Category: Biodun Jeyifo

As I stated repeatedly last week in this column, there is no necessary and logical connection between the effective devaluation and deepening fall in the exchange rate of our national currency, the naira, and the apparent decreasing profile in the standing and credibility of our new ruling party, the APC, as a progressive force for change. If for one reason or the other, the world price of crude petroleum was to suddenly begin to go up and up and up, the value of the naira would begin to appreciate significantly. But this would not necessarily mean that the standing of the ruling party as a force for progress and genuine development would automatically also begin to improve. As a matter of fact, we have seen this happen before during the reign of the former ruling party, the PDP. During the sixteen-year period of its rule, we went through one or two cycles of fall and rise in the world price of oil and concomitant cycles of fall and rise, rise and fall in the value of the naira. But this had absolutely no effect on the standing of the PDP which, from day one to the end, absolutely never stopped in its fall from grace and, eventually, power. Can and will the new ruling party learn from this fate of the PDP? More importantly, what can we, the Nigerian people and nation, learn from this and what must we do with the lesson? In this postscript on last week’s piece in this column, I am invoking the following parable of the worm as a speculative and imaginative answer to these questions.

The worm provides us with one of nature’s most fascinating profiles of consumption and self-reproduction. Because its digestive tract extends through the entire length of its body, the worm consumes endlessly and indiscriminately; the only things which it does not consume are inorganic materials like discarded plastics and tin cans. But as far as all organic materials are concerned, whether they are living or dead, warm or cold, moist or dry, worms will consume them endlessly. Perhaps the most gruesome thing about this omnivorous pattern of the consumption habits of worms is the fact that sometimes, they take up residence inside a living organism which they feed on until it dies, after which the consumption enters into another round on the dead carcass of the deceased host. If this profile is beginning to give the reader intimations of a parable about the PDP when it was in office for sixteen years, please note that this is indeed my intention.

True enough, Nigeria as a whole did not exactly “die” and provide the putrefying body of the nation for the “worms” in the PDP leadership and rank-and-file foot-soldiers to feed on, but we came close to that macabre fate. Indeed, if you talk to the families of Nigerian soldiers killed in the campaigns against the Boko Haram, I am sure that they will tell you that to them, all those involved in Dasuki-gate that shared the monies meant to procure weapons are human “worms” feeding on the corpses of their loved ones. Thus, in the context of this week’s postscript on last week’s piece, the question that arises is whether or not the symbolic and metaphoric implications of this parable can be extended to our new ruling party, the APC. To answer this particular question, we must now move to perhaps the most fascinating thing of all about worms as a metaphor for limitless predatory consumption in nature and society, this being the myths and facts regarding the innate capacities for self-production and self-regeneration of different species of worms.

For centuries, it was widely believed that if you cut a worm into two, each of the two halves would regenerate and become a new organism giving rise to two new worms. But this was and is not exactly true of all species of worms. For instance, take the case of the common earthworm whose scientific name is lumbricusterrestis. If you slice it too close to the head (yes, worms have heads!) which is very near the swollen part of the worm known as the clitellum, it will not regenerate and both halves will die. In other words, the self-regeneration of the earthworm is limited by the fact that only on the condition that you leave its head completely intact can it reproduce when it is sliced into bits. The species of worms that will reproduce and regenerate regardless of where you slice it and into how many parts you cut is the so-called planarian flatworm, planaria torva. This particular species in the family of worms is the ultimate in its capacity for endless self-regeneration. For instance, if you slice off just one-three hundredth (1/300) of its body part, that infinitely small part will grow into a new flatworm that will retain all the memory of the worm from which it was sliced! Let me state this clearly: the new flatworm regenerated from just one-three hundredth of the old worm, will have the full memory, not of all flatworms in general, but of the particular flatworm from which it was sliced! In other words, and to link this to consumption, the new flatworm will start consuming with all the memory of what its “parent” flatworm was consuming!

I leave it to the reader to decide for herself or himself whether the APC is a lumbricus terrestis reproduction of the PDP or a planaria torva transmogrification of the former ruling party.There can be no question at all that it is either one or the other, for as we all know, close to a half to two-thirds of the leadership of the APC at one time or another in the past belonged to the PDP. Above all else is the fact that the extremely predatory consumption habits of the former ruling party have resurfaced widely and deeply in the leadership ranks of the new ruling party. What is still in doubt, what is still open to debate is whether or not the APC will do what the PDP never managed to do in its sixteen years in power and that is listen, actually listen, to the universal cry at home and abroad against the unrestrained, free for all, social-cannibalistic consumption that is without equal in the whole world. Permit me to dwell very briefly on this point before returning to the matter of whether the APC is an earthworm or a flatworm resurrection of the PDP.

For close to about the last ten years of its sixteen years in office, the PDP was relentlessly barraged by denunciations of the excessive greed in the payment of salaries, emoluments and allowances to our public officeholders, federal, state and local, with particular reference to the legislators and state governors and deputy governors. Columnists wrote endlessly on the matter, including this particular columnist. Professional associations and civil society organizations protested unceasingly. At one stage, some NGOs banded together and took the matter to the courts, suing the National Assembly to reveal to the nation and the world the “secrets” of just how much the legislators were being paid. Significantly, the suit was filed under the Freedom of Information Act (FoI) that the National Assembly itself had passed into law. The case was won and the National Assembly was ordered to comply with its own lawfully passed legislation. But it refused to comply and more or less arrested the suit in endless court hearings based on appeals and counter-motions. When one of the legislators, Dino Melaye, broke ranks with his fellow legislators and tried to reveal the actual figures, he was severely dealt with. At one point in this saga of the total refusal of the PDP to listen to the cries for accountability, prudence and frugality in the use of our national wealth, the former Governor of the Central Bank, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi (now Emir of Kano) waded into the fray and revealed the staggering sums the legislators were paying themselves. For his “audacity” he was ordered to appear before the lawmakers on pain of being charged with contempt of the “august” legislative chambers. Sanusi duly obeyed the summons but held his ground and spilled more beans on the iniquity, the shamelessness of the greed of the legislators. Indeed, the matter made a spectacular appearance internationally when, on July 15, 2013, The Economist published a report which showed that Nigerian legislators were not only the highest paid legislators in the whole world but that each Nigerian legislator was receiving 116 times the GDP per person of the country. No other country in the world came remotely close to this staggering figure.

The leadership of the APC, like that of the PDP before it, is giving every indication that it either cannot hear or will not listen to the cries that this must stop, especially now that the naira is in a freefall and there is crippling economic stagnation and great suffering and hardship in the land. This brings us back to the parable of the worm. Is the APC a lumbricus terrestis reincarnation of the PDP or a planaria torva regeneration of the old ruling party? I admit that this parable is a satirical and mildly playful imaginative rendering of a matter that is of life and death urgency to the vast majority of Nigerians. My justification for this is that satire and irony have their uses in times of great stress and hardship in the experience of individuals and entire societies and nations. Please think of the following grim fact, dear reader: there is no great personal consequence for most of the leaders of the PDP that the party is no longer in power and has perhaps gone into permanent historical oblivion since most of them have their loot, their billions of naira and millions of dollars. As we can see from what is going on in the courts in the trials of the accused mega-looters, most of them seem confident that with the help of an endlessly corrupted criminal justice system, they are going to get away with their loot. This raises this crucial question: are the bosses, the leaders of the APC not thinking along these lines and are therefore not really bothered whether or not they last in power beyond 2019? I mean, if you can make as much as you can now, before 2019, what does it really matter whether your party is back in power after the 2019 elections?

Ultimately, the riddle of whether the leadership of the APC is metaphorically speaking a resurgent lumbricusterrestis or a planariatorva of the PDP is for the Nigerian people to figure out and take appropriate action. For, is there really a choice between the worm which has limited regeneration capacities and the one whose strategies and forms of self-regeneration after a dismembering are endless? No, there isn’t; one is just a more odious, more challenging version of the other. The real challenge is to shake off all species of worms from our national body politic.

Biodun Jeyifo                                                                                                      bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

This was the note on which we ended the column last week: Donald Trump linked his economic nationalism and anti-globalization – America first! – with xenophobia, racism and Islamophobia and this is why his message, his demagoguery has created a mass movement numbered in the tens of millions, especially among the white working class. Is this a portent, a frightening portent for the future? No, I don’t think so, I wrote last week and write again this week. Let me now address this issue in this closing piece in the series.

First of all, and as a slight qualification of what might appear as an over-confident assertion that Trump and his movement do not represent deeply troubling auguries for the future of our global community, let me admit that there is great cause for alarm in the successes of Trump, first through the Republican Party’s primaries and now in the unfolding see-saw movement of the polls between him and Hillary Clinton. Ordinarily and on any measure of decency, maturity and responsibility, Trump should be in the gutter, in the sinkhole of public and electoral popularity. His vulgarity, his bombastic egomania, his mendacity and his reckless disregard for accountability for his past and present misdeeds are unmatched in American electoral politics in the last hundred years. Indeed, in January this year, Trump went so far as to declare that if he went down the streets of New York City and shot dead the first person he met, the masses would still stick with him! That such an odious person and a politician with the mind and the morality of a teenager with a severe case of arrested emotional and ethical development is riding so high in electoral popularity in the richest and most powerful country in the world should be worrisome for all of us, especially as the fundamental basis of his appeal is a total rejection of neoliberal globalization and its discontents.

Trump and his mass movement are troubling also because they present us all with an all too familiar reminder of how all human beings typically behave when confronted with severe economic hardship, this being the tendency to displace our anger, resentment and bitterness on the strangers, the collective “other” among us. Remember the “Ghana Must Go” debacle to African unity and solidarity in 1983 when an order was given by the government of Shehu Shagari for the expulsion of about two millions “aliens” from Nigeria within a period of two weeks? After the economic boom of the 197s, oil prices had slumped and the economy had sharply contracted. Moreover, elections were approaching and Shagari and the NPN found it expedient to displace the anger and resentment of the masses on”foreigners”, especially the Ghanaians who numbered a solid one million among the two million ordered expelled. I remember it distinctly now with a rueful anger that has never gone away: Shagari’s expulsion of the Ghanaians and other West African nationals was very popular in our country, especially in Lagos. And this is not in any way mitigated by the fact that about two decades before “Ghana Must Go”, the government of Ghana had in 1969 itself expelled hundreds of thousands of “foreigners”, most of them Nigerians, from Ghana.  And then of course, there is post-apartheid South Africa in which we have seen wave after wave of murderous, xenophobic violence against “foreigners” in the wake of the rising tide of economic and social insecurity attendant on the failure of the government and the ruling party, the ANC, to effect deep and meaningful redistribution of wealth after the end of apartheid. Thus, the millions trooping to the xenophobic trumpet of Trump indeed have justificatory examples and similarities to point to in our continent and other parts of the world.

All these caveats notwithstanding, I still insist that Trump and his mass movement, though deeply troubling in the ways in which they connect with our human tendency to scapegoat “others” in periods of deep insecurity, do not present us with a portent for both the immediate and long-range future ahead of us. Trump may have won the Republican primaries, but he has not captured the American presidency. And I for one will go out on a limb now to declare that he is unlikely to win in November. In making this seemingly unguarded “prediction”, I hasten to declare that it is not so much the issue of winning or losing in the contest for the American presidency that concerns me as what this would mean for the forces of anti-neoliberalism and anti-globalization in our country, our continent and the world. Let me express what I have in mind here very clearly and unambiguously: even if he were to win in November, Trump will not in any sincere and meaningful way carry out the most important of his anti-globalization campaign promises. This is partly because of his fundamental insincerity and    inconsistency. But there is also the far more important fact that Trump – and for that matter any American president – would need the legislative approval of the U.S. Congress to push through the sort of deep and wide departure from free-trade capitalist globalization that he is promising his supporters. Congress, as it is presently constituted, will not give legislative support to such a project. In other words, and to bring the particular speculations I am making here to their logical conclusion, in office as president, neither Trump nor Clinton would embark on a serious project of doing away with free-trade, neoliberal capitalism. And on this point, we need to briefly consider Bernie Sanders who, as a matter of fact, has given deep thought to how to take on the U.S. Congress in dealing with neoliberal globalization and its discontents in America in particular and more generally, in the world. What do I have in mind in making this observation?

It is one of the great regrets of the present cycle of American presidential elections that both the electoral platform and the message of Sanders have been grossly underreported at home in the U.S. itself and around the world. Other than the significant fact that he attracted millions of young people and previously unregistered Independents who had never participated in elections, little has been reported or discussed on his absolute insistence on the limits to electoral politics in America and what to do to circumvent and get beyond those limits. Specifically, Sanders has addressed the issue of the certainty of Congressional opposition to his project of dismantling neoliberalism in favor of an economic nationalism that mostly favors working people and the shrinking middle class. With a courage and a frankness that are rare in American electoral politics – indeed in electoral politics all over the world – Sanders again and again told his supporters that many of the things he was promising would not get Congressional approval, and that the only way they could be overcome resistance and blockage from the present political order was through a permanent political revolution in which a permanent siege on Congress in particular and all political appointees would put an end to business as usual. In other words, Sanders has repeatedly told his supporters, “don’t expect that after you elect me into office you can go home and leave everything to me and my cabinet; no, you will not go home, you will remain permanently mobilized to make sure that things will not go back to business as usual”.

I started this series with the idea of portents in the current American presidential electoral campaigns and return to that topic in my concluding observations and reflections. As we now know, thanks to the hacking of the emails of the Democratic National Committee, Sanders was defeated by Clinton in part because she is the candidate preferred by the Establishment. In fairness though, diehard Sanders partisans must admit that Clinton did win a resounding majority and plurality over Sanders and that, in the words of Chinua Achebe, it is not morning yet on creation day for the sort of left-wing anti-neoliberalism of their hero, Bernie Sanders. If Sanders had defeated Clinton in the primaries, and if he had then gone to trounce Trump in the general elections, that would have been a portent of great significance to all of us across the world for it would have indicated that it is not necessary to link anti-globalization with xenophobia and racismin order to win elections and change the course of global affairs away from a seemingly entrenched and immoveable neoliberalism. As things stand now, Clinton has taken on board some of the items on the Sanders electoral platform. This too has a portent specific to it: depending on how sincere she proves to be if she wins the elections in November, we may see and get some reforms to neoliberalism that we have not seen so far in any Western country, least of all in America itself, the heartland, the center of gravity of neoliberal globalization and its enforcement in our world through both arms and diplomacy, aggression and enticement, the stick and the carrot.

Our last words, our concluding thoughts must go Trump and the great threat that his coupling of economic nationalism with xenophobia and racism poses to all of us around the globe. In insisting that the future does not belong to Trump and the mass movement that he has inspired and set in motion, I am, I admit, expressing the wish, the hope that he loses and loses mightily in November. These are very chaotic, very perilous times in our world and the last thing we need now is a demagogue, a charlatan, a conman and a rabid misogynist at the helm of affairs in the most powerful nation in the world. But I am also fairly convinced that Trump will not win, that the Western world is not about to descent into a new dark age into to which it will, undoubtedly, pull all of us in our planetary home. If the best we can hope for and get now is Clinton-Sanders, so be it. Let it not be Trump, alone, his supporters fooled and in their disappointment digging deeper into the morass of the worst fears and anxieties that plague us when turn on the “enemies” among and within us.

Biodun Jeyifo                                                                                                                         bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

It is the early hours of Friday, July 22, 2016 and as I have been doing in the last three days, I have been sitting up late into the early hours of the new day watching television broadcast of the Republican Party’s National Convention on the CNN channel. Because I am in Berlin, Germany that is six hours ahead of the Eastern Standard Time (EST) of the United States, tonight as in each of the last three nights, I have to persevere till the wee hours of the morning. This is unusual for me as the only thing that I normally watch on television this late is tennis and then only when it is one of the four so-called “Opens” – Australian, French, Wimbledon and American. So what is there in the Republican National Convention that has kept me so bewitchingly glued to the television for hours on end? The answer to this is simple and unambiguous: the coming American presidential election in November 2016 is so portentous, both for the United States and the rest of the world, that I want to see and hear everything that leads to it. More on this point concerning the portents of this year’s American presidential election for the rest of the world later.

For now, it is difficult for me to hide my gladness that many things have gone wrong with and in the Republican Convention, from the deliberate and en massabsence of most of the “heavyweight” leaders of the Party; to the widely discussed plagiarism ofMichele Obama’s speech at the 2008 Democratic Convention by Melania, the wife of Donald Trump,in her speech at the Convention on opening night; and the refusal of Ted Cruz, who was one of Trump’s rivals during the primaries, to endorse Trump in his speech last night at this Republican Convention.One of the much touted claims of Trump in his electoral campaign is that nearly everything in America is broken and only he, Donald Trump, can fix things. Well, how come then that so many things in his Convention are so broken that it is not only embarrassing for his Party but calls into question his claim of heroic, superhuman and technocratic deal-making efficiency? Can a man who cannot run a Party Convention smoothly and efficiently run an entire country, that country being the richest and most powerful nation in the world?

Above everything else in this Republican Convention and far beyond the sheer noise and spectacle that we get in all Conventions, I have been struck by the extreme level of mob and herd instincts driving the thousands gathered at the Convention. It is nothing less than what you would get at a mass, open-airprayer meeting of one of our evangelical denominations, especially the sort of Dionysian frenzy that you see and hear at a gathering of the Mountain of Fire and Miracles – halleluiah!Last night, one of the featured speakers, Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey, drove the crowd at the Convention into an apoplectic frenzy of violent rage against Trump’s Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, with shouts of “Jail Her! Jail Her! Jail Her!” that sounded very much like “Kill Her! Kill Her! Kill Her!” I solemnly swear that the last time that I saw an electioneering gathering get driven into such a paroxysm of hate, anger and violent words and expressions was in my childhood in the early 1950s in colonial Nigeria when electoral politics was no more and no less than the continuation of warfare in the domain of politics. This observation leads directly to the theme of this piece, this being the portentousness of this year’s American presidential election for the rest of the world, particularly the West.

Many things are by now so well known all over the world about the demagoguery, xenophobia, misogyny and racism of Donald Trump that there is no need to restate them here. What is of relevance here is one particular issue that though it has not been ignored, it has garnered far less attention than it deserves. Permit me to state it very clearly if only because of its novelty: in Donald Trump we see the kind of extreme and uncompromising rejection of free-trade neoliberal globalization that for the most part, we have seen only in the Third World and hardly ever in the Western countries. Let me be very specific and unambiguous about this point. Xenophobic and anti-immigrant anti-globalization is quite common in the rich countries of the West and it has been so for about a decade now. As a matter of fact, this is the ideological and political fuel that powers the nationalism of many of the extreme, far-right parties of Europe. What is perhaps unique of Trump and the mass movement that he has fostered is a very plain, very explicit rejection of free-trade globalization and its many transnational practices, protocols and treaties, so much so that he has openly and vociferously stated that if elected, he will rescind all the free-trade treaties that Obama and the Republican presidents before him have signed with partners in Europe, North America and Asia. Trump has in particular singled out China in his tirades against currency manipulations that underwrite indebtedness and huge trade deficits of America to that country. And he has stated that as President, he will reinstate open protectionist policies to reinvigorate industrial factory production to create hundreds of thousands of jobs for American workers. Sounds like demands you usually get from the anti-neoliberal Left in Africa and many other parts of the developing world? Unquestionably so, except that this is a candidate of one of the two major ruling class parties of America, the heartland of neoliberal globalization, making these demands.

There is an even more uncanny similarity of Trump’s anti-neoliberal globalization to the ideological views of progressive activists in the developing world and this is to be found in Trump’s claim that while neoliberal globalization has generated unprecedented quantities of money wealth, the lion’s share of that wealth has gone to a few rich thereby immensely widening the gap between the haves and the have-nots.The careful regular reader of this column might have noticed that this was indeed a point that I made again and again in my recent two-week series on global political economy before and after neoliberalism. On this particular point, let me say again that while our peoples in Africa and the developing world have been continuously SAPPED (SAP – Structural Adjustment Programs of the IMF) for close to three decades now, the middle class, the working people and the poor of the rich countries of the global North have been experiencing SAP only in slightly less than one decade. All the same, SAP is SAP and Trump is the first major aspirant to very high office in a Western country with a chance to win that has articulated a fierce opposition to neoliberal globalization in terms that seem uncannily similar to what we have been saying in the global South for a long time now. Is this a hopeful portent? I don’t think so, especially if one considers the fate of Bernie Sanders during the Democratic Party primaries to that of Donald Trump in the Republican primaries.

At the risk of oversimplification, I would argue that Bernie Sanders, whose anti-neoliberalism was at least as passionate as Trump’s if not more so, could and would not connect his anti-neoliberalism and economic nationalism to racism and xenophobia as Trump did and this is why Sanders was defeated by Clinton. In this respect, the fate of Sanders is very much like the fate of progressive European opponents of neoliberal globalization who have consistently stopped short of attaining lasting or even sustained electoral victories precisely because demographically, those marginalized or altogether excluded by globalization in Europe are nowhere as numerous as in the Third World. In other words, in one part or region of the world, the wealth generated by and from free-trade neoliberal globalization has in many places left as large as 70% of the population desperately poor and marginalized, while in another part or region of the same world, the percentage of the truly disadvantaged and poor is (only) 25% overall. Of course, for many countries of the global North 25% of desperately poor people in the total population is a historical high, but so far this has not been sufficiently weighty enough to tilt the balance in the direction of an all-out assault on neoliberal globalization as we have it in Donald Trump. Which is why we have to zero in on the dimensions of xenophobia, racism, fascism, Islamophobia and misogyny as the factors that finally secured the electoral victories for Trump that eluded Bernie Sanders.

As I listened to Trump’s acceptance speech faraway from America in Berlin in the early of this morning, his fascism and xenophobia seemed to me the most insistent, the most clamant dimensions of the economic nationalism that is the core of the appeal that he potentially holds for white, blue-collar workers in the so-called “rust belt” region of the country. Fascism also once rose like a titanic force here in Berlin less than a century ago; and also, its hordes of frenzied supporters such as those at the Republican Convention, were drawn mainly from tens of millions of deeply disaffected blue-collar workers and déclassé middle class white-collar professionals. Is this a portent, a frightening portent of what lies ahead of us? No, I don’t think so. This will be our starting point in next week’s continuation of the series.

Biodun Jeyifo bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

[Continuation of the series that began last week of the keynote address given by me at the 2016 National Delegates’ Conference of ASUU, University of Uyo, May 6, 2016] 

The technocratic efficiency of “financialization” in our megabanks does not exist in isolation; it must be compared to other sectors of the economy and indeed, the national economy as a whole. Perhaps it does something to our sense of collective national pride when we come across television advertisements around the world that feature Nigerian megabanks like Guaranty Trust and Zenith, right there among the foremost banks in the world. But what has this done to make a real difference in the lives of the vast majority of Nigerians in their tens of millions? These Nigerian megabanks declare huge annual profits but this fact does not in the least translate to extension of credit and loan portfolios on a significant scale to the most vital and needy sectors of the national economy like farming and small scale enterprises. As a matter of fact, as in the rich countries of the world where the financial services industries consistently declare huge profits that are of inverse relationship to the economy as a whole, the very period that has seen the growth and the expansion of megabanks in Nigeria has seen a sharp widening of the gap between the haves and the have-nots, a phenomenon that is known to development sociologists as growth without development. This is in fact the ultimate indictment of neoliberalism nearly everywhere in the world: consistently huge profits that widen the gap between the few super rich and hundreds of millions of the poor around the planet, a gap of social inequality that exists as much between nations as within nations. Permit me to dwell a little on this particular factor of the impact of neoliberalism nearly everywhere in the world, rich and poor nations alike.

We know enough now about neoliberalism to know that the cause of its tendency to widen the gap of inequality between the rich and the poor everywhere in the world and to foster growth without development derives from the fact that the “economy” in which for the most part it operates is a shadow economy almost completely with very little meaningful connections to the real economy. In the real economy, the goods and services that sustain life and make human existence pleasurable and dignified are produced and traded: food, clothing, medicines, houses, transportation, sanitation, entertainment and leisure and the instruction of the young. In the shadow economy, no goods, products or services that anyone can eat or use in the course of living are produced and traded. The bulk of what is produced and traded are services based on speculation on securities and derivatives on huge debt and loan portfolios. This unregulated or indeed unregulatable degree of speculation in neoliberalism’s shadow economy around vast securities and derivatives attracts far greater finance capital than the quantum of investment capital that goes into the real economy. This, in essence, is what “financialization” means in neoliberalism: we are in a phase of global capitalism in which money creates more money without contributing much to the production of goods and services in the real economy. At previous historic stages of capitalism, finance capital was tied to something other than and beyond itself. In the mercantilist phase, money or finance was tied mostly to trading and commerce. In theindustrial phase of large scale factory production, it was tied to making industrial goods and heavy machinery, the machines that make other machines. In the third industrial revolution thatproduced advanced micro-processes that probe deep into the oceans, the heavens, the seas and the deep interiority of human genes, finance capital was devoted to making and doing things that both human beings and the heavy machines we have made cannot do. In the present phase of millennial, neoliberal “financialization”, finance capital is overwhelmingly devoted to making more money by and for the megabanks, the hedge funds, the oligopolistic billionaires. I should perhaps add here that money devoted to making more money as an end in itself is not new and has always been around in all the previous historical stages of capitalism. However, with the full maturation of neoliberalism, it becomes more than peripheral and secondary; it becomes the dominant mode of global capitalism.

I should perhaps add here that it is a little incorrect to say that “financialization” in neoliberalism primarily or even substantially constitutes money diverted away from the goods and services of the real economy in order to make more money as an end itself. Strictly speaking, money does not make more money as an end in itself; money makes more money for the rich and the powerful of this world who have been the beneficiaries of the colossal wealth created under neoliberalism, a wealth that has immensely widened the gap of inequality between the rich and the poor everywhere in our world. In this respect, perhaps the ultimate question that we can and must pose to neoliberalism is this: whatever the unprecedented levels of technocratic efficiency in the generation of wealth, whatever the highly impressive rates of growth under neoliberalism, who benefits, who suffers; whose bellies are full to bursting and whose bellies are bloated, not with nourishment or satiation but with the unreal and artificial kwashiorkor of destitution? Fortunately, this is not the end of the story for there are things happening below the surface of contemporary global political economy to trouble the belief of the apologists and defenders of neoliberalism that nearly all the capitalist and non-capitalist alternatives that can reduce or even wipe out terrible gaps in justice and equality have been substantially weakened if not erased from contemporary debates and struggles. In other words,in the last decade and half, there has appeared a totally unprecedented development in global affairs that that gives clear indications that we may be much closer than we realize to a time, a period beyond and after neoliberalism. To that development I now turn in my closing reflections in this talk.

Not too long ago, at the height of the global ideological hegemony of neoliberalism, the world was for the most part divided into two halves: one half comprised creditor nations that ‘restructured’ debtor nations; the second half comprised debtor nations that were ‘adjusted’ by the creditor nations. Here is another formulation of that decisive division of the world into two halves: nations that were “SAPPED” and those that did the “SAPPING”. If we are looking for the signal moment for the rise to world hegemony of neoliberalism, that was the moment. This moment coincided exactly with the emergence of an ideological ASUU. Now as we all know, until a country takes the IMF or World Bank loan thereby placing the lives of its citizens directly under IMF or World Bank control, the ideas and policies of neoliberalism are mere recommendations only which African and other countries of the developing world are free either to take or reject. As I have previously indicated in this talk, in the case of Nigeria, when Babangida put the matter before the nation in a referendum in 1986, Nigerians by an overwhelming majority rejected IMF and World Bank debt peonage. But Babangida went ahead and took the loan from the IMF. The rest is history and we have never recovered from the suffering, the hardship and the insecurities if life, liberty and possessions for the great majority of Nigerians that came with that fateful decision. I remember distinctly the humiliations that we felt when, in the face of massive shortages of essential commodities that came with the advent of neoliberalism in our country, we used to line up in queues in university campuses to receive our own “essential commodities” or “essenco” as it was popularly and jocularly known.

Our Union’s struggles for adequate funding for education, for better conditions with regard to the work we do and the students we teach, and for autonomy and academic freedom from external control and manipulation by successive governments that had sold their souls to neoliberalism date from that period. For me personally, it is profoundly discomfiting that the very things that we were struggling for thirty-five years ago when I became ASUU’s National President are the same things the Union is still struggling for today, except that things have gone far worse now than then. The fundamental cause of this, Comrade President, is the fact that neoliberal ideas and policies have become more entrenched, more militant and unyielding in the space of the three decades and half that have passed.

However, as I have earlier indicated, that is not the end of the story and we are beginning to see a world that will gradually put neoliberalism behind it. This is because the map of the global political economy that once divided the world into creditor nations that restructured debtor nations on one side and on the other side debtor nations that adjusted has changed radically. Now, nearly all the nations of the world are debtor nations, with only a few countries like China and Germany still being creditor nations. The most important aspects of this change in the global political economy of neoliberalism is that most of the nations of the world are being SAPPED now. For me personally, it has been quite an experience to have seen and lived through the effects and consequences of being SAPPED in both the poor nations and the rich nations. Concretely, it has been a revelation to see and hear protests of anguish and desperation that we have been making in our part of the world since the 80s now being made by tens of millions of people in the global North. And here I am talking not only of the most obvious cases like Greece, Spain, Portugal and Finland but even Britain, France and the Scandinavian countries, not excepting the United States itself, the heartland of global capitalism and the center of gravity of the global ideological hegemony of neoliberalism.

No countries, no peoples like being SAPPED, Comrade President! Peoples, unions, professional associations and mass movements are fighting back, not only physically as in the so-called Occupy movements but also at the level of ideas and ideology. I would go so far as to state that, at certain fundamental levels, neoliberalism is now in a sort of retreat or self-reappraisal as advocates and defenders of the welfare state, social democracy and protection of the public sector from complete privatization and deregulation are fighting mightily against the parties of the Right and the Center who are still sold on neoliberalism. As a matter of fact, Nigeria is one of the few countries in which all the ruling class parties and virtually all members of the political class still believe that neoliberal ideas and policies are here to stay forever and are therefore completely immovable from their confidence, their temerity in defense of neoliberalism. The very worst of these champions of neoliberalism in the Nigerian political class actually still believe and loudly declare that the problem with neoliberalism in our country is the fact that we have not gone far enough in embracing and applying its ideas and policies!

Comrade President, I leave this Conference and other conferences that will surely follow in the years and decades ahead of us to deliberate carefully on what will come after neoliberalism, specifically in our country but also in our region and in the world at large. The road will be long and hard but victory is certain. The first step in that long journey? Wealth that generates growth and development. A luta!

Biodun Jeyifo                                                                                                                                                            Uyo, May 6, 2016

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

Note: The texts of this week’s and next week’s columns come from a keynote lecture that I delivered at the 2016 National Delegates’ Conference of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) at the University of Uyo on May 16, 2016. These texts are being made public in this forum for the historical records.

Comrade President, members of the National Executive of our great Union, delegates, invited guests, ladies and gentlemen, it gives me great pleasure to be among you today, not only to give this keynote lecture but also to be a participant in the open sessions of the Conference. Two years ago, I was also a participant in the National Educational Summit in Abuja. I mention that occasion now because it marked the first occasion of what I hope will be my return to an active, elder’s participation in the affairs and struggles of our Union. For the youngest of those present at this Conference, I would like to draw attention to the fact that it was about thirty-five years ago that I became the National President of ASUU. Thirty-five years may be – and is indeed – a long time, but I assure you that to me, it is as if it was only yesterday! This is because becoming ASUU National President was a big, life-changing experience for me and I dare say for all those who succeeded me as the Union’s National President. For this and many other reasons, any occasion that brings me back to our Union is laden with memories of how and where this extraordinarily formative experience with ASUU came about.

By a rather interesting coincidence, the coming of neoliberalism to our country and our continent was a crucial world-historical background or context for that period of my presidency of ASUU. In other words, neoliberalism, the theme of this Conference, had a lot to do with what has been described as the emergence of a clearly ideological ASUU under the leadership of the first five or six National Presidents of ASUU starting from 1980. Of course we did not initially know that neoliberalism was the driving ideological force underpinning our struggles and the struggles of African peoples and other peoples throughout the developing world- and even the struggles of workers and poor people in the rich countries of the global North. However, by the middle of that decade of the 80s that awareness, that knowledge had penetrated the deepest and innermost recesses of our individual and collective consciousness and we had absorbed the lessons of this knowledge.

Comrade President, permit me to make what I am stating here obvious and it is this: the theme of this Conference has a rich resonance for me and I dare say for all of us who were in leadership positions in ASUU during that decade of the 1980s. It is this resonance that influenced the choice of both the title and the contents of my talk this lecture. This title is: “There was a time before neoliberalism; will there be a time after neoliberalism? – Nigerian and African Perspectives”.

My unambiguous answer to the two parts of this question is of course, yes, there was a time before neoliberalism and there surely will be a time after neoliberalism. At the risk of oversimplifying things but as a sort of opening move in my talk, permit me to succinctly summarize the essential ideological character and political economy of the time both before the high tide of neoliberalism: In that period, it was still possible to articulate and struggle for alternatives to the domination of our national economy by foreign and local oligarchs to the detriment of the vast majority of our peoples. Moreover, these alternatives to the combined forces of local and foreign oppressors could be found not only in the usual location at the far Left margins of the public sphere but right at the center of mainstream politics in Nigeria and the developing world. However, with the emergence of neoliberalism and its rise to global hegemony, alternatives to foreign domination and local oppression were all forced intoa retreat from which they have never recovered, a retreat to apoint where they almost completely disappeared in our national affairs, especially with regard to ruling class party politics. As this will be a crucial point in this lecture, permit to repeat this observation, this ideological and theoretical claim: before neoliberalism, both capitalist and non-capitalist alternatives to domination and control of our national economy by local and foreign oligarchs were very visibly and actively promoted; with the rise of neoliberalism to dominance in virtually all the nations of the planet, a world within which there seemed to be no viable alternatives to global, regional and national free market capitalism became a norm, a sort of end-of-history port of arrival for our planet and its nations and peoples.

Comrades, let me repeat: the world, our world was very different in 1980 when I became ASUU National President and this is why I have chosen to speak in terms of generational experiences in my reflections on the world before and after neoliberalism in this talk. At the most easily perceptible levels, both capitalist and non-capitalist models of development could be easily found in our country’s ruling class party politics in the period. Perhaps the most telling examples are cases like the Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN) that was liberal and welfarist in its programs and the Peoples Redemption Party (PRP) that was radically social-democratic in its ideology and policies. As a matter of fact, and from the historical record, let us recall that in the mid to late 1970s before ASUU became ideological, trade unions, students’ organizations and independent movements of radicals in the professions were militantly proactive in their opposition to the control of the national economy by local and foreign oligarchs. Ife;ABU, Zaria; BUK; Nsukka; Benin and many other campuses were vibrant with an activism that defined patriotism in terms of national unity, social justice and the pursuit of the common good.

Beyond these overt and dynamic socio-political processes, I am actually more interested in an ethos, a culture in which neoliberal ideas and policies were so strange, and ran so counter to the general tendencies of the period that people who spoke for them and acted on their presuppositions were not only in the minority but were extremely defensive in their pronouncements and activities. For instance, the brazen and militant gospel of prosperity of the megachurches of the present period would have shocked nearly everyone in the country’s political and ‘ethical’mainstream in the late 70s and early 1980s. Similarly,quintessentially neoliberal articles of faith of the present period like the privatization of every single one of our public enterprises and deregulation of controls meant to protect public and national interestswould have been totally out of place in the period under review here, the period before neoliberalism became hegemonic. As a matter of fact, one of the then newly ideological ASUU’s most popular monographs of the time before the hegemony of neoliberalism was a study with the revealing title, “Nigeria Is Not for Sale”. And perhaps most portentous of all, when the regime of Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida conducted a nationwide referendum in 1985 on whether or not Nigeria should take a loan from the IMF that would bring the country under the heel of the notorious SAP instrumentalities, the referendum overwhelmingly recorded an opposition to the IMF, its loans and the specter of debt peonage which it presented to our country. No, Nigeria then was not for sale. Except that in the eventuality, against the verdict of the referendum, Babangida took the IMF loan, massively devalued the naira and placed the country more firmly under the control of foreign domination with the invaluable collusion of the country’s nascent oligarchs with their base in the looting of the state.

It would of course be convenient to blame it all on either the Babangida regime alone or in combination with the military dictatorships that came after him. But in reality, the factors that made neoliberalism triumphin Nigeria were more complex than that. In other words, neoliberalism would not have recorded its far-ranging ideological successes if all that it had to fall upon to become ideologically dominant and “ethically” persuasivewas military autocracy and our thieving, barawo political elites. I suggest that it would be more productive for us to look carefully into the reasons why having once been very popular and attractive to millions of people in our country, elite and non-elite, ideas and policies like public ownership of key and sensitive enterprises and utilities andregulatory instruments to protect public and national interests in trade, commerce and industryall eventually fell to the dominance of neoliberalism. In making this suggestion, I have in mind the subtitle of the theme of this conference: “Neoliberalism: Ending the Conspiracy”. So was there a ‘conspiracy’ that worked in Nigeria and many other countries in Africa and the developing world to make neoliberalism hegemonic?

I think the answer to this question is yes – if by that answer you spell out what the “conspiracy” was and how it has worked so effectively. In my opinion, one way in which this could be usefully accomplished is to take seriously the ultimate locus of the claim of the superiority of neoliberalism in efficiency, competitiveness and the pursuit of the social good over opposing ideas like public or state-owned enterprises; strict regulation of trade and commerce in the national interest; and investment in public sector services, utilities and institutions. This locus is the financial services industry of contemporary capitalism which is also known by the technocratic lingo of “financialization”. In other words, beyond military autocracy and the ideological opportunism of thieving political elites, it was “financialization” that more or less effectively brought neoliberalism to Nigerian capitalism. For this reason, it provides our most objective and useful tool for critically deconstructing the truth claims of neoliberalism and exposing the tissue of lies and half-truths on which it is actually based. To do this, permit me to draw specifically from collective experiences of academics inthe Nigeria that we knew and in which we struggled before neoliberalism became dominant as ideology and above all else, asan ethos.

It was one of the most unpleasant, if not the most harrowing encounters that we, academics,used to have with Nigerian bureaucracy, this being the business of obtaining foreign exchange for professional purposes of diverse kinds. These included travel abroad to attend vital conferences; buying books and equipment from the convertible currency countries of Europe and North America and having them shipped to Nigeria;getting approval for payment of stipends and allowances during extended stints of study abroad. In each single instance, after getting the support and approval of your own institution’s Registry and Bursary, you had to make day-long or two-day trips to Lagos where you had to go for approval in each of the following arms of the federal bureaucracy: the office of the Secretary to the Federal Government; the Ministry of Finance; and the Central Bank. I remember distinctly that apart from the physical exertions, it was also a soul-wearying experience that demanded of one supreme patience with civil servants who apparently took perverse delight in lording it over academics, no matter how fleeting this exercise of power and authority was.

Stories and anecdotes from this period of severe protectionist regulation of transactions between our national currency, the naira, and the convertible currencies of the world now seem like tales from another epoch, another lifetime. In place of those harrowing trips to Lagos, anytime that I am in Ibadan these days I don’t even have to travel out of my own neighborhood in the city, Oke-Bola, to remit and receive funds to and from abroad. More crucially, far beyond the issue of the personal or individual convenience of neoliberalism-inspired banking services in Nigeria, the benefits extend to all segments of the economy, including small and medium scale enterprises (SMEs), numerically the largest and most vibrant sector of our national economy. Thus, strictly in terms of technocratic efficiency and the benefits that derive from the connection of our national economy to global circuits for the movement of capital across the whole world to make businesses and enterprises grow and prosper, the protectionist regulations and practices of the pre-neoliberalism period in Nigeria are uncontestably inferior to the facilities and services offered by the “free trade” financial services of the present period. This, in a nutshell, was what secured the hegemony of neoliberalism in our country. As we shall see in next week’s column, this was and is not the end of the story.

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu