day of the elections. Fani-Kayode was a charismatic but sinister strongman of politics who was generally known to deliberately cultivate and encourage public perception of his image as a fascist, malevolent politician. He was also the Deputy Leader of the Nigerian National Democratic Party (NNDP, aka “Demo”), the ruling party in the Western region. Here is Fanny Power’s infamous declaration: “Bee se tiwa, bee si se tiwa, Demo a wole” (Whether you are for us or against us in your votes, Demo will win”).More than fifty years later and in the richest, most powerful and scientifically advanced nation on the planet, Donald Trump, his surrogates and diehard supporters have been saying and doing things worse than our own nefarious Fanny Power and his henchmen in those terrible days in Nigeria. What relevance does this observation have for the current campaign season in the United States?

    I will answer this question completely unambiguously. The “victory” of Fani-Kayode and the NNDP and their allies in the 1964 elections were so bad for the country that our then young and fledgling democracy rapidly crashed, eventually leading to the military coup of January 1965 and the counter-coup of July that year and, ultimately, the Nigeria-Biafra civil war of 1967-70. If Donald Trump wins next week, it is of course highly unlikely that coups and another civil war will break out in America. However, it is highly probable that with a Trump victory next week, liberal democracy in the United States and perhaps in the entire Western world would have suffered its greatest threat from fascism and rampaging right-wing mob rule since the rise to power of Hitler, Mussolini and Francisco Franco in the 1930s and early 1940s in Western Europe. On what basis am I making this observation, this dire prediction?

    Quite simply, my argument here rests on the following rather very straightforward though quite startling fact: the “tribalism” of Trump and his supporters comes from an age in human cultural evolution that goes back all the way to the transitional time between hunter-gatherers as the dominant social formation in all the regions of the world and the emergence of tribal societies based on agriculture. In contrast, the “tribalism” of Fanny Power and “Demo” in 1964 harked back to the internecine tribal wars in precolonial Nigeria of the 18th and 19th centuries, thousands of years after the hunter-gatherer stage of evolutionary history. Moreover, it is pertinent to note here that Fanny Power, “Demo” and their allies in the Northern Peoples’ Congress (NPC) were not the only tribalistic political agents and forces in Nigeria in the volatile electoral campaigns of 1964. Indeed, every single party and most politicians in Nigeria then openly used tribal mobilization as a means of either forming alliances throughout the country and/or consolidating dominance on the “home” front. The practice has continued to the present period; however, it is now deliberately and rather ostentatiously understated or even hidden. By contrast, in the early 1960s in the run-up to the 1964 elections, tribalism was all out in the open and rather very raw. S.L. Akintola, aka SLA, the “Demo” party leader, and Fanny Power, his deputy, were thus only the first among equals in the length to which they openly expressed and deployed raw, ethnic stereotypes as the staple of their electioneering campaigns. In other words, what most of the other political parties and politicians said covertly, away from the glare of newspaper headlines and radio and television broadcasts, Akintola and Fanny Power said openly and with maximum venom. Trump and his supporters have been doing the same thing throughout the current campaign season in America, but on a more unrestrained, even more grandiose scale in their militant and total promotion of the interests of what they perceive as the White tribe. What does this mean?

    Please note, dear reader, that I did not say the interests of Whites in general in the immediately preceding sentence; I said, quite specifically, the White tribe. This is because not all Whites belong in the White tribe; indeed, going not by any statistical or census figures, but anecdotally, I would argue that the majority of Whites in America at this moment in history do not see themselves, and are not perceived by others, as White tribalists. As in all kinds of tribalism beyond the hunter-gatherer stage of human social and economic history, White tribalism is a construction and a project of tribalists who exclude from their ranks Whites who do see the world as they do. Note also, dear reader, that I am not using the terms “race” and”racism” in this discussion; I am using the terms “tribe” and “tribalism”.Without going too deeply into etymological nuances around these terms, let us simply say here that while “race” and “racism” are very widely used in America, “tribe” and “tribalism” are hardly ever encountered. This is nothing short of a grand irony because White tribalism and tribalists are abundantly in evidence in the American social and political landscape in groups that go by names and appellations such as White Aryan Resistance, The White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, White League, White Order of Thule, and White Volksfront. For a long time now since the end of legal racial segregation in the United States, such groups have existed in the far-right margins of society and polity in America. Occasionally, they have bubbled up from the depths of their marginalization and made distinct appearances in the electoral rowdiness of the Republican Party. That is until the advent of Donald Trump as the official presidential candidate of the party which has seen them move from the margins to the centre. Permit me to briefly explain what this entails.

    Apart from the extremity of his personal individual moral and temperamental flaws, the one thingabove all others with which Trump has astounded everybody in America is the openness with which he stirs up among Whites hatred, fear and phobia of Black people, foreigners, and Moslems. And women. And Whites who do not share his hatred and phobias. In this respect, it is almost impossible to separate the hatreds and phobias of the candidate from the hatreds and phobias of his surrogates and supporters: which is feeding and/or fueling the other? A quite needless question: the one feeds, and is in turn fed by the other. Indeed, this past week, at the debate among the shortlisted candidates for the open Senatorial seat in the state of Louisiana, Donald Duke, the notorious former Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, claimed that people are wrong to say that he and others like him are thronging to the campaign of Donald Trump when, in Duke’s opinion, it was Trump whose presidential bid has been so astonishingly successful precisely because his campaign, in both its open and secret code words, has drawn a lot from White nationalists, i.e. “tribalists” like himself.On this account, “Make America Great Again”, that is the ultimate slogan of the Trump campaign is really a code term for “make America great as it was when it was dominated by Whites and for Whites”.

    In bringing this piece to a conclusion, let us return to the “tribalism” of Akintola and Fanny Power in those fateful days of the 1964 elections in Nigeria. In some of the extremely vitriolic and abusive things that Trump now says about Hillary Clinton, I for one hear distinct echoes of what S. L. Akintola and his flamboyant deputy, Fanny Power, used to say about Obafemi Awolowo whom both men hated withgreat passion. Unquestionably, Awolowo saw himself as a Yoruba leader; but from that baseline and on the basis of a welfarist or social-democratic ideology, he went out in search of progressive alliances among other major and smaller ethnic groupsthroughout the country. Nothing annoyed and threatened SLA and Fanny Power more than Awolowo’s alliance with the NCNC which they saw exclusively as an Igbo-dominated political machine. SLA in particular coined and spouted unthinkably derisory things about Awolowo, Igbos and socialism, precisely in the same manner that Trump and his surrogates are saying unprintable things about Blacks, Mexicans, Moslems, women and socialists, things that can only be found in the verbal swamps of Facebook and Tweeters, things that prior to this electoral season in America, had never been openly said by a candidate running for the highest post in the land on the platform of one of the two major political parties.

    In a way, it is an insult to the hunter-gatherer societies of the past to compare their “tribalism” with the “White tribalism” of Donald Trump and the Republican Party, circa 2016, CE. This is partly because, in a strict sociological sense, tribalism had not yet emerged at the hunter-gatherer stage of our social evolution as a species; it emerged after the great, epoch-changing agricultural revolutions in diverse regions of the world, together with the associated emergence of non-laboring chieftains and rulers at the top of the social hierarchy. I have deliberately but, I hope, productively “insulted” the hunter-gatherer societies of the past and the present by foisting on them a “tribalism” they did not and do not have, because I wanted to draw attention to and expose the extreme anomaly and anachronism of the reemergence, before our eyes, of White tribalism in America of the 21st century. I end with a prediction of what will happen next Tuesday on November 8, 2016, when Americans go to the polls to elect the country’s 45th President. Hillary Clinton will win. I am neither a prophet nor a soothsayer. I make this prediction on the basis of the following rational calculation: the only way that Trump can win is through the defeat of Clinton’s coalition that is made up of Whites who reject Trump’s tribalism, Blacks, Latinos, Asians, Moslems and new immigrants. It is not an impossible challenge for the Trump team; only, it depends on Whites returning in overwhelming numbers to the long period when, in the name of White supremacy and segregation, White tribalism was both the law of the land and the social ethos of America in its formative years as a modern, democratic republic. I simply cannot see that happening next Tuesday. I may be wrong, but I most definitely hope not!

    • Biodun Jeyifo bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • The cautious and incautious victory lap before the finish line: again, Nigerian echoes in the 2016 American elections

    Democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the other forms.   Winston S. Churchill

    The elements of a true liberal democratic society and state are as few as they are well known: full adult suffrage that gives the right to vote and be voted for to every citizen above 18 without any limitations based on race, gender, class, ethnicity, religion and physical disability; an electorate that is well informed and actively participates in the democratic process; a free and vibrant press that is not beholden to special interests and forces with the wealth, power and influence to interfere and manipulate the process of democracy to their advantage; checks and balances between the three arms of government; and the peaceful transfer of power from one administration or political party to another. Of these elements, none is considered more important, more fundamental than the last: the peaceful transfer of power.

    This brings to my mind that ironic but luminous declaration of Jesus, one of the earliest and most exemplary incarnations of revolutionary, popular democracy in history: “So the last will be the first and the first will be the last” (Matthew, 19:30). As we all know, in Nigeria, peaceful transfer of power as the bedrock of liberal democracy is the least and the “last” in observance and implementation; it is as rare as snow in the Sahara Desert. In the United States, for the first time in the country’s political history, in the current presidential contest and with regard to this last and first principle of democracy, it is not only as if we are in Nigeria but have always been there without knowing it. Trump and his campaign team are giving every indication that peaceful transfer of power will be once again observed at the end of the current electoral cycle only if their candidate wins. What is going on? Why has the American electoral process suddenly become so similar to the Nigerian one in this most cardinal of the principles and foundations of liberal democracy?

    I suppose that I owe a duty to readers of this column to now let them know that for the two weeks remaining to election day in the American presidential elections on Tuesday, November 8, I will focus exclusively on aspects of the unfolding saga of the contest that seem to me remarkably or even uncannily similar to the presidential elections of 2015 in Nigeria. Last week, in a piece that was pointedly titled “I will accept the results of the elections only if I win”, I discussed the resonance of that statement from Donald Trump, the Republican Party’s candidate, with the extremely volatile and obdurate positions that some of Jonathan’s most sanguine supporters took in our elections, people like Doyin Okupe and Elder Peter Godsday Orubebe. This week, through the metaphor of the victory lap that winning athletes who reach the finish line before other contestants in a race typically take, I will be looking at the interesting fact that both candidates in the American elections, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, are taking symbolic victory laps several weeks before the conclusion of the race, just as Jonathan Goodluck and Muhammadu Buhari and their supporters did last year in the Nigerian elections. In athletics, a victory lap before the finish line is so rare as to be factually non-existent; in electoral politics, it not only exists but is typically deployed as an element of strategy and tactics in the final stages of an electoral cycle. All, the same, in most instances, at least in true liberal democracies, it is always cautiously expressed or executed.

    At this point in the discussion, it is perhaps helpful to note in passing that while in the American case the”victory lap” is being executed cautiously (Clinton) and incautiously (Trump), last year in Nigeria, Goodluck and Buhari were both militantly incautious in their confident and aggressive expressions of victory as we approached the finish line. If we decode what “cautious” and “incautious” mean in both the American and Nigerian contexts, we realize that we are dealing with the fact that while the “cautious” contestant is willing to accept the result of the race even if she or he does not win, the “incautious” contestant will accept the result of the race only if he or she wins. Let me put this in much stronger terms: the incautious contestant is quite willing and apparently able to use all means available to him or her – including violence – if he or she loses. If that is the symbolism in our use of these codes or metaphors of “cautious” and “incautious” victory laps before the finish line, what can we make of the fact that three out of four contestants in these two races (Trump, Jonathan and Buhari) were/are incautious? That is the subject of this week’s column.

    It is perhaps useful to draw the reader’s attention to concrete acts and words at this stage of the discussion in this piece.Definitely, I hope that I speak for every Nigerian who has been observing the campaigns of the American elections on television that it has been eerily uncanny for me to see visual images and verbal chants and rhetoric that are extraordinarily similar to what we saw and heard last year in the Nigerian elections. For instance, at Trump campaign rallies, scores of supporters, men and women, are now openly saying that “revolution” will follow in the wake of the elections if Trump does not win. Some have even openly called for Clinton to be “shot”, now or after the end of the elections, if she wins. And Trump himself has repeatedly stated that one of the first things he will do as president is have Clinton sent to jail. Remember, dear reader, that this is America not Zimbabwe, not South Sudan, not Nigeria. But just as we saw in the last days of the Nigerian presidential elections last year, members of the press have been both verbally and physically attacked at Trump rallies on the accusation of being partial to the Clinton campaign. Indeed, on many occasions as I have watched this particular phenomenon of vitriolic attacks on pressmen and women in the American elections, my mind has reached back concretely to images of Doyin Okupe, at his last media conference at Aso Rock, shouting himself hoarse with defiant cries of “Buhari never! Buhari never!” as many members of the press corps present responded with deafening shouts of “APC! APC! APC!”.

    This last point about what we might regard as a replay in the American context of Doyin Okupe’s last stand atAso Rock brings us centrally to the question of why liberal democracy seems so fraught, so endangered in Americathat it seems to be on the same level of evolution as in Nigeria where it has never taken deep roots in the political culture and indeed, actually seems to have undergone retrogression in the last few decades. This is precisely the point at which to explore Clinton’s “cautious” victory lap and the truth behind its claim of being consistent with the fundamental principles of democracy. For it turns out, too, that Clintonian politics seems also very “Nigerian” in its unrestrained and rampant use of political office and connections for self-enrichment on a grandiose scale. The money-grubbing and opportunism are staggering. Speaking fees calibrated in hundreds of thousands of dollars per speech for Bill and Hilary Clinton for lectures delivered to the technocratic and plutocratic elites of corporations and foundations that dominate the economies of the United States and planet earth. The Clinton Foundation, even with the unquestionable benevolence of the charitable works it does in Africa and around other parts of the developing world, openly and extensively tied, as a constant beneficiary, to some of the most corrupt and repressive governments in the world. And a congenital inability to separate the affairs of government or the state from their private, aggressively pursued selfish interests. In the Clintons, Bill and Hillary, it seems that the excuse, the justification for the great moral and ideological problems of liberal democracy as expressed by Winston Churchill in the epigraph to this essay has found its greatest incarnation: “Democracy is the worst from of government – except for all the other forms”.

    In fairness to the Clintons and perhaps also to liberal democracy and the validity of its self-imposed moral and ideological limits, the great majority of those who are voting for Hillary know who and what they are getting in the candidate. And there is also this fact: whatever anyone may validly say in criticism of Hillary Clinton, in ability and preparation for the demands of the office, she is probably as qualified as any man who has ever run for the American presidency on the ticket of one of the two major political parties in the last one hundred years. Of any woman who has done the same thing, she is of course the best since she happens to be the only person who fits the category. These are the reasons why Clinton has been “cautious” in taking her symbolic victory lap before crossing the finish lineas most polls confidently predict she will on November 8. If she loses the election, she will undoubtedly be endlessly crushed by the loss of the great opportunity to smash the glass ceiling against her gender in the highest political office in the land, but she will walk away without bringing the whole edifice of liberal democracy down with her defeat. After all, she went into politics a long time ago virtually penniless though well-educated and enormously talented and now she is one of the politicians of her generation who have benefitted enormously from the spoils of office. In this respect, she is a little like Goodluck Jonathan who, to the disappointment of most of his supporters calling for bloodshed, walked away from it all perhaps because, as everyone knows and like Hillary Clinton, he had done a lot for himself financially through politics.

    Trump, Jonathan and Buhari, the incautious executors of the victory lap before the finish line, are the real symptoms of the extreme fragility at the heart of liberal democracy in countries in which, in the face of untold wealth, vast and expanding segments of the population feel increasingly forgotten, increasingly left behind and finding no satisfaction in elections and abstract principles like the peaceful transfer of power between administrations and political parties, are more than ready to, if necessary tear down the whole edifice. On the basis of this reading of the unfolding drama of the American presidential elections of 2016, the expected victory of Clinton will not change much. This is a dire prognosis that offers no hope beyond the inevitable necessity of continued struggle by the forgotten and their allies, well beyond electoral politics and its formal conclusion. The Americans will find out, as the Nigerians found after the victory of Muhammadu Buhari last year, that it is still a, long, long way from deliverance and restitution.

    Biodun Jeyifo                                                                                                bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • “I will accept the results of the elections only if I win” -Trumpian Nigerian echoes

    “I will accept the results of the elections only if I win” -Trumpian Nigerian echoes

    By now, everyone reading this piece who has been closely following the campaigns of the 2016 presidential elections in America probably knows where the quote that serves as the title of this week’s column comes from. Earlier this week, at the end of the third and final debate with his opponent, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, the Republican Party’s candidate, flatly refused to commit himself to an unambiguous, affirmative acceptance of the results of the election. The question was repeated three times and on each occasion, Trump gave the same answer. As a matter of fact, the day after the debate when nearly all the newspapers headlined his stunning refusal to endorse the definitive and regulative institutional significance of elections forthe strength of American democracy, Trump reasserted this refusal in the quote that serves as part of the title of this piece: “I will accept the results of the elections only if I win”.

    I expect that every adult and politically sophisticated person reading this piece will immediately get a sense what I am calling “Nigerian echoes” in this Trumpian stunner. Why?Because in the last presidential elections in Nigeria, neither of the two contestants, Goodluck Jonathan and Mohammadu Buhari committed himself to respect for and principled acceptance of the results of the then impending elections. Indeed, the fears were very widely held throughout the country that the declaration of either of the two as winner would plunge Nigeria into a nation-wrecking violence precipitated by the loser’s supporters. This, in the main, is what I am calling “Nigerian echoes” in Trump’s stunning refusal earlier this week.However, it is not the main point that I wish to discuss in this piece. If that is the case, what do I have in mind in this article?

    What I have in mind in this discussion can be briefly and succinctly expressed before I go into the matter at some length and it is this: In Nigeria, Trump’s refusal would not have come as a surprise to anybody, let alone send shock waves down the collective spine of large segments of the national body politic as it did in America. This is because while Nigerians know their country and its politics and politicians very well, in America the great majority of the populace are in profound denial about the scope and depth of Trumpian beliefs and tendencies in the country’s politics and politicians. This phenomenon is perfectly consistent with fundamental human traits and well-known norms of social psychology: until it is almost too late, we are often in denial about things that other people can see in us as plain as daylight. And indeed, on the basis of what Nigerians know about their country and its politics, any Nigerian who has even a minimal contact with, or awareness of American politics in the last few decades could easily have seen the declaration of Trump this last Wednesday coming, even as most Americans stolidly refused to recognize or acknowledge the signs.

    Concerning what I am calling “Trumpian echoes” in this piece, let me be specific and concrete. In the main, it is politics at its most vicious, divisive, cynical, opportunistic and violence-prone. As if this is not bad enough, throw into the bag of Trumpianism racism, misogyny and xenophobia. I should perhaps explain here that I am deliberately using the abstract noun and adjective of “Trumpianism” and “Trumpian” to indicate that in the context of this discussion, I am talking about attitudes and beliefs that are not specific to Donald Trump but go far beyond the individual politician who bears that name to scores upon scores of other politicians as well as millions of the populace considered as potential and actual participants in the electoral process as a core institutional dimension of democracy. If this is the case, why are Americans in such widespread denial about the fact that Trumpianism runs much deeper than the intensely obnoxious person known as Donald Trump and is nothing short of a notable infection in thecountry’s politics and politicians? And why does Trumpianism, so familiar in a country like Nigeria, seem so strange, so unprecedented in America that most people are so shocked by it that they spontaneously and reflexively go into denial about it, generally thinking of it as an aberration?

    In reflecting on the ramifications of these questions, let us admit that until the coming of Donald Trump to American presidential elections, “fire and brimstones” demagogues of the likes of Ayodele Fayose, Elder Orubebe, and Doyin Okupe, with their counterparts in the APC and other Nigerian political parties, were not common and definitely were not in the storm centers of American electoral politics as they are in Nigeria. Let us be very precise here: fire-spitting neo-fascists were not unknown in American politics before the portentous advent of Donald Trump in the current presidential campaigns in the United States; they were active and visible in the far-right margins of the electoral mainstream and were to be found mostly among racist hate groups, neo-Nazis, rural, xenophobic militias in the American heartland and the dwindling remnants of the KKK. To such groups, American democracy is either a complete sham or is non-existent, especially with regard to elections and electoral politics. As a matter of fact, these groups are so contemptuous of mainstream American democratic institutions and values that they have for a long time now been ranting and raving tirelessly against all mainstream American politicians and political parties. In this historic context, we can say that Trumpianism existed in embryo in the extremist and incendiary politics of these groups before Donald Trump arrived on the scene both to give the tendencies embodied in these marginal groups a seemingly irrepressible incarnation and a real chance of actually wining the highest prize in American electoral politics.

    At this point in the discussion, it is perhaps useful to pause for breath, metaphorically results of speaking. In this country, whether in civilian “democracies” or military dictatorships, we have had thugs, fascists and demagogues who take no steps whatsoever to hide who they are in very high political positions. We have had political elites who make no secret of the fact that they are willing to take any and all measures to stay in office by rigging elections openly and with maximum impunity with the use of both state violence and non-state violence. In America, people and groups of this kind of mindset have for the most part been in the margins of the political mainstream. That is until the advent of Donald Trump and his defiant, stunning declaration: I will accept the results of the elections only if I win.

    Among many other signs, Obama’s experience as a two-term president should have alerted the American political mainstream to the combustible personal advent of Trump himselfand the irruption of Trumpianism into the highest levels of the country’s electoral politics. Ina merely formal sense, Obama’s electoral victories in 2008 and 2012 were accepted; they were not contested. But in actuality, the non-cooperation that he experienced from the Republican Party was so total that it effectively amounted to non-acceptance of his electoral victories. There have been widespread discussions as to whether this effective delegitimation of Obama’s electoral victories was based on race or ideology or a combination of both. In the context of the present discussion, this hardly matters. What matters is the fact that what was done to Obama, for whatever reasons, was bound in the end to be done to precisely the same group of people who had been so overeager in robbing the nation’s first African American president of his electoral mandate. As Americans themselves like to express the deal in matters like this one, “what goes around comes round”.

    But that cannot be our last word in this piece. There remains the issue of how the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world could produce Trumpianism of a kind that is so similar to what we routinely experience in Nigerian electoral politics that we are left wondering what the cause of this startling similarity might be. Common human frailties that afflict all human societies and individuals, rich and poor, powerful and weak, developed and developing? Without a doubt, yes. On this count, Trump is as Nigerian as Fayose is American. Bu there is also the crucial issue of difference and diversity, racial, sexual, class, ethnic and religious. I would rank this particular factor perhaps higher than the more generalized dimension of universal human traits. This is because on the whole America has struggled for a much longer period and perhaps even more honorably than has Nigeria in dealing with the negative, nation-wrecking manipulation of difference. But without ignoring this historic factor, in the last few decades, the long unresolved legacies of the manipulation, by and for white men, of racial and gender difference for advantage over racial minorities, women, poor migrants, and non-Christians have been festering, just as they have in Nigeria. They can and should learn from us, the Americans might say to the Nigerians. To which it is perfectly logical for the Nigerians to say the same thing to the Americans.

    • Biodun Jeyifo bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu