The Nation Newspaper

Category: Biodun Jeyifo

  • Interlocutory Appeals Unlimited Nigeriana: Has the Supreme Court killed the Administration of Criminal Justice Act of 2015? No!

    Interlocutory Appeals Unlimited Nigeriana: Has the Supreme Court killed the Administration of Criminal Justice Act of 2015? No!

    Interlocutory appeal (or interim appeal): in the law of civil procedure, an interlocutory appeal is an appeal of a ruling by a trial court that is made before all claims are resolved as to all parties.
    Dictionary.com (Online)

    War is too important to be left to the generals. Politics is too important to be left to politicians. And law is too important to be left to lawyers and judges.
    A mélange of quotes from many sources

    This past week, the Supreme Court of Justice of the Federation seating in Abuja made a ruling in which the honorable justices granted a stay of proceedings pending the determination of an interlocutory appeal by Bukola Saraki’s lawyers in the criminal action brought by the Federal Republic of Nigeria (FRN) against the Senate President in the Code of Conduct Tribunal, Abuja. By that act, it would seem that the Supreme Court has more or less killed the Administration of Criminal Justice Act of 2015 (ACJA) that was passed by the 11th session of the National Assembly and signed into law by the former president, Goodluck Jonathan, on May 13, 2015. This is because in at least two of its clauses, 306 and 396 respectively, ACJA had completely banned the invocation and use of interlocutory appeals and stay of proceedings to prolong criminal cases in the law courts of the land. Since the Justices of the Supreme Court cannot claim to be ignorant of ACJA and its explicit ouster of interlocutory appeals in criminal cases in Nigeria and since as a matter of fact, the provisions of ACJA have not been successfully challenged before the Supreme Court or indeed any other court in the country, the question arises as to whether or not the intent of the Supreme Court is to kill ACJA even before it begins to be implemented in our law courts.

    My frank answer to this question is I do not know; I cannot read what’s in the collective mind of the learned justices of the highest court in the land. But having made that admission let me now declare as vigorously as I can that the Supreme Court cannot and will not kill ACJA. ACJA has come to stay in our country and it is far beyond the power of the Supreme Court to block the cleansing and modernizing role it has come to play in our criminal justice system. Another way of stating this is to declare that History and Justice and Rectitude are on the side of ACJA and history all over the world has proved again and again that no supreme court can in the end stand against the tide of history. Since I am neither a lawyer nor a Pentecostal prophet, what is the basis on which I am making these ringing declarations? This question requires an explanation.

    In furtherance of that explanation, first a gloss of the word “Nigeriana” in the title of this piece which I intend to be a vigorous critique of that decision of the Supreme Court on the Saraki V FRN case. Here is the explanation: “Nigeriana” is a borrowing from Biology – or more specifically Botany – which implies that the thing or object indicated is native to Nigeria and no other country in the world. In this case, as strange as it may seem to anyone reading this piece, interlocutory appeals in criminal cases collectively constitute a legal procedure that is native to Nigeria and no other country on the planet. In other words, in every other country in the world, interlocutory appeals to prolong court cases apply exclusively to civil cases. Moreover, as the definition of this legalistic term demonstrates in the first of the two epigraphs to this piece, interlocutory appeals are, in nearly all the other countries in the world, intended to be “interim”, temporary. Only in Nigeria do they become so prolonged, so unbounded in the months, years and even decades in which they are perpetually invoked in the same case that they have more or less become temporally unlimited.

    One more word of explanation: in virtually all instances, this uniquely Nigerian aberrant form of interlocutory appeals is available not to any Tom, Dick and Harry charged with criminal offences in Nigerian courts; they are a special privilege available only to politicians and public officeholders accused of looting vast, humungous sums of money from our national coffers. As a matter of fact petty criminals and underclass felons in Nigeria typically face terribly inhumane and unjust treatment in our law courts. When trials of this class of poverty stricken Nigerians take long – as they indeed quite often do – it is not because interlocutory appeals have been invoked on their behalf; it is quite simply because they are forced to languish in prison for months and years before their cases are brought for trial on account of the great backlog of cases awaiting trial in Nigerian courts.

    Since I am not a lawyer but an academic whose professional field is literary and cultural studies, it is perhaps necessary for me at this point in the discussion to echo the words of the second epigraph to this piece: war is too important to be left to generals; politics is too important to be left to politicians; and law is too important to be left to lawyers and judges. Nonetheless, it so happens that I do indeed have a professional basis for daring to dabble in a discussion of this legalistic term, interlocutory appeals. From my training and background in cultural theory, I can explain that interlocutory is derived from interlocutor which itself is derived from the combination in Latin of two words, “inter” which means between and “loqui” which means to speak. From this, we get the meaning of the word interlocutor: a person who speaks between and among other speakers; a person who takes part in a conversation or dialogue. In other words, in the English language as much in its Latin roots, an interlocutor is only a participant in a dialogue in which, as a matter of fact he or she is never the major participant. This is why in its legal reformulation as interlocutory appeals it was never the intention for it to take over, dominate and endlessly prolong cases into which it is introduced by one of the parties. Also, this is why even as interim and provisional as it is meant to be, interlocutory appeals are rigorously restricted only to civil cases and never to criminal cases since, as everyone knows, it is perilous for victims in particular and for the society as a whole to delay or prolong the trial of criminals.

    At this stage, let me now inform the reader why I have taken this long in this piece to establish my professional qualifications – such as they are – to engage in a decision of the Supreme Court whose ramifications have thrown even members of the legal professional into a raging controversy. Indeed, this controversy among the lawyers is so acrimonious, so fraught that nearly every member of the profession now speaks and writes with the fear of being indicted for contempt of the highest court in the land. One reason for this is the fact that with great bellicosity, Saraki’s lawyer in the case, Mr. J. B. Daudu, SAN, has threatened to have any lawyer that henceforth dares to criticize the ruling of the Supreme Court in the case prosecuted for contempt. And in a similar but perhaps more odious and ominous vein, for and on behalf of those who had already negatively criticized the Supreme Court before Mr. Daudu’s anathema, the President of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), Mr. Austin Aleghe, SAN, has tendered an unreserved apology to the Justices of the Supreme Court.

    One consequence of these acts of intimidation by very senior and powerful members of the legal profession can be seen in the fact that only a handful of brave and hardy souls in the profession are speaking up forthrightly against the Supreme Court’s invalidation of the ban on interlocutory appeals and stays of proceedings in the Administration of Criminal Justice Act of 2015. I have not the slightest doubt that this was in fact the intended consequence of Saraki’s lead counsel, J.B. Daudu and the NBA President, Austin Aleghe in their presumed defence of the Supreme Court’s war on ACJA. But Daudu and Aleghe and others like them (e.g. Olisa Agbakoba) will not prevail in this struggle, especially outside the ranks of the membership of the NBA in particular and the legal profession in general. The credibility, the success of the war against the excesses and the impunity of corruption to which the new administration of Buhari has dedicated itself to the hearing of the country and the whole world rest fundamentally on the retention and implementation of the provisions of ACJA. And threats of prosecution for contempt of the highest court in the land will not silence those who fought for the enactment of ACJA.

    Let us hope that the Supreme Court will somehow find a face-saving way to reverse itself on its ruling that interlocutory appeals are still valid judicial principles in criminal cases in our country, against the explicit provisions of ACJA that stipulate that they are no longer valid in the Nigerian criminal justice system. In other words, if the Supreme Court does not find a way to redeem its ideal image as a chamber of justice for all and not just for the few that have bled the country dry, we will start all over again for enactment of a new and more invincible version of ACJA! Finally, how long can this Supreme Court – or any other that comes after it – uphold Nigeria as the only country in the whole world in which interlocutory appeals operate in criminal cases? How long can we as a country endure the shame, the notoriety that come from the fact that criminal prosecution of our looters are far more successful in foreign lands than in the Nigerian judicial system?

     

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Aliko Dangote at Harvard: the question I wanted to, but did not ask him (3)

    Aliko Dangote at Harvard: the question I wanted to, but did not ask him (3)

    When PDP came to power in 1999 Nigeria was generating about 4,000 MW of electricity. After 15 years and $20 billion spent we are generating between 3,000 and 4,000 MW.
    Presidential Candidate Muhammadu Buhari, November 2014

    As published in ThisDay, February 22, 2015 on the eve of the presidential elections that swept Goodluck Jonathan out of office, the following statement was made by Jonathan’s Minister of Power, Professor Chinedu Nebo, during the re-commissioning ceremony of the privatized Egbin Power Plant in Lagos State:

    “Your Excellency, since privatisation, the power sector has received as it were a new baton to move Nigeria to the next level of moving in the direction of uninterrupted power supply. Your Excellency, since privatisation and handing over to the private sector, distribution and generation value chains of the electricity sector, we have seen an employment of over 2,000 engineers hired in the sector. Your Excellency, please remember that for 16 years before you became President, the entire power sector in the country under both NEPA and PHCN did not hire a single engineer.  The level of dilapidation of the power sector that you inherited was so huge that it was not only with regards to material components but also with regards to human resources. It was also with regards to funding that was allowed to go so low that it appeared the power sector had become an orphan”

    Please note Professor Nebo’s observation that in the 16 years prior to Jonathan’s ascendancy to the presidency, the entire power sector in Nigeria had been in such a state of “dilapidation” that it seemed to have “become an orphan” grossly lacking in vital human and material inputs that could have made it capable of resolving the nation’s perennial crises of inadequate and irregular power generation and distribution. Note that for most of those 16 years before Jonathan came to power, his party, the PDP, was in power. Note also that the PDP presidents before Jonathan, Obasanjo and Yar’ Adua, had in fact disbursed billions of petrodollars for the resuscitation of this sector, all to no avail. Finally and finally, please note that Professor Nebo’s boast about the unique “achievement” of the Jonathan administration within the 16-year reign of the PDP pertains to the fact that energy production in Nigeria rose to its highest level ever in the country, this being 5,500 Megawatts. But as soon as you compare this “achievement” with energy production around the planet, it is actually one of the lowest per capita, not only in the world at large, but within the African continent itself. I pass silently over the fact that among all the nations of the world, we have an unusually high and even superabundant supply of the raw materials needed to generate and supply power to our peoples – fuel oil; natural gas; coal; water; sun and wind. But this question I will not pass over: at the dawn of the reign of the new ruling party, will things be different in the energy sector?

    In the context of this series based on Aliko Dangote’s lecture at Harvard University on October 29, 2015, this question is directed as much to our business elites as to our political rulers. As a matter of fact, I am directing the question more to our business moguls that to the government. In doing this, I ask the reader to please remember that I started this series with the following question that was prompted by Dangote’s lecture at Harvard on October 29: why is it that our business elites have never considered that they could be part of the solution to our perennial crisis of power generation and distribution? Let me now proceed directly to a discussion of this all-important question.

    Given the depth of the crisis of power production and distribution in Nigeria, the reader of this series will be surprised to learn that there is actually in existence a considerable number of quite excellent studies, reports and commentaries on the things that are wrong with the power sector in our country. But to my knowledge, not a single one of these excellent studies and reports was sponsored by any of our business moguls. If I am wrong in making this assertion, I ask anyone who has the evidence to refute my assertion to please step forward and correct me and I will take back my assertion. For now at least, this much I can further assert with absolute certainty that nobody can step forward to disprove what I now declare: there has never been a lobby, a self-organized front among our business elites to promote ideas and actions that could make our energy problems and crises things of the past. To put this assertion in concrete terms, let me point out to the reader that there is in existence a so-called Presidential Task Force on Power (PTFP); however, there is not now in existence and never has been a task force set up by our business elites on power generation and distribution in Nigeria. If the matter really interested them, all Aliko Dangote or any of our billionaires or business moguls would have to spend on sponsoring and vigorously promoting studies on solutions to the problems of the energy sector would be very small fractions of their immense fortunes; they haven’t. More precisely, they have never thought of doing such a thing.

    It is perhaps useful to place these astounding observations of mine against the historical background of electrification as a vital part of economic, technological and cultural modernity throughout the planet. Historically, there are essentially only two paradigms or patterns available to us as models. The first and by far the more familiar paradigm is that of effective electrification by modernizing capitalist elites who were real industrial, commercial and financial haute bourgeoisie and on that basis used their influence with politicians and the state to construct power generation and distribution monopolies that were later broken up into smaller enterprises. Western Europe, North America and Japan are of course the big exemplars of this paradigm. Parenthetically, let me add here that history provides no single instance of bands of “emergency” contractors and business moguls that successfully led their nations to complete and adequate electrification of the nation and its economy.

    The second and far more limited but no less effective paradigm pertains to socialist or communist states that used the mechanisms of a centralized, command economy to rapidly construct successful national power grids as a vital sector in the drive towards economic, social and cultural development. One of the most memorable examples of this particular paradigm is that revealed in the slogan of the Bolsheviks when they came to power in Russia: “socialism = collectivization + electrification”. Within one decade the Bolsheviks transformed Tsarist Russia, one of the most backward countries in Europe into one of the economic and political powerhouses of the world; effective electrification of the country and the economy was one of the engines of that spectacular achievement. Maoist and Post-Maoist China and Cuba are also shining exemplars of this paradigm.

    It is of course indisputable that Nigeria under the new ruling party, the APC, is most definitely not about to take the path of the Bolsheviks and other socialist or state-capitalist nations of the world in installing full, adequate and reliable electrification in Nigeria. In ideological temper, the new ruling party is at best Centre-Right; the handful of Centre-Left thinkers and politicians in its ranks wield no real influence in both the party and the federal and state governments that the party controls. Moreover, at the current historical moment, very few countries in the world seem poised to follow the socialist path of the command economy and its model of technological modernity with particular relevance to rapid, complete or adequate electrification. In these contexts that are both national and global, the question that arises with regard to prospects of full and adequate electrification in APC-ruled Nigeria is this: Can or will the ruling party successfully apply the paradigm of true capitalist modernization in the energy sector and if so, what will be the contribution of our business elites to that process?

    Any regular reader of this column knows that if I had a say in the matter, we would choose the socialist path of rapid, complete and reliable electrification. Beyond ideology, there is a profoundly humane aspect to this preference: socialism places human beings, their needs and aspirations above economic production either an end in itself or as a means of surplus accumulation by the wealthy and the powerful. But since, as I have said earlier, it would be extremely unrealistic or delusional of me or anyone to expect that the APC governments at the centre and in the states are likely to choose this socialist path, the burden that lies squarely on the shoulders of the Buhari administration is to successfully apply the well known paradigm of the capitalist path. But since in this series I have been more interested in the contribution of our business elites, I must save the last words here for that group.

    Nothing proves more decisively that oil wealth has effectively wiped out the small, bourgeoning group of real capitalist industrialists and entrepreneurs that we had when the national economy was based on cash crops and light consumer goods industrialization than the ridiculously miniscule quantity of power generated in our country at great expense. At all times since the coming of oil doom, actual production of power has trailed far behind installed capacity for production; and both installed capacity and actual production have been one of the lowest per capita in Africa and in the world. Significantly, neither state-controlled energy production and distribution nor massive privatization has made the slightest dent in the abysmal quantity and erratic nature of power production in the sector. For this reason, we may conclude that there are no true capitalists in government or business in our country.

    In Dangote’s lecture at Harvard on October 29, 2015, I heard distinct intimations that he represents an emerging group of real capitalist industrialists and entrepreneurs. If this is true, will Dangote and these small groups among our business moguls please step forward, separate themselves from the majority of “emergency” or “barawo” capitalists in our country and lead the way to complete, regular and reliable electrification in Nigeria and our region of the continent? This will enormously make life much better for all our peoples. Moreover, the reduction that this would create in the cost of doing business in our country and our West African region is literally incalculable. In turn, this will create a vast internal market of actual and potential consumers in the region that will be numbered in scores of millions, most definitely one of the biggest regional markets in the world. And indeed, it boggles the mind that our business moguls that regard themselves as more than mere “agbero”, “barawo” or “emergency” contractors and businessmen have never set their sights, their prospects of surplus accumulation this high. It makes one wonder whether indeed there are true capitalists in our country beyond the philistine, lumpen-bourgeois hordes that emerged in the wake of the oil doom. I happen to think that there are; indeed, I personally know a few among them. What I have never observed among their ranks is a sense of critical self-awareness of themselves as a group on whom the fate of capitalism in our part of the world depends. Dr, Yemi Ogunbiyi, CEO and Chairman TANUS Books Limited, I swear I am not thinking of you as I write these words!

     

     

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Aliko Dangote at Harvard: the question I wanted to, but did not ask him (2)

    Aliko Dangote at Harvard: the question I wanted to, but did not ask him (2)

    In continuation of the series that began in this column last week, the first order of business is of course to correct the glaring error that I made in giving the figure of 80 billion dollars as Forbes’s estimate of the net worth of Aliko Dangote. The correct figure that I meant to write was 18 billion dollars; how my fingers typed 80 instead of 18, I do not know, especially as no billionaire in the world has reached the figure of 80 billion as his or her net worth. Perhaps my fingers were being preternaturally ‘prophetic’ in an unconscious prediction that Dangote will one day make it to 80 billion dollars. The only thing that militates against the likelihood of my fingers acting as the unconscious medium of such a ‘prediction’ is the fact that for me health is wealth. In other words, I am asking the reader to please read the superabundance that my fingers mistakenly typed for Dangote’s wealth as a wish for his health!

    And indeed, no slogan is more appropriate for the things that I wish to reflect upon in this continuing piece in the series than the well known adage, “health is wealth”. This is because if it is the case that no woman or man can dispute the wisdom undergirding this adage of “health is wealth”, the reverse – wealth is health – is far from being unquestionably true. This becomes even more so when the wealth of the nation is appraised in terms of the health of the nation: overwhelmingly in our country in the last five decades or so, the wealth of our nation has been a relentless generator of the ill-health of nation. This is as true of the specific topic of this series – the collusion of our economic elites with our political rulers in investing billions of dollars in electricity generation and distribution to little or no avail – as it is true of the massive privatization of national assets, public utilities and collective resources in areas as diverse as air transportation and civil aviation; public sanitation and waste management; road construction and maintenance; health services through private hospitals and clinics; mobile telecom services; education at all levels from the primary to the tertiary; and even the collection of taxes for some of our governments by private firms. And with regard to the specific topic of this series, let us not forget that if responsibility for power generation still largely remains with the state, power distribution has in large part been privatized.

    My main focus in this series is on how our business moguls can come to the realization that as much as they have been collusive with “government’” in being part of the problem of the transformation of the wealth of the nation to the ill-health of the nation, they may yet play a role in being part of the solution. But before moving to this center of gravity of my reflections in this series, I would like to make one final comment on this alleged role of our business elites as part of a problem that is often solely ascribed to “government”, to the state.

    It is tempting to describe the nefarious symbiosis between, on the one hand, our political rulers and, on the other hand, our business elites as crony capitalism. But the matter is far worse than that. Crony capitalism exists in every region and nearly every nation in the world, with perhaps the exception of Cuba. As bad as it is, crony capitalism does not typically treat consumers and citizens with the combination of greed, cheating and extremely inferior services with which the alliance of “government” and business elites treats Nigerians in general and the poor masses in particular. In my view, it is perhaps nearer the truth to use the analogy between the real economy and the shadow economy to describe our political rulers as the real government and our business moguls as the shadow government. In contemporary capitalism of the advanced economies of the world, in many respects the shadow economy has become more central, more determining than the real economy. So it is with the “shadow government” in our country. In other words, what the “real government” does to the people through corruption, arrogance of power and mediocrity of services rendered the “shadow government” of business elites does on a more grandiose scale through their total disregard for consumer rights. Indeed, the Nigerian consumer, the Nigerian people are so unprotected from the kind of services provided by our “shadow government” that even the business elites themselves have to run for cover from the services they provide to their fellow countrymen and women. For education, they send their children abroad; for “real” health services they go to India, Europe and America; for safety of travel within and outside the country they buy private jets.

    If the profile I have given above of the “shadow government” constituted by our business elites gives the impression that I am of the opinion that nothing good, nothing patriotic, nothing decent and genuinely altruistic can be expected from all our business elites without exception, let me quickly state that this is in fact not the case. Just as I have not given up on the “real government” run by our political elites so have I not given up on the “shadow government” run by our business elites. To think otherwise is to have a rather low and cynical view of human nature. Human nature is not static; it is not unchanging, especially in relation to the collective institutional challenges for cooperation, peace, justice and survival that we face as a nation. This view holds true as much for rich men and women as it does for the poor and the wretched of the earth even if, quite often, the wealthy and the powerful in our country think and act as if what applies to human nature in general does not apply to them at all.

    This seemingly counterintuitive view that some or a segment of our business elites can be part of the solution to our problems and crises was in fact strengthened by some particular comments that Aliko Dangote made during his lecture at Harvard on October 29, 2015. I may be wrong, but I very much doubt that he or any of our business moguls make these sorts of statements at home to their fellow Nigerians. Let me add here that since some of these statements were given in the context of an unwritten speech that was delivered without reference to any notes, it may very well be that Dangote was in fact speaking straight from the heart. At any rate, let me inform the reader at this point that Dangote made these particular observations at moments in his speech when he was at his most relaxed, witty and engagingly unselfconscious. What were these observations?

    First, as an acknowledgement that businessmen and women are always deeply involved with government, Dangote stated that he in particular and many other businessmen in general had to be very careful during the era of military rule not to be perceived by the soldiers as an actual or potential financier of coups. To my astonishment, Dangote added that nearly every coup was financed by a businessman. At any rate, the main point in this particular observation is that he, Aliko Dangote, had stayed away, both in principle and in practice, from the “business” of coup-making during the military era. Second, was Dangote’s sharp observation that corruption is so deep, so antithetical to the possibility of our country’s transformation into a developed modern economy that it is far more deadly than the Boko Haram insurgency for our collective survival.

    The third of these observations or assertions by Dangote at his lecture of October 29 was on the surface more mundane. To me, however, it was the most revealing: he stated that though he was one of the handful of Nigerians who succeeded in obtaining licensing from the government to launch a corporation for GSM or mobile telecom services, he was so uninterested in that line of business that he was quite happy to sell off his license so he would not be tempted to get into the fraternity of MTN, Glo, Starcomms, Etisalat and the other mobile telecom providers in Nigeria. I must add here that I was surprised by the figure that Dangote gave for the sale of his license, this being 250 million which, I am certain, was in dollars, not in naira. However, against my wonderment that one could make a cool 250 million dollars without having produced anything at all, I squared off the significance of Dangote’s self-avowed decision to stay focused on industrial manufacturing of goods in the real economy. As a matter of fact, it was on the basis of this self-declared determination to be a producing industrialist rather than an idle-rich GSM provider that Dangote pitched his remarks in his lecture on his determination to be completely self-dependent in electricity supply for his industries.

    If the connection of these musings about Dangote’s lecture at Harvard to the issue of the solution to the crises of incomplete and imperfect electrification in our country and our continent is not (yet) clear, let me now spell it out unambiguously. I don’t know if it was intentional on his part but to me, the drift of Dangote’s lecture was a separation of his brand or mode of industrial and entrepreneurial activities from the more common and much better known tribe of “emergency” contractors, businessmen and operators. This separation is not exclusive or personal to Aliko Dangote; rather, it is historic and every country or region of the world that has successfully or substantially erected industrial production at the base of its economic production has had to go through it. Sadly or tragically, the distinction between real producers and “emergency” contractors and businessmen and women in our country seems either nowhere in sight or is indeed non-existent.

    Every modern amenity, utility or infrastructure in colonial Nigeria was put in place primarily and sometimes exclusively on the basis of how the particular amenity, utility or infrastructure prepared the groundwork for the industrial or commercial exploitation of the country, its peoples and its resources. This is the root of what at the end of last week’s column I described as the separation of industry from life in our country and our part of the world. To take only the case of electrification here, within cities in particular and the whole country in general, only those segments of the population and areas of the country crucial for the commercial exploitation of the land and its resources enjoyed electrification. This pattern of placing “industry” over “life” has not only persisted in post- and neocolonial Nigeria, it has worsened immeasurably. In next week’s concluding piece in the series, we shall explore Dangote’s implicit separation of “real” from “emergency” producers as a basis for both overcoming the separation of “industry” from “life” and rapidly and successfully making incomplete and imperfect electrification a thing of the past.

     

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Aliko Dangote at Harvard: the question I wanted to, but did not ask him (1)

    Aliko Dangote at Harvard: the question I wanted to, but did not ask him (1)

    It is perhaps appropriate that I go straight to the question that I very much wanted to put to Aliko Dangote but decided not to when he gave a talk at Harvard University on Thursday, October 29, 2015. This is the question: Why is it that our business moguls have never given the slightest indication that they realize that the solution to the perpetual crisis of fitful and unreliable generation and distribution of power in our country depends as much on them as a group as it does on the state, the government? Having begun this piece with that unasked question, perhaps the next thing for me to do here is to admit that I did not put the question to Dangote because I realized that it would have been a bit unfair to put the question to him in that particular context, quite apart from the significant fact that the audience at the talk would have so completely misunderstood the intent of the question that they would almost certainly have read it as a deliberate provocation to Dangote, an attempt to detract from the extraordinarily buoyant and euphoric mood of the reception of his talk. What is the background, the context for these observations and musings?

    Sponsored jointly by Harvard’s Center for African Studies and the Harvard Business School, Dangote’s talk was the first in the so-called Hakeem and Myma Belo-Osagie Distinguished African Business and Entrepreneurial Lecture. In my ten years at Harvard, this was quite easily the most well attended lecture given by an African at the University. In saying this, I have not forgotten that other notable Nigerians like Olusegun Obasanjo, the Sultan of Sokoto, the late Professor Ade Adefuye (former Nigerian Ambassador to the U.S.) and Babangida Aliyu, former Governor of Niger State have all given lectures at the University since I have been teaching there. Unquestionably, part of Dangote’s appeal is due to his fame as not only Africa’s wealthiest man, but also one of the world’s richest and most influential transnational business moguls. Ours is one of the poorest regions of the world and so far, with perhaps the single exception of the commercialization of religion, the efforts of our wealthiest entrepreneurs to effectively run global business operations have failed woefully. Reported by Forbes to be worth about 80 billion dollars, Aliko Dangote would stand out in any region, any nation on the planet; in Africa in particular and the global south in general, he is like a colossus. Thus, Dangote’s fabled achievements in entrepreneurship assume legendary proportions in the African context and this was reflected in the turnout for and reception of his lecture at Harvard on Thursday, November 29, 2015.

    Beyond these important but external factors, Dangote’s talk was also the very essence of relaxed, poised and, on occasion, witty delivery. Human self-identification with achievement and celebrity, especially in wealth, is a phenomenon known all over the world and at all times in recorded history. The good folks at Harvard, one of the world’s most prestigious universities, are no exception to this norm. Thus, those who showed up for Dangote’s talk – the great majority of them either Africans or of African descent – dutifully laughed at every joke that he gave and indulgently cheered every turn of phrase through which he expressed a solidarity, an African oneness with the audience, despite the aura surrounding his person and worth. Above all else, the man was absolutely in command of the occasion; he not only gave his talk fluently without any prepared notes, but he did so with a mixture of candor and a complete absence of pomposity. He has probably given versions of the same talk in many other contexts; all the same, the combination of straight-from-the-heart anecdotes concerning the origins of his wealth and the highlights of his business activities greatly endeared him to the audience. Moreover, he was very forthright about the challenges of doing business across virtually all the regions of our continent, without obscuring the really daunting obstacles or blowing them out of proportion as many ‘roving’ entrepreneurs on our continent tend to do. To crown it all, during the “Q & A”, Dangote was very attentive, very solicitous towards his questioners, especially the young students who, it seemed, came to the talk determined to milk every ounce of intimation from the great man on how to strike it rich, how to become billionaires themselves some day.

    In that context that I have taken such great care to describe as fully and as positively as possible, it would have been thought completely out of place and perhaps also out of order for me to have put that question to Dangote: why is it that our business moguls fail to recognize that the solution to our perpetual, crippling problems with the generation and distribution of power lies as much with them as with the government? No one in the audience would have missed the implication that behind this question lies a suggestion that our business moguls are as much to blame as “government” for our problems with power generation and distribution. No matter how much I tried to hide or blunt this implication behind the question, the audience and perhaps Dangote himself would have felt that I was putting him in particular on the spot; I was making him personally answerable for a problem that everyone thinks lies solely with the “government”. Also, it would have been thought that even if my premise was right, this was not the right place, the right occasion to bring up such a matter for discussion.

    At this point in this piece that I am writing more than a week after Dangote’s lecture, I must now openly admit that this idea was and is indeed on my mind: the most powerful and influential among our business elites are as responsible as “government” for the fact that almost 200 years after electrification became indispensable for industrialization and the modernity that came in its wake, in Nigeria and most of our continent we are still literally and symbolically in the “dark” when it comes to dependable, efficient and life-changing and life-enhancing electrification. In making this assertion, I wish to state that if it seems like an accusation, a bitter indictment of our business elites, my aim is to generate productive discussion, not to try and condemn the “accused” thoughtlessly. As a matter of fact, to the extent that virtually everyone thinks that the ‘problem’ lies solely with “government”, to that extent have discussions on the failure of effective, regular and dependable electrification in our part of the world been extremely tortured and unproductive. If this is the case, the very last thing I wish to do in this piece is to shift the venue of frustrated discourses on incomplete, imperfect and frustrating electrification away from “government” to “business”.

    In his lecture at Harvard, Dangote as a matter of fact spoke repeatedly on the problems that he and the Dangote Group have had with power supply. He shared with the audience the information that the only way he solved the problem, indeed the only way he could have solved the problem, was to opt out completely from any local, regional or national power grid, not only in Nigeria but almost in every country in Africa in which he operates as an industrialist, a manufacturer. He was particularly emphatic on the fact that he and his Group strive everywhere they operate in Africa to be completely self-sufficient in power generation and supply, at every level of all the processes involved. If this is the case, the reader might well ask how justifiable it is for me to suggest that a business mogul that has so assiduously and successfully applied himself to sufficient and regular power generation and supply for his operations could be part of a business elite that is as responsible as “government” for our national and continental crises of incomplete and unreliable electrification at the dawn of the 21st century.

    I do have a response to this perfectly logical and understandable query for my claim that without exception, all our business elites are as responsible as “government” for our problems with power generation and supply. The Dangote Group may be the largest African-owned industrial empire in our continent at the present time, but its apparent self-sufficiency in power generation and supply is neither unique nor atypical. As a matter of fact, it is so typical, so normative that it stands as a mark of the peculiar kind of “industrialization” that has come to replace the nascent, vestigial “industrialization” that was first introduced by the colonizers into our country and the rest of the continent. It is this mode of “industrialization” which, at least so far, subsists on incomplete and vastly imperfect electrification that I wish to explore in this two-part series.

    I locate this peculiar mode of “industrialization” in post-independent, postcolonial Africa against the background of the universal dream of all mankind at the dawn of electrification as a linchpin of modern industry: power supply everywhere and for everyone, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, year round, year after year. This is no longer a dream in those parts of the world in which electrification, having been extended to all areas of life, is no longer restricted to “industry” as a privileged site. In next week’s conclusion of the series, I hope to show an iron-clad collusion between our political and business elites in the separation of “industry” from “life” as a primary cause and effect of our perennial problems with power generation and supply.

     

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • “Friendly fire” at the dawn of a new era: an exchange that may prove prophetic

    “Friendly fire” at the dawn of a new era: an exchange that may prove prophetic

    Note:

    I got the response below from Mallam Garba Shehu, Senior Special Assistant (Media and Publicity) to President Buhari to the three-part open letter that I addressed to him in this column over the last three weeks. The response speaks for itself. I was both surprised and pleased to receive it; more importantly, I am glad to have it published in this column so that it will reach as many of those who read the series to which Shehu is responding. In the spirit in which Shehu writes, I respond to him with the hope that the exchange here will clarify many things that were on my mind when I wrote but were probably merely implicit in my series. In my short response to Shehu, I have made these things more explicit.

    BIODUN JEYIFO’S FRIENDLY FIRE

    Garba Shehu

    Dear Biodun,

    Thank you for your letter to me, published in The Nation newspaper over the past three weeks. In addition to your generous but humbling praises of the work I do for the President, all three parts of the essay contained a profusion of goodwill towards the President himself. Behind these cordial notes however, the essay seemed to have done some straight talk on the need for a fair and balanced government structure, which is fair enough. It equally contained a sense of forewarning, and, perhaps, frustration on the part of the writer.

    For me, what it all amounts to, is “friendly fire”, or better still, a mock dialectical battle. The Emir of Kano, Mohammed Sunusi (The Second) said it all a week ago.

    Your friends are those who tell you that which you don’t want to hear. They don’t love you if all they tell you is what pleases you. I read it with a sense of pride at being part of a government such as that of President Muhammadu Buhari’s, where Nigerians are able to enjoy such freedom of expression on the pages of a national daily. Our great country has indeed come a long way from the days of censorship and clampdown on the press, and I am grateful to God for granting me the unique opportunity to be a part of this new dispensation in Nigeria’s history.

    Indeed, my participation in this government nullifies a number of points you made in your article.  My very presence among President Buhari’s staff destroys the foundation of your argument that our Commander-in-Chief is parochial and not accepting of new people in his environment. If that statement were true, President Buhari would have chosen someone other than Garba Shehu as his spokesperson.  I would have been considered unqualified for the job.

    For over a decade, I was the spokesperson for former Vice President, Atiku Abubakar, who stood against President Buhari, not only in the last elections but in two previous ones: 2003, 2007 and to a lesser extent 2011.  Despite this, after Atiku conceded defeat in the December 10, 2014, APC primaries and pledged his full support to the Buhari candidacy, I was appointed as the head of the APC Campaign Media and Publicity Committee.  Thus, President Buhari not only trusted me with his presidential campaign but, thereafter, made me his spokesperson. He gave me the privilege of attending nearly all his meetings.  Clearly, President Buhari is not distrustful of new people around him as you alleged.

    You also lent your enormous weight to those who accuse the President of punishing individuals and parts of the country that voted against him.  This criticism of the President began as paranoia in the minds of some Nigerians, when the President’s initial appointments appeared lopsided.  At the time, he had appointed barely a fistful out of the hundreds, perhaps thousands of appointments that he is expected to make over the course of his administration. His staff at the time he spoke was made up of only a Personal Assistant, a Senior Special Assistant on House Hold Affairs, the Special Assistant responsible for his kitchen, a Special Adviser on Media, and myself. At that time, there was no Chief of Staff, no Secretary to the State Government, and none of the many other key appointments that followed.  This remark wasn’t intended as a philosophical foundation for government appointments. Instead, it was meant to be an explanation to what then had happened. If there are a hundred balls in a drum and the first seven someone picks are all blue, can anyone honestly and scientifically declare that the drum is filled with blue balls?  Of course not.  Not if they studied basic mathematics and if they understand probability.

    Yes, I am quite aware of that statement allegedly credited to President Buhari during his trip to America.  But no, he never said that politics is a system of reward, and that you give favours to only those who voted for you. The infamous remark was removed from its context by people whose stock in trade is to fuel the flames of public distrust. Unfortunately, critics won’t just let go of this falsehood even after the publication of the full transcript, which clearly shows that President Buhari’s meaning was distorted. Pity. What he actually said on that occasion was that in politics in its classic meaning, you give rewards to only those that chose you.  However, he went on to add that he was a different kind of leader; that he, unlike the average leader, would be balanced. “I will respect the constitution in ensuring a fair representation for all,” he added.

    Dear Biodun, please I encourage you to give the benefit of the doubt to the President as you promised you would. Let us give the President a chance to do his work.  He is bent on improving the economy, on extinguishing corruption and on restoring security to every region of Nigeria.  The success of this government is not to President Buhari’s advantage alone.  All Nigerians will benefit when he does well, when he accomplishes that for which we installed him with our millions of votes.  Let us therefore not succumb to the distractions from mischief-makers with no one’s interest in mind but their own.  There is nothing to be gained by propagating accusations that have no basis in reality.  Thankfully, the media in the country, including our foremost columnists such as your good self, to their credit, have shown that they are fully aware of the challenges facing the country at this time and our much-admired President. As President, Muhammadu Buhari will walk his talk as a converted democrat and a civil, fair and a balanced leader. Time will prove him right on all counts.

    Thanks, again, for taking the time to write me.  I wish you all the best as you continue to apply your pen to being a voice for the masses of Nigeria.

    May your ink always speak the truth.

    Garba Shehu.

    My Response:

    I am heartened by Garba Shehu’s affirmation that we are now in a new dispensation in which the government will fully respect freedom of the press within the rule of the law and will never again clamp down and harass those whose views it finds critical of its policies, actions and inactions. However, I would like to remind Shehu that much as I take this particular affirmation of his in good faith, freedom of expression is not something that has suddenly descended on the country with the coming into power of the new administration; it is something that many of us have fought for all our adult lives and will continue to fight for as long as we are alive. Indeed, I would also like to remind Shehu that in the darkest days of the last administration of the PDP under Goodluck Jonathan when Buhari and his supporters were being hounded, we did not keep quiet but spoke up vigorously against the nefarious humiliations of and injustices against Buhari in particular and many of his supporters in general.

    In his response, Shehu completely keeps silent on my reference to, indeed my quotations from the transcript of the President’s interview on the BBC Hausa Service on Tuesday, October 13, 2015. Shehu also keeps silent on my reference to reports of Nasir El Rufai, the Governor of Kaduna State, to the effect that he stated in a public arena for the whole of Kaduna State and the country to hear that the parts of the his state that did not vote for him should expect to be treated differently than the parts that voted for him. Finally, Shehu is also completely silent on the fact that in my series, I dealt rather extensively on trends within the leadership of the APC that I consider ominously neo-feudal.

    I draw attention to these “silences” in Shehu’s response because they show that in his understandable resolve to rise to the defence of his boss, the President, Shehu consciously or unconsciously omits the fact that in my series, my criticisms of President Buhari were located in the more general and far more consequential critique of trends in the leadership of our new ruling party, the APC. In now briefly repeating these aspects of my series that Shehu leaves out of his response, I wish to make my motivation for making a general critique of the APC – and not criticisms of President Buhari – the centre of gravity of the series. Because this is a huge subject that cannot be dealt with in one piece in a weekly column, I shall have to be very brief, very summative in the following profile of the dynamics of neo-feudalism in the APC as our new ruling party, hoping that the skeletal account that I give here can be more fully explored in the weeks and perhaps months ahead of us.

    Everyone knows or thinks that the alliance between the Northwest/Northeast and the Southwest, or between the CPC and the ACN, was the critical or deciding factor that made it possible for the APC to emerge as our new ruling party, not forgetting the mass defections from the erstwhile ruling party, the PDP. On their own, neither the CPC nor the ACN could have ever become a nation-wide ruling party. I acknowledge these generally well-known facts but derive my perspectives from elsewhere, precisely from what these two parties were before they merged to become the new ruling party. Respectively, Buhari and Tinubu were the moving forces in the CPC and the ACN. Buhari did not base his towering dominance in the CPC on money; he based it on his charisma and the facts and myths surrounding his role and place in the country’s political history. So far at least, within the APC, he has made “reward” of those who have been loyal to him over the decades a cornerstone of his key appointments in his administration. Hopefully, this will be a temporary, passing phase of his presidency.

    As the preeminent political boss of the ACN, Tinubu derived his colossal influence in the party from total control of the “war chest” that was used to fight the PDP and keep control of many states in the Southwest in the grip of the party. No committee, no sub-group in the ACN had any say whatsoever in how Tinubu either amassed that “war chest” or spent it on behalf of the party; all that is known is that he did disburse a lot of handouts from the “war chest” to leading members of the party fighting for their political survival against the relentless onslaughts of the PDP. So far, there is little evidence to show that Tinubu will move away from a reliance on this base of his influence within the new ruling party.

    In conclusion so far, neither Buhari nor Tinubu seems inclined to put their days and ways in the CPC and the ACN respectively behind them. Neo-feudalism has survived into the bourgeois-democratic era in many parts of the world, including Europe. But only as vestiges, not as the linchpins of the political order. Until ideas and practices that promote progress, peace, justice and unity between our peoples replace the predominance of the currently dominant neo-feudalist currents of the APC, the party will never become a ruling party that fights for the vast majority of Nigerians across the length and breadth of the country. But this is material for other pieces in future reflections in this column.

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • All the president’s men: an open letter to Garba Shehu, Senior Special Assistant to the President, Media and Publicity (3)

    All the president’s men: an open letter to Garba Shehu, Senior Special Assistant to the President, Media and Publicity (3)

    If you will do justice to me, as an elected Nigerian president, let them look at the Constitution a Nigerian president works with, there are people who will closely work with me that don’t need to be taken to the Senate. If I select people who I know quite well in my political party, who we came all the way right from the ANPP, the CPC and the APC, and have remained together in good or bad situation… will that amount to anything wrong?
    President Buhari, BBC Hausa Service Interview, October 13, 2015

    Mallam Shehu:

    This has been a long letter, but we are close to its end. So far, one unspoken but underlying reason for writing this letter is the fact that, like most other Nigerians – in particular those who were adults when President Buhari was a military ruler – I am trying to figure out if the elected president will be different from the military ruler and if so, in what consequential manner this will be manifested. With regard to this consideration, there is also this particular factor in my motivations: as a military ruler, the President had a widely known and much deserved reputation for holding strongly and rather inflexibly to his ideas and beliefs; indeed, he was known to be so indifferent to what people in general thought about him that the only people to whom he gave his ear were associates and confidants among his inner circle of supporters and followers within and outside the military. The infamous Decrees Numbers 2 and 4 of 1984 were the ultimate testimony to this aspect of the President when he was a military ruler.

    I do not know how old you are, Mallam Shehu; I do not know if you were already an adult when those decrees were promulgated by Buhari’s military administration, but I can tell you that the pleas, the remonstrations to the young man that Buhari was as a military ruler to reverse himself and his administration on those obnoxious decrees were not only made throughout the length and breadth of Nigeria, they were also made widely in the international community. But to all these pleas Buhari remained totally deaf, even arrogantly and contemptuously so. Against the backdrop of this aspect of Buhari as a military ruler, as we are gradually getting to know the President as an elected ruler, one question that I and I suppose many other Nigerians of my generation will be asking is whether or not the second coming of Buhari will show a ruler who is willing to listen to and reason with people outside his inner circle of advisers and confidants. In essence, this boils down to who the President will put first, Nigerians from all parts of the country, especially the teeming majority of the talakawa North and South, or his inner circle of confidants.

    Mallam Shehu, if the President does not know that the words of the quote that serves as the epigraph to this concluding piece in this series of letters to you provides no justification, none at all, for almost exclusively drawing his non-ministerial appointees from his inner circle of loyalists, let him know that people are not as gullible, as naïve as he apparently thinks. Every thinking and politically savvy Nigerian knows that the non-ministerial appointees of elected Nigerian presidents that don’t have to be sent to the Senate for screening constitute the inner core, the “kitchen cabinet” of the President; they wield far greater influence on our elected presidents than cabinet members that have to be sent to the Senate for screening and approval. Indeed, Malam Shehu, I do hope that you are aware of the fact that several commentators have pointed out that many of the ministerial appointees whose names the President sent to the Senate for screening were also selected on the same basis on which the inner core of non-ministerial appointees were chosen, i.e. loyalty to the President over the years and decades from military rulership to four attempts to become elected president, first in the ANPP, then in the CPC and finally and successfully in the APC.

    Some pundits have even plausibly argued that the real reason why it took the President so long to make his ministerial appointments was not because he wanted to choose the best and the brightest but because he had to weigh and decide carefully among the large throng of loyalists who had worked for him over the years and decades. In this respect, “loyalty” in this context more or less means “fealty”; not surprisingly, fealty is a word that comes to us from the feudal age when all who served a baron did so on the basis of “fealty’ sworn to the overlord. Indeed, the distinct neo-feudal overtone here is strengthened by the President’s extension of “reward” to those personally loyal to him to states and peoples that voted for him. In other words, it is one thing to reward individuals that have been loyal to you; it is another thing entirely to reward or punish entire states and peoples that voted for or against you; when the two are combined, you have as close as it is possible to neo-feudalism in a 21st century plural, multi-ethnic, federal, democratic and constitutionalist state whose wealth and resources do not come from inherited estates but from rents collected from extractive oil and gas industries. In such an historical context, it is very shocking that the President can be so open, so blatant in linking rewards and “punishments” to those who show or do not show fealty to him, Muhammadu Buhari. Because I wish the President well politically, I sincerely hope that he can and will be made to abandon these distinct neo-feudalist strains in his actions and utterances this early in his presidency before they become entrenched as defining features of his administration.

    I concluded last week’s installment in this series by stating that part of my concerns in this long letter, Mallam Shehu, is the fact that neo-feudalism is not a trait, a mode of thought and behavior that is exclusive to the President within the leadership of the APC as the new ruling party. Little did I know when I wrote this observation into the concluding segment of last week’s piece that the same newspaper that carried my column would publish an account in which Nasir El Rufai, the Kaduna State Governor, one of the leading intellectual lights of the APC, a man who had savagely pilloried the late President Umar Musa Yar’ Adua for being so parochial, being so nepotistic that his inner core of advisers and confidants came exclusively from his area of Katsina State, this same El Rufai was reported to have told a town hall meeting last week that people from the part of the state that did not vote for him should expect little or nothing from him. El Rufai’s brilliance is indisputable even if his opportunism is not easily forgettable; if he can be this crudely neo-feudalist, there is much to ponder on where the APC is headed as our new ruling party. The talakawas of all parts of the country and those who struggle for and on their behalf must start a dialogue now with the leaders of this new ruling party.

    This preceding statement brings me to perhaps the thorniest or most convoluted expression of neo-feudalism in the APC, specifically the one that pertains to the Leader of the Party, Ahmed Bola Tinubu, aka “Jagaban”. Tinubu’s political “estate” within the APC, unlike Buhari’s, is not based on those who have been loyal to him over the years and decades; rather, his “estate” is based on those who have been his beneficiaries in the long war of attrition and conquest against the PDP. Ask no questions as to how he amassed the vast war chest that was in many instances used successfully against the PDP; the only thing that is important is that a great number of chieftains and heavyweights in the APC and before that the ACN, owed their political lives, their very survival on Tinubu and his control of that war chest. This was the basic rationale of his colossal political influence since 1999, at least before the formation of the APC and more specifically, before Tinubu’s encounter with Muhammadu Buhari as incumbent president. There is a telling lesson here from the feudal age: the baron on whom the supreme feudal overlord obtained his sovereignty over all the baronies in the land was always the first to go, the first to be done away with. In plain language, Tinubu seems to have reached the limits of the reach of his political “estate” in the suggestion, the imputation that Buhari is one of his “beneficiaries”. This is not untrue, but it is a gross simplification; nevertheless, it is being peddled widely within and outside the ranks of the APC.

    Finally, there is Bukola Abubakar Saraki whose political “estate” within the APC is actually pre-bourgeois, pre-feudal and pre-modern in that his brand of cynical and opportunistic horse-trading had always existed in all historical polities prior to the modern full-blown bourgeois democracies. When he seized control of the Senate leadership with the great majority of his votes coming from the defeated minority party, he spoke and acted as if this was the most natural thing in the world of representative democracy. It isn’t it but this is beside the point. The ‘point” was that Saraki was successful and the party was unable to do anything to either reverse his “victory” or even call him to order. In effect, Bukola Saraki’s cynicism and opportunism hang like specters over all factions within the APC, at least in the present period when “estates” and “franchises” are being negotiated and traded in the new ruling party at the same time that what the party really and truly stands for remains unclear, even to its own ideologues and within its rank-and-file followership. The real worry within the ruling party itself and the country at large is that there are dozens, perhaps scores of other “Sarakis” lurking within the heart and soul of the new ruling party waiting for their chance to strike it big and rich, change and progress be damned.

    Mallam Shehu, all is far from well with the APC as the new ruling party and the President has a large share of what needs to be corrected in the affairs of the party. If perhaps there seems to be too much “Dogon Turenchi” in my use of words like “neo-feudalism” and “fealty”, permit me to say that what I have been arguing in this long letter is really quite simple and straightforward and it is this: we are still at an early stage in both the administration of this President and the time of the APC as a new ruling party; before it is too late, before he becomes known as a ruler who chooses those he favors or disfavors depending on his past and recent experiences, Muhammadu Buhari should strive to be the president of all parts of the country, the parts that did not vote for him as much as those that voted for him. He must especially devote himself to a better life for all of our peoples that have for so long been set aside by the wealthy and powerful few for whom the wealth of the nation was indistinguishable from their personal richness and well-being. If he does these things, his example will redound on his party, the rest of the political class and the nation. I don’t know about Bukola Saraki but the President and the Party Leader have it within their grasp to transform the APC to the first ruling party in our country’s political history that begins to make a real, beneficial difference at home and abroad.

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • All the president’s men: an open letter to Garba Shehu, Senior Special Assistant to the President, Media and Publicity (2)

    All the president’s men: an open letter to Garba Shehu, Senior Special Assistant to the President, Media and Publicity (2)

    Mallam Garba Shehu:

    In this continuing piece in the series that began as an open letter to you last week, I wish to start with a question that may come as a surprise to you: When will President Buhari put behind him and finally move on from the travails that he experienced, perhaps even suffered, first from his overthrow as a military ruler in 1985, and subsequently as an unsuccessful presidential candidate three times between 2003 and 2011?  In starting this piece with this question, I am particularly mindful of the account that you gave earlier this week of how, during the last presidential electoral campaign, you and your family awoke one morning in your house at Abuja only to find that your house had been surrounded and completely blockaded by heavily armed units of the Nigerian Police. According to the account that you gave of that sinister siege on your house, only the intervention of social media activists through twits and posts on twitter and facebook accounts on the Internet alerted the country and the world to what you and members of your family were being subjected to. Once that happened, according to you, the besiegers had to leave you and your family alone because they realized that they and whatever evil intentions they had in mind had been exposed on the Internet.

    I am almost certain that this was not the only intimidating and frightening experience that you personally had as the Spokesman for the Buhari Campaign Organization, just as I also know that many other members of Buhari’s campaign team as well as chieftains of the APC faced untold harassment and intimidation from the PDP during the last elections. As the whole world knows, starting from the Ekiti and Osun States’ governorship elections of 2014, the PDP under Jonathan became more and more fascist in its open and maximum use of armed and sometimes hooded state and non-state thugs, kidnappers and enforcers against all opponents, especially of the APC. Indeed, I wish to assert here that though I was and have remained highly critical of the APC as previously a potential and now an actual ruling party, I spoke out consistently and forcefully in this column against those fascist actions and tendencies of the PDP in general and the Jonathan administration in particular. If this is the case, you might wonder, Mallam Shehu, why then am I asking when President Buhari will put behind him the many undoubted travails and humiliations of the years and decades that he spent in what I am in this series calling a political wilderness?

    Mallam Shehu, because I consider this a very crucial question, I shall try to respond to it with the greatest clarity and concreteness that I can muster. Thus, I draw your attention as well as the attention of other readers of this piece to two separate but closely linked and portentous statements that President Buhari has made as an elected Head of State. First statement: the states and peoples that did not vote for me cannot expect me to treat them like the states and peoples that voted for me. Second statement: for the non-ministerial posts in my administration that I do not have to submit to the Senate for screening and approval, I have appointed those who have stood loyally with me over the years, first in the ANPP, then in the CPC and APC. As an amateur psychoanalyst, to me these two statements reveal that the President not only has a long memory of those who have worked for and against him, but this memory, this political unconscious, weighs so heavily on his mind and psyche that things that happened years and decades ago still affect his thoughts and actions now, in the moment of his eventual political ascendancy as an elected president.

    It is not my intention in this piece to dabble into a sustained psychoanalysis of the President’s every utterance and action. As I see the matter, it is far more profitable for all of us to evaluate the potential and actual objective consequences and ramifications of those of the President’s actions and utterances that seem to come from his long memory of those who worked for and against him. Objectively therefore, whatever may be the understandable psychological basis of the President’s actions and utterances, I wish to state that what should concern us is the fact that he seems deeply inclined to a neo-feudal conception and practice of governance in a constitutional order that is intended to be bourgeois-democratic. As I consider this to be very portentous for our country’s future under the rule of the President and the APC, permit me, Mallam Shehu, to explain what I have in mind in making this observation, this claim.

    Mallam Shehu, to call a spade a spade, it is nothing but the very height of a neo-feudal act for the President to have said for the whole country and the world to hear that the states and peoples that did not vote for him cannot reasonably expect to be treated like the states and peoples that voted for him. I have not the slightest doubt that in all probability, many of our political leaders of the past and the present operated and still operate on the same basis as the President on this matter with regard to their marked predilection for punishing those who are against them and rewarding those are for them. But as far as I can tell, no other Nigerian Head of State has ever publicly stated this openly and with the apparent belief of Buhari that it is a declaration that is so logical, so unexceptionable that no thinking Nigerian can question or fault it. To a slightly lesser degree, the same thing is true of the declared intention to reward those who have stayed loyally over the years with the President through thick and thin: all our political leaders think and act on the basis of this idea, but none but Muhammadu Buhari has ever publically declared it as an underlying idea, a cornerstone of his actions and utterances, at least in this inaugurating period of his presidency.

    It is perhaps necessary at this point in the discussion to throw some historical and cultural light on the specifically neo-feudal nature of these ideas and utterances of the President. First of all, in all areas of the world in the long era of its dominance both as a form of political rule and a way of life, feudalism was profoundly local in its ideological, social and demographic expressions. The feudal overlord often extended his area of effective political and military hegemony far beyond his locality but fundamentally, those closest to him, those on whom he depended came from his village or his so-called demesne. Secondly, in extending the sphere of his rule far beyond his locality, the feudal baron always based himself on the strict policy of severely punishing those who were against him while rewarding those who were for him. Thirdly and finally, as much as it was fundamentally based on locality, feudalism was also profoundly patriarchal and male-dominant: a woman, any woman, was important not in her own right but only insofar as she derived that importance from a male relative – a father, a husband, a brother, an uncle, a male cousin.

    Of the about 12 non-ministerial appointments that the President made before sending his cabinet list to the Senate at the end of September, only two are from the South and only one is a woman. This caused considerable consternation throughout the country, significantly even among Buhari’s own supporters. Now that the President has explained in the interview broadcast on the BBC Hausa Service last week that those appointees were only incidentally Northern and that his real motive was to reward those who had loyally stayed with him over the years and decades, it would seem that the matter has been laid to rest.

    But this is not the case. For where in this piece I have placed my emphasis on the President’s neo-feudal reliance on locality, I am absolutely certain that others will continue to place their emphases on the Northerness of those appointees. This is not wrong, not misguided but it misses the fundamental neo-feudalism of the President’s presuppositions. To give a telling illustration of what I am arguing here, dear reader, please reflect carefully on the following barely noticed or talked about detail of the President’s non-ministerial appointees: only one is a woman, this being the Acting INEC Chairperson who is said to be a sister-in-law of the President. Unlike the PDP rabid dogs of war who have been shouting accusations of nepotism in the appointment of the Acting INEC Chairperson to the high heavens, I am willing to grant that this appointee is perhaps as deserving as any male (or for that matter Southern) appointee. However, the fact remains that Buhari’s ministerial and non-ministerial appointees are overwhelmingly male: out of around 56, only six are female. As far as gender bias against women in the appointment of public officeholders in our country goes, this is one of the worst in our recent history.

    Mallam Shehu, it is banal and unremarkable to say that both in our country and in the world at large, we are no longer in the feudal age. But feudalism did once exist and rather strongly in some parts of our country, principally in the North but also in some parts of the Southwest. For this reason, remnants of feudal modes of thought and behavior survive among many of our political rulers and leaders. As someone who is not a member of the APC or any of our ruling class parties but passionately hopes that we shall soon put the aimless and wasted years of the reign of the PDP behind us, I was deeply disturbed, even offended and alarmed by President Buhari’s declaration that the states and peoples that did not vote for him should not expect to be treated like those that voted for him. I do not wish to provide fodder for the mad war dogs and bad losers of the PDP to continue their nation-wrecking battles against the President. But the President must recognize that we are no longer in the feudal era; we are in a plural, multi-ethnic and constitutionalist era in which crude, patriarchal and neo-feudal ideas about which groups or communities deserve reward or punitive action can be made the benchmark for governance. The matter is made even more onerous by the fact that President Buhari maybe the most powerful embodiment of these neo-feudal ideas and behavior, he is not a lone voice or figure in the new ruling party, the APC. I had thought that I would conclude this series this week. But the necessity to locate the President among other neo-feudal elements within his party makes it necessary for me to extend the series by one more week. So, Insha Allah, we shall bring the series to a conclusion next week.

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • All the president’s men: an open letter to Garba Shehu, Senior Special Assistant to the President, Media and Publicity (1)

    All the president’s men: an open letter to Garba Shehu, Senior Special Assistant to the President, Media and Publicity (1)

    I have been with them throughout our trying terms; what then is the reward of such dedication and suffering? They did not defect because of positions; they did not involve themselves in the pursuit of personal gains, and they accepted their fate throughout our trying moments. President Buhari, BBC Hausa Program, Tuesday, October 6, 2015

    Dear Mr. Garba Shehu:

    Greetings! I confess that for the most part, I am directing this open letter to you rather opportunistically because it will attract more attention than if I had written it as a regular piece in this weekly column. But having said that, I should also state that I do have another reason in directing this piece of writing to you and this is the fact that I have found many of your press briefings on affairs in the Presidency very articulate. Indeed, this is such a strong element in my mind as I write this letter that I wish to inform you and the readers of this column that, rightly or wrongly, I have come to rely more on the things that you say about affairs in the Presidency than the things that Femi Adesina, Special Assistant to the President (Media and Publicity) says.

    Of course, you do occupy a more senior position than Adesina in the Presidency, but this is not the reason why to me, the things that you say carry more weight than Adesina’s press briefings. After all, we all know that, sadly, in our country seniority does not always mean superiority of mind and morality; as a matter of fact, it unfortunately often means the exact opposite. The things you say carry more weight because where Adesina tends to stick to the more mundane and routine aspects of what is going on in the Presidency, you tend mostly to come on the scene on the big issues, the critical factors vital to the success of President Buhari and his administration. Moreover, more than Adesina, in your press and media briefings you seem to speak with an authoritativeness that indicates that you have the President’s ear, his full confidence. Indeed, to me the contrast between you and Adesina is like the contrast between Doyin Okupe and Reuben Abati when both men worked with and for Goodluck Jonathan: Okupe was blunt and literal-minded; Abati was suave and articulate even when, on a countless number of occasions, he was defending palpably indefensible actions and policies of his boss, Goodluck Jonathan

    If you have read the book, All the President’s Men, by Ben Woodward and Carl Bernstein on the Watergate scandal that was made into a highly commercially successful film bearing the same title as the book, you might think that the title of this open letter to you is intended to insinuate an allusion in the reader’s mind to that book and the film based on it. As we know, the Watergate scandal revealed a depth of abuse and corruption of power by Richard Nixon that was so monumental that it led to his downfall and that is what both the book and the film titled All the President’s Men is about.  I hastily and vigorously refute any intention in this piece to project onto President Buhari what Watergate meant for President Nixon – heavens forbid!  I wish the President well; and God knows that our country deserves a break after the disastrous reign of the PDP especially in its last stage under Goodluck Jonathan. So rather than a reprise of Nixon’s downfall for our current President, what I have in mind by invoking the phrase “all the President’s men” as the title of this piece can be highlighted by two outstanding features of President Buhari’s ministerial and non-ministerial appointments since he took office on May 29, 2015: first, overwhelmingly, most of his appointees have been men; second, also overwhelmingly, most of his appointees have been men who, in one way or another, have been loyal to him, particularly in the long years of what one could describe as time spent in the political wilderness after his overthrow as military ruler in 1985 through the twelve years from 2003 to 2015 when he ran for the presidency four times before finally succeeding in the most recent of these elections. It is in this sense and this sense only that in this piece, I talk of “all the President’s men”: few or no women at all; and men who have been with Buhari through thick and thin. In other words, a distinct gender bias and an equally distinct over-personalization of the power of incumbency with special regard to ministerial and non-ministerial appointments, these are the issues that I wish to discuss and reflect upon in this open letter to you, Mr. Shehu.

    It is perhaps necessary for me to state that in focusing on these two particular issues, I am not unaware of other issues that have been raised and widely discussed with regard to President Buhari’s exercise of his power to make appointments for key positions in his administration. Indeed, about three to four issues have been very prominent, so much so that they have almost completely eclipsed the two issues that I have chosen to emphasize in this piece. These include the unprecedented delay in making his ministerial appointments; allegations of a palpable “Northern” bias in the non-ministerial appointments; a much publicized disinclination on the part of the President to make appointments from states or geopolitical zones that voted heavily against him in the presidential elections; and alleged intra-party squabbles within the ruling party, the APC, over which chieftains or ‘heavyweights’ were snubbed and which were ‘rewarded’ by the President in making his ministerial appointments. In shifting the focus in this piece away from this particular set of issues, I wish to give no indication whatsoever that they are not important. They are important and indeed, no administration, military or civilian, in the country’s political history has so far ever managed to escape allegations of being tainted by one or all of these charges in one form or another.

    In drawing attention to this important fact of our political history, I do not wish to imply that all that can be said about this set of issues have been said and I have nothing more to add. No, I do have one or two things to add and I shall do so very briefly here, for whatever such additional commentary is worth. Thus, I must say to you and through you to the President that I was deeply surprised and disappointed that a few months ago, he, the President, openly and rather vehemently asked why anyone should expect him to look to states and regions that voted against him in dispensing presidential favors, either through appointments to public offices or the citing of federal projects. This was extremely far from a statesmanlike statement and moreover, it was politically very myopic for one would have thought that the President and his advisers would have realized that it is in the long-term interest of himself and the ruling party to enlarge their actual and potential electoral plurality by being large-hearted and non-punitive toward the states and zones that did not vote for Buhari and the APC in the recent electoral cycle. In this regard, the Southeast geopolitical zone constitutes a very special case. In line with this assertion, I ask: how in the world could a ruling party that claims to be truly progressive and forward looking adopt a stance of permanent adversarial opposition to the peoples and interests of one the three major power blocs in the country simply because in one electoral cycle this major geopolitical zone voted against the President?

    In asking this question, Mr. Shehu, I wish to draw your attention to one intricate and easily overlooked aspect of that widely publicized statement of the President in which he asked how anyone could dare to contest his right to reward states and zones that voted for him while sticking it to those that did not vote for him. As reported in many newspapers, the President did not say states and zones that did not vote for his party, the APC; quite specifically, he said states and zones that did not vote for him. It would have been bad enough if in that statement he had based himself on the party; however, it is a thousand times worse that his displeasure, his angst, pertained exclusively and unambiguously to himself, Muhammadu Buhari.

    In a slightly different but related register, this same over-personalization of the politics of governance was very, very strong in the explanation that the President gave for accusations of a Northern bias in his appointments to the major non-ministerial posts in his administration. For months, this particular accusation had been rife in the press and other media outlets, so much so that when an “explanation” of sorts came this week through an interview with the President on the BBC Hausa Service, it was something of a relief that he was at last responding to something that had bothered many Nigerians including some of his supporters. But what an explanation, what an explanation! Northern bias was not his motivation, the President said; the appointees were only incidentally Northern; more substantively and subliminally, these appointees were men who had stayed with him loyally through the long years when he walked and toiled in the political wilderness. The epigraph to this letter, Mr. Shehu, is a direct quote from the translated version of that interview on BBC Hausa Service program this past Tuesday.

    I readily admit that at a certain level of basic human sentiments and emotions, the quote from that BBC interview that serves as the epigraph to this piece is very moving, very touching in the President’s rather simple and innocent belief that his listeners everywhere will readily agree that it is a right and honorable thing to acknowledge and reward friends and supporters who had been unwavering in their loyalty in the darkest periods of one man’s travails. But the Presidency is an institution; for far too long our country’s governance has been bedeviled by extreme over-personalization. For me as a member of the nation’s “commentariat”, I had thought that we had reached a pinnacle in this phenomenon of the extreme individualization of the institution of the presidency during the two terms of Olusegun Obasanjo. Now along comes Muhammadu Buhari with a variant of the same phenomenon that seems even more problematic that OBJ’s incarnation of power as an instrument, an extension of the self’s driving passions and desires. In next week’s continuation of the series, I will focus on the gendered and neo-feudal expressions of our current President’s version of the phenomenon. Don’t worry, Mr. Shehu, my critique will be constructive, though honest and bracing. I want the President to succeed for his success will in the end be more than a personal triumph; it will be a welcome break from the impasse, the political, economic and social calamities that now stalk the length and the breadth of the land.

    • Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyfo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Those of us who are ‘older’ than the country: October 1st reflections

    Those of us who are ‘older’ than the country: October 1st reflections

    It is Thursday, October 1, 2015. I am writing these words, this column about six hours after the event I am about to reveal took place. I had just finished teaching my last class for the week at Emerson Hall. The class had gone very well and for this reason, I was in a pleasant mood. All teachers like their classes to go well no matter how long they have been teaching and how many teachers they have produced in the course of a long career. And there was also the fact that I was looking forward to a long “weekend” that would go beyond Sunday and Monday to Tuesday, the day on which my first class next week would take place. It was within the soft emotional glow of these pleasant thoughts that one of the students in the class that I had just taught approached me and with a warm, beaming smile said to me: “Happy anniversary, Prof”. A little taken aback, I replied, “what anniversary”? realizing at the very instant that I asked the question that she is Nigerian and was referring to the anniversary of the country’s independence. And so before she could respond to my puzzling question, I said, “Oh, but of course, happy anniversary!” To this, I then added a rather mumbled explanation that my initial response of “what anniversary?” is a product of the fact that I normally do not remember birthday anniversaries, my own and our country’s included.

    In the short conversation that followed this initial exchange with this young compatriot, the thing that stood out the most in my memory is the fact that she was very enthusiastic, very hopeful about many things “Nigerian”, so much so that she effectively sent a powerful if subliminal message to me that her state of mind, her euphoria distinctly reflected a generational outlook on the present historical period. She told me that she was in her senior year as a Biology major intending to go on to medical school with hopes of eventually qualifying and being certified as a medical doctor. She said that the majority of Nigerian-born students at Harvard were majoring in subjects that would lead to professions in medicine, engineering, law and business. She said mine was one of the very few courses in the Humanities she had taken in her three and half years at Harvard. She said that she is a member of the Nigerian Students Association and that they were planning a big gala in celebration of the country’s 55th anniversary on October 11 and I should please be sure to be there as guests were going to be regaled with many festive items like delectable Nigerian cuisine, music, a fashion show and a grand ball.

    Oh, to be young and full of hope and a joyful openness to all of life’s possibilities again! This was undoubtedly the sentiment that I went away with earlier this afternoon after that conversation with this young student of mine. But closely following in the wake of this good-natured “envy” of the young by a man about to enter the eighth decade of his life was the recollection that throughout the first decade of our independence in the 1960s, I had also, like this young woman, been very hopeful, very sanguine about what the country, together with my sense of its place in Africa and the world, had in store for me and members of my generation who did well at school and university. Let me be very specific here.

    When, at the end of the first decade of independence I graduated from U.I. I was not unaware of the fact that I was one of a tiny fraction of the members of my generation that had received a first-rate education that could take me to any educational or professional heights that I aspired to, not only in Nigeria but anywhere in the world. Over the decades, I have written extensively about the elitist privileges, together with the scholarships, that made possible the education that I received at U.I. as an undergraduate and in America as a graduate student. Additionally, I have written on countless occasions that my awareness of this elitism was, I hoped, neutralized by the fact that I and other members of the radicalized segments of our generation dedicated ourselves to extending the privileges from which had enormously benefitted to the less privileged groups and individuals in our society. However, as one decade succeeded another in the post-independence era, the realization gradually dawned on us that it was our fate to be the very last “fortunate” generation among the other generations of living Nigerians who, in the words of the title of this piece, are “older” than the country.

    It is perhaps necessary at this stage in these reflections to clarify exactly what I have in mind in the phrase “older than the country” together with the observation that I belong to the very last “fortunate” generation among this composite cohort of Nigerians that are “older’ than the country. The phrase “older than the country” can be quite succinctly explained as a literal and perhaps even reductive understanding of the age of the country as appertaining only to the post-independence period. But we all know that with regard to the peoples and societies of which it is made, “Nigeria” is much, much older than 55! On this account, I and members of the small demographic group of Nigerians that are older than 55 – far less than 10% of the population – are not older than the country in any substantive sense. In other words, the “birth” of the nation is unlike the birth of an individual, any individual: one is subject to the biological determinism of one single life and its eventual demise; the other transcends biology and includes aeons of time and experience that come in stages or cycles of growth and decline, retrogression and renewal.

    The phrase “the very last fortunate generation” among living Nigerians over the age 55 has its resonance within this idea of cycles of decline and renewal in the stages of the historical being and becoming of the country. Let me be very concrete about what I have in mind here. Only five years separated my graduation from U.I. and my return to the university as a young lecturer but within that very short space of time, all the privileges, all the conveniences and all the rituals of an Oxbridge-type education that we had enjoyed as undergraduates had vanished completely and forever in the experience of all subsequent generational cohorts of university students since that time. Some of the vanished privileges were trivial while some were decisive and life-changing. Let me give only one example of the more trivial and ridiculous dimensions of our “fortunate” generational experience: Sunday afternoon “tea” comprising tea or coffee as beverages, with cakes and ice cream as complements all consumed in unison with the Hall Master and the Wardens seated at the High Table. By the end of the 1968/69 session Kuti Hall, of which I was a resident member, was the only hall of residence that was still clinging to a strict observance of this ritual. But during the second term of that academic year, the hall authorities decided to follow the lead of the other halls of residence and do away with Sunday afternoon “tea”. We successfully revolted against the cessation of the ritual and to my eternal embarrassment I was one of the leaders of the revolt!

    The real “fortune” of our experience as the very last generation to be truly privileged with regard to the conditions under which we were tutored can be gauged by the inestimable fact that we were the last set of Nigerian university students to receive a qualitative education that was the equal of university education anywhere else in the world. I should qualify this portentous claim by two observations. First, it is my belief, my fundamental article of faith that quality education should be the birth right, the civil right of all the young citizens of our country, of indeed all the countries of the world. Second, quality education did not vanish entirely from the Nigerian university system with my generation; it was just the case that as from around the late 1970s, you could find it only in bits and fragments that were unequally distributed among the faculties and lecturers of our universities. For instance, when I taught at both Ibadan and Ife between 1975 and 1987, most students knew which faculties were reputed to have good numbers of conscientious and dedicated lecturers and which faculties were deemed relatively indifferent to high standards of teaching and research. By contrast, in our day, virtually all faculties were deemed reputable; moreover, we had the environment, the facilities for quality education that was equal to any other national tertiary educational systems in the world.

    In bringing these reflections to a close, I must now disclose the reason why my encounter with that student in my class earlier this afternoon of Thursday, October 1, 2015 sparked these thoughts in me. As we talked and she seemed to be proud of, and was rejoicing in how well Nigerian students at Harvard were doing, I wanted to gently remind her that Harvard students are some of the world’s most privileged students; I had an inclination to remind her that hundreds of thousands of university students in Nigeria and millions around our continent and other developing regions of the world do not have even the most elementary infrastructures and the environment conductive to the kind of education that could prepare them for the demands of the world of the 21st century. Of course, I did not utter any of these thoughts to the student; I did not have the heart to spoil her spontaneous celebration that seemed to me both personal and collective in the sense that she was speaking for herself as well as for other Nigerian-born students at Harvard.

    This leads me to the most important point that I wish to make in these reflections on the 55th anniversary of our country’s independence. I am afraid it is a gloomy thought; it is a thought that puts a damper on any hopeful prospects Nigerians might or should be feeling in the wake of the change that came with the last presidential elections: revitalizing education is by far the toughest task that Buhari and his administration will face and I have very serious doubts that they will be up to the challenge. This challenge is far more daunting than the war against corruption and I don’t think the new administration is aware of this. Yes, there are other seemingly intractable challenges like widespread poverty, joblessness and insecurity of life and possessions in many parts of the country. Heaven knows that these other challenges are monumental in their own right. But the challenge of reforming and revitalizing education in our country from its current utterly broken state is the mother and the father of all the other challenges that Buhari, his administration and the new ruling party will face, but I don’t think they are in the least bit aware of this fact. This will be a topic that we shall be exploring in future essays in this column.

    • Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

     

  • Pope Francis, the talakawa Pontiff: a man for our times, a man for all ages

    Pope Francis, the talakawa Pontiff: a man for our times, a man for all ages

    Alufa n’sonra, ijo n’ru [While the priest grows fat, the congregants grow lean and emaciated with hunger] A popular Yoruba wisecrack against priestly pursuit of riches

    It is Wednesday, September 23, 2015. I have just watched the television broadcast of the address of Pope Francis to a joint meeting of both chambers of the United States Congress. The Pope’s speech was stunning in the eloquence, wisdom and humility with which he took up the cause of the poor – the talakawas of this world – and the cause of survival of our planet as a common home for all of us, the denizens of planet Earth. The speech is over and I think hard. I think back to the entirety of my life and I conclude that I have never heard a more powerful and moving speech than this speech by Pope Francis. This thought, this realization is why I started writing my column for the week a whole two days before Friday, September 25, 2015, which would have been the deadline for writing and submitting the piece for this week’s column to my Editor.

    I am writing now because I want what I write to come straight from the powerful emotions stirred in my mind and imagination by Pope Francis’ speech to the U.S. Congress. As I begin to write, I think further: if I wait until Friday morning, what I write may be good and compelling, but it will not have the emotional force of what I am feeling right now, right after listening to the delivery of the speech. For in essence what I am feeling right now is this: this man, Pope Francis, (former Catholic Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Argentina, former Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglo) comes closer than any man I have ever met or read about to my sense of the spirit, the moral vision and energy that animated that man of Judea who was one of the greatest moral reformers and revolutionary visionaries that ever lived, this being Jesus Christ of Nazareth. As this thought takes hold of my mind with great clarity and conviction, I say to myself that if I don’t write what I am feeling about this speech right now, if I wait until Friday morning to write the column, I would perhaps have begun to think, perhaps like the conventional Christian that I am not, that comparing Pope Francis with Jesus is extravagant and hyperbolic, if not even blasphemous. With this particular idea in my mind, I continue to write, thinking that all I will have to do two days from now on Friday morning before sending the piece to my Editor would be to read it over, and make necessary corrections and revisions if any are needed.

    To be entirely truthful and perhaps even somewhat confessional here, this comparison of Pope Francis to Jesus Christ comes from a region of my mind that goes all the way back to my youth when I was a Christian who was drawn to the faith by the combined effect on my evolving moral imagination of some of the most vivid, inspirational and transformative stories of Christ’s ministry: the story of the preacher who asked his disciples to sell all their worldly goods, give up their monetary possessions and take up the vows of poverty as a non-negotiable condition of their acceptance into his ministry; the narrative of the militant anti-capitalist who took up the whip to drive and scatter the profiteering money-changers and usurers from the temple and its precincts; the account of the radical and inventive allegorist who stated that it would be far easier for a whole camel to be threaded through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God; the realistic and compassionate preacher who, before his famous Sermon on the Mount, fed the hungry and the destitute in their thousands, their tens of thousands; and the tale of the man who, in the greatest of his sermons, gave us those eight so-called “beatitudes” that are almost unmatched in the clarity and eloquence with which they articulated ethical and spiritual imperatives for a just, humane, simple but dignified life for each and everyone of us, most especially the poor, the talakawa.

    That was the composite image of Christ in my mind in the period of my youth as an activist in the Students’ Christian Movement (SCM) when I was the Secretary General of all the secondary schools in Ibadan that had chapters of the SCM. Today, Wednesday, September 23, 2015, nearly fifty years later, that image rose up again in my mind, except that it was not of Christ himself that I was thinking about but Pope Francis.

    It is not necessary for me to itemize the three or four central ideas expressed by the Pope in his speech that conjured this comparison with Christ in my mind. This is because, as important as these ideas are, it is the moral and spiritual framework within which Pope Francis articulated them that made the comparison possible, even compelling. I know no better way of giving the reader an idea of this moral and spiritual framework than by saying emphatically that while ordinarily political imperatives are extremely difficult to align with moral imperatives, the Pope in his speech made this alignment between politics and morality not only easy and logical but vital. And the manner in which he accomplished this task was incredible in its discursive elegance: he talked of politics in the loftiest of spiritual and moral terms. In other words, in an age in which in nearly every country in the world, nobody in his or her right senses would think of politicians as moral leaders of their communities, Pope Francis asserted, simply but vigorously, that this is what politics is or should be – the moral touchstone of mankind.

    The central ideas or themes of the Pope’s speech can be briefly summarized. One: the gap between the rich and the poor is growing wider and wider at the same time in which the ranks of the poor grow bigger and bigger; as a consequence, the poor in their millions or even billions in all the countries of the world are being excluded from all that is vital for life lived in dignity and freedom from want. Two: there is no need to be fearful of the “stranger”, the immigrant in our midst for nearly everyone in the Americas at the present time is a descendant of “strangers” and immigrants to the two continents, South and North America. The Pope extended this idea to what is happening in Europe now with the flood of refugees and migrants fleeing from their war-torn or poverty-stricken homelands and he took it upon himself to remind Europeans that they themselves have in the past fled from Europe in times of war or desperation in search of new lives in other parts, other continents of the world. Three: human activities are posing serious and possibly catastrophic dangers to the earth and our natural environment and if urgent and coordinated action is not taken now or soon enough, the very survival of our species will be doomed irreversibly. Four: human life is precious and sacred and should be protected at all stages and all in circumstances of weakness, impairment and peril. Capital punishment should be abolished in all the countries of the world and to the necessity that often arises to punish criminals in order to protect the society and the innocent from their misdeeds, we must add the recognition that rehabilitation is always possible for even the worst offenders. Five: in the pursuit of wealth and profits, the global trade in arms seems unstoppable; lethal weapons of mass destruction are quite easily acquired by nations, groups and individuals who absolutely make no secret of their intentions to use the weapons they buy either on defenseless populations or in pursuit of criminal activities linked with international drug trafficking.

    It will be readily seen that although these are issues and ideas whose moral and practical usefulness to humankind seems indisputable, they are in fact issues and ideas that divide the peoples of the world and all its nations into fiercely and bitterly opposing camps. This is why, on balance, though most commentators on the views of Pope Francis agree that a few of his views are conservative, especially those that pertain to matters of church doctrine, these commentators place the Pope far more solidly on the Left than on the Right. It would be disingenuous of me not only to say that I am in agreement with this assessment of the “politics” of the Pope’s views, but that it pleases me enormously that he is more Left-leaning than Right-leaning. However, the fundamental thing about the Pontiff’s “politics”, his political views is that they are solidly grounded in a notion and a practice of “politics” which powerfully calls out to the moral being in all of us. In other words, whether you are a woman or man of the Left or the Right, the Pope’s political views place your claims to being a moral being on the line. Only the most cynical, the most asinine men and women would abjure or give up their claims to being moral beings. This is the underlying power of the Pope’s speech to the U.S. Congress.

    That should be my last word in these reflections but there is one more factor to add. Like Jesus of Nazareth, this Pope is also a brilliantly strategic and pragmatic moral philosopher. Like Jesus, in his speech, Pope Francis grounded the moral framework of his political views on pragmatism and enlightened self-interest. Throughout the delivery of his speech, he made allusions to the golden rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. If you are haunted by the specter of poverty for yourself and your offspring, do not impose poverty on other men and women and their progeny. If you turn your back, your compassion on refugees and migrants now, know that you or your children and their children may one day also be refugees and migrants, as indeed your ancestors once were in these Americas, this Europe, this world.

    • Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu