Category: Biodun Jeyifo

If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there would be a shortage of sand. Milton Friedman

Last week, I ended the discussion with the following observation. In his Independence Day speech, President Buhari would have been both closer to the truth and doing himself and his administration a lot of good if he had told Nigerians and the world that since the recession did not start with him, it would take quite a while before his efforts could be expected to turn things around for most Nigerians and the national economy itself. Needless to say, some questions arise from this rather strange decision of the President not take this path in his speech to the nation on October 1. Did Buhari and his advisers think that if he had told Nigerians this truth that the so-called recession did not start with him, most Nigerians – and his enemies in particular – would have accused him of passing the blame to previous administrations? Was the President afraid of being called a weak, confused or irresolute leader unable to rise to the occasion to stop the massive hemorrhaging of the national economy? Or did the President and his advisers simply and truly believe that we are really in a short recession that would, like most recessions, not last for a long time, especially if the right policies and actions are applied?

I leave the probable answer(s) to each of these questions to the reader. However, I for one would like to offer the view that the answer to all the questions without exception is a resounding YES. In other words, just as Buhari apparently does not want to give his enemies the “ammunition” in the view that more than a year in office he is still passing the blame for our economic woes to previous administrations, so also does he not want to be considered a weak, confused and indecisive leader. Above all else, I also think that Buhari and his advisers do really believe that we are in a short recession that can be “cured” with careful use of the vastly reduced revenues that are still flowing into our national coffers even with the fall in the world price of crude petroleum. And this is what worries me the most, this sinking suspicion that not only Buhari and his administration but virtually the entirety of our economic and social elites believe that we are indeed in a short recession that can be managed and curtailed by a “reflation” made possible by the combination of our oil revenues and loans from both internal and external markets.

This is the very simplistic and dangerous belief that I wish to explore in this concluding essay to the series that began last week. A man, a woman, a government can believe anything that he, she or it wants, as long as it does no harm to anybody, especially if it does not go from mere belief to action and deeds in the real world. I can find no better analogy to explain what I have in mind here about beliefs and the consequences they can have in the real world than the tragic devastation that Hurricane Matthew recently had on some communities in the Americas and the Caribbean. As the hurricane began to grow from a tropical storm off the African coast to a full-blown hurricane as it approached the Atlantic coast of the Americas, the warnings went out from authorities for people to evacuate their homes because “Matthew” was expected to be a Category 4 monster. However, some folks believed that as they had done many times in the past, they could also ride out the fury of “Matthew” and so they did not evacuate. As a result of this erroneous belief, many lives were tragically and needlessly lost.

I am using the analogy of tropical storms and category four hurricanes quite deliberately in this discussion. Extending this analogy to the domain of economic activities and the wealth and poverty of nations,one could say that a recession is like tropical storms that, generally speaking, tend not to last too long or cause catastrophic damages on peoples and communities. By contrast, a serial recession is like a typhoon or a hurricane because like an economic depression, it lasts for quite a while and causes colossal havoc that usually takes a long time to recover from. In the light of this analogy, I put it to President Buhari and his economic advisers that whatever category one chooses to examine, our national economy has for a long time now been relentlessly battered by a hurricane, not a mere tropical storm: waves after waves of high school leavers and university graduates unable to find employment; industrial production operating well below 30% of installed capacities; absolute poverty rate of six to seven out of every ten Nigerians; the borrowing frenzy of our federal, state and even local governments, even when oil prices on the world market were relatively high; and ever rising levels of hardship, insecurity and restiveness among large segments of the population, especially the youths that constitute the biggest demographic community in our society. It is a great error, Mr. President, to call a hurricane a mere tropical storm that will soon end.

At the level of formal discourse in the professional field of economics, concepts like recessions and depressions are meaningful and useful only in the true capitalist nations and economies of the world; they do not explain much inthe kind of pseudo-capitalist economy that has been in operation in our country for a long time now. There are many reasons for this. Perhaps the most important reason in the context of the present discussion is the enormously significant fact that, unlike Nigeria, in true capitalist economies wealth – or capital in its abstract form – is not and indeed cannot be constantly and relentlessly looted and taken out of productive, value-added economic activities. A second reason that is of equal importance is the fact that in contrast with what obtains in Nigeria, in true capitalist economies, recessions are not measured by a sudden and very sharp, very severe drop in the capacity to pay for imports in an economy that is overwhelmingly dependent on the importation of nearly everything needed to keep the economy running or working.This particular feature of the pseudo-capitalism in force in Nigeria is what I had in mind when I chose to quote from Milton Freidman, the arch-monetarist, free-market founder of the Chicago School of Economics for the epigraph for this piece. In a hundred years, I never would have chosen to quote from Friedman, except perhaps my intention was to critique or debunk his ideas and their influence among economists. But in this particular context, I am quoting Freidman with qualified approval: “If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years, there would be a shortage of sand”.

Of course, Friedman did not have the Nigerian federal government in mind in this famous quote; he had the federal government of his own country, the United States in mind. Like the true supply-side monetarist that he was, Friedman’s message in this quote was simply this: as the business of government is not business, government should stay out of business, otherwise what you would have is shortages galore, even of sand in a place with an abundance of sand as the Sahara Desert. In applying this quote to the Nigerian pseudo-capitalist context, for sand let us substitute capital itself: whether the world price of crude petroleum is high or low, it makes no difference to Nigerian governments of the past and the present; there is a perpetual and artificial shortage of capital in the areas that really matter, there is an unceasing and relentless diversion of the wealth of the nation away from productive economic activities that go beyond the capacity to pay for foreign imports.

Despite all I have been saying inthis piece, I will makethe following concession to Buhari and his economic advisers in their diagnosis of a short recession and the “cures” for it, as contained in the President’s Independence Day speech: professional, salaried, upper middle class Nigerians, together with importers and exporters that dominate wholesale and retail trade in the country are facing “recession” of the kind that professional economists in the true capitalist countries of the world have in mind when they use the concept. This is because the groups and individuals that belong to these categories of privileged Nigerians have been the only real beneficiaries of our over-dependence on foreign imports as the lynchpin of the national economy. Do I need to say why this is the case? Well, as everyone knows, the bulk of whatever is unlooted in our national wealth goes to paying for foreign imports so as to keep this form of national economy alive. Isn’t that the case, compatriot?

I do not wish to seem cavalier and insensitive to human suffering in making this observation: the ability to meet obligations and necessities crucial for livelihoods and life itself is under severe, traumatic strain for hundreds of thousands of Nigerians across the whole country. And because these categories of Nigerians often bear responsibility for thousands of relatives and dependents that are less fortunate, the “recession” that Buhari has in mind extends far beyond the circle of the fortunate and the “blessed”. It is not unlikely that if for one reason or another world oil prices were to suddenly and unexpectedly spike upwards, relief would come to our import-dependent national economy and itsbeneficiaries. If this happens, at least for a short while the “recession” would be over.

All the same, compatriots, let us not forget that the vast majority of Nigerians in their millions have been in a serial recession, a sort of depression, for a long time now. Buhari’s program for overcoming the “recession” as outlined in his speech on October 1, does not even begin to approach this overwhelming reality of severe hardship and suffering for most Nigerians in the hurricane of a serial recession or depression that they have endured for a long time now. Short of full employment under a vastly reformed capitalism that actually keeps the bulk of capital in both oil revenues and non-oil, value-added surplus accumulation in the country, nothing that the President and his economic advisers do can change the course from the present location of the national economy in the eye of the hurricane of serial, repeated recessions. Mr. President, will our country move away from wasteful and cannibalistic kalo-kalo, barawo capitalism under your administration and the rule of your party, the APC?

• Biodun Jeyifo bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

The following was the last paragraph in this column last week: “Obviously, we have traveled or strayed far from the paths indicated by those debates. Indeed, anyone who, upon reading all the relevant documents in those debates, claims that she or he could have anticipated an extremely unregenerate and unjust capitalism in which mega-looters and their defenders dominate the political order, the national economy and the judicial system would be hard put to defend that claim. So: how did we get here and how can we get out of it? If there are no simple answers to this question, this does not mean that there are no answers at all. This will be our starting point in next week’s concluding piece in the series.”

I think it is productive to begin this week’s column with an online reader’s comment that I deem a fit and proper launching pad for the concluding piece in the series. Here’s the short comment, quoted in full because of its brevity and succinctness: “My dear Prof., you may as well help us to (sic) with those documents because I know you have them. But in case you don’t, I know you know people who have them. Thanks for your ever illuminating pieces”.

In response to this reader’s comment, I say that both the 1979 and 1999 Constitutions can be downloaded via the Internet. So also can the 1989 Constitution whose Chapter 2 is very similar to the Chapter Two of the 1979 and 1999 Constitutions. Readers may also wish to download the American Constitution in order to avail themselves of the following very pertinent fact: The American Constitution is only 12 pages long. Now, if you add the supplement of Amendments that were ratified (27) and those not ratified (dozens), together with historical and philological notes on the background of these amendments, the entire document is 85 pages long. But the essential document itself is only 12 pages long. In fact, the Constitution of the United Kingdom is zero pages long – since it does not exist in a written form. By contrast, none of our own Constitutions is less than 153 pages long. The reason for this is the fact that while philosophers, businessmen and inventors greatly outnumbered lawyers in the drafting of the American Constitution,overwhelmingly the drafters or “writers” of our Constitutions were lawyers who believe, quite erroneously, that the longer and more cumbersome any legal document is, especially a Constitution, the more “legal” it is. This is an absurd tautology, this idea that something is more legal because its length seems to make it more legal! But that is how in general the law, with notable exceptions, operates in our country – as an instrument, not for illumination but for mystification. As to our online reader’s query about how and where to get the Minority Report of 1976 produced by Drs. Segun Osoba and the late Bala Usman, while it is widely discussed in articles easily available on the Internet, I have not found any downloadable versions on the Internet. Fortunately, Dr. Osoba is still alive and well and I promise to approach him soon to see if he has a personal copy of that document.

I have a reason for the sarcastic comment that I have just made about lawyers in the preceding paragraph: I want to start with the law in my final reflections in this series on whether or not capitalism can or should be reformed in our country in a future historical path of evolution away from the extremely backward, cannibalistic capitalism in force in Nigeria at the present time. But before I give my thoughts on the law as the very first item on the agenda of reform, permit me for one last time in this series to explain why the very subject of reforming capitalism is neither my or anybody’s pipe dream nor a waste of time in pursuit of a lost or unworthy cause.

In this series, I have in mind three particular groups of readers. First, I have in mind self-identified socialists, Marxists, Leftists and revolutionaries. Some of them, especially those of the older generation, are my friends, comrades and acquaintances. In general, they hardly ever talk of capitalism – except to denounce it. Moreover, they denounce capitalism in very vague or generalized terms, without any differentiations as to which capitalism they have in mind, especially with regard to the kind of capitalism in force in our country at the present time in contrast with the past. I remind them that this did not use to be the practice in the past – as they will find out if they go back to the documents I cited in last week’s column. And I ask them to remember that reform is not an end but a beginning, a possibility for deeper renewal and development.

The second and third groups of people I have in mind in writing this series are, first, progressives, democrats, patriots and decent and humane people who do not apply any ideological labels to themselves and, second, compatriots who as a matter of fact and principle, do call themselves capitalists and are fierce opponents of socialists and Marxists. I have met many of these two types of Nigerians and actually have close friends, relatives and acquaintances among them. In my opinion, they have all rather become more complacent than they used to be. For instance, it is a long time that I have seen or read either a robust defense of capitalism or a critique of the kind of capitalism dominant in our country at the present time. Again, this is a departure from what used to be the practice in the past in this country, a past that is not so distant in time from the present moment. In fairness, we do occasionally get criticisms of aspects of the capitalism of these years and decades of the rule of the PDP and the APC, aspects like wholesale privatization of state-owned enterprises and public utilities that has massively and very cheaply transferred their ownership to a few Nigerians, without in the least improving the quality of products and services rendered. But these criticisms are never extended to capitalism as a whole with regard to how the political economy, the fiscal and monetary policies of government at federal and state levels, relations with foreign-owned multinational corporations doing business in our country and the law in general and the criminal justice system in particular all work together at the present time to make what I call Capitalism Nigerianaone of the worst, if not the very worst of capitalisms in the whole world.

I have only a modest proposal to offer as a conclusion to this series and it concerns reforms that are not only necessary but that, for once in a long, long time, seem at last to be within our reach. Thus, with the systemic and structural framework outlined above in mind, I see the law and the criminal justice system as pivotal with regard to the all-important question of what to do, and how to stop the super-exploitation, the looting frenzy, the untold suffering and hardship of the vast majority of the Nigerian peoples across the length and breadth of the land. Reform of the law and the criminal justice system in our country is a desirable end in itself,but it has the added advantage that if the reform can be successfully carried out, it will redound to benefit of the system as a whole. Let me be very clear and concrete on this point.

Most Nigerians do not know this, but by far the greatest acts of “looting” going on in our country are being perpetrated, not by the mega-looters- as incorrigibly menacing to the national economy as they are – but by policies through which around 70% of the budgets of all the governments in the country go to so-called recurrent expenditures while only 30% are allocated to capital expenditures. In plain language, the salaries, emoluments and allowances being paid are far in excess of actual services being rendered. As a result of this, the cost of governance in our country is one of the highest in the world; it is one of the most uneconomic among the fiscal policies sustaining all the national capitalisms of the planet. If only half of what is consumed annually in cost of governance is used to create employment for the masses of Nigerians, the multiplier effect on the national economy would be incalculably high. (Remember, apart from the federal government, we have thirty-six states in the country – thirty-six mini-states!) This is completely unacceptable, but as long as mega-looting not only exists but thrives, the popular demandfor, and the national will to reform capitalism in Nigeria will never be sufficiently mobilized to take on this much bigger source of looting and wastage in the APC’s Nigeria.

There is also the fact that as regrettable as this may be, it is nonetheless true that most Nigerians are far more outraged by mega-looting than “looting” via the immensely bloated cost of governance. Fortunately for us, the law in general and the criminal justice system in particular are the only things blocking a permanent end to mega-looting with impunity in our country.Against this trend, The Administration of Criminal Justice Act of 2015 (ACJA) is gradually aiding the Buhari administration’s hugely popular war against corruption and the mega-looters in the law courts. And an internal war is raging within the Bar and the Bench as to where the winds will blow: business as usual and the status quo; or reform to bring criminal justice in our country in line with the justice system in the more benign capitalist systems in diverse nations around the world. It will be a very different Nigeria the day mega-looters are made not only to cough up their stolen loot but to suffer punitive, deterrent justice for their crimes against the nation and the national economy.

At this point, I would like to use the analogy of medical science with regard to treating cancer itself and treating the severely high fevers often caused by cancer to illustrate the point that I am making here about reforming the law and the criminal justice system and reforming the bloated and severely uneconomic cost of governance in our country. The corrupt and compromised criminal justice system is the “fever”; the unregenerate and extremely wasteful cost of governance made possible by the rentier state and its clients in the thirty-six states of the country is the “cancer”. As surgeons and physicians know, you must first bring down the fever before attempting to deal with the cancer, otherwise the patient may die on the operating table before surgical operation on the cancer has even started. To extend this analogy of cancers and fevers a bit, it sometimes happens that a minor but aggressively opportunistic disease may kill the patient before either the fever and/or the cancer does: a bad cold; pneumonia; a bad fall caused by the extreme physical exhaustion and debilitation of the patient. There are many such symbolic social diseases lurking around the cancerous, fevered body politic of the nation – ethnic militias; religious bigotry and fanaticism; extreme feminization of poverty; a whole generation of restless youths without any prospects in the present or hopes for the future. Please, treat the “fever” quickly and successfully before any of these other opportunistic ailments finish us off.

Biodun Jeyifo                                                                                                bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

This was the first sentence of my closing paragraph last week: Every form of capitalism has the judicial-administrative superstructure necessary for its functioning and survival. Our criminal justice system, with regard to the open and defiant protection it gives to the unjustly rich and powerful, is one of the most unjust and irrational criminal justice systems in the world precisely because Capitalism Nigeriana is one of the worst forms of capitalism in the world. In clarification of this observation, let me adduce the evidence or proof provided by the following two astonishing facts.

First: In the year 2005, the former World Bank President, the American Paul Wolfowitz, gave a speech at the so called “Sullivan Summit” (named for the Reverend Leon Sullivan, an African American cleric with a passionate interest in Africa who had been one of the world’s fiercest opponents of apartheid) that shocked the whole world, especially the international business community. In the speech, Wolfowitz, with the solid authority of his position as the World Bank President, claimed that between 1970 and 2001, Nigerian political leaders, military and civilian, together with their cronies, had stolen about 300 billion dollars from the Nigerian people, with the effect, among other things, of continuous ruination of the Nigerian economy and the impoverishment of about 75% of Nigerians in both urban and rural communities. Let us note in passing that Wolfowitz made this revelation in 2005, in which case the question naturally arises as to how many more billions of petrodollars have been looted from our country and diverted away from the national economy since then, about eleven years ago? Let us note also that although Wolfowitz was making a moral and humanitarian argument against the effects of corruption in our country, above all else he was speaking as an economist, the chief guardian and protector, as it were, of global capitalism. In other words, Wolfowitz was motivated by a bafflement as to what breed, what transmogrification of capitalism was taking place in Nigeria that capital could be so massively and consistently diverted away from our national economy.

Here is the second fact, that I wish to adduce here: After Muhammadu Buhari won last year’s presidential elections, there was a widespread optimism, not only in Nigeria but around the whole world, that before the new president’s inauguration, looters would flee the country in droves in their private jets but would however find no places in the world in which to hide because wherever they went, they would face repatriation back to Nigeria to face the music. Moreover, it was widely expected that at last corruption would be checkmated in our country and looters would finally be made both to return the stolen loot and face punishment for their economic crimes against the nation. We do not know how many looters tried to flee; all we know is that those who have been arrested and charged have found seemingly impregnable protection under legal principles and practices in the administration of criminal justice that are unique to Nigeria among all the nations of the world.In this column, I have identified and condemned the very worst of such principles on innumerable occasions, but itis worth repeating again: Nigeria is the only nation on the planet in which interlocutory injunctions are admitted in criminal cases; in every other country in the world, this injunction through which cases can be prolonged for a very long time, is allowed only in civil cases. Seen in the context of the legal cover and protection that it provides for mega-looters – by the way, it is used by and for ONLY alleged mega-looters – this is the single most important legal principle working against the Nigerian national economy because it is the judicial rampart for the superstructure of what I described last week as Capitalism Nigeriana, one of the worst forms of capitalism in the world. As a demonstration of this claim, think of the following fact: some mega-looters who have been successful in evading retributive and punitive justice for their crimes in Nigerian courts all the way up to our Supreme Court, have been jailed in courts outside Nigeria, sometimes for the very same charge of money-laundering. Money laundering exists nearly everywhere in the world, but only in Nigeria and other countries with extremely backward and unregenerate forms of capitalism does money laundering enjoy the kind of protection available to looters in our criminal justice system.

In case it has not been sufficiently made clear in all I have been saying in this series, let me make it clear at this juncture that my focus here is almost exclusively on the structural and institutional principles and workings of capitalism in our country in about the last three decades. In other words, I am not really concerned in this series with a moralistic and humanitarian critique of capitalism in Nigeria. No doubt this is implied, but it is not the main or real focus of this series that began in this column two weeks ago and will end next week. The commentariat in our newspapers, newsmagazines and online public interest journals are overwhelmingly powered by protests and analyses that are fueled by moralism and humanitarianism. This is all well and good, but in this series, I am arguing for us to pay more attention to structural and institutional factors, these being areas of the public sphere that the commentariat in Nigeria is generally very either uninterested or frankly uninformed, especially as this relates to capitalism and the forms through which it has evolved in the post-independence period. In the closing paragraphs of this piece, let me briefly deal with this observation by posing the following enabling question: was it access to oil wealth on a colossal scale that changed capitalism from a potentially benevolent and transformative kind to the present extremely unregenerate and malevolent Capitalism Nigeriana?

Counterintuitively, my answer to this question is no, a resounding no. Before Nigeria became one of the world’s largest oil producing countries, we were very well on our way to using surplus accumulation from export or so-called “cash crops” to transform our economy into a modern capitalism with an internal industrial base for light consumer goods for a very large “home” market that embraced virtually all of West Africa. The richest Nigerians then did not depend, as they do now, on patronage from government, federal or regional. The vast majority of the aggregate of all presently living Nigerians did not experience and do not know anything about this form of capitalism but there are enough of us still alive to tell the stories! Let me give a personal testimony about this: in 1970 when I taught for four months at Adeola Odutola College in Ijebu-Ode before returning to the University of Ibadan to begin my graduate studies, I used to travel every weekend to Ibadan. The Ibadan-Ijebu-Ode road on which I made the journeys is still nearly as good and durable it was then, almost fifty years later, while other roads which were either freshly constructed or rebuilt after then all constantly undergo severe and extremely dangerous disrepair. Indeed, that high school at which I taught, Adeola Odutola College, was much better equipped (and probably better staffed) than many of our universities now precisely because the founder and proprietor for whom the school was renamed from its previous name, Olu-Iwa College, was a true capitalist magnate whose influence and authority were completely independent of the patronage of politicians and governments. Above all else, what I wish to stress in this testimony which does not claim to be an exhaustive analysis of capitalism at that stage of our (under)development is that we were well on our way to transforming a capitalism that was primarily agriculture-based to modern industrial capitalism. If this was the case, it was not a given, foreclosed development that oil wealth should have been diverted away from that trajectory. Indeed, the argument could be made that the oil wealth could very well have been used to augment that trajectory. Nothing in history is preordained to happen the way it usually seems to be after the fact, especially after things have become very fixed and settled along a particular path of mal-development.

On this last note, I wish to emphasize, especially to younger people reading this series, that if the things I am saying and claiming here seem far-fetched, please know that in fact they were very vigorously nationally debated in the not so distant past in our country. I particularly advise those who are eager to find out for themselves the truth of these claims to get copies of the following documents: the “Minority Report” submitted by Segun Osoba and the late Bala Usman in 1976 after they disagreed with the Constitution Drafting Committee (CDC) which had recommended welfarist capitalism in the main document produced by that CDC while Osoba and Usman recommended socialism in their report; the 1979 and 1999 Constitutions, especially the Second Chapters of both documents that contain extensive reflections on fairness and justice in both the ownership of the means of production and the distribution of the wealth of the nation. When Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida formed the two political parties that contested the 1993 presidential elections, the National Reconstruction Convention (NRC) and the Social Democratic Party, (SDP) and stated that one was “a little to the Right while the other was a little to the Left” he was reflecting the considerable influence of these debates on the kind of capitalism Nigeria should both enshrine in its constitution and back up with the force of state policies and actions.

Obviously, we have traveled or strayed far from the paths indicated by those debates. Indeed, anyone who, upon reading all the relevant documents in those debates, claims that she or he could have anticipated an extremely unregenerate and unjust capitalism in which mega-looters and their defenders dominate the political order, the national economy and the judicial system would be hard put to defend that claim. So: how did we get here and how can we get out of it? If there are no simple answers to this question, this does not mean that there are no answers at all. This will be our starting point in next week’s concluding piece in the series.

Biodun Jeyifo                                                                                                    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

First parable/riddle

A tree, a mighty tree falls in the forest but no one, no conscious, prescient being is there to see the fall: does this event have any significance? The riddle is more forceful if the tree is a mighty tree, one of the biggest in the forest, but the implied enigma could be arguably extended to even a small tree whose height or girth is unremarkable since all trees, all living things are deemed inherently worthy. So, let’s make the riddle, our riddle, pertain to any tree in the forest, even though we agree that the parable works better if the tree is a tree among trees. By this very extension of the object of the parable, we have already indicated a possible answer to the riddle. What is this answer? It is the contention that no one needs to be present for the fall of the mighty tree – indeed of any tree – to have significance or meaning. This is because the fall, the death of any living thing is of inherent value in itself whether or not anyone is around to see it, record it, mourn the loss or perhaps even bear witness to its passing. For what is life if it is not, in and of itself inherently valuable? But this very answer already poses its own problem and further complicates the riddle and this is because no living thing is satisfied with only the inherent, inalienable worth of its life, its existence? Put another way, we could ask the following question: which living thing, which human being does not like for its/his/her passing to be recorded and mourned? The pure phenomenology of being alive, of having once passed through this time and place in the grand scheme of things in the universe may seem philosophically elegant and pleasing, but it does not seem to suffice for how most living beings, especially humans, wish to live their lives.

There are of course women and men who do not care much that how and when their passing occurs should be noted. However, such people are in a significant minority among human beings. Why do most people, in all times and places, care so much that their passing should not be anonymous and unremarked? It is perhaps because what happens in and after death is a big, consequential commentary or even judgement on life. On this account if one life, or the many lives of a group of people, end without anyone noticing or recording the event, the conclusion is that the life or lives have, in their entirety, been meaningless. The awesome social critique and ethical commentary implied in the Yoruba notion of “awon asiniwaye” comes to mind here. In a rough translation, this means “expendable fellow travelers that accompanied the real, true and worthy human beings to the world”.

Summing up, this in effect means that our riddle has an open-ended answer: we can either affirm the philosophically and ethically humanistic “answer” which states that every death, regardless of whether it is noted, recorded or mourned, is inherently worthy in its own right; or we can affirm the contending “answer” that deaths that are unnoted or unrecorded, willfully or accidentally, constitute a powerful commentary on life, the life or lives that the person or the community lived before the moment of death.

I will not dwell much on the implications of this parable or riddle for our society or, more generally, the world in which we all live at the present time. But I do suggest that the reader think about the number of lives that are lost needlessly every year on the death-traps we call roads and highways and the temporary morgues that we call hospitals and clinics. Even more portentously, I suggest that we reflect on the slow, long drawn out deaths of hundreds of thousands of our peoples every year through the grinding poverty that is structurally and forcibly imposedon them by the cannibalistic looters’ paradise, the predatory political order we call a “democratic”republic. And I ask: how many of these deaths, actual and symbolic, are ever noted or mourned by our leaders?

Second parable

This parable is from an Afro-Cuban myth which, generally speaking, goes thus: In the beginning, Olofin created the heavens and the earth; he created all the living things in the world and all the principles and attributes, positive and negative, through whichthey could live in happiness and dignity on the condition that they would always have to find a reconciliation, a synthesis between the positive things and the negative things. It was with this in mind that God created Truth and also created its opposite, Falsehood. To help humankind, he made Truth big and powerful and made Falsehood skinny and weak, though God made him cunning and duplicitous. Also, unbeknownst to Truth, God armed Falsehood with a cutlass.

For a long time, things worked to the best advantage of human beings: Truth was big and strong and for this reason was very helpful while Falsehood, being only too conscious of his disadvantages, could not wreak havoc with human beings by manipulating the darker inner promptings of their hearts. However, one fateful day, Truth and Falsehood met and a fight ensued between them. Being very big and powerful, Truth felt confident – but also very complacent, perhaps because he did not know that Falsehood had a cutlass.This was why a fight which seemed so uneven ended rather quickly and surprisingly when Falsehood cunningly took out his hidden cutlass and cut off the head of Truth.

The fight could have ended on that decapitation of Truth if it wasn’t the case that this was a fight, not between ordinary mortals, but between fundamental principles of the universe and their incarnations in Truth and Falsehood. And so, with his head cut off, rather than being finished, Truth felt doubly, trebly empowered. He went scrambling around for his head in order to put it back on his neck and continue the fight. At that point, something of great and everlasting consequence for human beings happened: in scrambling around for his head, Truth accidentally felt the head of Falsehood which he mistakenly took for his own head. His strength being truly awesome, a pull from Truth yanked off the head of Falsehood and this Truth then placed on his neck. And from that day, what we have had in the world is this grotesque and confusing mismatch: the head of Falsehood on the body of Truth.

We do not have the space in which to explore the full ramifications of this myth, this parable. Beside pointing out that it powerfully encodes the suspicion that we encounter in almost all human societies of the past and the present that “truth” lies more with what we feel in our bodies while the head is the seat of all falsehoods, I only wish in the present context to apply the powerfully suggestive implications of this parable to the “head” as symbol of leadership and the “body” as metaphor for followership in our present political order. Please dear reader and compatriot, look carefully at the terrible tales of suffering and hardship among and within the collective “body” of the followership in every part of the land. Is the “truth” not in plain sight everywhere you look? And then look carefully, compatriot, at the “heads” of nearly all our political institutions and organs of power, law and administration and what do you see? Is it not falsehood everywhere? The headship of government? The headship of the judicial system, the Supreme Court, and its own headship? O The headship of the state governments? Of the legislatures, national and state? Above all else and especially now, at this present time, the headship of the Senate and the House of Reps?

Third parable

This third and final parable in our reflections in this piece may seem to have a primarily religious provenance but its ramifications are very wide and affect every sphere of life. Basically, it pertains to what we might call the “end of life or of time” myth or legend. It has recurred again and again throughout recorded history and in diverse regions of the world. Basically, here is what it consists of: an either sudden or gradual feeling of deep and widespread malaise builds up into a conviction, a premonition among large segments of the population that the world is coming to an end. Typically, the religious expression or version of this myth is the most culturally and socially significant, if it is also often the most alarmist. For in most cases, this religious version signifies the coming of a messiah, quite often the Messiah. Needless to say, we have already been hearing echoes of this religious version of the myth in our country for at least a decade now. Definitely, it gathered momentum under the rule of the PDP. Will this chiliastic and apocalyptic myth or parable resurface and gather more strength and volubility during the reign of the new ruling party, the APC? Your guess is as good as mine!

An interesting version of this myth or parable is that which pertains, not to the end of life or time in general but to the end of things as one generation has known and loved it. Although nearly every generation goes through one or another version of this myth, it is often far more powerfully floated and peddled around among members of some generations more than others. I definitely cannot speak for the generation of my father and of his father before him, but I am pretty sure that my generation in general feels more acutely that between us and the generations of my children and grandchildren, the world, time itself, is coming to an end as we have known and perhaps cherished it, with all the inevitable challenges and crises that we faced. Here’s one of the most troubling expressions of this generalized feeling of angst, of an ineluctable malaise of my generation of Nigeria’s educated elites: merit is gone, the professoriate itself has been degraded beyond belief and repair and so, what will happen to the transmission of knowledge and the social reproduction of intellectual capital in our country. And will this not further decrease or narrow the opportunities for equality of opportunities between the classes in our society?

Epilogue

Against the logical thrust of the title of this piece, I will neither say, “take heart, compatriot, things could be worse”, nor say, “be afraid, be very afraid, compatriot, for things will get worse”. Why not? The future is open-ended and our fate lies in our hands. If one set of rulers cannot or will not lead us to the promised land, we cannot and must not give up. The parables or riddles in this piece are all provocations to the mind to raise issues but not to be controlled or limited by the implications of the issues that we raise. That tree that fell in the forest and no one was around to see and record its fall? Well, a dozen other trees have risen and grown in its place. And these new trees sprang from the shoots, from the efflorescence of the fallen tree. That is a testament to the fallen, “asiniwaye” tree having once been here in the forest, in the world.

Biodun Jeyifo                                                                                                        bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu