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Category: Biodun Jeyifo

And why are we so blessed? – the uneasy mix of grace and truth in friendship [For Femi Osofisan @ 70]

Eni t’olorun o pa, eda to le paa ko si. FO t’olorun o pa, FO fun’ra e ko le paa! [S/he that has the protection of God, nobody can cause to die before his/her time. FO that has the protection of God, FO himself cannot kill before his allotted time!]
The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk G.W. F. Hegel

No, I have not suddenly become religious with the ripeness of age. The words in the first of the two epigraphs to this tribute come from an absolutely terrifying experience that I had in what I believe was the very last ride that I took with Femi Osofisan (FO) on a long journey in his car. The time was the early 1980s and we were travelling from Ile-Ife to Benin. For a long time after the start of the journey, I sat completely speechless as my friend broke all speeding records flying through space and time between 130 to 140 km per hour, absolutely without regard to whether or not we were travelling over smooth tar surfaces or broken, pitted patches of dirt road. When I could no longer take this experience in silent terror, I asked my friend in feigned nonchalance so he would not register my fear why he was speeding so recklessly. To my surprise, FO casually said, “you think all this time I haven’t noticed how tense, how fearful you have been? Relax, my friend!” Well, straight talk begets straight talk and so throwing all my pretended nonchalance to the winds, I answered back: “Relax? When you are going to get us killed?”

After that journey, FO went on to have one more child – our Sisi. As a matter of fact, he went to achieve artistic and professional accomplishments that only few writers and academics ever achieve in the course of a lifetime: one of Africa’s preeminent playwrights and a dramatist whose plays are produced and studied in virtually all the continents of the world, both for the delight they give and the light they shed on the human condition in our continent and our world; more than 70 plays, novels, collections of poetry and essays; a much deserved reputation as one of our continent’s foremost theatre scholars, researchers and administrators; and the winner of the Thalia Prize for 2016, arguably the most prestigious prize for theatre scholarship, criticism and theory in the world. Obviously then, we did not perish on that journey to Benin. But it was my last journey in a car driven by FO. For the truth is that, at least at that period in our lives, the man apparently felt in the bone marrow of his Being that he was indestructible! I have the testimonies of other friends and acquaintances to back me up on this idea. For after apparently having had the same kind of experience on long journeys with FO, such friends and acquaintances came to me pleading, “BJ, you are the only one he will listen to; he is going to kill himself and kill others with him as well!” To such people, I would give a forlorn answer, “you think I haven’t tried, you think I haven’t spoken with him on the matter time and time again? He thinks he is indestructible!”

For those who might think that I am exaggerating, that I am blowing things out of proportion for rhetorical purposes in what is after all a tribute, let me say that I am in dead earnest in this matter of FO’s belief at that period of our early adulthood that a special grace from providence was looking out for him and protecting him from the perils of the road and of life itself. At least, that was what I thought initially. For instance, in this same period, in countless travels over all parts of Nigeria as ASUU National President, I survived only one horrible road crash. By contrast, FO survived at least half a dozen more horrific crashes! And what was truly amazing is that in every single instance, he escaped virtually unhurt. Why wouldn’t such a man come to feel that that he had a special access to the inscrutable benevolence of grace from the powers that govern the universe?

But things were a little more complicated, as I eventually found out from the case of his and my confrontation with – high blood pressure! For it turned out that ore ofe, grace, had come to abide with FO not in a simple manner but complexly. Here, I must emphasize that I am publicly telling this particular anecdote for the first time ever in this tribute. This pertains to the time when the combination of our genes and our restless, manic lifestyles began to make us prone to hypertension. After an illness that nearly took me away, I began to very dutifully take my prescribed anti-hypertensive medications in order to stay alive. Again by contrast, for nearly a whole decade, FO completely ignored my desperate pleas with him to pay attention to his high blood pressure crisis. Whenever my endless pleas made him relent a bit, he would take his medications, but for a short period only after which he would discard the pills again with the absurd “explanation” that he could tell by intuition when the high BP was there and when it wasn’t there! On at least two occasions, one of them far away in Sri Lanka, he had violently explosive, migraine-like headaches that required emergency medical treatment. And still to my great despair, my friend remained incredibly nonchalant about his high BP crisis. It took me a long time to gradually fathom the cause of this sublime dalliance with early demise as a sort of semi-conscious fatalism. Both his father and his uncle had died in middle age and apparently, FO felt doomed by the law of genetic inheritance to have the same fate. But he did not have that fate and has lived beyond the age when his father and uncle departed by two decades – and still counting!

I have gone into this lengthy narrative of that period of our young adulthood in order for me to say, quite simply but in great gratitude, that FO and I, we are extremely lucky to be alive today. By the law of averages and the logic of probability, we should have passed on decades ago. This “luck” that is of course more profoundly a matter of grace, is indeed generational. All of our great and dear friends and companions that are still alive today are also incredibly lucky – Kole Omotoso; Yemi Ogunbiyi; Eddie Madunagu; Odia Ofeimun; Ropo Sekoni; John Ohiorhenuan; Niyi Osundare; Niyi Aiyegbayo; Kunle Akanbi; Olu Ademulegun; Siji Adelugba; Tokunbo Dawodu; Olu Obafemi; Bode Lucas; Chima Anyadike and others. We have all lived far beyond our country’s life expectancy rate of 52 years. Moreover, for about half of the time that we have lived, some of us have lived as if we were wired to fulfill that national life expectancy rate of 52 years! We were of course not indestructible; we were only lucky. We were and are the beneficiaries of a grace that we not only did not earn but actually did everything not to deserve.

Here, Hegel’s famous words, as expressed in the second epigraph to this tribute, come to mind. By the owl of Minerva that only spreads its wings and flies at the end of the day, Hegel metaphorically asserts that unhappily, wisdom and insight come to most women and men at the twilight of their lives, too late to have had the chance to shape and transform the course taken by their lives. But going against the grain of Hegel’s thought, I say that if you are still alive if and when wisdom and insight at last come to you, then all is not lost. I’d like to express this idea both playfully and in all seriousness: failing to perish on the roads in the 70s, 80s and early 90s as much as he tried to, FO began to drive carefully by the middle of the 1990s! Similarly, all of us who have lived past that putative, statistical national endpoint of 52 years, from the chastened experience of our years and decades of recklessness and daring, we have much in knowledge and fortifications of the will to leave to those who will come after us!

The ultimate mark of grace is of course the gift of life itself. Not bare, exigent life but life lived in dignity, unburdened by the terrible scourges of poverty, insecurity and abuse by the rich, the powerful, the enemies of all the values that sustain and enrich human life. Bearing in mind all these caveats to the celebration of life itself as a mark of grace, I am immensely grateful for the life of my friend, FO. I say this because it is through his life and the lives of two or three other friends that I came to understand that friendship is a great gift, one of the most precious manifestations of grace that we have as human beings. Blessed immeasurably by the friendships of FO and these other few friends, I have often wondered: Why am I personally and all of us collectively so blessed in and through our friendships?

Grace is of course a part of the answer to this question: in a country and a continent where lack of the simplest but most basic necessities of life is so deep and widespread, we have been lucky, we have been blessed not to be among the ranks of the wretched, the forgotten, the betrayed. But truth is also a part of the answer to the question, perhaps even more portentously so than grace. For FO and I and all these other friends, we have never hidden truth from ourselves, most of all the truth of our divergent and often conflicting perceptions of what needs to be done to extend the “blessings” of our own personal and professional successes to the underprivileged of our society and our common earth. Indeed, of all my friends, FO perhaps stands alone in this fact that he and I are keenly and deeply aware of the truths of where we agree and where we differ on what needs to be done to extend our own “blessings” to all of our peoples and all of the denizens of our planetary home. Here is another way of putting across what I am trying to say here about truth and friendship or more properly, truth in friendship: a true friend is one whom you love and trust so completely that you are sure that everything you have, including your life, is safe with him or her; on another level, a true friend is she or him from whom you never hide the crucial things about which you do not see eye to eye, things indeed on which you may have conflicting differences. Of all my friends living and departed, FO stands alone as the one with whom there is a near perfect balance of these two dimensions of the close, intimate and very uneasy relationship between truth and friendship.

The grace and the truth, they walk together in a friendship that has been one of the most treasured things in my life. So, okunrin ogun, cherished husband, father, grandfather, sibling, cousin and friend to so many to whom your life has been a rich harvest of blessings, take this salute of your friend (and elder!) as I bid you welcome to our midst, those of us who did not die young and hope to live the rest of our days in a land, a world where the blessings will spread all around, boundlessly and bountifully.

Ire o! Ire aiku ti se baale oro!

Biodun Jeyifo bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

June 12, 2016
The Buhari administration has issued its ‘minimum program’; we, the people, must now issue ours

For too long, ours has been a society that neglects the poor and victimizes the weak. A society that promotes profit and growth over development and freedom. A society that fails to recognize that, to quote the distinguished economist, Amartya Sen, ‘poverty is not just the lack of money. It is not having the capability to realize one’s full potential as a human being”.
President Muhammadu Buhari, First Year Anniversary Speech, May 29, 2016.
Above all, that means political parties and politicians committed to serving the Nigerian people rather than themselves.
From the same speech

From my professional skills as a literary critic one of whose specializations is the use of words and language to either obscure or clarify meaning, I checked very carefully to determine whether or not President Buhari’s quote from the great Harvard Nobel Laureate in Economics, Amartya Sen, in the first epigraph to this piece was a mere opportunistic appropriation that did not fit in at all with the overall philosophical and ideological tenor of the president’s first year anniversary speech. After all, Nigerian politicians do this a lot, perhaps the most egregious example I can think of being Atiku Abubakar quoting Frantz Fanon! In this particular case of Buhari grounding the moral and philosophical foundations of his speech in the ideas of Sen, I was greatly pleased to discover that the quotation was not gratuitous, was not opportunistic. For as much in substance as in finer points of detail, Buhari’s speech was powerfully evocative of a genuine and robust social egalitarianism that had for a long time now seemed to have vanished completely from both the discourses and policies of our ruling class politicians. It is true of course that the President’s claim that his government’s plan for the poor and the downtrodden of our society “by far the most ambitious social protection programme in our history” is vastly overstated. We have the programs and policies of the Awolowo welfarist governance in the First Republic and the social democratic policies and acts of the PRP state governments in Kano and Kaduna to disprove Buhari’s claim for the program his administration is about to launch. However, we must give this much credit to the president’s claim: this is the closest we have come since the resumption of civilian democratic rule in 1999 to a “Talakawa Liberation Minimum Program” What does this mean?

To respond substantively to this question, first a clarification of what a “minimum program” is, especially in contrast with a “maximum program”. In a “minimum program” of deep and meaningful socio-economic reforms in favor of the marginalized majority, the basic structure of greatly unequal wealth and income distribution is left untouched and the wealthy and the powerful still call the shots and corner the greater part of the surplus value generated in the economy. Moreover, a “minimum program” is profoundly gradualist and incrementalist: even if the program lasts for several decades, only a small percentage of the poor will see meaningful improvement in their conditions of life. Finally, a “minimum program” is really a manifestation of the enlightened self-interest of the rulers: they see and fear great and damaging social convulsions that may sweep their rule away and so they act, not so much because they want to end or substantially reduce poverty, but only and mainly because they want to either save themselves or prolong the day of reckoning. Seen in the light of this explanation, the absence of a “minimum program” in the 16-year rule of the PDP is the best indication that we have that that moribund ruling party was completely devoid of enlightened self-interest, so total, so self-defeating was its predatoriness.

We can only very briefly deal with the concept and praxis of a “maximum program” since we have never had one in the annals of our political history, with perhaps the debatable exceptions of the proclamations of the both the January 15, 1966 coup and of the so-called “Ahiara Declaration” in the secessionist Biafra Republic. Moreover, a “maximum program” typically comes only on the heels of a revolutionary overturn of the existing political order, hardly ever on the basis of the electoral defeat of a ruling class party by another party, another faction of the same ruling class.

Having thus acknowledged the deep divide between a “minimum program” and a “maximum program”, we must observe that there is sometimes a deliberate and sincere attempt to lead one to the other, to see the incremental, gradualist gains of the “minimum program” as milestones towards the sea change of the “maximum program”. In other words, some progressive and reform-minded governments and ruling class parties see their embrace of a “minimum program” as, not an end in itself, but a means towards achieving a far more genuine narrowing of the great gaps between the haves and the have-nots. I happen to think that this is not the case with the “minimum program” outlined in Buhari’s First Year Anniversary Speech. If that is the case, we, the people, have to issue our own “minimum program” and bring it into dialogue with that outlined by the President.

The cornerstone of Buhari’s “social intervention programme” for the benefit of the Nigerian masses is the allocation of 500 billion naira in the 2016 budget for the following five key areas: job creation opportunities for five hundred thousand teachers and one hundred thousand artisans throughout the nation; 5.5 million children to be fed nutritious meals to improve learning and completion of education rates; a conditional cash transfer scheme that will provide financial support for up to one million beneficiaries, most of them market women, together with four hundred and sixty thousand artisans and two hundred thousand agricultural workers, all across the nation. This all sounds very impressive, but only on the condition that this will not be a one-time only budgetary allocation. For altogether, the whole programme will affect far less than 10% of the national population. Even if one makes an adjustment for the multiplier effects of some of the individual items of the programme, it is only on the condition that the same or even higher levels of allocation will be made for extension of these projects in annual budgets throughout the life of the Buhari administration that we can say that this is indeed a genuine talakawa “minimum program”. On this note, it is significant that the President was completely silent on this point, leaving us with no other conclusion than that this is almost likely a one-time only affair. In our people’s talakawa “minimum program”, it must be clearly spelt out that we are talking of repeated annual budgetary allocations for these projects well beyond the life of the current administration. And most important of all, the size of the total allocation should be greatly enlarged by at least 300%. What is the basis of this demand?

One of the most astonishing things about the President’s First Year Anniversary Speech is that it actually asserts that 30% of the budget will be for capital projects – as if this was a profound or revolutionary change from the existing status quo. When I saw this figure, I thought I had misread the text, but a second, more careful look showed that I was not mistaken. Then I thought that perhaps this was the result of a mistype by the speechwriters. This is because this is exactly what the PDP and the Jonathan administration left as a legacy to Buhari and APC: expenditure for capital projects is immensely dwarfed by appropriations for recurrent expenditure. In plain language, the cost of governance is absurdly high in our country; indeed, it is one of the highest in the world. To leave this practice, this tradition completely unchanged means that the sums available for the talakawa minimum programme of the administration is severely limited. Add to this the fact that what our legislators and public officeholders get as salaries and allowances are many, many times larger than what millions of our people will get in Buhari’s “minimum program”. In other words, it is still “monkey dey work; baboon dey chop”.

It is important to speculate on why the President leaves the structure of the inverse largeness of recurrent expenditure in relation to capital expenditure more or less intact as it was handed over to him by the PDP. On this account, it is instructive for us to bring into the present conversation the words of the second epigraph to this essay: “Above all, that means political parties and politicians committed to serving the Nigerian people rather than themselves”. The whopping part of the cost of governance in our country goes to paying politicians in government and the legislature salaries and allowances that are one of the highest in the world: this is not serving the Nigerian people; it is the Nigerian people serving politicians! If the President means what he says and says what he means in the words of this second epigraph, he must have the courage and the will to put an end to this legalized and institutionalized pillage by our politicians that is diverting colossal sums of money away from programs for the poor, the excluded toward whom Buhari seems so solicitous. After all, he is the head of the ruling party.

Will he do it? Can he do it? Not without a great shakeup throughout the rank and file of the new ruling party. And that is the bottom line of our own peoples talakawa minimum program. If the President had the opportunity to consult Amartya Sen on this matter, that is the advice he would get from the thinker he so approvingly quotes in his First Year Anniversary Speech.

Biodun Jeyifo bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

June 5, 2016
When “Hear Word! (Naija Woman Talk True)” came to Harvard – finally

Gboro, iyawo gboro/Gboro, iyawo gboro so’ko lenu! [Listen, woman listen/listen, wife listen and obey your husband!] From a popular Yoruba “apala” hit song of the 1960s

It a literal, non-idiomatic level, the Yoruba word, gboro, that I have translated as “listen” in the first of the two epigraphs to this piece is more accurately translated as “hear word”. But as every self-respecting translator and linguist knows, literalism is the death of language, especially in its capacity to enable us to actually say what we mean and mean what we say. This is why “listen” is a much better translation of “gboro” in English than “hear word” that is almost nonsensical in the English tongue. But then, along comes Nigerian Pidgin which uses this same bad translation, “hear word”, as its normative term, not only for “listen”, but for “listen and obey”. Tracing our way from this normative Pidgin mistranslation back to the song fragment in our first epigraph, we find rather unexpectedly that in Yoruba “gboro” also means “listen and obey”. More felicitously, it means “listen and comply with what you hear, what you’re told”. Thus, both in Yoruba and Pidgin English – and I dare say most Nigerian languages – the word for listen when used beyond the mere phenomenology of sound, really serves as a powerful normative tool for enforcing obedience and compliance with the established order of things. This is why though in the song fragment in the epigraph only one woman, one wife is addressed, the command is actually to all wives, all women: wives obey your husbands; women, accept that it is a man’s world! In contemporary radical cultural theory and criticism, a word, a phrase that has such power of constructing and imposing identity is said to be ideological in the most effective way possible. But what does all this have to do with the subject of this essay? Well, these thoughts on language, gender, identity and human equality came to me after “Hear Word”, an all-female theatrical production on the condition of women in contemporary Nigerian society came to Harvard, but only after I had thought deeply about the impact of the performance.

Yes, “Hear Word” did finally come to Harvard and, moreover, its coming turned out to be a veritable instance of the sort of outstanding foreign adventures captured in the classic rendering of Julius Caesar’s victorious military campaigns in Pontus: “veni; vidi; vici” (I came; I saw; I conquered). Except of course that in this case, that famous phrase has to be slightly revised to more properly fit the visit of “Hear Word” to Harvard: “we came; we performed; we conquered”. For the three days between April 15-17, 2016 when the show was staged here, the house was not only completely sold out, the impact on the audiences far exceeded all our expectations. Performance is not war, not a military campaign and so the analogy to Caesar here is misleading, even if the phrase celebrating Caesar is metaphorically and fortuitously appropriate. Performance is art; it is poetry in motion, space and time that brings, when truly outstanding, all the emotions that move people individually and collectively to get out of their comfort zones to see reality and the world with fresh eyes. This was what happened when “Hear Word” came all the way from Nigeria to perform to ‘standing room only’ audiences for three days nearly a month ago. If that is the case, why am I just writing about the event now; why didn’t I write about it earlier?

This question is not as redundant as it seems; rather, it goes to the heart of what I wish to write about this performance in this essay. I could truthfully say that the performance took place at a critical period toward the end of the semester and the school year when things were so busy for me that I could simply not find the time to write a review, a discussion of the performance and the group that brought it to Harvard. But this is not the real reason. Also, quite truthfully, I could argue in addition that since in this column about seven months ago I had actually written in great anticipation about the coming of “Hear Word” to Harvard, I could take my time to reflect deeply on the event when it finally took place. [See “Hear Word” comes to Harvard and America: ‘rebranding’ Nigeria with the best in ourselves”, TLH 134, September 20, 2015] But this also is only part of the story. More to the point is the fact that as I sat and watched the performance on two occasions, it gradually dawned on me that I was seeing something of a very rare order in art and performance, something that required one to go back to basics, to first principles.Not to sound too professorial in expressing the nature of this sort of illumination or revelation, I would put it as the moment when the power, pain and joy of a performance takes us to the roots of being and becoming. That’s what happened to me – and as far as I can tell, also to the majority of the members of the audience – when “Hear Word” came to Harvard last month.

In getting to the heart of the discussion in this piece, I draw the attention of the reader to the main artistic and structural features of the performance, with special regard for the most powerful, moving and eloquent moments of what was altogether and almost without exception a performance whose every segment, every moment was well conceived and executed.In its main artistic and performative identity, “Hear Word” combines the best of individual character acting with ensemble group performance. In laywoman or layman language, that means that in some of the 22 pieces of stories making up the entire production, it seemed that one was watching a slice of a dramatic play exploring the emotional and psychic depths of one character’s soul while in other pieces, it seemed as if one was watching experiences common to women as a group, as half of the human race within one particular national community, Nigeria.Those who know anything about theatrical performance know that it is a daunting challenge to successfully combine character acting with ensemble performance. Actually, in my experience, “Hear Word” ranks as one of the best performances that I have ever seen that consummate this rare order of artistic achievement. It so happens that this achievement is central to the overall impact and future potential of the production as, hopefully, it makes its way across Nigerian and many other foreign travels to come. What exactly does this observation, this claim mean?

If you are either an outright misogynist or a covert male and/or female opponent of gender equality and the empowerment of women of all social groups and classes in Nigeria, you could – and perhaps would – argue that “Hear Word” seems to be doing too much all at once. The 22 pieces in the production just about covers the demographic and regional diversity of the whole country, from the North to the South and from the East to the West. The list of issues and topics it covers is truly staggering: the chastening oppressions of child marriages in some parts of the North; in the South-south, the moral cynicism of families that participate in the trafficking oftheir own daughters and nieces in the international trade in abducted or enslaved sex workers; the chillingly unhappy fates of widows in “traditional” marriages in whichthe deaths of husbands transform women into non-persons in many parts of the country; sexual violence, rape andthe ensuing silencing of the victims after the act, within and outside the family as a social unit; the relentless, unending and ‘universal’ chorus of the preference for male as opposed to female children; the ubiquitous practice of training girls and young women to devalue and degrade the girl or woman who tries to set goals and targets that are considered “male”; the often slow and inchoate nature of girls’ and women’s coming to consciousness of themselves as innately valuable and worthy of respect from men and other women. The list goes on and on and, moreover, the stories and anecdotes are legion: “Hear Word” [Naija Woman Talk True] is truly a compendium that apparently wishes to tell it all, almost as if no other chance will ever arise to tell these stories again. So, how did the combination of individual character acting and ensemble performance of the whole group rise to the challenge of this driven, relentless inclusiveness of all the alienating challenges that women face in Nigeria today?

In responding to this question, we must return to our opening reflections on the linguistic and ideological dimensions of the phrase “hear word” as a Nigerian Pidgin rendition of the most controlling and repressive term for the oppression of women, from infancy as a girl-child to adulthood as a married, unmarried or widowed woman. Everyone reading this piece who speaks and/or understands Nigerian Pidgin has heard the phrase used in one or two of its many controlling forms: “you no wan’ hear word?”; “the porson wey no dey hear word, na trouble go teach am sense!”; “wetin we fit do for dis pickin make e begin dey hear word?”; “Ha, you no know am, dem done beat am, beat am, still she no de hear word!”. It was a stroke of simple but profound genius for “Hear Word” [Naija Woman Talk True]” to have hit on this keyword, this trope of ideological control and normalization of oppression that universally applies to diverse groups and situations but finds its greatest functional power of coercion and intimidation in application to women and children as the anchor for all its otherwise staggering number of tales, anecdotes, dances, jokes and songs.At the most obvious level, as one watched the play, it became more and more apparent that the first part of the whole performance comprising about 12 of the 22 stories dealt with “hear word” in its repressive, negative constructs while the closing 10 narratives reversed the dominant, controlling form and began a counter-discourse, a counter-narrative of liberation in which the term, “hear word”, was now being addressed to both the oppressors and the dominated. But at a more fundamental level beyond the structure of the contents of the production, the whole performance came to encode a powerful feminist vision of both oppression and liberation as being in the final analysis, embodied. Speaking for myself, I think that the inspired combination of brilliant individual character acting with ensemble performance made this possible.

Honourable Minister of Information and Culture are you reading this piece? This is a show that did Nigeria proud at its first international outing at Harvard. This outing, this journey of this performance must now extend far beyond Cambridge, MA, to other parts of the world with large Nigerian and African diasporas.

Biodun Jeyifo bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

May 29, 2016
Deregulation – in a fantastically deregulated economy that is neither pro-labour nor pro-business

There is great hardship and suffering in the land – and though the burden is overwhelmingly on the poor of the land, quite a good number of the social elites are also drinking from the bitter cup of altogether avoidable national adversity.I saw this in a concrete, existential and rather sardonic form two weeks ago when I was in Uyo to deliver the keynote lecture at the ASUU National Delegates Conference, 2016. A colleague and an old friend of mine who is a retired social science professor in employment through contract at one of the universities in Lagos, took two whole days to decide whether or not to inform a friend of his that he was in town for the ASUU gathering. This friend of my friend is himself a retired academic, a very distinguished clinical professor of cardiology who had been dean at some of the university medical colleges in Nigeria. What was the source of the reluctance? Well, two weeks ago, a litre of petrol was selling for N320 at Uyo and the visiting colleague was not sure of the wisdom of a call to his cardiologist friend that was certain to make the man take to the road in a car whose petrol tank had to contend with N320 per litre. The thing that would make big, important men sneeze will make the poor man to catch a full-blown cold: at N320 per litre, what is admittedly a great inconvenience for a distinguished cardiologist is a matter of bare survival for the poor, both the working poor and the unemployed poor. All the same everyone but the few obscenely and corruptly rich amongst us suffers when the pump price of a litre of petrol hits N320.

Dear reader, how much is the actual, as opposed to the posted or deregulatedprice of petrol in your part of the country? That is the fundamental question underpinning this short, bitter essay on deregulation and our national economy. Of course, the Buhari administration insists that the new N145 per litre price came from the effects of drastic forex scarcity and not deregulation as such, but we will come to that matter presently in this discussion. In the meantime, a brief circumstantial contextualization is necessary here. For it so happens that after I delivered my lecture at Uyo and went to Calabar by road, I felt a great impulse to travel back to Ibadan (and later, Lagos) by road rather than fly. This was because the road travel from Uyo to Calabar was such a harrowing experience that I wanted very much to see what road conditions were like traveling east to west in the country, a journey that I regularly made in the 80s but had not made in close to two decades. Everyone to whom I expressed this wish promptly dissuaded me from trying it, giving many reasons, not the least frightening being the possibility of being kidnapped en routebefore I got to Lagos, you know a “Harvard professor” and all that is associated with it. The reason that finally persuaded me not to travel by road was, yes, fuel availability and wildly fluctuating price regimes in different localities in the country.

From a columnist’s diary, I can report that after finally flying from Calabar to Lagos and going by road from Lagos to Ibadan, my experience of diversity and differentiation at the petrol filling stations in the city is worthy of note for the light that it throws on deregulation. In the stations that were selling at the posted, officially deregulated price of N145, the queues were very long; in many cases, they were so long that it took the better part of a half day to get to one’s turn at the head of the queue. At the stations that were not selling at the posted price, there were of course no queues. But as I soon found out by driving around foraging for fuel for my car, this did not mean that one simply went for the available petrol at the unofficial or illegal price. This is because, again as everyone knows, illegally inflated prices could range anywhere from N5 to N20 per litre.

Of course, not a single one of these illegal price increases was too big for my personal, domestic economy; after all, I am a member of the socio-economic elite. That was not the point. The point was and is that the difference between N5 and N20 per litre means everything to the overwhelming majority of my countrymen and women. Indeed, as many supporters of the government have stated, the new posted, deregulated price of N145 actually lowered the going price regimes in many parts of the country, Uyo in my own personal experience being one of the worst or most unstable cases. Thus, the government’s denial that deregulation had anything to do with the new posted price can only be properly assessed against the background of this overdetermined context in which official deregulation exists side by side and is often in collusion with unofficial, multiple and perverse deregulations, the subject of this piece: a fantastically deregulated economy that is neither pro-labour nor pro-business.

David Cameron it was that applied the word “fantastically” to corruption in his widely discussed expression of malign disdain for the moral state, the “soul” of our country. But I do admit it: it is from the same British Prime Minister that I have borrowed that word “fantastically”, though of course I am linking it specifically to deregulation in this piece. To his eternal credit, President Buhari did not fall for the cheap, gratuitous and rather puerile insult of Cameron. I do not care for your apology, the President said to Cameron, you and your country are receivers of stolen property and I want only that you return the vast, concentrated loot from my country that is lodged in your banks. In other words, this, in effect, is what Buhari said to the British Prime Minister: the difference between me and you on corruption is that I act on it while you talk but don’t do anything about it. This observation opens up for our consideration the stakes involved in deregulation.

For those who don’t know it, there are quite a few other things that separate Buhari from Cameron in the matter of how the affairs of this world, our world, are run. In the present context, the chief one to bear in mind is, precisely, deregulation. Cameron’s Conservative Party and his government are militantly for deregulation, at home in Britain itself and abroad in the world at large. Against stiff opposition from the Labour Party and many segments of British society, Cameron has been pushing hard to end or drastically reduce the scope of the world famous and much revered National Health Service (NHS) of Britain; cut down massively on welfare benefits to the poor; and hold down state spending on education and other social services vital to workers and the poor.

By contrast, at least so far, the Buhari administration has refused to be compelled by Britain and the forces of Western neoliberalism into full scale embrace or implementation of deregulation.The principal theatres of contention, of war between Buhari’s government on one side and, on the other side, Cameron’s government and all the powerful forces of Western neoliberalism, are devaluation of the naira; privatization of ALL public or state enterprises, especially in the oil and energy sectors; and complete removal of governmental oil subsidy. Given the amount or degree of both open and covert pressure that those media bibles of British and world neoliberalism, The Economist and The Financial Times, have put on the Buhari government to deregulate on all of these fronts, and given also the additional fact that many influential members of the Buhari administration are militant supporters of neoliberalism in general and deregulation in particular, it is nothing short of heroic that, so far at least, the current Nigerian government has remained firm in its stand against the complete and unrestrained deregulation that Western forces of so-called free trade capitalism are demanding of us.

For those who have been wondering why the government has been so insistent that the new N145 oil pump price came from the effects of severe forex scarcity and not deregulation, what I have briefly sketched above is the answer. My own frank view of the matter is that both the internal and external pressure to deregulate became too strong for the governmentand it has merely sought a cover, an alibi in the foreign currency scarcity explanation. Literally and metaphorically speaking, my eyes were opened to this realization by my encounter two weeks ago with that N320 per litre price regime at Uyo. Who knows if and whether there were indeed other places in the country that the price rose higher than that phenomenal N320? The government had to have known of such places and, knowing this, it apparently felt that resistance to official deregulation no longer made sense when unofficial and illegal deregulation had already made a decisive move – as it has always done for several decades now as corruption, waste and squandermania became the prime motive forces of politics, economy and society in our country. What lessons can we learn from this?

Official deregulation is the collective name or designation of state policies and acts that considerably lessen regulation and control over prices, the quality and value of products and services, and the movement of finished goods and raw commodities within the country and between Nigeria and the rest of the world. In this respect, official deregulation is the great weapon of neoliberalism: the more you can remove or weaken controls and regulations between a semi-industrialized, economic monoculture like Nigeria and the rich, industrialized nations of the world, the more surplus you can extract from it. Unofficial or illegal deregulation is the product of corruption, especially of the “fantastically corrupt” variety of Cameron’s insult. In the face of this mother of all corruptions, all regulations, all controls, all checks and balances crumble and the looters reign supreme, even over the law and far beyond and above the legitimate interests of workers and of businesses and enterprises. This is why the first line of defense against the official deregulation that neoliberalism is persistently demanding of the Buhari administration is a massive curtailment of unofficial and illegal deregulation through a decisive defeat of the looters and their powerful allies. I call on NLC and all its allies to hold the line against official deregulation and neoliberalism but to rally round the government in its war against corruption. Indeed, I call on the NLC and all patriotic organizations to not only support the government in the war against corruption but to actually claim and own this war. The first demand of this alliance of labour and the government in the war against corruption? Ask that Malami, the AGF, who is clearly not up to the task, be fired and a new AGF who can collaborate with popular forces be appointed to get the job done.

Biodun Jeyifo bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

May 22, 2016
Socialism and its tangled archives of victories and defeats: for Edwin Madunagu @70

I am a Marxist and a socialist and have been so since 1973. I am also strongly influenced by anti-sexism, humanism and revolutionary internationalism. I have remained committed to what Karl Marx called the categorical imperative, that is the struggle to overcome all circumstances in which the human being is humiliated, enslaved, abandoned and despised… As I have said publicly on several occasions, this commitment comes before everything else, including family, ethnic group and nationality.
Edwin Madunagu, The Nigerian Left: Introduction to History [2016, p 183]

Thank you very much, but please let us put awaythe fears, the worriesof the faint-hearted among us that socialism is dead in our country and our world. Indeed, without being in the least complacent about the challenges ahead of us, let us rest assured that prospects for a post-capitalist era of political, economic and social justice for the vast majority of our people in Nigeria and the peoples of our planet are as good now as they were more than forty years ago when, in the Anti-Poverty Movement of Nigeria (APMON), we first became, instantly and forever, lifelong comrades in working class activism. What is this all about? Well, it is about a quiet but unshakable reaffirmation that Eddie and Bene Madunagu and I made this past Tuesday at Calabar a few hours before my departure for Lagos after a short visit to the couple.

Of course, this undiminished belief in socialism and its bright prospects for the future of our country and the human community will strike many of the readers of this tribute as utterly fanciful. Outside of a very narrow group of what could be regarded as its diehard adherents, the visibility, not to talk of influence, of socialism in the politics of this country is at the present time near zero. More pointedly, in sharp contrast with things as they were only two decades ago, not a single one of our ruling class parties at the present time has anything in its ideology or policies vaguely reminiscent ofsocialism; without exception, they are all for neoliberalism, for privatization of all our public enterprises and unfettered deregulation.And in the world at large, the number of the nation-states of the world that are either actually socialist or socialist-inclined is countable in single, not double digits. Given this general background of national and global politics at the present time, is this faith in promising future prospects for socialism in Nigeria and the world merely an ‘audacity of hope’, as in Barack Obama’s book of the same title?

Yes, it is; except that it is far more than the audacity of a hope that has nothing behind it other than hope itself. Beyond hope as hope, beyond a simple and uncomplicated faith that in the end things will work out for the good, what we have here is the completely rational certitude of Eddie Madunagu, the greatest materialist historian andarchivist of socialism and the Left in our country’s political history, that in the long view of things,historyis on the side of socialism, not capitalism.Madunagu arrived at this certitude not through romantic, fanciful ideas of something innate or natural in socialism and socialists but through an unwavering engagement as much with the defeats as with the victories of the past, present and future of the Left in the struggles for justice for workers and the poor in Nigeria. Indeed, of the many achievements of this comrade among comrades, it is thistotal dedication to going back again and again to the archives of where things went either wrong or right with leftists and socialists in this country that I wish to single out for discussion in this tribute to Madunagu on his 70th birthday anniversary today, Sunday, May 15, 2016. But before coming to this specific subject, it is helpful to locate Madunagu among the group of extraordinary human beings that it has been my great good fortune to have come across in the Nigerian socialist movement in the last four and half decades.

After dedicating my first published book to my father and my maternal grandmother, my second book, The Truthful Lie, was dedicated to three comrades: Seinde Arigbede, Edwin Madunagu and Ntiem Kungwai, respectively a neuro-surgeon; a mathematician; and a political scientist.I confess that before my separate and joint encounters with these three men on Nigerian soil, it was only in the anti-war and anti-imperialist, Third World liberation support movements in the United States that I had met socialists and leftists that were not only brilliant and highly regarded in their chosen professional fields but were also deeply caring human beings with a great passion for justice, equality and dignity for all people, especially the most downtrodden. It is rather strange, both to recollect and to admit this fact now, but back then in the early to mid-70s, the socialists that I had met in Nigeria were, with few exceptions, stereotypical ‘firebrand socialists’ that were mercilessly caricatured in the daily press, in novels and plays and in the lambasting tirades of right-wing politicians like the late S.L. Akintola.

As incredible as this assertion may seem now, especially to readers of this piece below the age of forty, at one time socialists and leftists were widely considered a very strange breed of men and women in our country and our continent. True, some of themdid strike fear and terror in the governments of this country, but only on the basis of a wildly irrational hysteria that saw a looming showdown with communism that was more imagined than real, a hysteria that was in fact manufactured and stoked by ideological proxy wars of the East-West Cold War. Arigbede, Madunagu and Kungwai were the first of the dozens of socialists and leftists that I was to meet in the course of the next two decades that nobody, no government, no rabid right-wing ideologues could easily write off as rabble-rousers, as losers who turned to socialism only because they had been unable to make it in their professions, their private lives, their lackluster forays into bourgeois politics.The list is much too long to give here in its inclusive entirety, but in the 70s and 80s, it was a life-changing experience for me and many others to meet in the socialist movements in this country women and men of the intellectual and moral caliber of people like Segun Osoba; Bala Usman; Toye Olorode; Mahmud Tukur; Dipo Fasina; Molara Ogundipe; Benedicta Madunagu; Idowu Awopetu; Ropo Sekoni; Ngozi Ojidoh; Kayode Adetugbo; Mohammed Sokoto; Dunni Arigbede; Festus Iyayi; G.G. Darah; Tony Engurube; Princewill Alozie; Asisi Asobie; Grace Osakwe; Jibo Ibrahim; Rauf Mustapha. Above all other considerations, what was particularly remarkable about these men and women was the fact that, placing their personal brilliance and professional successes at the service of a cause that was much greater than each person, they created organizations that were unparalleled in their effectiveness in the history of the left in this country, organizations like ASUU, Women in Nigeria (WIN), and NANS. This is precisely the point at which Edwin Madunagu’s almost unique contribution comes into the picture.

At this point in time, I think it is fair for me to say that it is common knowledge in the circles of socialists and leftists in our country that Eddie Madunagu and myself are so close in our positions, our views and our interventions that we are almost inseparable. To this, I can add that we have both been very concerned, very dedicated to documenting and informing Nigerians and the world of the struggles of the Left especially against the background of the distortions and crises of capitalist underdevelopment in our country. However, I think that while a few comrades and compatriots on the Left know of Eddie’s work of careful and painstaking documentation, most people are not aware of just how very deep and wide this work is, especially with regard to the past – or rather, the many pasts – of the socialist, feminist, workers’ and mass movements in Nigeria.

I draw the attention of the reader to the fact that, for the very first time in this tribute, I have just alluded to the diversity, the multiplicity of the many levels and strands of leftists and socialists in our country. As a matter of fact, I now in addition draw the reader’s attention to the fact that the list of dedicated socialists, feminists and radical leftists that I gave earlier in this piece is dominated by academics and intellectuals. Though he is himself an academic and a scientist, Eddie Madunagu’s sustained work as the quintessentialhistorian and archivist of the Left in Nigeria has ranged far beyond academia to a consistently ecumenical purview that takes in virtually all the major figures and key players of the past and the present, in essence demonstrating that genuine and passionate socialism did not begin with the present generation. Permit me to give a succinct elaboration of this observation.

Among the many published works of Eddie are the following that are crucial for an understanding of the victories and defeats, the successes and reversals of the Left in this country: The Philosophy of Violence (1976); The Tragedy of the Nigerian Socialist Movement (1980); Human Progress and Its Enemies (1982); Problems of Socialism: the Nigerian Challenge (1983); The Political Economy of State Robbery (1984); The Making and Unmaking of Nigeria (2001); and Understanding Nigeria and the New Imperialism(2006).Not included in this list is the considerable number of journalistic pieces that Eddie published both while he was on the editorial board of The Guardian and later as an unattached stringer. There are also many written but as yet unpublished manuscripts in his vast output. Thus, what we confront in this immense corpus of Madunagu’s writings is an array of issues and subjects too vast to be grouped under a single theme. But even so, a careful perusal of the published and unpublished materials will readily reveal the consistency with which Eddie has been obsessed by the avoidable errors, the missed breakthroughs, the promising roads not taken. Speaking only for myself, I have been particularly awed by the passion and scrupulousness with which Eddie has approached the lives and works of what we now know as the Old Left, all in a bid to tease out what connections and legacies, positive and negative, they have with us. In the writings of no other major figure of the Nigerian Left at the present time will you find figures like Pa Curtis Joseph, Pa Michael Athokhamien Imoudu, S.G. Ikoku, Tayo Akpata, Eskor Toyo, Ola Oni and the Zikist revolutionaries of pre-independence Nigeria. And here, it is necessary for me to point out that in many cases, Eddie actually sought out and had extensive interviews with these figures before they passed on;and some of them indeed not only gave full access to our indomitable archivist but in fact donated their papers to the holdings of the Calabar International Institute for Research, Information and Documentation (CIINSTRID) that Eddie, with the cooperation of a few other comrades including this writer, founded in 1994. By the way, CIINSTRID is the only free research institution and public library of the Left on the African continent.

The work of Eddie Madunagu has been monumental; but it is still unfinished.As I wish my friend and comrade a hearty welcome to the club of septuagenarians that I joined only five months ago, I wish to applaud the vastness of the archives that he has bequeathed to us. In those archives are the details of the many problems that socialism and socialists have faced in our country and our part of the world. What we must now do is square off those archives with the archives of the problems and challenges that socialism and socialists have faced in the world at large. It so happens that the prospects for a post-capitalist future are indeed much brighter in many other parts of the world than in our country at the present time. But we are part of the world at large, thanks in part to global capitalism. No comrade that I know understands and appreciates this contradiction better and keener than Edwin Madunagu.

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

May 15, 2016
Neoliberalism at home and abroad in the world: a postscript

As postscript to the series that began three weeks ago in this column, I wish to start this piece with observations and reflections that take neoliberalism on its own terms, in its own ideological self-understanding, especially with the role of our megabanks. 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 funds 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. To put this in a more positive formulation, it does not hurt a developing country like Nigeria to have megabanks that can move capital easily and expeditiously across the whole world; indeed, it makes a crucial area of our national economy keenly competitive both regionally in West Africa and also globally in the centers of the inter-state and international financial services industry.

But this is true and valid only if one looks at technocratic efficiency in isolation, without extending the claims that one makes for the banking and financial services sector in Nigeria to the national economy as a whole. Perhaps it does something to our sense of collective national pride when see television advertisements around the world that feature Nigerian megabanks like GTB, Zenith, Eco Bank, First Bank, Union Bank right there among the foremost banks in the world, but has this made 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 enterprises 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 uncountable 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 without any 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 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 attracts far greater finance capital than 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 having contributed much to 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 industrial 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 that produced advanced micro-processes to probe deep into the oceans, the heavens, the seas and the deep interiority of human genes, finance was and is largely devoted to making and doing things that both human beings and the heavy machines we make cannot do. 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.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.

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.

Fortuitously, 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 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 the 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 of 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. We could say that since what they used to do to the peoples of the poor countries of the world, the rich counties of the global North are now doing to their own people, the chickens have come home to roost. But there is no cause for gloating when all the working people, all the poor people of the world are catching hell from the ravages of neoliberalism.

No countries, no peoples like being SAPPED! 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, a sort of self-reappraisal as advocates and defenders of the welfare state, of 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 that are still sold on neoliberalism. As a matter of fact, Nigeria is one of the few countries in the world in which all the ruling class parties and the majority among members of the political class still believe that neoliberal ideas and policies are here to stay forever in a quite remarkable divergence to what is happening in many other parts of the world. The very worst of these apostles and 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!

In the months, years and decades ahead of us there will be time enough to deliberate carefully on what will come after neoliberalism, specifically in our country but also in our region and the rest of the world. The point is what is to be done now, at this moment when a new formation of the ruling class has come to power on the slogan of change, change, and change. Change without transformation, growth without development? In other words, more of the same with neoliberalism? Nasir El Rufai, will you please speak up?

Biodun Jeyifo bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

May 8, 2016
Megabanks, megachurches, mega-looters: neoliberalism at home and abroad in the world (3) [Random thoughts and notes]
In this closing piece in the series that began two weeks ago, let us begin with the question with which we ended the discussion in last week’s column: How did we move from Sabo Bakin Zuwo to Sambo Dasuki? Let us recall the contents of this question. When tens of millions of naira were found in his bedroom after the coup of 1983 that terminated his incumbency in the Kano State executive governorship, Sabo informed the police detectives that since the money was “government money”, Government House was a logical place in which to stock the money. Moreover, Sabo later vehemently denounced the detectives who carted the stolen loot from his bedroom for underreporting the amount they took away from “Government House”. Last year, 2015, when millions of monies in dollars and other foreign, convertible currencies were found in Dasuki’s house, what did the former National Security Advisor to Goodluck Jonathan say? Well, we don’t know exactly what he said to the EFCC operatives that found the monies in his house; all we know is that in his place, his lawyers, a phalanx of Senior Advocates of Nigeria (SAN), have been speaking for him in the law courts. So far, these lawyers have said little or nothing about either the monies found in Dasuki’s home or the immensely vaster sums of the billions of dollars lodged in both Nigerian and foreign banks. To the contrary, Dasuki’s lawyers have been fixated on consolidating the terms of his release on bail so that he can travel out of the country for medical attention.

What points, what lessons concerning looting in the age of neoliberalism am I making in this matter of the move that we havemade in our national economy from Sabo to Dasuki? First point: compared to the monies found in Dasuki’s home in 2015, the loot found in Sabo’s house in 1983 was, as the Americans would put it, peanuts. Second point: the loot found in Sabo’s bedroom was all in naira, not in dollars or any other foreign currencies. Third point: although Sabo’s puerile explanation of government money in Government House fooled nobody, it is significant that he found it necessary or convenient to invoke the government as the real owner of the money. Fourth point: Sabo did not speak through any lawyers, any SANs; he spoke in his own voice, as raucous and impudent as that voice was. Fifth and final point: Sabo launched a counter-offensive on the police detectives that carted the monies from his house by alleging that they, too, had stolen “government money” by not reporting the actual sum they took from his bedroom. Well, let me add a sixth point which, I admit, is mere speculation on my part: Sabo was keeping the stolen loot in his bedroom in readiness for the time when he could convert the millions of naira to foreign currencies on the black market and then have them smuggled out of the country in suitcases.

For readers under the age of forty to whom, I imagine, this whole scenario of Sabo and “government money in Government House” might seem so strange as to come from another age, another era, this was in fact how the disposition of looted monies from our national coffers typically organized at that stage of our post-independent economic history. In other words, Sabo’s case was not an exception, not an aberration: government and those who looted monies from its coffers confronted each other directly; and the government was the undisputed superior protagonist in the confrontation.As strange as it may sound now, there was a widespread or common assumption that government money did belong to the government, just as there was a belief, an expectation that “government” mattered and could and would act to protect the monies held in trust for all Nigerians. Dear reader, if you know nothing else about the extraordinary changes that neoliberalism has wrought in our country and many other countries of the world in the last four decades, please know this one particular fact: government did matter as the trustee, the guarantor of our commonweal, of the health and justness of the institutions and processes that make our collective experience as Nigerians safe, secure and dignified.

Yes, “government” very often not only often failed to deliver on these assumptions about its place in our collective existence, it was in fact sometimes turned into the very antithesis of these expectations. But these were aspects of, or enclaves within “government” – like the military and their rapacious self-serving coups; or the civilian politicians and their nepotistic political parties; or the civil services of the federation and the states in their entrenched practices of using administration to feather their own nests; or especially the police and the notorious “wetin you carry” expropriations that they tirelessly make from the already meager resources of the Nigerian masses. No, typically government has been far from perfect, in our country and indeed in most countries of the world. What neoliberalism did was to go far above and beyond the imperfections of government to more or less perpetrate a massive retrenchment or displacement of “government” in favour of something called the market or market forces. In other not to lay myself open to the charge of distorting neoliberalism in its relationship(s) to the government of our country and the governments of the nations of the planet, let me put this point in the language of neoliberalism’s own self-understanding, its own ideology: “the business of government is not business”.

Of course the apostles of neoliberalism and the warriors of its policies and programs never quite clearly come out to say that they are intent on the complete retrenchment of government. Their keywords and phrases are “privatization” and “deregulation”. Their favorite slogan is free trade devoid of so-called protectionist distortions. Their choice targets are trade unions, both public sector and private sector unions. They also do not care much, if at all, for governmental or state investment in public sector institutions, services and utilities like education; physical infrastructures like roads, highways and bridges; and human enrichment projects like health care delivery, public sanitation and waste disposal and the care of the young in state supported preschool and kindergarten programs. But dear reader, think of this crucial fact: about the only enclaves of the government from which the apostles and warriors of neoliberalism have, at least so far, not extended their mega-project of privatization and deregulation are the armed forces, the police, and the prisons. We could add the three arms of government – the executive, the judiciary and legislature – to this list, but everyone knowsthat for neoliberalism to do this, it would have to bear the cost of maintaining these institutions that, for the most part, are not income-generating “enterprises”. Moreover, neoliberalism is in its essence a global and globalizing phenomenon; it is content to leave the “business” of governance in every nation in the world to these three arms of government – the executive, the legislature and the judiciary. But with this comes what we might regard as the real cleverness, the true genius of neoliberalism: national governments are made everywhere to take a back seat to market forces. And in turn, the powerful and the wealthy control and manipulate these market forces.

Dear readers, please do not just take my words, my testimonies at their face value in these matters. Look deeply and carefully at the innumerable manifestations of these things that I say in this series in our country in the last two and half decades. Look especially at the triad of megabanks, megachurches and mega-looters that I have made the prime exemplars of neoliberalism in our country and our national economy at the present time. Each one of the three seem so strong, so impregnable that they seem to be above the Nigerian government as a national government, a government of one country and one country alone. For instance, the vast majority of Nigerians rather naively thought that the mega-looters would flee the country in their private jets with the Second Coming of Buhari, but did this happen? Have the mega-looters not stayed and fought back, in defiance of the wishes and aspirations of the Nigerian government and peoples?As for the megachurches, have we not seen how much influence, how much authority their proprietors have on politicians at home in Nigeria itself and across the whole of the West Africa region? And is the whole world not the hunting and haunting ground of these megachurches, with branches and franchises as far away as in Eastern Europe and the Asian Far East, not to talk of Western Europe and North America? Did not one of the eminencies of these megachurches boast that their intention is to have a church within five minutes of walking in every city, town and village in the developing world and within five minutes of driving in every city in the developed world?

What of the megabanks? Ah, the megabanks, great tidings of joy! Just this week, a friend from home in Nigeria visiting me in Cambridge, Massachusetts, rather proudly showed me his credit card from one of the megabanks at home that he has been able to use quite easily without any fuss in ATMS across America. As I reflected on this information, my mind went back to the 1980s around the time of Sabo Bakin Zuwo’s “government money in Government House” wahala. At that point in time when I was still teaching at Ife, if you wanted to get forex for your naira to enable you to go to conferences abroad, you had to go all the way to Lagos where you would go for approval from first, the office of the Secretary to the Federal Government; then to the Ministry of Finance; and finally to the Central Bank.In most cases, the amount did not or could not exceed $500. And of course, at that time there was nothing like domiciliary or dollar accounts in Nigerian banking. If you were desperate enough, you smuggled forex that you got by any means possible concealed somewhere on your person. Or in suitcases if you were one of the looters. In that period, that age, what is known in the jargon of neoliberal economics as “financialization”, the most important, the most dominant and hegemonic sector of contemporary global capitalism, had not yet made its way into Nigerian banks. In our closing piece in the series next week, we will start with how this came to the Nigerian banking system without the slightest beneficial impact on the poor but to the great benefit of the very wealthy, especially the mega-looters and the megachurches.
- Biodun Jeyifo bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu
May 1, 2016
Megabanks, megachurches, mega-looters: neoliberalism at home and abroad in the world (3) [Random thoughts and notes]
In this closing piece in the series that began two weeks ago, let us begin with the question with which we ended the discussion in last week’s column: How did we move from Sabo Bakin Zuwo to Sambo Dasuki? Let us recall the contents of this question. When tens of millions of naira were found in his bedroom after the coup of 1983 that terminated his incumbency in the Kano State executive governorship, Sabo informed the police detectives that since the money was “government money”, Government House was a logical place in which to stock the money. Moreover, Sabo later vehemently denounced the detectives who carted the stolen loot from his bedroom for underreporting the amount they took away from “Government House”. Last year, 2015, when millions of monies in dollars and other foreign, convertible currencies were found in Dasuki’s house, what did the former National Security Advisor to Goodluck Jonathan say? Well, we don’t know exactly what he said to the EFCC operatives that found the monies in his house; all we know is that in his place, his lawyers, a phalanx of Senior Advocates of Nigeria (SAN), have been speaking for him in the law courts. So far, these lawyers have said little or nothing about either the monies found in Dasuki’s home or the immensely vaster sums of the billions of dollars lodged in both Nigerian and foreign banks. To the contrary, Dasuki’s lawyers have been fixated on consolidating the terms of his release on bail so that he can travel out of the country for medical attention.

What points, what lessons concerning looting in the age of neoliberalism am I making in this matter of the move that we havemade in our national economy from Sabo to Dasuki? First point: compared to the monies found in Dasuki’s home in 2015, the loot found in Sabo’s house in 1983 was, as the Americans would put it, peanuts. Second point: the loot found in Sabo’s bedroom was all in naira, not in dollars or any other foreign currencies. Third point: although Sabo’s puerile explanation of government money in Government House fooled nobody, it is significant that he found it necessary or convenient to invoke the government as the real owner of the money. Fourth point: Sabo did not speak through any lawyers, any SANs; he spoke in his own voice, as raucous and impudent as that voice was. Fifth and final point: Sabo launched a counter-offensive on the police detectives that carted the monies from his house by alleging that they, too, had stolen “government money” by not reporting the actual sum they took from his bedroom. Well, let me add a sixth point which, I admit, is mere speculation on my part: Sabo was keeping the stolen loot in his bedroom in readiness for the time when he could convert the millions of naira to foreign currencies on the black market and then have them smuggled out of the country in suitcases.

For readers under the age of forty to whom, I imagine, this whole scenario of Sabo and “government money in Government House” might seem so strange as to come from another age, another era, this was in fact how the disposition of looted monies from our national coffers typically organized at that stage of our post-independent economic history. In other words, Sabo’s case was not an exception, not an aberration: government and those who looted monies from its coffers confronted each other directly; and the government was the undisputed superior protagonist in the confrontation.As strange as it may sound now, there was a widespread or common assumption that government money did belong to the government, just as there was a belief, an expectation that “government” mattered and could and would act to protect the monies held in trust for all Nigerians. Dear reader, if you know nothing else about the extraordinary changes that neoliberalism has wrought in our country and many other countries of the world in the last four decades, please know this one particular fact: government did matter as the trustee, the guarantor of our commonweal, of the health and justness of the institutions and processes that make our collective experience as Nigerians safe, secure and dignified.

Yes, “government” very often not only often failed to deliver on these assumptions about its place in our collective existence, it was in fact sometimes turned into the very antithesis of these expectations. But these were aspects of, or enclaves within “government” – like the military and their rapacious self-serving coups; or the civilian politicians and their nepotistic political parties; or the civil services of the federation and the states in their entrenched practices of using administration to feather their own nests; or especially the police and the notorious “wetin you carry” expropriations that they tirelessly make from the already meager resources of the Nigerian masses. No, typically government has been far from perfect, in our country and indeed in most countries of the world. What neoliberalism did was to go far above and beyond the imperfections of government to more or less perpetrate a massive retrenchment or displacement of “government” in favour of something called the market or market forces. In other not to lay myself open to the charge of distorting neoliberalism in its relationship(s) to the government of our country and the governments of the nations of the planet, let me put this point in the language of neoliberalism’s own self-understanding, its own ideology: “the business of government is not business”.

Of course the apostles of neoliberalism and the warriors of its policies and programs never quite clearly come out to say that they are intent on the complete retrenchment of government. Their keywords and phrases are “privatization” and “deregulation”. Their favorite slogan is free trade devoid of so-called protectionist distortions. Their choice targets are trade unions, both public sector and private sector unions. They also do not care much, if at all, for governmental or state investment in public sector institutions, services and utilities like education; physical infrastructures like roads, highways and bridges; and human enrichment projects like health care delivery, public sanitation and waste disposal and the care of the young in state supported preschool and kindergarten programs. But dear reader, think of this crucial fact: about the only enclaves of the government from which the apostles and warriors of neoliberalism have, at least so far, not extended their mega-project of privatization and deregulation are the armed forces, the police, and the prisons. We could add the three arms of government – the executive, the judiciary and legislature – to this list, but everyone knowsthat for neoliberalism to do this, it would have to bear the cost of maintaining these institutions that, for the most part, are not income-generating “enterprises”. Moreover, neoliberalism is in its essence a global and globalizing phenomenon; it is content to leave the “business” of governance in every nation in the world to these three arms of government – the executive, the legislature and the judiciary. But with this comes what we might regard as the real cleverness, the true genius of neoliberalism: national governments are made everywhere to take a back seat to market forces. And in turn, the powerful and the wealthy control and manipulate these market forces.

Dear readers, please do not just take my words, my testimonies at their face value in these matters. Look deeply and carefully at the innumerable manifestations of these things that I say in this series in our country in the last two and half decades. Look especially at the triad of megabanks, megachurches and mega-looters that I have made the prime exemplars of neoliberalism in our country and our national economy at the present time. Each one of the three seem so strong, so impregnable that they seem to be above the Nigerian government as a national government, a government of one country and one country alone. For instance, the vast majority of Nigerians rather naively thought that the mega-looters would flee the country in their private jets with the Second Coming of Buhari, but did this happen? Have the mega-looters not stayed and fought back, in defiance of the wishes and aspirations of the Nigerian government and peoples?As for the megachurches, have we not seen how much influence, how much authority their proprietors have on politicians at home in Nigeria itself and across the whole of the West Africa region? And is the whole world not the hunting and haunting ground of these megachurches, with branches and franchises as far away as in Eastern Europe and the Asian Far East, not to talk of Western Europe and North America? Did not one of the eminencies of these megachurches boast that their intention is to have a church within five minutes of walking in every city, town and village in the developing world and within five minutes of driving in every city in the developed world?

What of the megabanks? Ah, the megabanks, great tidings of joy! Just this week, a friend from home in Nigeria visiting me in Cambridge, Massachusetts, rather proudly showed me his credit card from one of the megabanks at home that he has been able to use quite easily without any fuss in ATMS across America. As I reflected on this information, my mind went back to the 1980s around the time of Sabo Bakin Zuwo’s “government money in Government House” wahala. At that point in time when I was still teaching at Ife, if you wanted to get forex for your naira to enable you to go to conferences abroad, you had to go all the way to Lagos where you would go for approval from first, the office of the Secretary to the Federal Government; then to the Ministry of Finance; and finally to the Central Bank.In most cases, the amount did not or could not exceed $500. And of course, at that time there was nothing like domiciliary or dollar accounts in Nigerian banking. If you were desperate enough, you smuggled forex that you got by any means possible concealed somewhere on your person. Or in suitcases if you were one of the looters. In that period, that age, what is known in the jargon of neoliberal economics as “financialization”, the most important, the most dominant and hegemonic sector of contemporary global capitalism, had not yet made its way into Nigerian banks. In our closing piece in the series next week, we will start with how this came to the Nigerian banking system without the slightest beneficial impact on the poor but to the great benefit of the very wealthy, especially the mega-looters and the megachurches.
- Biodun Jeyifo bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu
May 1, 2016
Megabanks, megachurches, mega-looters: neoliberalism at home and abroad in the world (2) [Random thoughts and notes]

Has Nigeria in the last two decades either gone too far or not gone far enough in embracing neoliberalism? As I stated in the conclusion to the beginning essay in this series last week in this column, since this question does not interest me in the least, I will not address it at all in this series. However, to avoid the impression that I am avoiding the question because I have no effective response to the champions and defenders of neoliberalism in our country, let me briefly give the reason why I have chosen not to address the question. Very simply, here is the reason.

All over the world, the debates between those for and those against neoliberalism is a perpetual and never-ending debate, including the United States, the heartland of both global capitalism and its current phase of neoliberalism. Nigeria is one of the few states in the world – indeed perhaps the only state in the world – where the champions of neoliberalism feel that this crucial debate, this elemental struggle between neoliberalism and its opponents is over, and the champions of neoliberalism have won the battle. As I write these words on Friday, April 22, 2016, three of the five remaining candidates in the U.S. presidential primaries are waging a fierce battle of words and ideas against neoliberalism. These candidates are Bernie Sanders on the Left, Hillary Clinton at the Center and Donald Trump on the Right. In varying degrees of passion and varied ideological hues, all three are vigorously challenging fundamental policy and ideological postulates of the free trade agreements that the U.S., in its moment of unbridled neoliberalism, imposed on itself and the rest of the world. In other words, economic nationalism, in form of ideas pertaining to protectionism and regulation, the double-headed ultimate nemesis of neoliberalism, is making its way back into the mainstream of American debates about the economic fate of the country in general and in particular, the hardship and suffering of the majority of Americans.

I do not make reference to this important feature of the current U.S. presidential primaries to imply that if the Americans are at last challenging the central ideas of neoliberalism, this should serve as a legitimating catalyst for us in Nigeria and the rest of the world to begin to question neoliberalism. The premise of my arguments in this series goes much deeper than that and it is this: from its inception in the mid to late 1970s, neoliberalism has faced fierce opposition everywhere in the world, Europe, America and Japan included. On this account, what we are seeing now in the U.S. presidential primaries is no more and no less an indication that the U.S. is at last catching up with the rest of the world in the sustained and fundamental critique of neoliberalism that is at the heart of the economic history of the world in the last half century. And this is happening in America right now because at last, the issue is being raised as to who has benefitted enormously and who has suffered unconscionably in the wake of the world hegemony of neoliberalism.

Nasir El Rufai, articulate and zealous apostle of neoliberalism, unwavering champion of complete privatization of all our public or state-owned enterprises especially the NNPC, are you listening, are you reading these words? Neoliberalism, the late 20th and early 21st century version of mid-19th centurylaissezfairecapitalism, has created unprecedented levels of growth around the world, but only on the basis of the greatest economic inequality in modern history wherein a tiny minority of the populations of the nations of the world grow enormously wealthy while the rest of the population in nearly every country in the world sink more and more into poverty and destitution. This is why I am completely uninterested in whether we have fully embraced neoliberalism or not gone far enough. The central issue is and has always been who gains, who loses; whose bellies are full to bursting and whose bellies are bloated because of the kwashiorkor political economy of the criminal justice system as it pertains to the prosecution of mega-looters in Nigeria.

Dear reader, what I am arguing here may be unusual, but it is easily demonstrated and it is this: neoliberalism is at the heart of the looting of our national coffers on the scale in which we have seen it in so many unbelievable cases but particularly incases like the oil subsidy mega-scam of 2010 and Dasukigate of 2015, cases that posed grave threats to the survival of the nation. In the oil subsidy mega-scam, the sums involved were much bigger than the total amount in the nation’s budget for the year in question. In the Dasukigate mega-scam, the sums were diverted from their intended, budgeted use: procurement of arms for the army in the war against the Boko Haram insurgency. In the oil subsidy case, not a kobo of the stolen loot has been recovered and no one has been penalized for the crimes. And with regard to Dasukigate (and all the other fresh cases currently being tried in the law courts), we are seeing the incredible spectacle of the prosecution and the entire country being forced into lame, defensive positions as lawyers, magistrates, judges and pundits mount arguments and devise tactics and strategies rooted in the Nigerian legal superstructure and its institutions in support of the rights of the looters. Welcome to looting in the age of neoliberalism!

Of course, this is not to say that large-scale looting, and more generally miasmic corruption, started with the inception of neoliberalism. That is not the case. Looting is as old as human social and economic history itself; and corruption is endemic to basic moral failings of humankind that will always be with us as a species. But the scale and kindof the looting of our collective wealth that we are dealing with now in the law courts in Nigeria is nothing but the underside of the freewheeling, deregulated (or indeedunregulated) brand of capitalism that neoliberalism brought into being. Against this historic backdrop, there are three things to bear in mind with regard to looting in the age of neoliberalism: first, it must be pitched at a colossal scale, dwarfing all “normal” or previous levels of looting in the country and the world; secondly, it must be unregulated or indeed be unregulatable; thirdly and finally, starting from Nigeria but going far beyond the borders of the country, it must be able to travel around the globe, traversing all the economic regions and currency zones of the planet. Let us look briefly at these fundamental preconditions of looting in the age of neoliberalism as they apply to Nigeria at the present time. As we do this, please bear in mind, dear reader, that neoliberalism does well what it is meant to do around the world because of the massive institutional and moral distortions it brings into being in the public affairs of nearly all the nations of the world.

Mega-looting in our country as the product of a (falsely) triumphant neoliberalism would have been impossible without the introduction of interlocutory injunctions and stay of proceedings into the administration of the criminal justice systemin Nigeria. As I have remarked countless number of times in this column,we are the only country in the world where this takes place; in all other countries in the world, interlocutory injunctions are applied only to civil cases. To this observation, I now wish to add two new observations that take us into the heart of neoliberalism. First, the diversion of interlocutory injunctions from its exclusive and normative restriction to civil cases to extensive application inthe criminal justice system in our country is an extremely costly affair; money changes hands on a colossal level, in both local and foreign currencies. Secondly, this in effect means that the loot must be big, it must of necessity be super-scale, for there are many SANs, many magistrates and many judges to “settle”. To these now add the following element and the circle of the neoliberal paradise enjoyed by Nigerian mega-looters and those who live on surplus extraction from their loot is complete: the megabanks must be there and willing to move the stolen loot around the capital markets and safe havens of the financial services industries of the world. Stolen loot in Nigeria used to be moved around throughthe smuggling of suitcases packed with foreign currencies into and out of the country. But that was before the global ascendancy of neoliberalism with its central dependence on megabanks that are able to electronically move billions and trillions of financial capital around the world.

Of course, allegedly, hundreds of thousands of foreign currencies of diverse denominations were found in Sambo Dasuki’s house in Abuja. But this is not comparable at all to an earlier time when the same kind of loot was found in the home of former Kano State Governor, the late Sabo Bakin Zuwo, of laconically comicand sardonic memory. To the police detectives who found the loot in his bedroom, Sabo was alleged to have said with deadpan composure: “What you find here is government money; where else do you expect to find government money if not in Government House”? We have come a long way from Sabo to Dasuki. The space between them is marked by the movement from a time, an age when local and national priorities still mattered, still mediated market forces to the present neoliberal age in which these same local and national priorities have become very tough to defend and sustain against looters who, in contrast to what many Nigerians naively expected, did not run away in their private jets in the wake of Buhari’s Second Coming, looters who indeed stayed and are fighting back, aided by seemingly invincible forces within and outside the judiciary. How this movement was consummated will the starting point in next week’s continuation of this series.

Biodun Jeyifo bjeyifo@fas.harvard.

April 24, 2016
Megabanks, megachurches, mega-looters: neoliberalism at home and abroad in the world (1) [Random thoughts and notes]

I readily admit it: the series of essays that begin with this week’s column was instigated by the subject that has consistently dominated my writings in the column in the last two to three months. As every regular reader of the column knows, this subject is the current war being waged in the law courts by the Buhari administration against alleged mega-looters of our national treasury. Readers who may have noticed my increasing frustration at the totally inept manner in which the administration, specifically AGF Malami, is waging the legal battles are right in that perception. As a matter of fact, last week’s column in which I addressed an open letter to AGF Malami was a sort of turning point, marked by my declaration at the end of the piece that for the next six months, I would not be addressing this matter at all in this column. But this does not mean that I am done with the mega-looters and the destructive effect that they have had – and continue to have – on our collective existence as a nation. For the simple fact is that the law courts in which they are being tried – and fighting back powerfully against an inept adversary – is not the only theatre of their operations, their massive impact on our lives and the lives of those who will come after us. This, indeed, is the huge subject that I begin exploring in a series that begins with this week’s column. In this series of about three essays altogether, I will counterintuitively be exploring links between mega-looters, megabanks and megachurches as essential aspects of the current historic phase of global capitalism in all itshemispheric, regional and national formations:neoliberalism. Not to prematurely reveal the conclusions in this opening essay in the series, I will be arguing that much of what we find supremely shocking and objectionable in the unpatriotic acts of the alleged mega-looters comes from – and could only have come from – massive institutional and moral distortions ofneoliberalism on economy, polity and society in our country in about the last two decades.

Dear reader, do not be intimidated by the high sounding tone or the abstract ring of this term, “neoliberalism”, a term that on my insistence links mega-looters with megabanks and megachurches. At the risk of oversimplifying things, here’s a quick, everyman’s and everywoman’s definition of “neoliberalism”: in a world that has become enormously interconnected in economic and commercial affairs, all local, national and regional interests and priorities must give way to market forces that should, as much as possible, be free of regulations and regulators.Here is one crucial additional element to that basic definition, offered to help the common man and woman to understand what neoliberalism really means: government, all the governments of the world, must remove themselves from tampering with market forces, since, as the golden adage that underpins neoliberalism puts it, “the business of government is not business”.Indeed, this particular dimension of neoliberalism that seeks to completely remove government or the public sector from “interfering” with business is the key to understanding the otherwise surprising or even enigmatic use of the suffix, “liberalism” in the term “neoliberalism”: once you remove or massively reduce the role of government in regulating business, the field of play for business becomes “liberal”;it becomes gloriously free for business to operate everywhere in the world. Thus, while neoliberalism is actually not liberal, while it actually seeks to prevent the governments of this world from liberally spreading the economic and financial dividends of capitalist production to the majority of the populations and citizens of the nations of the planet, it has appropriated the term “liberalism” merely because market forces and businesses can move freely and “liberally” around the world andaround all the spheres of the planet’s national economies. These include the spheres of production in public,private,collectivist,non-profit and non-capitalist enterprises, including and especially enterprises in the domain of religion, faith and spirituality.

As a matter of fact, for all who may be confused or bemused by the term neoliberalism, I suggest that perhaps the best way to get an angle on what it means and how it operates is to look at the profile of the big, enormously wealthy megachurches of our country for a grasp of what we confront in this new, historic phase of global capitalism. For who does not know that our Nigerian megachurches, while being quite obviously and even aggressively profit-generating enterprises, are completely free of regulation – except perhaps by God. Moreover, the most successful among them operate transnationally, far beyond the borders of Nigeria. Please remember that neoliberalism is capitalism without and beyond borders, putatively owing no allegiance, no fealty to any nation on the planet. Above all else, please consider this fact: just as neoliberalism makes the vast majority of the peoples of the planet poor and marginalized, in every country in Africa and the world to which our megachurches have successfully transplanted themselves and found hundreds of thousands of fervent followers, only the clergy and a sprinkling of middle class parishioners are economically and socially secure; the vast majority of the congregants are poor and downtrodden.

Unquestionably, the complex moral equation responsible for the looted lives in these megachurches is different from the morality that produces the looted lives of tens of millions impoverished by the looting of our national treasury. In plain language, I would be the last person to suggest that Dasukigate is a mirror image of the kind of surplus extraction that goes on in our megachurches. Whatever one may think or say about the commercialization of religiosity that powers faith and worship in our megachurches, it is nothing like treating the Central Bank as a gigantic ATM machine – as Dasuki did in his diversion of billions of dollars intended for arms procurement for the army for the benefit of himself and his uncountable partners in crime. This important qualification being duly acknowledged, there is nonetheless a common structural dimension between what, on the one hand, looters of the nation do and what, on the other hand,”looters” of the soul in the megachurches do. This is where the megabanks come into the discussion, for the simple fact that they are the linchpin, the glue that holds all the operations of neoliberalism together in our world. In other words, there would be no megachurches and no mega-looters without the megabanks, precisely because the megabanks are the structural and institutional foundations of neoliberalism as the current reigning formation of global capitalism. Permit me to draw the reader’s attention to some obvious but easily ignored facts that give compelling evidence for the structural links between mega-looters, megachurches and megabanks in the Nigerian experience of neoliberalism.

I think it is widely known that our megabanks and megachurches are the only successful multinational or transnational enterprises that we have in Nigeria, with perhaps the single exception of the Dangote business empire. For one reason or another, in all other spheres of economic and financial activities, our business enterprises have found it tough if not downright impossible to compete at the global level, even at the level of the continental Africa region. But in the megachurches and the megabanks, Nigeria has been as successful as South Africa, the home base of most of the most notable African multinational corporations. This much is widely known. But what is not well known or known but not much appreciated,is the fact that Nigerian megabanks and megachurches went global and became transnationally successful not only around the same time but on the basis of joint and intimate collaboration between the two. I confess that this fact was first brought to my notice in Ghana and by Ghanaians. During many visits that I made to the country about a decade ago, I constantly came across discussions in which the uneasy conversations revolved around the presence of many Nigerian-owned banks and Pentecostal churches in the country, the unmistakable suggestion being that there was a link between the two, especially in their dominance over Ghanaian churches and, yes, Ghanaian banks.Significantly, the uneasiness of the conversations had to do with the support, the solidarity that the Ghanaians I talked with expressed for branches ofNigerian megachurches in Ghana that had broken away from the Nigerian headquarters or “mother” churches. As a matter of fact, it was a difficult task for me to disabuse my Ghanaian interlocutors of their conviction that the Nigerian megabanks and megachurches did not come together to Ghana in a secret but tightly knit collaboration to enable both to lord it over Ghanaians, one in the domain of the spirit and the other in material economic affairs. In almost every instance of such incidents, the first thing the breakaway Ghanaian branches of Nigerian megachurches did was to open new accounts in Ghanaian banks and stop paying expected “franchise fees” to the branches of Nigerian megabanks in Ghana.

In making the observations and reflections in this piece, I have not been unaware of the fact that neoliberalism has many articulate and thoughtful defenders in Nigeria. For such people, with the exception of my bringingthe case of the mega-looters into the discussion, nearly everything that I have said in this piece could be turned around and used as an argument in favor of neoliberalism. For instance, the emergence of Nigerian based or owned megabanks as vigorous players in continental African and global financial services industries is a great plus, an exceptional dimension of a general movement into the ranks of the big league of the world’s biggest national economies. As a matter of fact, for these ideological and journalistic defenders of neoliberalism, the essential problem with neoliberalism in our country is not that it wholeheartedly adopted neoliberalism about two decades ago; rather, it is their belief that Nigeria did not then embrace – and up till now has not fully adopted – neoliberalism in full, without equivocations. For such people, the ultimate “proof” of their argument that we have not truly and fully embraced neoliberalism enough is built on three major claims: one, that oil subsidies should go once for all, never to be reinstated; two: that we should completely sell off and privatize all national and public assets and resources; three: that we should once and for all stop artificially propping up the naira as our national currency and let it find its “true” (devalued) value in the marketplace of transnational, global currency exchange.

In next week’s continuation of this series, I will engage these claims of the ideological defenders of neoliberalism, not with a view to either refute or confirm their contentions, but to take the discussion to domains they never, never go wherein we can see who has illegally and immorally benefitted and who has suffered unjustly and unconscionably when the Nigerian political class, with very few exceptions, went neoliberal and abandoned alternative modes of truly liberal modes and forms of both capitalist and non-capitalist economic and political organization of our country and society.

Biodun Jeyifo bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

April 17, 2016