The Nation Newspaper

Category: Biodun Jeyifo

  • Will the Dasuki and Saraki cases still be undecided one year from now? The call for a special anti-corruption tribunal by Justice Oguntade and others to the rescue!

    Will the Dasuki and Saraki cases still be undecided one year from now? The call for a special anti-corruption tribunal by Justice Oguntade and others to the rescue!

    [An open letter to AGF Malami]

    Honourable Minister:

    If you read the open letter that I wrote to CJN Mahmud Mohammed in this column last week, you will immediately recognize that, in a slightly different formulation, the question that is the first part of the title of this open letter to you is the same question that I posed to the CJN at the very end of this column last week. As a matter of fact, permit me to quote the question in the exact formulation in which I directed it to the CJN last week: “To take the cases of Dasuki and Saraki as the most (in)famous of all the cases in the law courts right now, will these cases still be undecided a year, two, three or four years from now, your lordship?” Why am I directing basically the same question to YOU?

    Honourable Minister, you and CJN Mohammed are the most important judicial officers in the land; consequently, what will happen one way or another in the resolution of the war on corruption in our law courts will depend on what you and the sitting CJN do or don’t do. Right now, it does not appear that both of you see eye to eye and are willing to cooperate to ensure that justice is done in the high profile corruption cases. As I said in my letter to the CJN last week, his lordship has recently been making statements of displeasure at what he considers interference with the independence of the judiciary and the rule of the law, statements that were clearly directed at you and President Buhari. This probably arose from the fact that your good self and the President have also been making statements expressing great concern that some highly influential forces in the Bar and the Bench are hell-bent to sabotage the government’s prosecution of alleged looters in our law courts. Indeed, as I am sure you are well aware, there is now a clear division in the bar of public opinion between commentators and pundits who side with you and the President and those who take the side of the CJN.This development is at the heart of the reason why I am writing this open letter to you in the same manner in which I wrote that open letter to the CJN last week, indeed addressing the same basic question to both of you. Before taking up this central issue, permit me to make a comment that might startle you and many of those reading this piece.

    Honourable Minister, President Buhari is not a lawyer, he is not a member of the legal profession. You are. Apart from his political experience as a ruler – military and now civilian – the President’sreal profession, his true vocation is that of a soldier. The kind of “war” he was professionally trained for is military warfare, not legal skirmishes and battles. This is why when as a military ruler he launched a “war” on corruption, the tactics, the means that he used were militaristic. Parenthetically, let me observe here that for the most part they were fairly effective and most Nigerians at the time greatly applauded both the tactics and the results.But even then, with all his popularity at the time, Buhari had opponents that deeply resented his use of those militaristic tactics and means to wage his “war” on corruption. It is precisely this kind of commentators and pundits that arecurrently rising up in arms against the President, now that he is an elected, civilian president who has taken off his military fatigues and donned his babariga. Absolutely without any evidence for their claims, some of these pundits have gone as far as to see a creeping move toward totalitarian destruction of the rule of law in the President’s justified anger at the obstacles being mounted against the successful prosecution of alleged looters in the law courts. On his part, the President has been completely indifferent to such charges – as well he should since, in my opinion, they are completely baseless if not indeed mischievous and cynically opportunistic. At any rate, this is where YOU, Honourable Minister, come in, as both the Attorney General of the Federation and the President’s chief legal adviser.

    Here, I must be completely frank with you, Honourable Minister, inexpressing my disappointment at the fact that if the President himself has not cared to give clear explanations for his disdain, his anger with forces intent on sabotaging the war against corruption in our law courts, why have YOU been silent, why haven’t you explained carefully to the nation and the world what exactly is going on? More specifically, why haven’t you taken issue with the near total disregard for the Administration of Criminal Justice Act, 2015 (ACJA) by most of the magistrates and judges presiding over the trials of the alleged looters? You are the chief law officer of the land, Honourable Minister; it should be of great concern to YOU of all people that the effective law of the land in the administration of criminal justice is being massively disregarded in the law courts trying the alleged looters. Permit me to give a short illustration of what I am saying here.

    Clause 306 and clause 396 of ACJA are pretty clear and unambiguous in the manner in which they have effectively done away with the use of frivolous and obfuscatory injunctions and stay of proceedings to unduly prolong the trials of the alleged looters. Indeed, taken as a whole and applied as required by law, ACJA has reduced the length of the trial of any and all criminal cases in our country to less than one year, inclusive of appeals all the way to the high court. [Let us note here, for the benefit of the cynical journalistic defenders of the human and legal rights of the looters, that this time span is consistent with standard practice in most countries of the world] Already, we are in the tenth month of the life of Buhari’s administration and NONE of the cases in court is anywhere close to resolution one way or another. This the basis of my question to you and the CJN: a year, two years, three or four years from now, will the legal battles over Dasukigate still be in the courts, given the fact that if the provisions of ACJA were being applied some of these cases would be near resolution by now? And so I repeat, Honourable Minister: why the hell have you been so silent, so unimaginably indecisive in the face of the widespread disregard for ACJA in the law courts?

    As I am not unaware or unmindful of the tone of this open letter, let me explain its cause to you, Honourable Minister. Moreover, this is something that every person reading this piece should carefully consider: even if ACJA was being faithfully and diligently applied in the law courts, the backlog of cases going back to more than a decade and half is so vast that many cases would still be around years from now. Add to this the fact that the anti-graft agencies are uncovering new cases every day and dragging new defendants to the courts all the time. For a judiciary that is already overwhelmingly predisposed to prolongations and deferments of cases, this is like a bonanza, a perfect alibi. All they have to say is, can’t you see that we are helpless before the sheer weight of the multitude of cases piling up to the high heavens? And indeed, the magistrates, the judges and the born-again fundamentalist defenders of the legal and human rights of looters have precisely been saying this, shouting it to the rooftops of our national public opinion edifice.However, what remains buried beneath this cacophony is the extraordinary fact that a recommendation actually exists in the recent legal history of our country that a special anti-corruption tribunal beset up exclusively to try the sort of prosecutions that the anti-graft agencies are taking to the regular law courts almost on a daily basis now. What does this mean?

    As I have pointed out before on the pages of this column, in the Jonathan National Conference of 2014 (JNC 2014), the Committee on Law, Judiciary, Human Rights and Legal Reforms headed by Justice Adesola George Oguntade, a retired Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, made a recommendation that only a special tribunal separate from the regular law courts could successfully meet the legal, administrative, human and moral challenges that corruption poses both to our judiciary and our country. Let it be known that the recommendation had the unanimous support of all the members of the committee. I draw your attention, Honourable Minister, as well as the attention of everyone reading this piece to the fact that Olisa Agbakoba, SAN, President of the Nigerian Bar Association, 2006-2008, a highly respected senior advocate and generally regarded as a progressive and enlightened legal luminary among our most influential lawyers, was a member of that committee that made this unanimous recommendation. I mention this fact because Olisa Agbakoba is saying completely different things today about what is happening or not happening in the law courts in the trials of the looters. I think, indeed, I suggest that the question should be put to Agbakoba now whether or not he is still in favour of the urgent need to set up this special anti-corruption tribunal. But far beyond the individual case of Mr. Agbakoba, Honourable Minister, YOU also have to let the nation know where YOU stand on the matter of this recommendation. For let this be clearly understood: if it is not implemented, not even full and vigorous implementation of ACJA can ensure that a year, two years, three or four years from now many cases will not still be lingering in the law courts.

    I end on a positive, hopeful note, Honourable Minister. Six months from now, in a future issue of this column, I will write you an open letter again, confident that things will be much different then. For me, three crucial things are at stake in the current war against corruption in our law courts. First: the stolen loot MUST be recovered and what is recovered must be transformed into economic and social dividends that will bring significant relief to the hardship and suffering of the vast majority of the looted and the downtrodden of our society. Secondly, the guilty must be punished in accordance with scale of their crimes. When the Russian writer, Fyodor Dostoevsky, wrote his famous novel, Crime and Punishment, the crime went with the punishment and vice versa; for if the crime is dissociated from the punishment, the society will lag for a long, long time in a state of moral and spiritual darkness. Thirdly, our judiciary needs deep and wide-ranging reforms; the historic occasion of the ongoing legal battles against the alleged looters in our law courts provides a unique foundational moment for these reforms. You and CJN Mohammed have a large, collaborative role to play in this reform agenda.

    Yours in the service of the nation and its looted majority,

    Biodun Jeyifo                                                                                                         bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • The barrel of the law: the judiciary as subsoil for unregenerate primitive accumulation [An open letter to CJN Mahmud Mohammed]

    The barrel of the law: the judiciary as subsoil for unregenerate primitive accumulation [An open letter to CJN Mahmud Mohammed]

    Justice delayed is justice denied William Ewart Gladstone (attribution)
    Where one thing stands, another thing will stand beside it. Chinua Achebe

    Your Lordship:

    With all protocols duly observed, let me go directly to the subject of this open letter to you: justice delayed is justice denied. I don’t have to tell you of all persons that this is one of the most universally known and venerated legal maxims in the world. The reason for this is quite simple, though it is also quite profound. A person, a community, a nation that is deeply wronged must obtain timely justice in the law courts; if this does not happen, if it takes too long or forever for the wronged or injured party to obtain justice, it is the same thing as having effectively been denied justice. In the worst possible scenario of this sort of miscarriage of justice, the wronged person may have died while waiting for justice. In that case, what use is the “justice” to her or him if and when it comes at last after his or her demise? Even in cases in which actual death is not involved, an injured party who is compelled to suffer delayed or deferred justice usually finds that the effects of the original wrong or injury magnify or fester, leading to all manner of afflictions and crises. Such is the case of our country with regard to the manner in which trials of high-level cases of corruption that involve the looting of our national treasury have become the most delayed, the most deferred among all national systems of administration of criminal cases of the planet. This has been the situation for at least the last decade and half in our country. But now, for the very first time and in a period when your lordship is the Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN) and Chairman of the National Judicial Council (NJC), this established order in our judicial system is being challenged as it had never hitherto been challenged. In this historic context, the question I am putting to you, the question the country and the whole world is putting to you is: where do YOU stand, what are YOU going to do to help to bring this shameful and endlessly unjust judicial order to an end peacefully before – heavens forbid -both the judicial order itself and the country are fatally damaged?

    I put this question to you, your lordship, because it appears to me from recent statements and actions credited to you that you do not seem to recognize that this unprecedented challenge is being made to the long tradition of ‘justice delayed and justice denied’ in our country.Not too long ago, you spoke forcefully against those who, in your opinion, were using the pretext of a few rotten apples in the basket of our judicial system to undermine the rule of law and the independence of the judiciary, leaving no one in doubt that you had the President and the Attorney General of the Federation (AGF) in mind. There is also this: as Chief Justice, you have participated in collective decisions of the Supreme Court that have ignored the provisions of the Administration of Criminal Justice Act of 2015 (ACJA) that have done away with the application of interlocutory injunctions in criminal cases. In other words, the impression that you and the other Justices of the Supreme Court have given is that as far as you are concerned, ACJA does not exist and its provisions don’t matter. Moreover, following your lead, most of the country’s law courts have also adopted this indifference to ACJA, with only a few magistrates and judges breaking ranks with you to rather timidly apply the game- and rule-changing provisions of this landmark 2015 Act. This particular matter of indifference or perhaps even hostility to ACJA of the Supreme Court under your leadership is indeed so fundamental that I wish to use it as the basis of the most important points that I wish to make in this open letter to you.

    You know this, your lordship, but for the layman reading this piece, I need to explain that the main thing about ACJA is that it has considerably reduced the length of time that the trial of all criminal cases, especially the high profile ones, should take in our law courts. Under the relevant provisions of this law, both the original cases and their appeals all the way up to the Supreme Court, would take less than a year at the most. This is a big blow to the existing status quo in which there being no time limit to how long a case might last, cases often last indefinitely, sine die as a matter of fact. Now, as unbelievable, as strange as it might seem, this much is true about the root cause of why trials of high profile corruption cases involving billions of dollars and trillions of naira stolen from our national coffers often last for months, years and even decades: our country is the only one in the world in which interlocutory injunctions are applied to criminal cases; in all other countries on the planet, they are applied only to civil cases.The reason for this goes back again to the cardinal principle of ‘justice delayed is justice denied’: in civil cases, postponements and prolongation follow the dictate of the financial ability of plaintiff and defendant to keep the litigation alive; in criminal cases, everyone, including the society as a whole, loses when trials are prolonged beyond rhyme and reason. Apart from the national shame and embarrassment of being the only country in the world in which interlocutory injunctions are applied to criminal cases – routinely, excessively and frivolously – the real issue here is the question of what use this serves in the national and public affairs of our country.

    I have long reflected deeply on this question and this is my answer: the soldiers, when they were the rulers, had the barrel of the gun to enforce their looting of the coffers of the nation; the civilians, when they came to power in 1999 after a long military interregnum, invented “the barrel of the law” as the means of effecting their own looting, their own pillage, their own unregenerate primitive accumulation. The ubiquitous and almighty interlocutory injunction, together with the endless application of stay of proceedings, are the principal ammunitions of this barrel of the law. Thanks to the cynical deployment of these two armaments of the barrel of the law, substantive issues in the cases of high profile looters are hardly ever considered; the main business is an endless round of postponements and deferments. As a result, the courts at all levels are clogged with hundreds of cases, some of them going back to as far back as the year 2001! This in its own right has become an epiphenomenon, defined as a secondary phenomenon that makes the original phenomenon more confusing, more intractable. What do I mean by this?

    Concretely, everyone accused today and confronted with prosecution for corruption knows that with the backlog of hundreds and thousands of cases in the courts, he or she can use the interlocutory injunction and stay of proceedings with maximum effect, as long as he or she has the means to employ the services of the odious brood of the SANs (with the few exceptions noted). Thus, ultimately, the barrel of the law gives assurance to looters and their judicial backers that no matter how bitterly angry our peoples are in their tens of millions, looting and pillage will be backed by the force of the law and the great poverty and suffering of the many will stand side by side with the obscene and immoral wealth of the few. As Achebe puts it in the second epigraph to this letter, where one thing stands, another thing will stand beside it. Permit me, your lordship, to make this important addition to Achebe’s luminous words: with the barrel of the gun, Nigerians knew how things stood; but with the barrel of the law, there is widespread confusion in the land, even among members of the Bar and the Bench that are opposed to the existing status quo and are deeply ashamed that their profession serves as an institutional refuge forsome of the worst anti-social, cannibalistic robbers on the face of the earth. You are in a unique position to clear up the mess, the confusion, that is if you are really and truly on the side of justice.

    The barrel of the law: your lordship, as I write these words, I have in mind many things happening in the administration of criminal justice in our country at the present time to indicate that once again, although billions of dollars and trillions of naira have been looted from our national coffers, the objective of the “law” is that not a kobo will be recovered and no one will be successfully prosecuted. I have in mind the flamboyant drama of Ricky Tarfa, SAN, accused of bribing judges to induce them to comply with the pre-ACJA status quo and charged to court; he arrives in court with about 90 SANs in a show of force meant to indicate that nothing has changed, ACJA or no ACJA.I think of the Chief Judge of the Federal Capital Territory(FCT), Abuja, who, in contravention of the provisions of ACJA, has ordered all the magistrates and judges under his jurisdiction to stop issuing remand orders demanded by the anti-graft agencies for indicted persons. I think of four judges concerning whom the EFCC amassed evidence of receiving bribes from two SANs and yet the NJC of which your lordship is the Chairman, has not seen it fit to suspend any of these indicted judges. I see the perpetual, endless delays and postponements being granted in the trials of Saraki, Metuh and Dasuki among others. At the present rate, many of these cases will still be in the law courts long after the tenure of Muhammadu Buhari, even if he gets a second term in office.

    Your lordship, when you were appointed CJN in 2014, many commentators within and outside the legal profession wondered whether you would follow in the footsteps of your predecessor in office, former Chief Justice Aloma Mariam Mukhtar, who initiated many badly needed reforms in the Nigerian judicial system. These included instilling discipline against corrupt and dishonest magistrates and judges; fighting for the fearlessness and independence of the judiciary against encroachments of external forces, with special reference to the Executive branch of government; and doing away with some of the age-old, cumbersome and outdated administrative practices of the Bench. You inherited that reform mantle of CJN Mukhtar and it remains to be seen whether or not you will effectively build upon those achievements of your predecessor. However, there is a level, a sphere of reform that Mukhtar did not see: the need to do away with the barrel of the law. ACJA was not signed into law in the time of Mukhtar; it was signed into law about a year after you became CJN. The country, the whole world is waiting to see if you will continue to act and speak as if this law is not the effective law of the land in the administration of criminal justice in our country. Let me put this as concretely as possible, so that there can be no question that my main points in this open letter can be missed. To take the cases of Dasuki and Saraki as the most (in)famous of all the cases in the law courts right now, will these cases still be undecided a year, two, three or four years from now, your lordship?

     

    Biodun Jeyifo       bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Palladium, do you live on Mars? Our judiciary is ‘a laughing stock around the civilized world’!

    Palladium, do you live on Mars? Our judiciary is ‘a laughing stock around the civilized world’!

    Should President Buhari continue in his present course of fighting brutally by hitting below the belt and biting in the clichés on the excuse that the mill of justice grinds too slowly, he will not only have defined his presidency, he will have defined Nigeria and made her the laughing stock of the civilized world, far worse than the corruption he speaks so loathingly about.
    Palladium, The Nation on Sunday, March 20, 2016

    My fellow columnist in this newspaper, “Palladium” (Idowu Akinlotan), must be the only columnist in our country today who apparently does not know that when it comes to the trial of alleged looters, our judicial system is one of the most disreputable national criminal justice systems on the planet; it is indeed, in Palladium’s own words, “the laughing stock of the civilized world”. Every well informed, literate reader of Nigerian newspapers knows that high-profile Nigerian looters are a hundred times far more likely to be successfully prosecuted abroad than in Nigeria itself. But again, Akinlotan is blissfully, even militantly unaware of this fact. Finally, everyone but Akinlotan knows that trials of alleged high profile looters in Nigerian courts are typically so endlessly prolonged that most of them are either never concluded or lapse into a state of suspended animation while the looters walk away free, their loot intact in their domestic and foreign bank accounts. Now, I know that Akinlotan does not live on planet Mars; he lives in Nigeria and is indeed almost unmatched by any other newspaper columnist in the country in his grasp of personalities, details and intricacies of political affairs in our country. So: why is Akinlotan so blissfully ignorant of the well-known fact that the Nigerian judiciary is, at home and abroad, a laughing stock when it comes to the trial of alleged high profile looters?

    This was the question that I kept asking myself as I read and reread Palladium’s column last week.Now, most readers of Akinlotan’s column know that in the last couple of months, he has been persistent, he has been relentless, he has been outspoken in his criticisms of the President, the AGF and the EFCC in their handling of the prosecution of the alleged looters in the law courts. Indeed, Akinlotan has included the masses of ordinary Nigerians in his tirades against the President, the AGF and the EFCC. On the whole, his criticisms have rested on two basic claims. One: that the guilt of the alleged looters having already been decided before their trial, the President, the AGF and the masses are more than ready to ignore or perhaps trample to the dust all the standard protocols of fair judicial trial like the independence of the judiciary, the authority and dignity of trial magistrates and judges, and the right of the accused to a fair hearing. Two: in his criticisms of the manner in which the President and his AGF have been prosecuting the alleged looters, Akinlotan asserts that the new administration is doing irreparable damage to the rule of law in our country, so much so that, in Akinlotan’s view, there is a distinct, creeping move toward a dictatorship in which after the trial of the alleged looters might have been forcibly “won” by the President, the judiciary would have been so crippled that we, the Nigerian people, will have no rule of law left to protect and enforce our many civic and political rights. As a matter of fact, on the basis of this second point, Akinlotan has consistently argued over the last few months that Buhari is doing far more damage to the judiciary than anything that corruption and the looters have done to Nigeria and our judicial order.

    In his column last week, Palladium took these criticisms to a new high – or anew low, depending on whether one is in agreement with Akinlotan or one finds the intellectual – and now also factual – bases of his arguments and criticisms false, biased and tendentious, as I do.Titled “Justice Haliru’s welcome boldness”, Akinlotan went way beyond all his previous pieces on the war on corruption to claim, vigorously and passionately, that we are more or less already at that dreaded moment he had been warning all of us when the rule of law would have been so gutted that only its shadow would remain. Against the massive and perhaps even overwhelming evidence that one can easily bring to Akinlotan’s attention, he asserted that the whole of the Nigerian judiciary comprising the Bar and the Bench are quaking in fear and trepidation before the tyranny of the President, the EFCC, the DSS, the Army, etc., etc.It was against the backdrop of this alleged universal climate of fear hanging over the Nigerian judiciary in its entirety that Akinlotan praised Justice Haliru’s “boldness” in terms so superlative that the stature that Palladium bestowed on the judge was larger than life. Perhaps it is useful at this juncture to put this point across in Palladium’s own words:

    “Until Justice Haliru seized the bull by the horns, judges were in a panic to avoid the waspish tongue of the EFCC; and because of the bind Ricky Tarfa, a lawyer and senior advocate found himself, lawyers tiptoed around the anti-graft agency and spoke in whispers around its officers. In fact, for many months until now, it was perhaps only the Chief Justice of Nigerian (CJN), Mahmud Mohammed, who stood up to the presidency and the rampaging anti-graft agencies, warning against the wholesale condemnation of the judiciary”.

    Since there is no other delicate or sensitive way to put the matter, I assert here that the profile of a cowed and quaking judiciary that Palladium paints in this quotation is not only overblown, it is completely false. For instance, on the first day of the hearing of the Ricky Tarfa case, the accused was accompanied to the hearing by a horde of SANs so large, so aggressive and so demonstrative in their demeanor that the trial judge was compelled to remark that if this show of force was meant to intimidate him, he wanted the learned senior advocates to know that he was not intimidated. By the way, this is a case in which the accused is alleged to have transferred large sums of money to judges trying some looters with the express purpose of influencing them in the cases they were trying. Moreover, contrary to Palladium’s claims in our quotation from his column last week, the senior advocates of virtually all the accused looters are not shaking with fear and trepidation; they are militantly and confidently ignoring ACJA 2015 and staying put with the existing status quo of criminal justice administration in Nigeria that allows the endless prolongation of the trial of high profile looters, And for the most part, except in a few notable cases, they are getting the willing cooperation of the trial magistrates and judges. Here we might as a matter of fact invoke the case of Bukola Saraki and his lawyers: every time that they show in up court in the endlessly adjourned and resumed sessions, they appear with a large throng of supporters in an evident show of force that is obviously meant to show the trial judge, the country and the whole world that they are not intimidated, that they are not cowed. And haven’t the President of the Nigerian Bar Association and many other senior advocates made public statements intended to isolate members of the NBA opposed to the countless invocations of stay of proceedings in the trials of the looters? What is the factual source of Palladium’s portrait of universal fear and trembling in the Bar and the Bench?

    Factually, one of the most amazing claims of Palladium in his column last week is the claim that the problem of the Nigerian judiciary in matters pertaining to the trial of high profile looters pertains to only a “few corrupt judges and lawyers” (his own words). Please listen to the following expression of alarm by Akinlotan that Buhari’s manner of conducting his war against corruption in the law courts might cause a calamitous loss of faith in the judiciary among the Nigerian public: “How, in their enthusiasm to clean up the country, President Buhari and the anti-graft agencies became inured to the dangers of provoking incalculable damage to the judiciary and even instigating public loss of faith in that vital institution is hard to explain”. Was Palladium mentally asleep when he wrote words and sentences like these in his column last week? What can one say to an adult, literate and highly articulate Nigerian who does not know that for at least more than a decade now, there has been a widespread and profound public loss of faith in the Nigerian judiciary, whether one is talking of justice for low-level common felons who often languish in jail for long periods while awaiting trial or, more portentously, high profile looters who get away with mindboggling sums of loot on the basis of the impossibility of bringing their prosecution to a conclusion one way or another? And indeed, I ask again: does Palladium live on planet Mars?

    There are quite a number of other terribly negative facts about the Nigerian judiciary that are common knowledge but that astonishingly, Palladium feigns complete ignorance of them. One: it is well known that the Nigerian judiciary is the ONLY national judicial system in the world in which interlocutory injunctions to prolong trials are allowed in criminal cases; everywhere else in the world, they are allowed only in civil cases. Two: bail is normally regularly granted to high profile looters, no matter how humungous the amount of loot they have stolen. This also is well known: when they are granted bail, they are asked to surrender their passports; but after the case might have lasted for months or years, their passports are returned to them and they are then able to leave the country, thereby making the prolongation of their cases more possible. Three: by an overwhelming percentage, the number of trials of looters more or less permanently stalled in the law courts is far greater than the number of cases that have been resolved with conviction of the accused and the recovery of the stolen loot. Four: the corruption perpetrated by high profile looters in our country could never have assumed the impunity that has become world famous if it did not have the systemic backing of the Nigerian judicial order. If Palladium says he does not know or has never heard or read of these facts, I will ask him to tell it to the marines.

    In conclusion, let me say this: to Palladium, Justice Haliru and the CJN are heroes who are speaking out boldly and courageouslyagainst a creeping trend toward the Nigerian public’s total loss of faith in our judiciary. But to me and I dare say to most Nigerians, what Palladium regards as the heroism of Justice Haliru and the CJN is really more like hypocrisy. Where have Justice Haliru and CJN Mohammed been all the years and decades when the looters, their lawyers and compliant judges have seized control of the Nigerian judiciary? Why have Justice Haliru and the CJN not cried out and struggled for justice for the millions of Nigerians whose lives have been looted again and again? And why has this CJN in particular never expressed regret or shame that our judiciary is the laughing stock of the civilized world?

    Biodun Jeyifo                                                                                                         bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • The exposures and the arrests are legion; but there are no convictions, no recovery of the loot yet in sight

    The exposures and the arrests are legion; but there are no convictions, no recovery of the loot yet in sight

    The recent exposures probably far outnumber the arrests but still, the scale of the arrest of high public officeholders for corruption is probably without precedent in the history of Nigeria. Moreover, the arrest of public officials for corruption is higher in our country today than any other country of the world at the present time. Simply stated, in its twelve-year history, our national anti-corruption agency, the EFCC, has never been busier than at the present moment. Prior to now, exposures of corruption of mindboggling proportions had been the main thing, but now the arrests come right on the heels of the exposures, even if only a small fraction of those exposed have actually been arrested, charged and are facing prosecution. I think the question that arises from this extraordinary development concerning Nigeria’s special place in the contemporary worldwide war against corruption is the following: will we conduct the war against corruption in such a way that we will be able to teach the rest of the world somevaluable and lasting lessons about how to wage a concerted war against corruption and not only win but win decisively? Of course, this in no way obscures the fact that the outstanding moral and social objective of the anti-corruption war that our country is waging at the present time is justice for a looted nation and its teeming, pillaged masses. In other words, the point I am advancing here is that we should be asking both questions together: what to do to be victoriousin the struggle for justice in the war against corruption and how such a victory might serve as a teachable model for other countries of the world.

    One reason why these two questions should be posed together is the fact that Nigerians as a whole seem relatively assured that the looters and their supporters will lose the war. This is in part wish fulfillment, the thinking behind it being the fanciful belief that the looters and their allies will lose because we very desperately want them to lose; and moreover, justice, morality and decency all demand that the looters should lose. But as I have repeated many times in this column, both the Nigerian government and people in general vastly underrate what it will take to win and win decisively against the looters and their allies. This is because legend and myth as a dedicated and indefatigable anti-corruption crusader preceded Buhari to office. Indeed, prior to his electoral victory and eventual assumption of office, there were stories doing the rounds of the national grapevine to the effect that as soon as Buhari was pronounced the victor in the presidential elections, all the looters would board their private jets, take flight and escape to safe havens abroad. However, in the post-election period in the real world, nothing remotely close to this fantastic scenario took place. The looters not only did not take flight, they stayed and they are fighting back mightily, with great help from their allies in the Nigerian Bar and Bench. Moreover, at least in these early rounds of the legal battles, the determined and organized band of lootersand their allies are declaring a stalemate if not an outright victory. This is because in the majority of the cases in the law courts, they have been granted bail and they have succeeded considerably in deploying delaying tactics to prolong the trial of their cases, if possible permanently. At any rate, the looters have given every indication available to them to give notice to Buhari and indeed the whole country that this is a battle they have fought before, a battle they know how to win.

    Thus, beyond the myths of Buhari’s credentials as an anti-corruption crusader and beyond the wish fulfillment that we will win the war because justice and morality is on our side, the onus in this war of maneuver is for the government to demonstrate that it knows what it will take to defeat the looters, obtain their conviction and recover a sizeable proportion of the pillaged loot of trillions of naira and hundreds of billions of dollars. In other words, too much of the government’s present credibility and high ratings in the legal war on corruption come from exposures and arrests of lootersbeyond anything we have ever seen in this country; too little is coming from a perception that the government is conducting the war effectively and knows what to do to assure victory. Permit me to make a few observations in support of this claim.

    In all fairness, the most charitable remark that can be made about the government’s prosecution of the looters in the law courts is that slowly but gradually, there are signs that a plan, a method, a sort of strategy is beginning to emerge from the overwhelming sense of a shocking lack of coordination in how exposures and arrests are being made and prosecution begun against alleged looters. There are at least FOUR separate and distinct arms or agencies of the government all working together at the same time, but without a sense that they are all working in sync, that they are all on the same page. The concerned agencies are the EFCC; the office of the Solicitor General of the Federation (SGF) working under the direction of the Attorney General of the Federation (AGF); the Nigerian Police; and the office of the Director of State Security (DSS). To date and as far as I am personally aware, no public announcement has ever been made to give a report on the number of arrests made and the individual and collective size of the loot stolen. Are all the prosecuting lawyers working together as a team and under the guidance of a “command center” located in the SGF’s office? Your guess is as good as mine, compatriots!

    As everyone knows, there is a lot of anger and frustration among the members of this prosecuting team that bails are being granted to virtually every accused looter and stays of proceeding are still being granted, even though this runs counter to the law of the land as enshrined in the Administration of Criminal Justice Act of 2015 (ACJA). This raises many troubling questions. Why is the government keeping quiet about this and silently licking its wounds of disappointment and frustration? Why has not a single statement or declaration been made about what the government will do about this crucial development? Why have press and media houses throughout the country not been brought into a widespread and sustained reporting and discussion of this rampart and willful disregard of the provisions of ACJA by many if not most of the trial judges? Why have the names of the defense lawyers and trial judges disregarding ACJA not been published, not to “shame” or disgrace them, but to give them the chance to explain why, as far as they are concerned, ACJA might as well be a bill awaiting passage in the National Assembly and not the de facto and de jure law of the land that it is? Why the silence, why the perplexity of the government prosecuting team before these onslaughts of the looters and their allies on the Bar and the Bench? Are these not the signs of a rudderless and uncoordinated team fighting only with the fatuous weapon of the wish fulfillment that it will win because justice, morality and decency are on its side?

    All is not lost and questions like those I am posing in this piece are being posed by many other commentators, pundits and activists all over the country. And there are signs that the government is listening; indeed, there are also signs that some of the trial judges are listening. [This past week, the trial judge in charge of the case against Olisa Metuh gave warning to Metuh and his lawyers that they have already used THREE of the FIVE adjournments of postponements to which they are entitled under ACJA]. Against the background of this development, the Sagay advisory committee could play a very crucial role in both the outcome and the educational possibilities in how Nigeria conducts this epic war against corruption. Technically, the Sagay Committee is not one of the agencies responsible for making exposures of looting, arresting looters and coordinating their prosecution in the law courts. No, the Sagay committee was not designed to do any of these particular things. What it is mandated to do, what it must do well, is in fact provide the moral and intellectual framework within which the war against corruption can be won and converted to a lasting instructional value for not only our country but the whole world. In other words, the task of the Sagay committee is that it must be the mind and the superego of the war on corruption: it must show that all is not simple and uncoordinated improvisation in Buhari’s war against corruption. If it fulfills this task, the Sagay committed might well show that Nigeria has something to teach the rest of the world in the current global anti-corruption war. I suggest that it must start posing the questions that the government prosecuting team is not asking, thereby enlightening the country and the whole world about the content and the lessons of this epic war against corruption that will, for good or ill, define the epoch we have just entered.

    Obasanjo and his”toothless bulldog” insult to the EFCC

     

    Just at the very historic moment when the EFFC is making far more disclosures about looting in our country and far many more arrests of alleged looters than at any previous period in the country’s history, along comes Olusegun Obasanjo to declare that the EFCC is a toothless bulldog whose bark is worse than its bite. What does he exactly men by this astonishing claim? Should it be regarded as one more instance of Obasanjo’s verbal and political charades that are best ignored completely?

    I confess that I am more inclined to the latter view. Obasanjo loves being in the news; he has a severe case of what could be described as the “relevance anxiety syndrome”. By this, I mean that he is so egomaniacal about his standing in the public affairs of this country that he cannot bear to be out of the view of the public for less than, say, three months at the least.And so since everyone is talking endlessly about the EFCC’s frenetic exposures and arrests of looters, what could be more irresistible for our Babasale of Egomania than to attack and ridicule the EFCC?

    I don’t think we should be satisfied with this response to Obasanjo’s attack on the frontline anti-corruption agency.And this is precisely the point: Obasanjo is attacking the agency, he is ridiculing it because the agency is making all these exposures, all these arrests. From this, we can conclude that Obasanjo is deeply troubled by Buhari’s war on corruption, if indeed he is not directly opposed to it.More insidiously, Obasanjo is perhaps saying that the arrests, the exposures will achieve nothing at all. If that is the case, it is now left to the EFCC and the Buhari administration to give the lie to Obasanjo’s insult by demonstrating that their bite will be as ferocious as their bark. In other words, when and if the convictions and the recovery of stolen loot start happening, the last laugh will be on the Egomaniac of Ota. QED

    Biodun Jeyifo                                                                                                                 bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • I repeat: there are limits to the power and the reach of journalistic punditry, compatriots!

    I repeat: there are limits to the power and the reach of journalistic punditry, compatriots!

    In this column last week,I don’t think I could possibly have been more forthright, more insistent in my assertion that no matter how truthfully, powerfully or movingly we columnists write in the cause of making meaningful change to happen in our country, we confront limits set by the ontology of the medium in which we write. In other words, in last week’s column I argued – forcefully, in my opinion – that the tides of change, progress or revolution don’t happen on the pages of newspapers and newsmagazines; they happen in the real world. I was particularly insistent that the ONLY way in which the limits that we confront as journalistic pundits can be overcome is for we columnists and those who read us to ACT on what we write about. Naturally or obviously, this pertains readersthat are convinced or moved by what we write, what we urge. Given these loud and clamant assertions in last week’s column, imagine my surprise when I received many email responses continuing to extend the illusion that punditry has no limits! One person wrote to inform me that the real problem that we face in the country is that of language, specificallyour official lingua franca, the English language, that the masses of our peoples don’t use or understand. Another reader wrote to say, forcefully, that our real problem is what he deems spiritual backwardness. Yet another reader wrote to suggest that the problem is with our leaders, insisting that the leader who will do the citizens’ bidding has not yet been born, let alone come to power in our country.

    My first response to these and other readers of my call in last week’s column for concrete action over and beyond perpetual commentary and punditry in newspapers was to make a decision, solemn but matter of fact, that until I myself, acting alone or with others, take action for the propagation of the urgent causes that I espouse in my column, I will no longer ask any readers to go beyond debate and argument on the pages of newspapers. In that case, my collective response to all who wrote me on last week’s column is quite simple and straightforward: until you are moved to act, until you are willing to show your countrywomen and men that you intend to back your words with your deeds, please don’t write me in the hope of continuing the conversation on who or what is responsible for the bleak prospects for real and meaningful change in our country. To the reader who wrote in particular that the most fundamental problem we face is with the English language and its elitism, I ask: who is restricting you to act, to protest, to demonstrate only or even primarily in English? Who says the masses of our people do not speak their own variety of English, this being what linguists call Nigerian Pidgin? Isn’t this unofficial national lingua franca of ours in fact used throughout the country and used to great effect by our peoples when the meet collectively to work together in their own interest?

    My second response to my readers who continue to clothe journalist punditry in the garb of potential or actual hero and/or tribune of the peoples’ cause and the nation’s salvation is even more basic, more fundamental: just as the proof of the pudding is in the eating, the proof of punditry is how well it stacks up against concrete action. No piece of journalistic illumination or brilliance can survive what happens to itin the sphere of consequential action. Let me put this observation, this claim in language that may be more easily appreciated: ideas expressed on the pages of newspapers, especially ideas about change and progress, are only as useful and as durable as the transformation they effect in people’s lives and prospects. Using myself to illustrate what I am saying here about the consequential limits of punditry in the arena of action, I have long wondered how some suggestions I have made repeatedly in this column about Buhari’s war against corruption in the law courts might work in real life, in the context of what is done or not done in the law courts to make the battle against the looters the resounding success that most Nigerians want it to be. For instance, I have for a long time and repeatedly suggested that Buhari, the AGF and the whole slew of advocates prosecuting the alleged looters should vigorously insist that the Administration of Criminal Justice Act of 2015 (ACJA) be the juridical basis for trying the looters since, in fact, it is the law of the land. Now, I happen to think that if this suggestion is vigorously pursued, many of the blockages that the looters’ supporters in the Bar and the Benchhave mounted against timely and successful prosecution of the looters would have failed and failed woefully. But so far at least, this remains merely or only the suggestion of a columnist who has not, for even a single day, been there at the law courts in a concrete show of action to back up his suggestion.

    Writing about one particular sort of limitation of journalistic punditry that nearly all the respondents to last week’s column completely ignored requires a bit of tactfulness on my part. This is because it seems nothing short of arrogance or even churlishness not to respond at all when people write you and express great admiration for you as they ask you to write back to them to continue the debate. How can you say I can’t and won’t write back because we, the columnists and our readers, have done too much talking already and it is time to act, time to match our wordswith our deeds? But that is precisely my view, my position! Another way of putting this is to say, quite emphatically, that I left the intellectual universe of the literary and debating societies of my secondary schooldays more than a half a century ago! In that discursive universe, there was hardly ever any possibility that the debates and controversies that raged between the teenage “pundits” could ever even remotely be held up against the benchmark of the reality check of actual, demonstrable impact on society, especially on the lives of the poor, the forgotten, the looted about whom most of us had only the vaguest awareness.

    Perhaps all I have been saying in this piece boils down to one essential point: life itself poses the most mundane but at the same time the most formidable limit to punditry, just as it does to just about everything else. It may seem banal to say this, but it is worth saying: each pundit conducts his or her punditry within the confines and the limits if his or her life. Obviously, I make this observation with the lived realities and pressures on my life on my mind. In concrete terms, my journalistic writings constitute only a small part of my life, only a small portion of the lived realities of my life. In concrete terms, every Friday morning when I sit down to write the piece for the week, I do so against the backdrop of a full-time, weekly academic work detail that leaves Friday as the only day of the week in which I have any chance at all to write the column and write it well. Moreover, and this is very crucial, the lived realities of my life leave me no room, no space for responses to readers who write to me with the expectation, the hope that I could and will write back. As this has been the single greatest limitation that I have felt about writing this column, I should express what I am saying here clearly, unambiguously: after I have taught and mentored my undergraduate and graduate students and administered the records of their academic progress, there is barely any room left for me to maintain an active, mutually sustaining contact with those among my readers that take it upon themselves to write me, for the most part as admiring interlocutors. A column, and even punditry itself, should never be a monologue! I say this to myself all the time even as I find it impossible to do anything about it. To this, add the fact thatwith not a little trepidation, I anxiously await the next time I will come into contact with a reader who first expresses great admiration – but only as a prelude to the complaint of not having heard back from me when he or she wrote.

    Am I hinting in this piece at the likelihood of a farewell to journalistic punditry? Most definitely not! I think that for the most part, I am writing against the complacency of the pundit and his or her readers, against what I feel is a general tendency to greatly overrate what pundits and punditry can achieve and indeed have achieved in our society. And there is also this: mine is a reasoning about limits and limitations that comes from philosophical traditions in which limits are in fact for the most part seen as the other face, the reverse image of possibility andrenewal. In other words, without limits, without constraints, there is little inducement to maximal use of what you are allowed. Conversely, in the face of limits, your passion for change and progress and justice draws immensely from the creative resources of the imagination.

    So: I will continue to write this column, even if the punditry does not immediately ignite the masses’ burning aspiration for deliverance, even if what I write, at least for now before my retirement from full-time employment as an academic, seems like a monologue – which it is most definitely not. But if it is after all a monologue? Call it the monologue of a conscientious interlocutor whose challenge to his readers does not leave him free of the insidious lure of complacency…

    Biodun Jeyifo                                                                                                         bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Change, change, change! – top-down and/or bottom-up? (3)

    Change, change, change! – top-down and/or bottom-up? (3)

    I start this final piece in the series that began two weeks ago in this column with a great emphasis on what I call the limits of journalistic punditry with regard to this column itself and all newspaper and newsmagazine columnists in Nigeria at the present time. We are all pundits, all of us of the clan of columnists that populate the dozens of newspapers and newsmagazines in circulation in our country. I think that on the whole and everything considered, the emergence and rise to high public visibility of journalistic punditry has been one of the most significant cultural and intellectual developments in Nigeria in at least the last two decades. For it is a very salutary cultural phenomenon that hundreds of thousands of literate Nigerians are avid readers of the opinions, analyses and reflections of columnists. This is because the historic moment of the vitality of the town or village square is gone, perhaps forever, at least with regard to the significance of the constituted public sphere of the national community. To express this observation in concrete terms, I for one as a columnist am immensely encouraged by the fact that people read what I have to say in virtually all parts of the country. Moreover, via the internet, this extends to the global community of Nigerians in the diasporas of Europe and the Americas. But notwithstanding this undoubted impact of columnists in the political and intellectual domains of our collective experience as a nation, I return to what I stated at the beginning of this opening paragraph: the limits of journalistic punditry. What does this mean and how does it relate to the issue that I have been discussing in this series?

    I shall be very succinct in my response to this question. Almost without exception, most newspaper and newsmagazine columnists – the commentariat – nurse the illusion that what they/we write collectively has a decisive role to play in the fate of the nation, especially with regard to the terrible condition of the masses of the poor and the underprivileged in our country. But this is simply not true; more to the point, it is delusory. Nothing illustrates this claim more than the war on corruption in high places in our country. For at least two decades now, we, the columnists, have been railing ceaselessly and tirelessly against corruption. This started long before the current phase of the war in Buhari’s administration, a phase in which the commentariat has exponentially stepped up its verbal attacks on looters and looting. For nearly two decades, corruption was completely undaunted by our salvoes. And now in the current phase of the war, corruption is striking back; it is fighting hard and seemingly effectively too, in the law courts and in the federal civil administration. If it is the case that we shall not and must not stop waging a verbal war against the looters and their allies, we must at least pause to reflect on this unquestionable limit to what we can hope to achieve. To put this in stark and admittedly rather oversimplified terms, it is time for us to come to the realization that the war against corruption will ultimately not be won in the pages of newspapers and newsmagazines.

    Let me rephrase that last sentence: We can hope to have an effective impact on the war on corruption only if what we write as pundits move the masses to act, to intervene – in the war against corruption and in the many other spheres of political and economic affairs that are badly in need of change and reform in our country at the present time. I place emphasis on this issue because it is a very notable and perhaps even defining view of journalistic punditry in our country that all that needs to be done is to write well, to write eloquently and all else shall fall into place. This may be true in those very limited and narrow circumstances in which calls are made to reverse a specific act or policy of the president, a governor, a federal minister, a local government chairman. But on far weightier and consequential issues like the war on corruption or redistributive justice in our country, if what we write as columnists do not move the masses of Nigerians to act, to intervene, then regardless of the vigour or eloquence of our writings, nothing significant will happen.

    At this point in the discussion, it is perhaps necessary for me to specify what I mean by the term, “the masses”, together with precisely what sorts of action and intervention I have in mind.In its most widely understood connotation, the term, implies, rather undifferentiatedly, the bottom layers of the socio-economic order, the truly disadvantaged, “the wretched of the earth”, in Frantz Fanon’s celebrated coinage. I admit that in general, this is what the term, “Talakawa”, in the title of this column implies. However, when the term is politicized with expectations of radical possibilities, mass action or intervention applies to any phenomenon that powerfully advances the interests, the collective cause of the truly disadvantaged of any society. Let me put this in simple, concrete language: an action, an intervention by even as few as two or three people that sparks the imagination and interest of the Talakawa in their millions is a mass action, a mass intervention. This is not to deny the fact that throughout history, the most powerful and consequential acts of the masses take place when sizeable proportions of the poor and the underprivileged march, protest, demonstrate or act in their own interests: Soweto; Mao’s Long March; Martin Luther King and the March on Washington; the innumerable occasions when our own departed and sorely missed Labour Leader Number One, Pa Michael AthokhamienImoudu, led thousands of workers and the unemployed against the injustices of both colonial and post-independent governments of our country.

    So while not ruling out the possibility, the necessity even of the masses of Nigerians to act decisively across the boundaries of region, ethnicity and religion that are often used to divide them, we end this series with a profile of the sorts of actions and interventions that might serve to advance the cause of the masses, even if they are undertaken by a few people, by a segment of the society, by a band of committed patriots, by a network of professional associations, and by a phalanx of civil society organizations and NGO’s with genuine credentials as honest and dedicated activists.This is in fact what the well-known phrase, “two or three people can change the world” means.

    Think, compatriots: the war against corruption and the looters in the law courts will get a tremendous boost if, for instance, the few SANs who have spoken out eloquently against the collusion of influential members of the Bar and the Bench with the looters launch a series of well publicized public forums or “town hall” discussions with diverse segments of the Nigerian society: workers on the shop or factory floor; university students in their dining halls or soccer stadiums; congregations of faith communities of Moslems and Christians in their places of worship; market women and male and female petty traders in the capacious spaces of our volatile open-air markets; even primary school pupils in their playing grounds. In such widely publicized conversations, the obstacles that the looters and their allies are placing in the path of the battle against corruption will be clearly identified and discussed. Needless to say, there will be no need in such forums to mention or publicize the names of the prominent legal backers of the looters, for this will be credibly subjected to the charge of “trial by the mob”. Rather, the judicial blockages to the war against corruption will be identified and x-rayed as first and foremost a process which is manipulated by individuals. Destroy or cripple the process and you incapacitate the individuals who manipulate the process. Apart from taking the battle in the law courts directly to the people, these forums will serve as immensely useful teachable exercises that will give the masses of our peoples a sophisticated understanding of how the process now works against their interests but can and should be made to work in the interest of all.

    Think again, compatriots: beyond the specific and currently very pressing battle against corruption in the law courts, almost all areas of our completely run down, dysfunctional and hugely unjust economic and political affairs can in the same manner bedirectly taken by a few people and organizations, acting alone or in collaboration with others, to the people across the length and breadth of the country. I give just a few examples of some of the most crucial crises of accountability, waste, injustice and insecurity in our country: the jumbo salaries, allowances and perquisites of our lawmakers and high public officeholders; the yawning gap between what is spent on maintaining the bloated bureaucracies of our federal, state and local governments and what remains for expenditure on capital projects to expand opportunities for gainful employment, especially for our youths; the terrible state of our physical infrastructures, especially the roads, highways, power generation and supply, public hospitals, clinics and dispensaries; the banking system and the terribly skewed nature of credits and loans to the rich and the powerful as compared with the poor and the powerfulness in their millions.

    As is well known, in one way or another, in “peoples’ parliaments” on radio and in “molues”, “danfos”, “maruwas” and “tuke-tukes”, Nigerians of all classes talk endlessly about these crises. The point being made here is that it is one thing to talk forever and despairingly about these crises, it is another thing entirely to launch public forums about them that lay bare to the people how they are manipulated by our political elites, and how it is in everybody’s interest to find ways to end the crises. Indeed, it is of supreme importance to emphasize thatcritical understanding of how our crises can be resolved should become common knowledge to the masses. Armed with such understanding, we write endlessly on these issues in our columns; it is time to take such understanding directly to the people.

    I end with only a partial list of cultural and pedagogical instruments that can be mobilized to make these radical public forums very lively and even entertaining to the masses of our peoples: musical performances by iconic figures as a backdrop for, say, a forum for stopping the “ilabe” of the lawmakers; drama sketches to augment forums on the judicial hideouts of the looters; specially commissioned short cinematic docu-dramas on why Nigeria has never exceeded 5000 megawatts of electrical power production in a country of about 180 million; traditional musicians, dancers and acrobats performing in open air markets as both prelude and closing frame for a public forum on how a country as rich in wealth and resources as Nigeria is filled with such unbelievable levels of poverty, suffering and hardship. This all amounts to a peaceful “revolutionary” process; whoever prevents peaceful means of attaining social justice makes the violent, traumatic alternatives that much more probable, alas.

     

    Biodun Jeyifo                                                                                                         bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Change, change, change! – top-down and/or bottom-up? (3)

    I start this final piece in the series that began two weeks ago in this column with a great emphasis on what I call the limits of journalistic punditry with regard to this column itself and all newspaper and newsmagazine columnists in Nigeria at the present time. We are all pundits, all of us of the clan of columnists that populate the dozens of newspapers and newsmagazines in circulation in our country. I think that on the whole and everything considered, the emergence and rise to high public visibility of journalistic punditry has been one of the most significant cultural and intellectual developments in Nigeria in at least the last two decades. For it is a very salutary cultural phenomenon that hundreds of thousands of literate Nigerians are avid readers of the opinions, analyses and reflections of columnists. This is because the historic moment of the vitality of the town or village square is gone, perhaps forever, at least with regard to the significance of the constituted public sphere of the national community. To express this observation in concrete terms, I for one as a columnist am immensely encouraged by the fact that people read what I have to say in virtually all parts of the country. Moreover, via the internet, this extends to the global community of Nigerians in the diasporas of Europe and the Americas. But notwithstanding this undoubted impact of columnists in the political and intellectual domains of our collective experience as a nation, I return to what I stated at the beginning of this opening paragraph: the limits of journalistic punditry. What does this mean and how does it relate to the issue that I have been discussing in this series?

    I shall be very succinct in my response to this question. Almost without exception, most newspaper and newsmagazine columnists – the commentariat – nurse the illusion that what they/we write collectively has a decisive role to play in the fate of the nation, especially with regard to the terrible condition of the masses of the poor and the underprivileged in our country. But this is simply not true; more to the point, it is delusory. Nothing illustrates this claim more than the war on corruption in high places in our country. For at least two decades now, we, the columnists, have been railing ceaselessly and tirelessly against corruption. This started long before the current phase of the war in Buhari’s administration, a phase in which the commentariat has exponentially stepped up its verbal attacks on looters and looting. For nearly two decades, corruption was completely undaunted by our salvoes. And now in the current phase of the war, corruption is striking back; it is fighting hard and seemingly effectively too, in the law courts and in the federal civil administration. If it is the case that we shall not and must not stop waging a verbal war against the looters and their allies, we must at least pause to reflect on this unquestionable limit to what we can hope to achieve. To put this in stark and admittedly rather oversimplified terms, it is time for us to come to the realization that the war against corruption will ultimately not be won in the pages of newspapers and newsmagazines.

    Let me rephrase that last sentence: We can hope to have an effective impact on the war on corruption only if what we write as pundits move the masses to act, to intervene – in the war against corruption and in the many other spheres of political and economic affairs that are badly in need of change and reform in our country at the present time. I place emphasis on this issue because it is a very notable and perhaps even defining view of journalistic punditry in our country that all that needs to be done is to write well, to write eloquently and all else shall fall into place. This may be true in those very limited and narrow circumstances in which calls are made to reverse a specific act or policy of the president, a governor, a federal minister, a local government chairman. But on far weightier and consequential issues like the war on corruption or redistributive justice in our country, if what we write as columnists do not move the masses of Nigerians to act, to intervene, then regardless of the vigour or eloquence of our writings, nothing significant will happen.

    At this point in the discussion, it is perhaps necessary for me to specify what I mean by the term, “the masses”, together with precisely what sorts of action and intervention I have in mind.In its most widely understood connotation, the term, implies, rather undifferentiatedly, the bottom layers of the socio-economic order, the truly disadvantaged, “the wretched of the earth”, in Frantz Fanon’s celebrated coinage. I admit that in general, this is what the term, “Talakawa”, in the title of this column implies. However, when the term is politicized with expectations of radical possibilities, mass action or intervention applies to any phenomenon that powerfully advances the interests, the collective cause of the truly disadvantaged of any society. Let me put this in simple, concrete language: an action, an intervention by even as few as two or three people that sparks the imagination and interest of the Talakawa in their millions is a mass action, a mass intervention. This is not to deny the fact that throughout history, the most powerful and consequential acts of the masses take place when sizeable proportions of the poor and the underprivileged march, protest, demonstrate or act in their own interests: Soweto; Mao’s Long March; Martin Luther King and the March on Washington; the innumerable occasions when our own departed and sorely missed Labour Leader Number One, Pa Michael AthokhamienImoudu, led thousands of workers and the unemployed against the injustices of both colonial and post-independent governments of our country.

    So while not ruling out the possibility, the necessity even of the masses of Nigerians to act decisively across the boundaries of region, ethnicity and religion that are often used to divide them, we end this series with a profile of the sorts of actions and interventions that might serve to advance the cause of the masses, even if they are undertaken by a few people, by a segment of the society, by a band of committed patriots, by a network of professional associations, and by a phalanx of civil society organizations and NGO’s with genuine credentials as honest and dedicated activists.This is in fact what the well-known phrase, “two or three people can change the world” means.

    Think, compatriots: the war against corruption and the looters in the law courts will get a tremendous boost if, for instance, the few SANs who have spoken out eloquently against the collusion of influential members of the Bar and the Bench with the looters launch a series of well publicized public forums or “town hall” discussions with diverse segments of the Nigerian society: workers on the shop or factory floor; university students in their dining halls or soccer stadiums; congregations of faith communities of Moslems and Christians in their places of worship; market women and male and female petty traders in the capacious spaces of our volatile open-air markets; even primary school pupils in their playing grounds. In such widely publicized conversations, the obstacles that the looters and their allies are placing in the path of the battle against corruption will be clearly identified and discussed. Needless to say, there will be no need in such forums to mention or publicize the names of the prominent legal backers of the looters, for this will be credibly subjected to the charge of “trial by the mob”. Rather, the judicial blockages to the war against corruption will be identified and x-rayed as first and foremost a process which is manipulated by individuals. Destroy or cripple the process and you incapacitate the individuals who manipulate the process. Apart from taking the battle in the law courts directly to the people, these forums will serve as immensely useful teachable exercises that will give the masses of our peoples a sophisticated understanding of how the process now works against their interests but can and should be made to work in the interest of all.

    Think again, compatriots: beyond the specific and currently very pressing battle against corruption in the law courts, almost all areas of our completely run down, dysfunctional and hugely unjust economic and political affairs can in the same manner bedirectly taken by a few people and organizations, acting alone or in collaboration with others, to the people across the length and breadth of the country. I give just a few examples of some of the most crucial crises of accountability, waste, injustice and insecurity in our country: the jumbo salaries, allowances and perquisites of our lawmakers and high public officeholders; the yawning gap between what is spent on maintaining the bloated bureaucracies of our federal, state and local governments and what remains for expenditure on capital projects to expand opportunities for gainful employment, especially for our youths; the terrible state of our physical infrastructures, especially the roads, highways, power generation and supply, public hospitals, clinics and dispensaries; the banking system and the terribly skewed nature of credits and loans to the rich and the powerful as compared with the poor and the powerfulness in their millions.

    As is well known, in one way or another, in “peoples’ parliaments” on radio and in “molues”, “danfos”, “maruwas” and “tuke-tukes”, Nigerians of all classes talk endlessly about these crises. The point being made here is that it is one thing to talk forever and despairingly about these crises, it is another thing entirely to launch public forums about them that lay bare to the people how they are manipulated by our political elites, and how it is in everybody’s interest to find ways to end the crises. Indeed, it is of supreme importance to emphasize thatcritical understanding of how our crises can be resolved should become common knowledge to the masses. Armed with such understanding, we write endlessly on these issues in our columns; it is time to take such understanding directly to the people.

    I end with only a partial list of cultural and pedagogical instruments that can be mobilized to make these radical public forums very lively and even entertaining to the masses of our peoples: musical performances by iconic figures as a backdrop for, say, a forum for stopping the “ilabe” of the lawmakers; drama sketches to augment forums on the judicial hideouts of the looters; specially commissioned short cinematic docu-dramas on why Nigeria has never exceeded 5000 megawatts of electrical power production in a country of about 180 million; traditional musicians, dancers and acrobats performing in open air markets as both prelude and closing frame for a public forum on how a country as rich in wealth and resources as Nigeria is filled with such unbelievable levels of poverty, suffering and hardship. This all amounts to a peaceful “revolutionary” process; whoever prevents peaceful means of attaining social justice makes the violent, traumatic alternatives that much more probable, alas.

    Biodun Jeyifo                                                                                                         bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Change, change, change! – top-down and/or bottom-up? (2)

    Change, change, change! – top-down and/or bottom-up? (2)

    We ended last week’s piece in this series with the question as to where the change that most Nigerians at home and abroad are yearning for at the present time will come from if it does not come from the top, from the leaders of the new ruling party, the APC. In resuming the discussion this week with that same question, let me once again admit that that I do recognize that to the APC and many of its allies and supporters at home and abroad, this question may seem premature and unfair, given the fact that Buhari and his administration are yet to clock one year in office. Let me further admit that it has not escaped my reflections on this matter that the enemies of change and progress, especially as they are concentrated in the defeated ruling party, the PDP, might seize on my question for their own utterly recalcitrant purpose of blocking any change for the better that might come from the APC and its leaders.

    With regard to this particular worry, I have a redoubtable response: my dedication to the cause of justice, dignity and security of life for the masses of Nigerians in their tens of millions are so clear that nothing I have ever written, nothing that I will ever write in this column will be found even remotely helpful to the PDP, regardless of how desperate and opportunistic the defeated ruling party is in setting itself against change and progress in our country. Indeed, this is the crucial axis of my reflections in this series and it can be stated in a very succinct question: regardless of who their rulers are, what can and should the masses do for themselves in order to bring about change for the better in the current very bleak, very dire conditions that persist even after the political demise of the PDP? Here is another way of putting this same question: how can the masses seize control of their collective destiny in a period when it seems more and more apparent that the end of their hardship and suffering is nowhere in sight?

    There is an easy, routine and even somewhat predictable answerto this question and it goes thus: if the masses want change, if they want to see deep and meaningful improvements in their political, social and economic conditions, they must act powerfully and decisively as agents of change; they must not leave it to their rulers to fight for change on their behalf. As a corollary to this dictum, there is also the routine idea that to act as agents of change and progress for themselves and their country, the masses must protest, they must march, they must unceasingly hold demonstrations and rallies, each and all of which will have the effect of indicating to the rulers and the whole world that the people are determined to have change and progress, are determined to take matters into their own hands and are not content to let the rulers act for them, no matter how sincere and determined the rulers may seem. Well, this sounds all too true; moreover, it sounds “revolutionary” and seems very appropriate to present circumstances in post-PDP Nigeria.

    But there is aproblem in routinely or mechanistically invoking this unquestionable dictum that the only way that the masses can really and truly assure change for the better in their circumstances is to seize their destiny in their own hands. What is this problem? It is this: the masses do not always step forward to take control of their own destiny; they do not always intervenewhen conditions seem ripe for them to surge forth and seize the day, politically speaking. Moreover, when the masses are complacent when all indications seem favorable for them to act decisively in their collective self-interest, there often arises the tendency of progressive members of the elite to make the grave mistake of blaming the masses for being so submerged in their economic impoverishment and political marginalization that they are content to leave life and death matters of their survival in the hands of their rulers. Insidiously, this often leads, consciously or unconsciously, to blaming the masses for their oppression.Here the dire foreboding in the famous title and lyrics of the late Fela Kuti’s hit song, “Shuffering and Shmiling”come to mind: those that suffer and smile through the terrible conditions of their looted lives are not yet ready for their liberation, for their “morning yet on creation day”, to make an allusion to one of the late Chinua Achebe’s most memorable metaphors for a coming day of deliverance for the oppressed peoples of this world.

    I bear witness to the fact that in the last five to six weeks in this column as I have unceasingly called for the masses of our peoples across the length and breadth of the country to show concretely and decisively that they are watching what is going on in the law courts in Buhari’s war against the looters, this thought has been vigorously present in my mind. In other words, as I have pondered the fact that no mass demonstrations, no citizens’ protests, no rallies of concerned professionals and individuals have takenplace to let the looters and their judicial backers know that the country and the masses are solidly behind Buhari in this war, I have had to tell myself again and again that I should not for one second think or feel that the masses deserve whatever they get from their inaction, their seeming reliance on Buhari to do all thatneeds to be doneto recover the identified loot in all its mind-boggling vastness and to bring the looters to much deserved punitive and corrective justice.Here I must make a confession about a thought that has greatly troubled me. This is nothing other than the suspicion that if I have been able to refrain from blaming the masses for not taking any concrete and decisive actions to lend support to Buhari’s war on corruption, it is perhaps only because I have lived long enough to have known my country and its teeming masses at other times when mass protests, rallies and demonstrations were rife and no ruler was treated like a Messiah the way Muhammadu Buhari is regarded today in his war against corruption and the looters. [For the records, let it be noted here that in his first coming as a military dictator, Buhari was far, far from being robed in the overflowing messianic garb in which the Nigerian public has clothed him in his current war against the looters]

    The foregoing observations and reflections lead to two probabilities for a reinvention of mass movements and actions coming from below to spark the reform-minded projects and policies of rulers in a country like ours in which radical protest movements seem like shades of a barely recoverable legacy from the past. In the first probable scenario, those who have lived long enough to remember and cherish periods and instances when the Nigerian masses took their destiny into their own hands may seek to reinvigorate the slumberous present with exemplary models of self-mobilization and agitation from the past. I am revealing neither a hidden secret nor a closely guarded conspiracy when I assert here that many individuals and organizations of the Nigerian Left are at the present moment engaged in a profound act of soul-searching that involves, as a crucial part of its agenda, the recreation of the feisty but peaceful protest movements of the past. In the second scenario, the probability lies in the completely unprecedented or unheralded creation of spontaneous acts by individuals and groups among the younger generation that come to the realization that they have had enough and that whatever genuine and meaningful change and progress will come depend on their own determined, purposive actions.The capacity of or for human self-renewal, individual and collective, is infinite and it can be found in all the spheres and levels of life. Those who have never seen or even read of mass demonstrations, protests and rallies may one day wake up and decide that they have had enough of looted, wasted lives – and take to the streets, the courts, the chambers of the National Assembly, the fortress of the Presidency in Aso Rock.

    It is far from my intention in these reflections to be romantic about traditions of radical mass movements and protests. In other words – and to be quite honest about my intentions in this series – though I do have a modicum of nostalgia about the period of my young adulthood that was deeply steeped in radical mass movements and activities, ultimately what concerns me most is what is to be done now as we confront a period in which all the signs are there for a radical reordering of priorities in our society but the leaders of the new ruling party seem wedded to a not-so-distant past of waste, squandermania and confusion.And so it is to the challenge of calmly and rationally building civic-minded activities and projects that can respond effectively to the great yearning for change and progress among our peoples at the present time that I will direct myself in the concluding piece in the series next week. Though I will be using the case of Buhari’s war against the looters in the courts as a sort of focal point in my closing reflections, as we shall see what happens or, conversely, does not happen in that war has much to tell us about what to expect and what to do in other areas of our collective existence as a developing and endlessly misruled nation.

    Biodun Jeyifo                                                                                                         bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Change, change, change! – top-down vintage and/or bottom-up model? (1)

    Change, change, change! – top-down vintage and/or bottom-up model? (1)

    I very strongly emphasize it: though change can be either positive or negative, prospective or retrogressive, the change that I have in mind in the series of reflections that begin in this column this week is change from very bleak circumstances to intimations of more hopeful portents ahead of us. This is consistent with the spirit of the times in our post-PDP Nigeria and many other parts of our world. True enough, Boko Haram has not faded away and other secessionist insurrections in potential or virtual states of mass mobilization dot the national horizon with threats of massive and fatal disruption of the unity of the country and its peoples. But overwhelmingly, Nigerians across the length and breadth of the country are united in their demand for and expectation of positive change from the hardship, suffering, insecurity and hopelessness that were the lot of the vast majority of Nigerians during the PDP years. And as a corollary to this, Nigerians also demand and expect profound change in the country’s new political rulers. This particular point leads directly to the central issue that I wish to explore in these reflections, an issue that can be posed in the form of a portentous question: can meaningful change in the new administration and the new ruling party take place exclusively or even primarily within the ranks of the new rulers without the intervention of powerful currents of mass action in words and deeds from below?

    Anyone reading this piece who is a regular visitor to this column would immediately know that the answer that I would personally give to this question is a resounding no: without the Nigerian masses intervening in the demand for and expectation of change, nothing much or significant will start from the top and percolate down to the masses of our peoples. This is a point I have been making unrelentingly in the last five or six weeks in this column, regardless of the particular issue that each column in the period has engaged. As a matter of fact, it is precisely because I have been harping relentlessly on this point that I now wish to reflect more carefully on its implications in the series of three essays that begins in the column this week. And as a first step in this exercise, I now wish to make a declaration that may startle many readers of this piece. What is this declaration? It is this: meaningful, significant and long lasting change can come from – and sometimes does come from – the top of the social and political order and from there percolate to the rest of the society; however, we have enough evidence now to come to the conclusion that this sort of change will almost certainly not come from the new ruling party, the APC. In other words, only if the groundswell for change comes powerfully from below, only to that extent will change of a reformative and beneficial kind take root and grow among the new rulers, the new ruling party. That is the conclusion that I have reached in carefully observing both the rulers and the ruled in post-PDP, APC-ruled Nigeria.

    Since time and space in the present series that begins today will not permit me to dwell exhaustively on this conclusion that will certainly strike many ardent supporters of the new ruling party as premature or unhelpful, in the present context, I will only briefly and in a rather summative manner give my reasons for coming to this conclusion. Thus, the main reason is none other than the tremendously consequential fact that the new ruling party is yet to forge an ideological and moral identity that is consistent with and conducive to meaningful reform of the state of affairs that the APC inherited from the defeated ruling party, the PDP. Let me put this in plain, unvarnished language: there are some genuine reformers within the leadership of the new ruling party at the federal and state levels, but their weight, their influence within the effective organs and institutions of governance is pretty insignificant. A few items highlighting the performance of the new ruling party in office might help to illustrate this claim.

    Item: in broad daylight and absolutely without any pretense to reform or “change”, Bukola Saraki seized the leadership of the Senate on the basis of a cynically opportunistic alliance with the defeated ruling party, the PDP; moreover, the APC was completely powerless to undo or reverse the coup. Item: the same arrant display of a blatant struggle for the spoils of office and power rather than a forthright prosecution of an agenda of reform marked theintra-party implosion of the APC in Kogi State in the recent governorship election in that state; significantly,this came after the APC had in fact become the national ruling party.In other words, the APC was not fighting the PDP in the Kogi State governorship elections; it was fighting itself. More appropriately, the APC was waging the fight within and againstitself in a war in which no principles or manifestations of reform or “change” were remotely in sight.

    There are many other items pertaining to the performance of the APC in power to which one could point to buttress the claim, the assertion that I have been exploring in the present discussion. Permit me repeat the assertion: we have enough evidence now to come to the conclusion that though there are some reform-minded leaders within the APC, change – if and when it comes – will not come from the top and percolate to the masses but will be sparked and fueled from below to strengthen the few genuine but isolated, confused and marginalized reform-minded leaders of the party. One item in this regard is the perpetuation of the extravagant greed of the APC members of the National Assembly in their completely unashamed dedication to receiving and consolidating the jumbo salaries, allowances and remunerations of the PDP years. In those years of the reign of the former ruling party, the non-PDP members of the National Assembly could claim – indeed, they did claim – that they were merely following the protocols established by the PDP. That excuse, that subterfuge is gone now and the APC lawmakers and lawgivers are glad-happy to continue to eat and drink from the same gravy train, as Americans like to call what we know as ilabe in the idiom of Naija decadence.

    If there is any aspect of the performance or behavior of the APC in office as a ruling party from which the winds of much needed change will blow from the rooftops of political governance to the rest of the society down below, surely it is the widely debated war on corruption, isn’t it? After all, the energy, the drive for the prosecution of the war has come mostly from the Presidency itself. Moreover, there is the far more significant fact that for the most part, the Nigerian masses have seemed to be content to be mere ringside onlookers in the war as it has been joined by a judiciary that, so far at least, has not been notably on the side of change, of justice.In drawing attention to this point, I do not ignore the fact that as ringside onlookers in the war on corruption, the Nigerian masses have been extremely agitated and voluble; they have lionized Buhari to the high heavens just as they have cast the looters and the lawyers and judges seemingly on their side to the darkest regions of hell. However, these factors notwithstanding, it is very doubtful whether even in this particular area of the APC’s performance in office meaningful and effective change will come primarily from the administration itself, that is to say from the top to the bottom.On what basis am I making this highly debatable claim, this highly contentious assertion?

    It is not my wish to embarrass him, but it was from a widely published statement credited to my comrade and former colleague at the University of Ife, Professor Itse Sagay, that it finally dawned on me that even in the war against corruption, we must not expect a one-sided flow of the winds of change from the government to the rest of the society. As everyone knows, Professor Sagay is the Chairman of the Advisory Committee on Corruption that Buhari set up very early in his assumption of power. Moreover, apart from being a celebrated legal luminary, Sagay has for long been an outspoken foe of the looters and their defenders within the top echelon of the legal profession.Imagine then the surprise and – I admit it, the sadness – with which I read the statement credited to Sagay last week in which he bitterly and rather helplessly denounced very senior and distinguished members of the legal profession and – yes! – the Supreme Court of the land itself as willful and unrepentant accomplices of the looters. Please dear reader, don’t get me wrong: Sagay’s patriotism and his fighting spirit were both indisputably present in his statement of last week. But alas, present also in the statement was a sense of desperation, a sense of perplexity as to what to do next in the war against corruption in the face of such powerful adversaries of change and justice as the Supreme Court and SANs galore.

    And indeed, where do we go from here, from this declared space of impasse and perplexity, not only in the specific warfront of the battle against corruption in the law courts but more generally in the universal yearning for meaningful and significant change in our country at the present time? Where will the momentum, the impetus for meaningful change come from? This will be our starting point in next week’s resumption of the series.

     

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • The anger, incoherence and impotence of a “concern citizen”: the raw underbelly of the war on corruption

    The anger, incoherence and impotence of a “concern citizen”: the raw underbelly of the war on corruption

    Absolutely unedited and uncensored, here is the text of one reader’s response to my reflections on the need to bring the rule of law into a fruitful union with justice in last week’s piece in this column. The only thing I have done to the text as received is to bracket it from the brief comment that I shall make on it by placing it in italics in its entirety. Here it goes:

    Prof as we used to call you guys with too much english knowledge in my days at 9ja Uni ive been reading with rapt attentions 4 some weeks now your dialogue about president buhari’s method in Fighting the anti graft war .Haba! Prof yoruba adage says ina esusu kijoni lemeji meaning once bitten ttwice shy why can’t you these grammar people 4 once consider that itvis you this so call elite that are destroying and using your so call classroom and pen knowledge to continously making this God blessed nation called Nigeria becoming a laughing stock to comity of nations . Why on earth are you ppl always talk of rule of law and human right in defence of those that need not to be prosecuted but stone to death haba! Prof you ppl hv now rven gone yo the extend of quoting the word of God lopsidedly in other to buttress your so call heartless heart please permit me as i really don’t want to personalise this write up but i cry for my beloved Nigeria whenever i read most of you people write ups sir where was the rule of law when God killed all the stiffnecked israelites and refused to let them get to the promised land bcos of their bresking God’s law where wss rule of law when God removed and eventually destroyed the first king of israel Saul when he broke God’s commandments have yiu all forgotten what happenrd to the guy that try to right the ark of God when King David was taking it from obededium house and were been instructed by God yhat nobody should torch it under any circumstances ive million and one example sir in the same bible you people started quoting arbitrarily to support those heartless animals called looters  to me they aren’t looters but murderers . Haba prof! Some people in a country that has no light no pipeborne water no hospital no no jobs for the semi demi illetrates that our so call glorified nursery schools called university are year in year out graduating with their only paper certificate shared 2.1 billion dollars among less than 100 people and you people are still talking and debatinga about whether their fundamental human right  or rule of law was or wssn’t follow. Sir with all respect in that America yiu are sir have you not hear of guetsmala bay prison in cuba? Thank Godvive lived there fir several years , in England am here right now have yiu not read about our MP some 2 or 3 years ago that went to jail for ordinary misapproptiating less thsn 5000 pounds? Not stealing o just may be claiming some ridicuolous 2000pounds over yheir imprest or for their mortgage thats agsinst the law of the land. Sir for all my years hrre in uk i never saw one article written to support them for being a good crook is only in Nigeria you see all sort of educated misnormals wasting english language if i may borrow from one of my olden days proffessor here in england he always wonder why we nigeria always waste english by speaking or writting in big grammar i remember then jokingly i usedvto tell him that people used such big english to defend  themself after embezzling public funds but today i think am right.Sir with all respect you peoplecshould remember that thats hiw you started condeming the same buhari in 1984 as head of state until you playrd into the hands of the real sabotouers and never allow yhr man to lay us a good foundation in Nigeria all is now history brother but unfortunately 33years after you people have started again with your big english and rule of law snd humam unright orvwhatever yiu call it but to before warn is to be fore harm  .God bless . Pst Dele  from London

    The anger, the rage of the writer of the text is all too palpable. The text was set to ME by email and I am addressed by my professional title, “Prof”, but the real addressee is a plural group identified as “yiu ppl” (you people). To the writer, we are all heartless people defending looters who are not “ppl” but animals that should be “stone to death”. Now anyone with even minimal literacy skills that read my pieces on the looters would have immediately understood that I was far from defending them, but this is of absolutely no importance to our raving interlocutor; I am guilty, I am one of the “heartless” “ppl” only because the term “rule of law” appeared in my robustly anti-looters pieces. The writer also finds me guilty of defending the looters for using “big enlish” but this a lesser charge or even a merely additional crime to the unconscionable evil of using the term “rule of law” in my writings on this matter, a matter that is of life and death importance for our absolutely irate compatriot. I ask Palladium especially but everyone else reading these words to please take note: the fury of the person who sent this text to me is so deep that it is almost elemental; moreover, it is shared by tens of millions of Nigerians at home and abroad.

    But beyond the anger, there are the incoherence and, above all else, the impotence. These are the things that I wish to reflect upon in this short commentary. The incoherence is of course at its most obvious in the complete absence of punctuation in the text; but it is not this technical register of incoherence itself that I wish to draw the reader’s attention to. Rather, it is the emotional and mental incoherence that the ‘punctuational’ incoherence produces that worries me. I call this order of emotional and mental incoherence strategic and tactical: merely by spotting the term, “rule of law” in ANY writing whatsoever, the writer of the irate text lost the ability to distinguish between “opponents” and “defenders” of looters, an inability, in other words, of the capacity to distinguish between potential allies and actual powerful backers of the looters, especially in the judiciary. I confess that this not only worries me tremendously, but it also frightens me, so much so that I have had to dig deep into my intuitions regarding what we can learn from experiences from all over the world in periods of volatile social ferment such as the one Nigeria now faces in this war on corruption and looters. This observation leads me to the last issue that I wish to reflect upon in this piece. I wish to express this as carefully as I can since it is at the core of all my reflections in this piece.

    In all parts of the world in periods when extremely volatile mass resentment against deep and wide social injustice is rampant, the strategic incoherence that makes it impossible for the millions of the aggrieved to distinguish between their potential allies and their real enemies reflects a deep sense of powerlessness, a political impotence in which raving incoherently against the prevailing order of things replaces the necessity for individual and mass action against the prevailing (dis)order, injustice and misrule. I suggest that this is the source of the kind of emotional and mental incoherence of the writer of the raging diatribe against anyone talking of the rule of law when, to him or her, the looters should all be “stone to death”. Let me be very clear about this point: to the writer of the irate text, Buhari and his administration will do the work that is necessary to bring the looters to justice; anyone and everyone seeming to question Buhari’s war, his tactics or lack of tactics, is an enemy. And so from the UK or from Kontangora, the cries go up: leave Buhari alone to do what must be done for us, for Nigeria! But when has it ever happened in the history of revolutionary periods that without the intervention of the masses themselves acting through their own organizations and as individuals, when has it ever happened that badly needed change and reforms come exclusively from the ruler(s)?

    In conclusion, let me say that this point about the necessity of mass action to bring the looters to justice and recover the loot from them is a point, a declaration that I have made again and again in this column in the last few months. I shall keep making it as long as the delusion remains that Buhari alone will deliver justice. Thus this is a call for action, a peaceful but determined intervention of our peoples for justice and restitution. One would have thought that as a ruling party that places so much propaganda value on “change” the APC itself would have called for this mass intervention in support of its intentions – if they are genuine. I end with a call to the writer of the diatribe against “yiu ppl” using “big english” to forget us and march, protest, and demonstrate for restitution of the stolen loot and punitive justice against the looters. If and when he or she does that, some of us using “big english” will join him or her. And we will prevail, Insha Allah!

     

    Biodun Jeyifo                                                                                                                 

    jeyifo@fas.harvard.edu