By Biodun Jeyifo

What do these two bracketed terms, “state capture” and “failed state” in the title of this piece mean and what do the terms have to do with the worsening security crisis in Nigeria? Setting aside the professional social-science definitions of these terms, here are what an informed layman’s understanding of each of the terms would mean. In “state capture”, either the entire state or governance apparatus of a country and/or powerful regulatory agencies within the state have been so coopted to serve the illegal or corrupt interests of segments of political and economic elites. For this reason, this amounts to nothing less than a “capture” of the state and/or its organs. Sounds familiar? If not, think of the Nigerian state itself, think of agencies and institutions like the EFCC, the NNPC, the NNDC, the Central Bank, all levels of the judicial system up to the Supreme Court and even the armed forces. Whose interests dominate the workings of these agencies and institutions, the people’s interests or the looters’ interests? Aren’t our rank and file soldiers and policemen and women part of the looted of the land?

Since I have previously written about the “failed state” in this column, I will deal with the term in a more summative manner in the present discussion. Thus, in a failed state, the most important thing to expect is the striking inability of a central government to exercise control and authority over both the territorial boundaries of the state and large internal areas of the country itself. Whenever and wherever these two factors converge, you have a failed state, as contenders for power and authority in a given country wrest control of large and diverse areas of the country, together with its external borders, from the central government. And of course since it is by violence, by a maximum use of forcible means that the authority and power of a central state can be successfully challenged, insecurity of life, property and movement are the hallmarks of a failed state.

Because the contents of this piece are talking points, not exhaustive or even substantial discourses, I will deal rather sketchily with the terms. I am deliberately linking these two terms in this piece because I wish to make explicit what many other commentators on the security crisis in our country make only implicitly or not at all. In other words, I am suggesting, I am insisting that you cannot have a failed state without having had state capture. Of course, not all instances of state capture lead to failed states. But there is no failed state in Africa or indeed in the world in which state capture did nor precede or enable the descent into a failed state. Consequently, neither the descent into a failed state nor a case of hovering at the edge of such a full-blown descent – as in Nigeria at the present time – can be successfully overcome without dealing with state capture in all its ramifications. Here is a question that readers who are so inclined might ponder in an effort to exercise the mind on the ramifications of the link between state capture and the failed state: why has South Africa, one of the most notorious cases of state capture in Africa and the world, why has this country not descended into a failed state and is indeed nowhere close to it?

Biological and medical metaphors for state capture and failed state?

Biological and medical metaphors for state capture and the failed state? Yes, why not? In a failed state, as much as the threat pertains to security of life, property, and movement, ultimately the threat pertains to existence or Being itself. Beyond fear and insecurity, we are talking of a profound existential crisis. A man or woman, a family or a community whose life circumstances have been damaged by the conditions and circumstances of a country that is caught between the “rock” of state capture and the “hard place” of the failed state. Let us take the measure of such existential angst in concrete terms.

Which Nigerian is not caught in such angst by the thought that Boko Haram is now so operationally successful that it is credibly threatening to march on Abuja, the nation’s capital, with a striking force? As we might well imagine, if such a march on Abuja were to be undertaken by the marauding insurgents, they do not need to – and would probably not attempt to – occupy the city for months, even for a week. All they would attempt, all they need to do is enter the city, carry out massive looting and abduction of hundreds or thousands of the city’s residents. That such thoughts have become imaginable is a mark of the anguished collective zeitgeist of the nation at the present time. Permit me to deploy some biological and medical metaphors for this state of affairs in our country.

To do this, let us revert to our comparison of South Africa and Nigeria. I suggest that the rampant state capture that has engulfed South Africa is very much like the invasion of an animal or human host by a parasite whose invasion may eventually kill the host but whose intent is to keep the host alive for as long as possible because its own life, its own survival is dependent on the life of the host. Like the residence of a parasite in the body or entrails of an animal or human host, this occupancy can last for years or decades. And while this lasts, the human or animal host endures degrees of anguish and medical predicament from mild to very severe, very acute. In the South African “case load”, it took the post-apartheid ruling political elite the space between Mandela and Mbeki and then Zuma and Ramaphosa to metamorphose from the minor parasitism of limited state capture to the advent of destructive parasitism of state capture at its worst, its most malignant. All the same, in South Africa, state capture has nor devolved into state failure and in all probability, it won’t.

As we have noted, Nigeria presents us with a “case load” in which we find a combination of the two ailments, the two forms of mild and malignant parasitism, these being state capture and the failed state. To the parasite whose intention is not to kill the host, there is the addition of viruses whose purpose is to wage war on the host, a war that is calculated to destroy the host. But since in Nigeria we have not (yet) descended into a full-blown failed state, there is a likelihood that we may be in for a long limbo in which the parasites and the viruses contend for the life of the host. Let me state this baleful prospect in concrete terms: beyond the end of Buhari’s second term in office in 2023, beyond even the possibility of an interregnum in which the presidency rotates between incumbents without Buhari’s charismatic but quite mediocre rulership, we may be in for a long period in which we will exist as a nation trapped in this space between state capture and the failed state.

Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da, la-la-la-la-la, life goes on, bra!

An etymological note on this section heading: it is a line from perhaps the most tuneful song in the Beatles’ complete repertoire of hit singles. The tune and title of the song was said to have been borrowed by the Beatles’ Paul McCartney from a London-based Nigerian conga player, Jimmy Scott Emuakpor. The phrase that serves as the title of the song was said to have originated in Scott Emuakpor’s family’s play on words of an Urhobo Everyman’s philosophical stoicism which posits that life goes even in the worst or most tragic of circumstances. In a slightly different and perhaps more sardonic register, Fela Kuti also expressed the same sentiment in his famous song, :Shuffering and Shmiling”. How do these song titles from The Beatles and Fela relate to the subject of this discussion, Nigeria’s immersion in its greatest security crisis since the end of the Nigerian-Biafran civil war of 1967-70?

On the surface, it seems that Nigerians are not doing enough, are not doing much about our endgame security crisis beyond bitter, scathing newspaper articles like this one or the countless unprintable posts in the social media of the Internet. I include here the progressive and radical Left. If there have been protests and demonstrations specifically and pointedly geared to the security crisis in the country, I have not heard of them or read about them. Yes, the outcries are deafening, the individual and collective expressions of outrage overwhelming. But we have yet to see the otherwise often very engaged activist human and civil rights organizations in the country direct their campaigns and mobilizations of popular energy to the state of (in)security in virtually all parts of the country. Is this situation therefore a matter of “Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da, life goes on”? It does seem that “scowling” has replaced the “shmiling” of Fela’s song, but the very sharp edge of Fela’s critique in his song has been replaced by inchoate and often reactionary posts in the social media. Again, if there are things that I have missed, I stand to be corrected and I will even willingly accept rebuke on that score. But with one caveat: the possibility, the necessity even of the gravediggers of the present political order in the country working silently and anonymously to bring restitution to the individuals, families and communities that have been the victims of the killings, the abductions, the pillages, the wanton destruction of lives and livelihoods.

The gravediggers of today and tomorrow

It, or they, will come, compatriots. In the terrible and criminal absence of the government’s defense and protection of the people from bandits, insurrectionists, kidnappers, jihadists and nihilists, resistance will come, the gravediggers will come. People will find the means, the strategy and tactics of defending themselves. The government is haunted by its two shadows, these being the former rulers in the opposition PDP and the “shadowy” kingpins of the insurrectionists and the marauding, extortionate bandit gangs. Compatriots, don’t you see how the government directs all its anger, bitterness and frustration against the “shadow” it can handle with bluster, these being the PDP “emergency patriots”? Why are the administration’s official megaphones not bullying and threatening the government’s other “ “shadow”, the insurrectionists and the bandits, many of whom operate openly, are exposed and yet are seemingly untouchable? Well, is it not the case that bullies threaten and cajole only those they have the power and authority to bully and cajole?

I am invoking the gravedigger trope in this discussion deliberately. The profession, the trade of gravedigging is one of the most lowly, indeed most despised jobs. Gravediggers wait, unseen and unheralded, until all the mourners have gone. But as much in the history of revolutions and revolutionary culture, gravediggers have always been invoked as a sort of vanguard, sometimes as a sort of non-hierarchical, faceless and leaderless vanguard and at other times as “technicians” of revolutionary change. Expect gravediggers of both kinds in our country. And remember, compatriots, these are talking points, not blueprints for what is to come.

• Biodun Jeyifo bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

By Biodun Jeyifo

“In the current impasse of a Republican party that has been taken over by the Far-Right and a Democratic party dominated by its Left, we are only one or two conflagrations from an apocalyptic showdown between the two forces. But mercifully, this is not the end of the story. In next week’s concluding piece, we will explore how Democrats can hope and plan to expand the plurality of their ruling coalition in the years ahead of us”. These were the last two sentences in last week’s column. Well then, to make good the promise in those “last words’, let us get to work.

Let us recall the narrowness of the Democrat’s electoral victory in last year’s general elections. Although the party captured the three arms of the government – the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives – with the exception of the presidency, the margin of victory was quite slim. In the Senate, the two parties were tied at 50/50, with only Vice President, Kamala Harris’ tie vote giving Democrats their one-vote advantage. In effect, the Democrats need every single vote of their 50 votes, otherwise they cannot get much of substance done in their very ambitious, very progressive legislative agenda. Meanwhile, Joe Machin, the most conservative Democratic party Senator from West Virginia, has given every indication that he will not cast his vote automatically but will weigh every vote on how far it “strays” from moderate, centrist interests. Indeed, he has hinted darkly that if he is pushed too hard, he might switch parties and cross over to the Republicans.

There is also this to consider: in last year’s elections, the margin of the Democrat’s control on the House narrowed considerably from about two dozen to just ten. As a matter of fact, not only did the Republicans narrow the Democrats control of the House, but they also did well in elections for control of state legislatures in many more states of the country than Democrats. Indeed, it is on that basis that the Republicans have embarked on a massive  project of changing electoral laws throughout the whole country to make it extremely difficult for Democrats to win in all future elections at every level, local, state and federal. Thus, if these new laws are not overturned in the law courts, and/or if they are not countermanded by federal legislation in Congress, the future will be very gloomy for the Democrats, specifically for progressive legislation to rectify and reorder present racial, gender and class inequities.

These ominous facts and realities of Post-Trump America are made even more fraught by the fact that the Far-Right swing of the Republicans is marked by a belligerence, a bloody-mindedness that is absolutely without precedent in America political history. Just to give one instance of this development, consider the “law” that was enacted in the State of Florida earlier this week and signed by the most authoritarian governor in America, Ron DeSantis. In the provisions of this “law”, any driver who plows into a crowd of protesters and demonstrators will be immune from prosecution and punishment. This “law” was passed specifically with the expectation that riots and demonstrations were going to break out if Derek Chauvin, the cop who killed George Floyd, was acquitted. But beyond that specific instance, the “law” targets all present and future protests and demonstrations of Black people and other minorities for racial and social justice. This is because it is only in such protests and demonstrations that White vehicle drivers have deliberately plowed into crowds of protesters. For the avoidance of confusion, permit me to repeat what this “law” permits: any driver can plow into a crowd of protesters and demonstrators and get away with it, no matter how many people he or she kills or maims.

The reader will have noticed that in the paragraph above, I have bracketed every instance of the appearance of the word, “law”. I hope the reason for this is not only clear but obvious. For it would be a misuse of language, a terminological barbarism to call the legislation that Ron DeSantis signed this week in Florida a “law”. Hopefully, long before the challenge to the “law” reaches the Supreme Court, it would have been struck down by a much lower court. But precisely because in present-day America no one can be sure that this “law” will be struck down in the courts, no one can be sure that many other states will not follow the lead provided by DeSantis in this heinous “law”, we are enabled to get an inkling of just how far the Republicans, as the party of Trump, are pushing the country toward a brutal and savagely racist wilderness.

At this point in the discussion, we must pause for breath, a breath of hope and unrelenting struggle against these dark, malignant forces that have captured the Republican party, body and soul. For, after all, I started this concluding piece in the series with the claim that all is not lost, that it is quite within the realm of possibility for the Democrats, led by the tremendously progressive energy driving the party at the present time, to expand its current narrow ruling plurality, thereby turning the tables against the Trumpian hordes lying in wait in the Republican party, ready to suspend the rule of  liberal democracy in America for a long, long time. There are about three portents on the horizon of present realities and future prospects that we can draw upon for these resources of hope.

The first portent – and perhaps the most significant – is the fact that almost without exception, the list of items and projects on the legislative agenda of Biden and the Democrats are enormously popular, so popular indeed that many of them have garnered widespread support among registered Republicans. For example, the $1.9 trillion stimulus package that went through both houses of Congress without a single vote from Republicans and was signed by Biden into law, was as popular among Republicans as among Democrats and Independents. As a matter of fact, after this stimulus bill was passed into law and the benefits started going to poor and middle class Americans, Republican congressmen and women who had voted against it began to clothe themselves, as members of the Congress that approved the bill, in the satisfaction, the praise that Americans in their tens of millions expressed about the package.

Read Also: Legislators mull cattle census: it never ends!

Equally enormously popular among Americans of all political persuasions is the so-called infrastructural bill, worth $2 trillion, now before Congress. Apparently, all Americans believe the Democrats’ promotion of this “infrastructural” bill as a potential mammoth jobs creator. And indeed, which populace, which electorate in the world would not gladly and widely embrace a legislative bill that promises, credibly, to create millions upon millions of new jobs, new skills, new opportunities? As a matter of fact – and to the utter consternation of the Republicans – the Democrats’ plan that this infrastructural bill will be funded by increasing taxes on corporations is also very popular among all Americans, Republicans included! And as if these signs were not stirring enough, many businesses and corporations are in support of this bill. Though they are not in support of the part of the bill that would increase corporate taxes, the part of the bill that promises renewal and expansion of infrastructures on a colossal scale is expected to be very good for business. As a Nigerian, I look at this bill and I think of our own “stomach infrastructure” – but with a difference. What is the difference? In this American Post-Trump bill, real physical and social infrastructures are in combination, through the creation of millions upon millions of new jobs, with “stomach infrastructure”!

Beyond the not insignificant concrete economic and social benefits of these and other legislative projects of Biden and the Democrats, there is also the potential social-psychological impact on all Americans. This is because if the Democrats succeed, if they bring about tangible and measurable benefits to all, perhaps – but only perhaps – Americans of the Right would become less open to the conspiracy theories, the lies, the deceits, the open assault on facts by Trump and the Far-Right. Let us place in this in a probabilistic framework. Who would any citizenry, any electorate in the world believe more, the party which thrives on fears, phobias and lies or the party which asks to be judged by the concrete facts and realities of social and economic benefits delivered? In the first year and half of his administration, Trump relied on the seeming successes of his economic policies, especially the big cuts in taxes for the rich. But how utterly woefully he failed at the first sign of deep and real trouble in the form of the pandemic and its catastrophic economic impact! On the other hand, in less than the first 100 days in office, Biden and the Democrats have done what Trump and the Republicans could not do in two years. This is why, as much as Trump and the Far-Right seem dominant in the Republican party at the present time, they really have no concrete policies and no programs attractive to the masses of poor and middle class Americans of all racial and ethnic communities. Indeed, with the exception of about half of the White American electorate, all other groups and communities in the country are overwhelmingly wary or even distrustful of the Republicans. This observation brings me to what I consider the “clinching” point of my reflections in this piece.

Let me put this point across in as concrete a formulation as is possible: if national elections were held in America today under the existing electoral laws and not the new restrictive, “Jim Crow” laws that the Republicans are enacting all over the country, which party would win and by how large a margin? The answer is unassailable: the Democrats would win resoundingly. Yes, Trump’s supporters are fanatical supporters and they do seem to have a firm grip on the Republican party. But that grip, that fist of iron and bloodshed is on the throat of the party; it is not lodged deep down into the windpipe of the country.

Human nature is not invariant; it adapts to changes in circumstances and prospects. But all the same, there are constants and verities of human nature and humankind. One of the most commonplace of these constants is self-preservation, which often manifests as individual and collective self-interest. This why is if elections are held in America today, Biden and the Democrats would win and they would win big. Of course, it is another matter entirely what will happen in the forthcoming midterm elections of 2022. My guess is that the odds then will still be in favor of the party in control of Congress and the incumbency of the White House. Thus, the most important thing to watch is the possibility, the likelihood of the expansion of the current ruling plurality of Biden and the Democrats to include what we might call “Biden Republicans” in alliance with the current coalition of liberal and progressive Whites, the Black Lives Matter movement and progressives of other minorities. I am not making a prophecy and I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself. Before we get to that conjuncture in November 2022, there will be many rivers to cross. Indeed, what is certain is that there are many, many struggles and crises ahead.

The guilty verdict against Derek Chauvin

We all exhaled when the verdict was pronounced. We could breathe. I was behind the driver’s wheel in my car just before the announcement of the verdict was to be made. Fortunately, I was in a neighborhood where there were parking spaces available for me to stop and park my car. I knew that one way or another, whatever the verdict was, I would need time and space in which to reflect after the announcement. After the announcement was made, I switched off the car radio. I did not want my own thoughts, my own feelings to be “processed” through the instant commentary of pundits. After about an hour after the announcement, I started the car and drove home, still wishing to leave my thoughts free of the expertise of the instant commentariat.

I am one of those who doubted, doubted fiercely, that a guilty verdict would be returned. Now that I was proved wrong by the verdict that was actually returned, I can breathe. But George Floyd breathed his last that day in May last year. And I am still haunted by the thought that, like George Floyd, other Black men and women will also take their last breaths under a White racist killer-cop’s knee or gun. And then, again, I shall hold my breath waiting for a guilty verdict that may or may not come. There are many more where Derek Chauvin comes from.

• Biodun Jeyifo bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

By Biodun Jeyifo

As I write this column very early in the morning of Friday, April 9, 2021, we are only in the nineth day of the trial of Derek Chauvin, the White Minneapolis policeman whose killing of Gorge Floyd in a chokehold was caught on video and startled the whole world. Yes, we are only in the second week of the trial that will last for several weeks, if not for months and already it is clear that the plaintiff has won a resounding moral and spiritual victory and nothing will ever be the same again.

In a formal technical sense, this plaintiff is the American government, but everyone knows that the real plaintiff is humanity itself. More specifically, humanity in this instance is embodied in and by all the witnesses so far presented by the government prosecutors, most especially two completely unlikely pair of heroes, Darnella Frazier and Dr. Martin Tobin. Ms. Frazier is the teenage girl who shot the video of Chauvin’s slow and satanic killing of Floyd by placing the whole weight of his body on Floyd’s neck  through one of his knees. And Dr. Tobin is the pulmonologist who, yesterday, used Ms. Frazier’s video to give stunning forensic evidence that it was “lack of oxygen” caused by Chauvin that killed George Floyd. Why do I claim that humanity itself is the plaintiff in this trial and, secondly, why do I claim that humanity’s representative in the trial are Ms. Frazier and Dr. Tobin?

During her testimony at Chauvin’s trial, Darnella essentially said two things. First, she said that she is Black, that her father is Black, her brothers are Black, her uncles are Black, her male cousins are Black and for this reason, George Floyd being Black, she saw in his tragic fate something that could have happened to any male member of both her immediate family and extended family of relatives. Secondly, she said, tearfully and inconsolably, that since the day of the incident, she has been haunted by the fact that she could not save George Floyd, that the video that she shot was ineffectual in saving his life. “I have been apologizing and apologizing to him”, she concluded. This is a young girl who is not out of her teens but had the inspired nerve and the presence of mind to keep her phone camera’s lens totally focused on Chauvin, thereby capturing that matchless act of 21st century lynching of Floyd by Chauvin. The world has most appropriately conferred great heroism on this young woman but what does she herself feel? She is haunted by the feeling that she failed George Floyd. What is this if not humanity at its most ineffable?

Within hours of the testimony of Dr. Martin Tobin, experts in the fields of pulmonology and forensic criminology had proclaimed that nobody in living memory can remember a more thorough, painstaking and commanding testimony in an American criminal trial than the one given yesterday by this expert. Without beclouding his testimony with jargon and alienated expertise, Dr. Tobin simultaneously made what he had to say both remarkably simple and understandable and yet impressively knowledgeable. At the same time that he drew expansively on scientific concepts and analysis, he used metaphors and similes drawn from quotidian, everyday experiences. As if teaching a class in basic physiology and pulmonology, he took the members of the jury through elements of the body’s response to imposed deprivation of oxygen. As a result, he delivered what was surely the most devastating blow to Chauvin and his lawyers, this being the argument by Chauvin’s lawyers that Floyd’s death was caused by his preexisting diseases and substance abuse. In Dr. Tobin submission, this claim is completely lacking in merit because even a very healthy person could not have survived the length of time in which Floyd’s body was starved of oxygen.

With only speculative or, at best, deductive reasoning as my guide, I declare that Dr. Tobin’s testimony was deeply inspired by Darnella Frazier’s video. Since he referred a lot to the video, it is obvious that that documentary evidence served the pulmonologist well in his own labours. But I am suggesting that there is more than a mere adventitious connection here. I have no other way of expressing this thought than by asserting, very simply, that humanity at its most elemental in one person, one instance, calls to and inspires humanity in another person, another instance. In other words, we can imagine that Dr. Tobin must have said to himself that if a teenage girl could be so faithful to what is most human in us at the moment of George Floyd’s savage slaying, he, Dr. Tobin, had a moral and spiritual obligation to extend and expand the reach and scope of that humaneness. Let me put some concrete flesh to this abstract, speculative claim: in Dr. Tobin’s detailed, scientific recreation of George Floyd’s last minutes of life, it was as if we are at last enabled to concretely place ourselves in the living tissue of the slain man’s own experience as life was being snuffed out of him.

There is a thin, almost invisible thread of argument pertaining to the claim that I am making here of a moral and spiritual victory even before the end of the trial. It is time for me to make this thread clear at this juncture. What does the thread consist of? It consists, first, of the fact that if Darnella Frazier had not produced that video of the slaying of George Floyd, Chauvin and his accomplices would never have been charged; they would never even have been dismissed from the MPD, the Minneapolis Police Department. Secondly, without thar video, the MPD and virtually all other Police Departments in the country would have closed ranks to impose the notorious, so-called ‘blue wall of silence” through which policemen and women never give evidence against their colleagues, especially when the case involves the slaying of an unarmed Black man or woman. Thirdly, it is on record that it is very rare for a jury to return a verdict of guilt for any White police officer standing trial for the killing of a Black person. Finally, in the trial of Chauvin, all that is required for the accused to be set free is for one single juror out of twelve jurors to return a verdict of not guilty. Taken together, all these factors mean that until an actual verdict of guilty is imposed on Chauvin, it is premature to declare victory in the trial of Chauvin, even if it is a moral victory.

Well, not completely. This is because apart from the overwhelming evidence of Darnella Frazier’s video and Dr. Tobin’s expert pulmonologist’s testimony, there is another piece of testimony that has broken from the normative pattern of protection of White police officers from prosecution or guilty verdicts in the slaying of unarmed Black people. What is this testimony?  Well, for the first time, other police officers have given damning evidence against another police officer, this being Derek Chauvin. It so happens that the police officers involved in this instance are officers greatly superior in rank and authority to Chauvin in the MPD. In their testimonies, these officers asserted that Chauvin used excessive, deadly force on Floyd; and they testified that Chauvin was not acting in line with both his training and the ethics of the MPD. Indeed, other uniformed personnel of the Municipality of Minneapolis like an operator in the emergency hotline phone service and a staff of first-aid medical personnel both testified that Chauvin and his accomplices prevented them from rendering aid to Floyd when it was still possible to save his life.

What is, or will be the distance from moral to actual victory in the Chauvin trial? This is the heart of the matter in this discussion. In any country in the world in which the humanity of all citizens is taken for granted and in which the equality of all before the law, especially in matters of life and death, is both a cherished legal precept and a routinely confirmed ruling in trial cases, this question would never have arisen because there isn’t or shouldn’t be any gap between moral and actual victory. Chauvin having been shown to be so massively in guilt, it should not turn out at the end of the trial that he is acquitted. If that should happen, then something fundamentally flawed is wrong with American justice. This is why nearly all commentators, all pundits agree that it is not only Chauvin that is on trial but America itself, with humanity as the plaintiff.

This contention is not as abstract or fanciful as it may seem. In concrete terms, virtually everyone is fearful, very fearful that in spite of the overwhelming evidence against Chauvin, he may be acquitted. After all, it will take only ONE juror out of twelve to acquit him. In Trump’s America, it is highly probable that such a juror could have sneaked through the roadblock of legal impartiality with one purpose and one purpose only: to free Chauvin in order to repair the cracks in the edifice of racism and White supremacy in the police forces of America caused by the worldwide reaction to the slaying of Floyd. Permit me to carefully and clearly delineate what I have in mind here.

Earlier in this discussion, I made mention of a so-called “blue wall of silence”, explaining that this pertains to the fact that it is a given, manifestly evidentiary fact of policing in America that the police never testify against their own, especially where it pertains to police brutality and/or murderous violence against Black men and women. This is why in the present trial of Derek Chauvin for the slaying of George Floyd, the testimonies of Chauvin’s superiors against him were so unprecedented that commentators and pundits are still in shock, still in amazement that it happened. Similarly, the testimony of Dr. Tobin yesterday seemed so remarkably beyond the pale of what obtains in American trials of police officers that the foreign sounding accent of the pulmonologist has been remarked, this foreign accent being nothing more (or less) than that of a first-generation, Irish-American who was born in Ireland. In this context, one can imagine that the “foreignness” of Dr. Tobin is appealing and disturbing to Americans for the same reason: it affirms their common humanity with George Floyd while it also confounds them with the fact that they had to discover this through a “foreigner”.

“I am human, therefore nothing human is strange to me”, so famously said Terrence, a major playwright of Roman antiquity, who was a freed North African slave also known as Plubius Terentius Afer. By this Terrence meant both the good and the bad, the benevolent and the maleficent in humanity. The video of George Floyd’s slaying sent unprecedented shock waves throughout the world because Chauvin, the White policeman, was so elemental in his incarnation of human inhumanity. Let me rephrase this observation: it was inhumanity at its worst; nevertheless, it was a very human inhumanity. It was specifically an inhumanity of the genus Americanus, historically most perpetrated against Black people and other Non-White peoples. For this reason, everyone knows that it is not only Chauvin but America itself that is on trial in this case. Either Chauvin will be convicted or he will be acquitted. Don’t put his acquittal beyond probability; and neither should you take it for granted that his acquittal is a foregone conclusion, as many Black people all over the world assume. But it is on the possibility of his conviction that I wish to conclude this discussion.

If Chauvin is convicted, will that lead to a symbolic and actual conviction of the racist and White supremacist culture and practices of policing in America? That is the question, compatriots. We are talking here of nothing short of a revolution. The Biden administration and the Democratic Party seem both very much aware that this will be the necessary and logical consequence of the conviction of Chauvin. But beyond that awareness, beyond legislation and policy, what actual struggles around implementation of legislation and policies will be like is another matter entirely.

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

By Biodun Jeyifo

“That distribution undo excess and each man have enough” – Shakespeare, King Lear

It is not as an act of prophetic insight that I declare in the title of this piece that sooner or later, Nigeria will be geopolitically and administratively restructured. Rather, it is an expression of a bitter but realistic acceptance of the logic of the misrule that makes life so terrible for the vast majority of Nigerian peoples at the present time and going back to the resumption of civilian “democracy” in 1999. By the light of this logic, we can see that about the only thing sustaining the bloated overconcentration and over-centralization of power in the country is the fact, first of all, that the oil is still flowing. If the oil stops flowing or if its control by the Nigerian rentier state is seriously challenged or disrupted, the concentration of power in Abuja will fade away in a matter of months, if not weeks.

Secondly, this logic includes the generally overlooked fact that restructuring of sorts is already taking place without the permission of the federal government. The most visible expression of this “restructuring” is the fac that throughout the length and breadth of the country, many communities are no longer looking to the federal government and its institutions for their security needs. As a matter of fact, there is a profound mistrust of the federal government and its clinging to power at the centre, given the widespread belief that its claim of “indivisible unity” has become a thinly disguised justification for blatant sectionalism and ethnic irredentism.

And then thirdly, “restructuring” of a very ominous kind is already taking place in the number of insurrectionary, secessionist and criminal movements and groups that are very successful in their challenge to the monopoly of power by our centralized state. Badly equipped, outgunned and demoralized, our armed and security forces, together with their command personnel, increasingly prove to be unable to provide and stabilize institutions vital to the maintenance of a modern centralized state. Yes, the army has not vanished into thin air – heavens forbid! – and the paramilitary formations of the Nigerian Police are still functioning, but who does not know that a large number of Nigerans fear these support units of the federal government as much as they fear the forces of Boko Haram and the marauding bandits and “herders”? We must face the facts, the truth, compatriots: restructuring is already happening, even if it is not the kind of restructuring that the liberal and conservative political and ideological forces of the intelligentsia have in mind when they propose that sooner or later, sooner than later, Nigeria must and will be restructured. Which is why, in the title of this piece, I make bold to declare that in the end, there will be restructuring in on form or another.

But then, I also mention redistribution in that same title. And in doing so, I come to the main idea of this piece: although most readers will almost automatically react negatively to the suggestion, the quest for redistribution is by a long shot more pervasive in our country than the quest for restructuring. Permit me to state this in another formulation: if you ask them, the vast majority of Nigerians will say that, yes, they want restructuring of power and authority to bring the benefits and assurances of governance closer to their communities, hometowns and neighborhoods, but above all else, they want the benefits of our oil wealth to be shared equally among all Nigerians, not cornered by our rulers, our elites, our emergency billionaires. They see that the looters of our common wealth come from all parts of the country without any exceptions. They want jobs; free or affordable and qualitative education for their children; subsidized, quality housing and well-equipped hospitals and clinics for themselves and their families. And they want national and state governments that put the interest of all Nigerians at the centre of governance. They also want a wage structure in which a livable minimum wage is enforced and also bears an equitable relationship to the salaries and emoluments of our legislators and public officeholders. In other words, they want the assets and resources of the nation to be held in trust for present and future generations of Nigerians. By the way, the Nigerian Constitution has clauses supporting all these expressions of the primacy of redistribution, even if the relevant clauses are, to use a legal jargon, “non-justiciable”. I shall come back to this issue in the closing paragraphs of this discussion. For now, permit me to go back to the suggestion that restructuring will not only happen sooner or later but is already happening.

It so happens, compatriots, that restructuring from below by non-state actors and forces is a prominent feature of the politics of all the failed states of our continent and other parts of the developing world. In all of them without exception, the refusal or failure of the central power to organize and actualize orderly, equitable and democratic restructuring is the cause of restructuring done by rogue elements and conservative, irredentist movements. For this reason, the view taken by Buhari’s administration that restructuring is risky if not actually dangerous is self-fulfilling. In nearly every state which refuses to restructure equitably and democratically, there is nearly always an outbreak of restructuring by other means – war, insurrections, uprisings, marauding non-state or anti-statist movements. This is part of the tragedy of the Buhari administration’s profound lack of understanding of what we might describe as the dialectics of restructuring: you can either work to achieve it peacefully and democratically or oppose it at the peril of letting it run its own chaotic and destructive course.

I should of course state here with as much emphasis as possible that I am not posing restructuring against redistribution in this piece. And I do admit that most liberal and progressive proponents of restructuring in Nigeria also bring redistribution into their demands and programs for restructuring. The real issue on which the Nigerian Left, conceived as an amalgam of many ideological and political currents and forces, should enter into serous debates with them is the fact that if pressed on the matter, most liberal proponents of restructuring will say let’s have restructuring first and then attend to redistribution later, after we have achieved restructuring. This is fundamentally wrong and is, at any rate, impracticable. Or more properly put, only if war and insurrection have taken over the struggle for restructuring will the toiling masses of Nigerians everywhere in the country agree that they should hold off on redistribution while the struggle for restructuring is fought and brought to a victorious end.

At any rate, it is very crucial to recognize that restructuring has already begun in Nigeria, without any ideological or programmatic fanfare. It is chaotic, it is inchoate, it is fractious and nation-wrecking. It is not the restructuring that liberal and progressive proponents of restructuring have in mind. I stated earlier that this kind of “restructuring” is rampant in all the failed states of the African continent and that this ought to serve as a warning, a cautionary tale for us in Nigeria. I now add that as a matter of fact, this phenomenon of a “restructuring” that does  not shout its name but is extraordinary in its militancy is rampant all over the contemporary world in all the continents, all the regions. As I write these words, the United States, the heartland of global capitalism and the birthplace of the modern democratic republic, is being shaken to its foundations by an atavistic restructuring of its democratic polity by one of the two ruling class political parties, the Republican Party. If this “restructuring” succeeds, a political party which has clearly emerged as a minority party based openly and militantly on white supremacy, will become a majority party with the possibility of indefinite grip on power at the center of the American political order.

In moving to the concluding paragraphs of this discussion, I now come to the observation I made earlier to the effect that the Nigerian Constitution itself makes equitable redistribution of the wealth and assets of the nation a desired end but making it “non-justiciable”. The term means, simply, not enforceable by law. In other words, while the Constitution says that all the good things in life, all the economic and social benefits that can come from the nation’s wealth should be extended to all Nigerians as a right, it nevertheless cannot for the present time be enforced by law; it can only be vigorously pursued until conditions are ripe for its enforcement by law. It is not for me to tell the story of how progressive and radical members of the Constitution drafting committee that produced the Constitution fought vigorously to make these particular clauses of the Constitution “justiciable”. What is necessary for me to narrate here is how such a clause came up for passionate debate among the drafting committee in the first place. How was this possible, you might ask? Well, simply this: the progressive members of the Committee listened, listened attentively to the masses of Nigerians who were clamoring for social justice on the basis of the redistribution of the wealth of the nation.

In his famous, canonical tome on capitalism, The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith memorably declared that the poverty of the nation is closely linked with, is indeed indivisible from the wealth of the nation. This is from a book that is regarded all over the world as the “bible” of capitalism. What did Adam Smith have in mind in making this startling declaration? Simply, this: there is no creation of wealth without the creation of poverty; and if this is so, capitalists must never ignore, must never take for granted the poverty that is created when wealth is magnified through surplus accumulation. In all progressive forms of capitalism, this declaration, this mantra is observed almost like a holy injunction, especially in the welfarist and social democratic states of the world. With this thought in my mind, I ask members of the younger generation to pay special attention to what I am making of the present Nigerian Constitution: it is a welfarist, social democratic Constitution, in intent if not in justiciability.

The present kingpins of the Nigerian ruling class, especially as constituted in the APC and the PDP, have strayed far from the origins of our present “democratic” order in that Constitution. They have widened the gap between the wealth and the poverty of the nation into a chasm. And they have refused to see any link, any productive relationship between restructuring and redistribution. And most alarming of all, they have completely misrecognized the fact that while they have been doing all that they can to silence and frustrate the calls for democratic and egalitarian restructuring, restructuring has already made great inroads into the country’s political bloodstream, not as an invigorating element but as nation-wrecking poison. Thanks to the “restructuring” successes of insurgents, secessionists and criminal marauders, many communities in the nation are beginning to turn against one another in various states of declared and undeclared belligerence. As stated in the title of this piece, restructuring will come, has indeed already begun to come, in one way or another. But restructuring without redistribution? It is a specter that is too frightening to contemplate.

• Biodun Jeyifo, bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

By  Biodun Jeyifo

It is only partly because in the last two and half decades of his life he endured, indeed overcame the material and psychic effects of great hardship that I could never hold him and death in the same thought. Beside his immense gifts and skills of emotional strength, there was also the fact of that his optimistic attitude to life was peerless. I am talking of course of the object of this tribute, Ebenezer Olufemi Ademulegun who died in Lagos of Covid-19 earlier this month of March 2021 at the age of 75. It is difficult for me to explain the inscrutable fact that of nearly all my close friends still living, still waiting in the departure lounge of life, I had expected Adex, as he was fondly and universally known, to be the last of us to go. Was this because he complained nearly all the time that he was beginning to feel the signs or, as a matter of fact, the pangs of a serious, life-threatening disease only to move on to another equally frightening disease? I do not know. All I know is that because I could never associate him with death and dying in an existential sense, even as I write this tribute in his memory, I am still unable or unwilling to say my farewell to him.

I write with the UI Class of 1967 in mind which is perhaps the most active and best organized matriculation set since UI was founded in 1948. Adex was quite easily the most popular member of the set. There were many reasons for this – his affability, his loyalty to the set as an organized body, his infectious gregariousness and the esteem in which he held every member of the set without any exception. But without intending to question the genuineness of anyone’s regard for Adex, I must say that few really knew him beyond the surface expressions of affable sociability. That being said, I am sure that nothing that I say in this tribute will detract from the abundance of affection and loyalty that Adex enjoyed from our set and from all his innumerable friends and acquaintances. At least, that is my hope.

In the bracketed subtitle to this tribute, I describe Adex as a “doughty ethnophilosopher” and “dedicated Awoist”. I could have added another sobriquet: “intrepid researcher in the esoteric sciences”. I shall presently get to what I have in mind in applying these appellations to the life, the mind and the identity of our late friend, especially in the ripeness of his biological and intellectual adulthood. But before coming to that center of this tribute, it is important to provide a sort of “introduction” by narrating the extraordinary occurrence that forever cemented my friendship with Adex.

The occurrence dates back to the very first semester of the 1967-68 academic year. Since this was our first year, it meant in effect that we had just met and were still to get a sense of each other as real friends. As with all young men at that age, a girl was involved in the encounter, this being a new girlfriend of his. The young woman involved was a beginning higher school certificate student at Ibadan Grammar School. On what seemed to have been his second visit to this girlfriend one late afternoon, Adex begged me to accompany him on the long tax ride from UI to Ibadan Grammar School at the tail end of the other part of the city leaving Ibadan and heading toward Lagos. He explained to me that he needed my company to add number and luster to the status of UI studentship which Adex regarded as the winning gambit of his courtship of the girl. To cut a long story short, we arrived at our destination and a go-between duly brought Adex’s new girlfriend named Wale to meet with us. As pre-planned, Adex introduced me to the girl as a close friend and we exchanged pleasantries for a while. Then, again as pre-planned, I moved away from the lovers, and from a discreet distance out of earshot, I stood apart from them in order for them to be alone together. And then I waited, and waited, and waited as the minutes became an hour. Very soon it began to be dusky and I began to be restless. We are going to UI, for God’s sake, I muttered to myself. If we tarry until it gets dark, we would have to walk all the way from the gates of the Grammar School to Molete to catch a cab for UI, a distance of about a mile. After what seemed to me to be an interminable stretch of time, Adex said his goodbye to the girl, came to me and we began our long walk to catch a taxi.

Needless to say, I was a little upset, perhaps even angry. But of course, my curiosity was much bigger than my anger. And so, “how did it go”, I asked Adex? Silence, no answer. I repeated the question and again, no response from my friend. And then all of a sudden, without any warning, Adex fell – or threw himself – flat on his back on the macadamized surface of the road and started to jabber! I went into total panic, thinking that my new friend was having an epileptic fit. That is until I discovered that Adex was actually reciting a love poem to Wale, his new girlfriend, absolutely flat on his back reciting, chanting his undying love to Wale to the darkling skies above. The poem was a love poem from British Romantic poetry whose author I can’t recollect now. Adex, full of passion and as if possessed, was pouring out his heart to his love, completely flat on his back!

Up to that moment, I had never had any experience remotely close to that night in 1967 at Molete with Adex, even though in high school, I had been considered the best writer of love letters, not in pursuit of my own love interest but for my classmates and schoolmates. There were manuals and booklets for boys and girls on how to write love letters and my classmates rated me a better writer of love letters than even the best of the manuals, “Love Letters and How to Write Them”. But that adolescent experience of inventing and putting flesh on a budding love relationship for others had not prepared me for Adex and the spellbinding quality of his enchantment by love. After the original “Molete”, Adex enacted other replacement “Moletes” with other girls, though none as momentous as the first one. He eventually got married but not before he had had numerous other encounters with women about whom one felt that he was trying to replace Wale of the first “Molete”. This was terribly, terribly unfair to most of the women he dated and passionately loved, but it seemed that he could not help himself. And then, nearly all of a sudden, he stopped: the enchantment had left him. Or rather, he diverted it to other avenues, other outlets like ethnophilosophy and a total embrace of Awoism.

In the years and decades when Adex was living as if he could not get “Molete” out of his system, he was professionally and socially at his most successful, his most fulfilled in terms of the most general or stereotypical notions of a fulfilled life, seen in terms of elite values and expectations. After we graduated from UI, he worked as a teacher for a brief spell and was adored by his students. And then he moved on to public relations and advertising. As a mark of his success in that profession, at one time he rented a whole floor at the famed Western House on Broad Street in downtown Lagos Island. No office complex was more prestigious in Lagos than this particular address at the time. Before then, Adex had bought a glitzy Mercedes Benz at a time when that brand was the king of cars in Nigeria and the rest of the world. Then he began planning to move his business operations and contacts to the wider world, with his base of operations split between Nigeria and the US, between Lagos and Boston. In this phase of his professional life, “Molete”, metaphorically standing for enchantment, reappeared in another incarnation in the life and experiences of Adex. He began to make grandiose plans and projections in his profession; and he embraced Awoism on a scale that went far beyond ordinary rank-and-file followership to an integrated adoption of Awo’s inflexible philosophical and ideological progressivism. The grandiose professional and business projections never really took off, never materialized, either because they were too impractical or because Adex was so much in the grip of “enchantment” that he could not coordinate all the practical or pragmatic necessities of his ventures.

To anyone, any relative, any acquaintance or friend who knew Adex at the times about which I am writing in this tribute, nothing that I have written so far was hidden. Starting from around the late 1980s to the early to mid-1990s, things began to be extremely hard for my friend. This, too, most people who knew him were very much aware of. Known widely too, was his estrangement from his wife, together with his incapability of sustaining his contacts with his two sons, all of them in the US (apart from two other children based in Nigeria). In any country in the world, it is a hard, hard thing for anyone to slip from the solid, charmed life of an elite. It is infinitely worse in Nigeria. Many friends rallied to Adex’s support and for the most part, they did so graciously. And Adex helped matters by never trading his dignity, his self-respect in seeking or accepting assistance from friends and relatives. But none of this fundamentally affects how any of us, any human adult, would deal with great hardship. In plain language, no assistance, no matter how genuine, how gracious, could help to salvage one’s self-respect or inner peace; one has to find them through one’s own efforts. Adex found both in ethnophilosophy and Awoism. And of course religion, specifically a kind of Christian eschatology mixed with Yoruba/African oral traditions of metaphysics.

It is on record that Adex published a booklet on Oduduwa, the mythical ancestral god-king of Yorubas. What is not known is that our friend also had a vast project to write and publish more extensively on Yoruba ethnophilosophy, based partly on metaphysics and comparative ethnolinguistics. Adex could hold forth for hours endlessly philosophizing on the coordinates of Being and destiny, on the foundations of the truly moral life and the contingencies and indeterminacies of value, not in the traditions of Western academic philosophy but in the accents of Yoruba and comparative African ethnophilosophy. Only very few of his friends and relatives knew of this side of his life, especially in the last decades when things were incredibly harsh for him materially. In public and in barely intimate contexts, he would sometimes break into snippets or gleanings of this vast project, depending on how receptive the particular audience was. But I was fortunate to have been a listener and an interlocutor of intimate conversations with him on these matters. His knowledge was vast, his adeptness truly astounding. But ethnophilosophy is fundamentally an oral not a written, codified tradition of philosophy. That is why Adex could not produce a written version of his project.

In combination with the disciplined, spartan habits of Awo, the sage himself, Awoism merged with  ethnophilosophy to make Adex turn completely away from the pursuits and obsessions of the younger adult and middle-age decades of his life. He conducted daily life on very strict, very organized forms and rituals of physical fitness. He did not cut down drastically on his culinary appetite as he did with his desire for female company, but he was careful about what he ate and drank. He came to terms with wanting and having only a little to sustain himself and he achieved an inner peace that enabled him not to forget his errors and mistakes but live with them without bitterness. Only in a few instances were his mistakes too painful for him to admit and in those instances, I think he devised techniques of silent spiritual mortification to ward off undue and unhelpful spiritual torments. Above all else, I think he came to that wisdom of the ages that posits that the only way in which to be truly rich is to want as little as possible.

Yes, only now can I say my farewell, Adex. But even then, this is only a beginning, not the end of my adieu…

• Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu