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Category: Biodun Jeyifo

  • ‘Hear Word!’ comes to Harvard and America: ‘rebranding’ Nigeria with the best in ourselves

    ‘Hear Word!’ comes to Harvard and America: ‘rebranding’ Nigeria with the best in ourselves

    Hear Word!’ is coming to Harvard and I can report that there is tremendous excitement at the prospect of bringing this powerful piece of Nigerian theatrical performance to the Harvard community. It says a lot that even though the event is nearly seven months away in mid-April 2016, already the folks at Harvard are as excited as if the visit is only a week or two from now. Moreover – and this is perhaps the most significant portent of all – at a meeting last week at which all the programs and organizations at Harvard that are collaborating and pooling resources to bring this performance to Harvard met to begin planning for the visit, everyone who spoke about ‘Hear Word!’ and its Producer-Director, Ifeoma Fafunwa, spoke with great respect and admiration, without the slightest bit of condescension that is the more usual sentiment that you get when Americans in positions of power and influence speak about something from Nigeria or abut Nigerians they purport to respect. As the only Nigerian or African at the meeting, I was struck by this factor, especially since Ifeoma Fafunwa (nee Obianwu) happens to be an old acquaintance of mine who, the last time I saw her was an architect, not a theatre producer and director. The observations and reflections in this piece have their origin in that meeting here at Harvard early last week.

    I suppose the first thing to do here is give the reader a sense of what ‘Hear Word!’ is and what its impact has been at home in Nigeria where, so far, it is the only place, the only country in which it has been performed. This is all the more necessary since I have myself not seen the play in performance but am going by what I have been told about it, and what I have read about it on the Internet, together with YouTube clips and images of the performance that I have watched. Actually, the full title of the piece is ‘Hear Word! Naija Woman Talk True”. It has an all-female cast that is appropriate for its content and message: Nigerian women are talking and are asking Nigerian men (and women) to listen and listen well to stories and accounts of the discriminations, abuses, injustices and suffering that women in our country experience for no other reason than the fact that they are women. Cast in the form of an experimental production that mixes individual and collective stories with music, song, dance humor, and biting wit, ‘Hear Word!’ has been performed to enthusiastic, perhaps even ecstatic audiences in formal proscenium stages at the MUSON Centre, the University of Lagos and the National Theatre and in the open-air venues of some markets in Lagos. If all these reports are true – and there is no indication of any kind that the reports are made up – these would make ‘Hear Word!’, in content, form and presentation, one of the most revolutionary theatre productions ever staged in Nigeria. These factors are critical for a proper appreciation of why the great excitement at Harvard about ‘Hear Word! is the axis, the pivot around which I am making all the observations and reflections in this piece, especially around the subject of the ‘rebranding’ of Nigeria in America and the world at large.

    My colleagues here at Harvard would definitely not be exactly happy to hear me say this, but I should emphasize the fact that the great interest, the great excitement at the prospects of bringing this performance to the Harvard community does not come primarily from the revolutionary nature of ‘Hear Word!’. Harvard is not instinctively against anything revolutionary, but neither is it known to be as reliably radical or revolutionary as some other major American colleges and universities are with regard to cultural currents and developments in Africa and the global South. The major criterion with Harvard is – excellence or merit of a high order. Social relevance also matters a lot to the University, but first you must have excellence. Thus, it was primarily because some Harvard faculty and staff watched ‘Hear Word!’ in performance in Lagos and saw how good it was, what impact it had on the audiences, that they became interested in bringing the performance to the Harvard community.

    Here one may think of the additional factor that at the present time, both the President of Harvard and the Director of the University’s Center for African Studies are women, together with the fact that the Director of the American Repertory Theatre (ART) that is based at Harvard is also a woman. This might imply that a play about women in Nigeria is bound to elicit the interest of such powerful female figures at the University, but I give you my word that if ‘Hear Word!’ had not so strongly impressed the Harvard faculty and staff that saw it in Lagos, no “sisterhood” solidarities would have launched the series of meetings and contacts that will eventually bring the performance to Harvard and America in April 2016. This is an appropriate note on which to now bring into this conversation the issue of the rebranding of Nigeria in America and the world at large.

    In case anyone reading this has forgotten let me remind the reader that under the previous PDP administrations, tens of millions of dollars were spent to “rebrand” Nigeria against the terribly negative perceptions of the country, its leaders and its peoples, particularly in the U.S. but also in the world at large. There is no reason to contest the fact that, at least on the surface of things, Nigeria and Nigerians seemed to need that project of rebranding. Across many parts of the world including the African continent, we were infamous for all kinds of indecent, backward and immoral things: political leaders and public officeholders who were not only some of the most corrupt in the world but were unequalled on the planet for the scale and impunity of their corruption; Internet scams that became the material of severely derogatory jokes about Nigerians throughout the world; the level of state and non-state thieving of oil products in the Niger Delta and the brigandage that passed for militancy in the region; tales of extremely cruel violence against women and children accused of witchcraft in many parts of the country and among communities of the Nigerian Diaspora in the United Kingdom; and the stories that visitors to the country carried back to their countries of the levels of chaos, squalor and insecurity of life and possessions in Nigeria’s towns and cities. So yes, on the surface, it seemed that Nigeria needed those projects of rebranding.

    There is no use in belaboring the utter uselessness of those rebranding projects, first under Frank Nweke Jr. which he dubbed “The Heart of Africa” and later under the late Professor Dora Akunyili that she called “Rebranding Nigeria”. Millions were spent, very costly Madison Avenue consulting firms were hired and the two Ministers, each in her or his time, went on extensive tours round the world in an attempt at bolstering Nigeria’s image that failed woefully and totally. I doubt that either Minister ever really understood why the projects failed, even though the reason is as simple as putting two and two together to make four: if the product is bad, if the material is rotten and rotten to the core, there is nothing in the world that you can do to make it smell and taste good. Moreover – and this is the most important point of all – while the official and totally hopeless rebranding projects were going on at great costs to Nigerians, quiet, non-official but powerful and eloquent acts of ‘rebranding’ were going on all the time and at no cost to the government or peoples of Nigeria. Examples: The Achebe Foundation, first based at Bard College in New York State and later relocated to Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, was holding seminal annual conferences that brought Africans at home together with Africans in the diaspora and that became the basis of identifying the locations of progress and renewal in Nigeria and the African continent; Wole Soyinka’s many appearances at congresses of the world’s leading thinkers and activists on issues of freedom and the war against terrorism in Nigeria and the world at large; Chimamanda Adichie’s addresses to many major forums of both high and popular political and cultural constituencies like the British House of Lords and the Oprah Winfrey Book Club; the relocation of “Fela!”, the hit musical on the life of Fela Anikulapo Kuti directed by one of the leading directors of American contemporary dance and opera, Bill T. Jones, from the small Brooklyn Academy of Music to Broadway; and the high profile performance of second generation Nigerian Americans as one of the highest achievers in high schools and colleges in North America, perhaps second only the children of South Asian immigrants.

    I see the coming of ‘Hear Word!’ to Harvard and America as a continuation of these currents projecting what is best, what is inspiring and creative in our country as a means of countering the many terribly negative things that are happening in our country and among Nigerian communities in many different parts of the world. The show has many first rate performers and artistes in its ranks: Joke Silva, Taiwo Ajayi-Lycet, Kate Henshaw, and Bimbo Akintola as well as many up-and-coming actresses who will probably go on to become the big names of the next wave of stage and screen actresses and performers in the country. Above all else, it is gratifying that having seen its impact in Nigeria, the Harvard faculty and staff are hopeful that through workshops and master-classes, Harvard students will get to learn much from the visit with regard to what we in the global South can teach the denizens of the rich countries of the world about issues of common concern to all the peoples of the planet. It is often the other way round: the global North dictating to the rest of us where things are headed for all of us, whether in the wrong or the right direction.

    I cannot end this piece without alluding to something about which I wrote in this column in October last year after the National Educational Summit (NES) organized by the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) at which I had the great honour of being the Chairman. At that gathering, the special session on women was endlessly and incredibly disheartening: virtually all the men at the gathering treated the presentations by and about women’s affairs and condition in Nigeria as things to joke and laugh about. As a former National President of ASUU, I was greatly shocked by that experience. I now ask that the current National President to make all members of ASUU mandatorily watch performances of ‘Hear Word!’ on the condition of fines for failure to do so!

    • Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Blessed are the merciful: a Stella Adadevoh in European refugee debacle

    Blessed are the merciful: a Stella Adadevoh in European refugee debacle

    “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy – Matthew 5, verse 7 “

    Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy. This is one of the eight so-called “beatitudes” of Christ’s “Sermon on the Mount”. This is without question, the most widely known and admired of Christ’s teachings. I am not a Christian; I am not a religionist, but I regard Jesus as one of the greatest moral reformers and visionaries that ever lived. This does not satisfy fervently religious prayer warriors like my older brother, Elder Ben Ade Jeyifous, for whom both the divine conception and birth of Jesus, together with the narrative of his ascension to heaven are matters of both revealed truth and transcendent faith. To each man or woman his or her faith, his or her belief; it is enough for me that what Christ preached in his Sermon on the Mount remains as valid today as they were then and will be until the end of time – if such an end will come.

    These thoughts, these reflections have their origins in a report that I heard on the World Service of the BBC three Saturdays ago, on August 22, 2015. Unfortunately, I caught only the last or closing segment of the report which was about a Nigerian-born woman who is an immigrant in Greece and had formed an incredibly vigorous and effective advocacy group comprised mostly of women to struggle for and obtain humanitarian relief for the thousands of refugees and migrants streaming into Europe at the present time. According to the report, this woman was until a few years ago herself a migrant or refugee; she does not have a high-paying job and her social and economic conditions are only slightly better than dire. And yet, she gives nearly all she earns together with total devotion in body and spirit to helping others who, like herself only a couple of yeas ago, are caught in this unfolding tragedy of waves of human beings fleeing form homelands that have become too dangerous to live in to foreign lands that are reluctant to give them humane and dignified welcome.

    Since I heard only enough of that report to know that this woman is Nigerian-born and has an advocacy group that she co-founded, I have been engaged in a seemingly endless search on the Internet for her name, her identity and her life story, at least since she arrived in Greece. So far, my searches have yielded no concrete facts or accounts about this woman and her group. But I will keep searching for I have no doubt whatsoever that I will eventually come across a source of information that will reveal all the relevant facts of this woman’s life and experience. But meanwhile, she remains anonymous in my imagination, which is why I have no other or better way of thinking about her than thinking of her in the words of the title of this piece: a Dr. Stella Adadevoh in the debacle of the European refugee crisis. For of a truth, my head swelled with great national pride when I heard that report of this woman on the BBC, just as I had been powerfully and ineffably moved by the accounts of the heroic role that Dr. Adadevoh played in rising selflessly and courageously to the threat of the Ebola pandemic contagion in Nigeria slightly less than two years ago. Then as now with the story of this woman in Greece, we have ample proof that Nigeria, like other national communities in the human family, can and does produce heroines that are made of the stuff of legend in the scale of their humanness, most especially in their mercifulness.

    Mercifulness or compassion is very special because it is the most selfless and the least calculating of all the virtues enunciated in the Sermon on the Mount. True enough, Christ said that the merciful are blessed because they shall receive mercy. But what mercy did Dr. Adadevoh expect to get when she gave her safety, her life, to prevent the spread of the Ebola virus in her country? What mercy does this “anonymous” Nigerian-born woman in Greece expect from the acts of mercy she has expended in alleviating the suffering and the trauma of the refugees streaming into Greece and other European countries in the wake of the wars raging in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya? There is of course the theological or ethical consideration that some acts of mercy may be predicated on the presumption that acts of goodness increase one’s stock of benefaction or recompense from the divine powers that are deemed to rule the universe. But in the lived and concrete immediacies of life and existence, true acts of mercy do not come from expectations of what one may get later in this life or in the life hereafter when the final reckoning, the final computation of moral and spiritual profit and loss is made by God or Providence. Indeed, we might ask here why genuine acts of mercy and human solidarity have been so sorely lacking in the European and more broadly, Western response to the debacle of the migrant or refugee crisis. Are these not, for the most part, Christian nations, these Western countries that have been so slow, so disinclined to show mercy, compassion and solidarity to the refugees and migrants?

    Here, it might be productive to highlight the case of Germany which has, by a long shot, been the most “merciful”, the most welcoming to the tidal waves of the refugees and migrants. In comparison to someone like the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, Chancellor Angela Merkel has been almost saintly in the compassionate statements she has been making about the plight of the migrants and refugees. While Cameron has more or less capitulated to the extreme paranoia of the British far right on the influx of the migrants and refugees, Merkel has repeatedly spoken very sharply against the racism and xenophobia of Germany’s far right. More significantly, she has stated that Germany is wiling to take about 800,000 refugees every year for the next few years. Here, you might say, is genuine, “Christian” mercy and compassion expressed in the idiom and the protocols of formal state policy. That is until you learn that this policy is actually calculated to be demographically and economically beneficial to Germany. This is because Germany has an increasingly aging population profile in which the birth rate and the youth population are not demographically robust enough to offset the percentage of the population that is growing too old for the effective workforce. In other words, Germany’s “mercy” here is predicated on the calculation that she will receive “mercy” in return from the consolidation of the stable workforce that is needed to ensure her economic supremacy in the European Union.

    Perhaps the thing that most clearly and incontrovertibly distinguishes the “mercifulness” of Chancellor Merkel and that of the “anonymous” Nigerian-born woman in Greece who is committing virtually all she possesses to the relief of the suffering and trauma of the refugees and migrants is the fact that while Merkel and the other European political leaders insist on making distinctions between “refuges” and “migrants”, the Nigerian-born humanitarian activist and others like her make no such distinction. In the context of the horrendous exploitation and trauma inflicted by traffickers on all those arriving in European countries from the Middle East and Africa, it is almost obscene and inhuman to make and insist on such distinctions. Putatively, a “refugee” is someone fleeing from dreadful war zones, especially the zones dominated and terrorized by ISIS. Conversely, a “migrant” is someone fleeing from the ravages of extreme or dire poverty with no end in sight for present and future generations. But in many cases, war and poverty are linked, whether they occur in states embroiled in full-scale war or post-conflict countries that are more or less failed states. Indeed, in the world we live in at the present time in this new millennium, poverty in the global south is often the extension of war into the domain of terribly unequal economic conditions within and between the nations of the world. And indeed, the late Marxist scholar and thinker, Giovanni Arrighi has determined, through rigorous research, that inequality in our world comprises two-thirds (or 66.6%) between nations and only one-third (or 33.3%) within nations. In other words, on this account, poverty is the continuation of war in the domain of economic production: the distribution and consumption of goods and services in our world are structured by great and incommensurable inequalities between the nations and peoples of the planet. The best and the most honest and humane among European thinkers and activists are very much aware of this fact and indeed make it the basis of their advocacy on behalf of the hundreds of thousands streaming into that continent at the present time.

    Nonetheless, Germany has stated clearly that it has room and space only for “refugees” and none at all for “migrants”. Ditto Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands. Some countries will take in neither “refugees” nor “migrants”, Hungary being perhaps the most intransigent and vociferous on this insistence. For the humanists and activists and their organizations, such distinctions, such language games used to mask outright racist and xenophobic sentiments and policies, amount to the collapse of genuine compassion and solidarity in a time of unprecedented crises of community and fellowship in our world. In this traumatic and traumatizing historical context for our world, one anonymous Nigerian-born woman, far away from home in a new home, is making a difference that is measured in the large-heartedness of the small acts of mercy and compassion that she and her advocacy group are taking to relieve the suffering and trauma that she sees all around her. I hope in time to find out who she is and thereby replace her present anonymity with the concreteness of a name, an identity.

     

    • Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Scholar-Diplomat Extraordinaire: Adebola Adefuye (Aka “Ade Blow”) (1947-2015)

    Scholar-Diplomat Extraordinaire: Adebola Adefuye (Aka “Ade Blow”) (1947-2015)

    First, from Accra, Ghana, Femi Osofisan forwarded the news to me, asking me if I thought it was true. Incidentally, the very week before in Berlin, Germany, he and I had been talking about him, about the eternally youthful “Ade Blow”. Then Olu Ademulegun sent me the same inquiry, this time more anxious, more desperate: is it true that “Ade Blow” is gone? And then finally, from John Ohiorhenuan in New York: “BJ, do you know what took him away?”

    I start this tribute to my departed friend in this manner in order to underscore one point: almost to the last person, everyone of our circle of friends, acquaintances and members of our generational cohort who knew Adebola Ibidapo Adefuye somehow did not in the least expect that he would go before any of us. Nearly all the way from primary school through high school to the University of Ibadan as an undergraduate, he was nearly always the youngest in the class, quite apart from also nearly always being one of the brightest. But more than this was what appeared to be his perpetual youthfulness: he looked much, much younger than his 68 years and had consistently looked younger than his age at any time in the last two decades since we, members of his generational cohort, entered our middle-age years. Yes, we have all been joking in the last decade or so that we were all now in the departure lounge of life, but the last person amongst us that we thought would take that “flight” was “Ade Blow”. And indeed, such is the tragic irony of life, of Being itself.

    In my sorrow, my heart goes out to his family: his widow, Sola and his three children, Bunmi, Tolu and Baba. I have many friends who are very devoted family men; Adefuye was quite easily one of the most devoted of such husbands and fathers. It may seem that in saying this, I am merely repeating a comforting cliché that is normative in tributes to departed friends, but in this case, it happens to be far more than a customary expression of condolence to the family; it is an incandescent truth. To all who met him, he was the essence of kindness, considerateness and generosity: I think these virtues in his life and work had their roots in the sort of life he shared with his family, with his wife and children. How they will cope with his loss seems unimaginable to me. All I can say, all I wish to express to members of his family and all who knew and admired him as a friend, acquaintance and colleague, is that he left a rich legacy that should be a source of comfort and solace for his loss.

    The standard obituary notices and editorials have given the bare bones of his achievements; I repeat them here and will then considerably add finer details of texture and nuance to these achievements. At the University of Ibadan, he graduated from the History Department on top of his class with an Upper Second Class Honors degree. By the way, at the time, I and others speculated that the only reason Adefuye wasn’t given a First Class Honors degree was because up to that point in time in 1969, the History Department at U.I. was “famous” – or “notorious” – in never giving anyone First Class, period. All the same, Adefuye went on to complete all work for his Ph D within four years, then and now something of an amazing achievement. From this he rose steadily from Lecturer 1 to Senior Lecturer, Professor and Head of Department of History, all at the University of Lagos. I think it is on record that when he became Head of Department, he was one of the youngest ever to have acceded to that position in Nigeria. Here, it is pertinent to observe that this was a period when meritocracy was still strong in our universities and the post of H.O.D. was not yet the mostly administrative and highly politicized position that it is today in our universities. To be an H.O.D. at that time was to be a solid source of professional and intellectual leadership within the given department itself and in the wider circles of the profession. Perhaps one way in which I might give an apt illustration of these observations on the academic achievements of Adefuye would be to give an account of what I discovered about him as a distinguished historian in our country’s diplomatic service when I visited him and his family when he was our High Commissioner in the English-speaking Caribbean based in Kingston, Jamaica.

    His invitation to me came when, through a phone conversation, he learnt of my interest in, and ties with the Caribbean. I was then at Cornell University and had developed strong political and ideological connections with the workers’ movements in that region of the world, especially Trinidad and Jamaica where I had many friends and comrades. I am not sure of this now, but I think in fact that Adefuye’s invitation to me came as a result of his having met some of my friends in Jamaica who had spoken very warmly about me to him and he had told them that he and I were friends and cohorts at U.I. At any rate, about a week after my arrival in Kingston, I finally made contact with these Jamaican friends. Dear reader, imagine my great amazement and pleasure when these friends recounted to me, with an awe bordering on hero-worship, the “revolution” that Adefuye had carried out in the Jamaican educational system through his introduction of African history into the curriculum of all primary and secondary schools in the country. Adefuye had not kept this information completely hidden from me; he had only in his characteristic humility hinted to me that apart from his diplomatic duties, he had been doing some unpaid work teaching African history in Jamaican schools. But what the Jamaicans themselves told me was something of epic proportions: Adefuye had had systematic discussions with teachers and educational administrators about how to make African history part of the curriculum of Jamaican schooling; he had brought in relevant texts, courtesy of the Nigerian government; he had travelled the length and breadth of the island nation giving lectures and talks; and his activities had begun to redound to some of the other island nations in the region.

    This story, this narrative which at the time seemed to come from a deeply redemptive response to the long, worldwide ignorance of African history, would be incomplete if I don’t link it with the effect that it had on Adefuye’s standing among all the other diplomats without exception in Jamaica when he was our man in that country, that region of the world. Simply stated, Adefuye was the most highly admired and respected diplomat of any country in the Caribbean at the time. The other Ambassadors and High Commissioner saw the great esteem in which the Jamaicans and the other countries of the Caribbean held Adefuye; they more or less had to “fall in line” with the situation. Two days before I left Jamaica on that visit, I went with Adefuye to a dinner at the home of one of these ambassadors at which virtually all the others were present. The high regard for Adefuye was more than palpable; it was electrifying. Everyone was duly impressed when Adefuye introduced me as Professor of English at Cornell; but they all quickly turned away from me to my friend, each one regaling me with his or her particular story about Adefuye’s enormous popularity in Jamaica and the Caribbean. Adefuye was clearly the unelected doyen of the diplomatic corps in Jamaica. About two years later when Emeka Anyaoku became the first and so far only African Secretary-General of the Commonwealth, it was largely thanks to the fact that through Adefuye’s work in the Caribbean, all the votes in that region went to Nigeria’s Anyaoku.

    In bringing this tribute to my friend to a close, I would like to end by exploring deeper ramifications of the link between history as a discipline and the place of diplomacy in the modern world with specific regard to jokes and conversations that I had with Adefuye over several decades concerning politics in general and socialism in particular. This needs to be told delicately and with becoming circumspection.

    Now, Adefuye belonged to one the two well known Nigerian schools or formations of historians and historiography, these being the Ibadan-Nsukka school and the Ahmadu Bello University school. Frankly speaking, the Ibadan-Nsukka school to which Adefuye belonged is much better known worldwide. Its three main driving ideas are, one, that Africa, like any other region of the world, has a history; two, this history of Africa did not begin with the coming of the Europeans and of writing to Africa; three, this history of Africa is part of the history of the world without which world history would be incomplete, truncated. You could say that the ABU school of history also accepts all these ideas of the Ibadan-Nsukka school, but it goes one step further by raising fundamental questions about how history in general and world and local histories in particular are written in order to advance the interests of dominant groups.

    Adefuye knew that though both of us are products of U.I., I was more inclined toward the ABU school of historians. And from this arose his good-natured but merciless teasing of me on account of a pre-recorded message that I had left on my phone answering machine when I arrived at Cornell in 1988. The message said: “I greet you in the name of socialism; please leave a message and I will get back to you as soon as possible”. Every single time that he either saw me or spoke with me on the phone, “Ade Blow” would start the conversation sarcastically by repeating that recorded message. As a retort, I would say, I wish I could greet you in the name of the capitalism or the bourgeoisie whom you serve as a diplomat, but you know that I don’t think the future lies with either capitalism or the bourgeoisie.

    Well, everyone reading this tribute would recognize immediately that my retort was too long, too clunky. And at any rate, it is not something attributable to Adefuye himself. He was not the subservient tool of any government, any abstract ideology. He treated all with whom he came into contact with a deep respect of their innate dignity, whether or not they were rich or poor, the powerful or the powerless. I can report with great pride about my friend that more than any other ambassador we have ever had in Washington Adefuye made the embassy in D.C. the most welcoming place for all Nigerians from every part of the country and of all social and economic groups. The tremendous respect that he enjoyed as a diplomat was reflected in the kind of place the embassy in DC was under his ambassadorship; both in turn, derived from his sense of the place of the history of Africa in world history. How many of our diplomats and political leaders have that sort of rich intellectual background?

    In his play, Julius Caesar, Shakespeare famously wrote the following lines to be delivered by Mark Anthony, the dead Caesar’s friend: “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones. So let it be with Caesar”. To that I say: No, not with Adefuye. The good that he did will be remembered, with gratitude and with solace in the recognition that when he was here, he made a big difference. My condolences, Sola, Bunmi, Tolu and Baba. May you and other members of the extended family be comforted by fond memories of who and what he was.

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Will members of Buhari’s cabinet be ‘Septemberists’ of destiny?

    Will members of Buhari’s cabinet be ‘Septemberists’ of destiny?

    The month of September is around the corner; it is almost upon us. If they haven’t already started, speculations will soon start on when Buhari will actually announce the members of his federal cabinet and what women and men will be in the cabinet. In starting this week’s column with these observations, I do not myself wish to start what, for the most part, I consider idle speculations. There isn’t anything special about the President’s choice of September, more than three months after his inauguration, as the month in which he would announce the members of his cabinet to the country. I mean, for all we know, he could as well have chosen August, October or even November. But he did choose September and I for one wish to give him the benefit of the doubt that September was not a random choice. And this is why I am invoking the trope of “Septemberists” in this article to explore the possibility, the necessity even, that members of Buhari’s cabinet might turn out to be women and men that in experience, abilities and impact, will be unprecedented in our country’s political history. What does this trope of “Septemberists” allude to; what does it mean? And why am I invoking it here when I am absolutely certain that Buhari and his advisers do not have the events in European and world history to which the trope alludes in mind at all?

    Our comments on the “Septemberists” will be shorter. Known in the Portuguese language as “Setembristas”, they got their appellation from their successful revolt of September 9, 1836 against Queen Maria 11. Their revolt was essentially against the terrible inefficiency, corruption and backwardness of Portuguese monarchical rule in the period of European colonial and imperial overseas adventures. In effect, they were liberals and “modernizers” who wished to lay the foundations of sound and efficient constitutional rule in feudal Portugal. One of their most notable actions was the prohibition of slavery in Portugal itself and all overseas Portuguese colonies. Ultimately, their success was short-lived, the British joining forces with the Portuguese crown to crush them.

    In order for this excursion into European and world history to have any pertinence to the subject of this essay, this being the potential impact of Buhari’s cabinet to be announced in a September that is only days away, we must be able to discern in present-day Nigeria a movement among our politicians and technocrats that can be adjudged to have the same liberal, progressive and modernizing worldview, values and dedication as the “Septemberists” of Portuguese revolutionary history. Please note that “September” happened to be merely incidental to the more substantial nature and impact of Portugal’s 19th century “Septemberists”. If their revolt had taken place in the month of October, they would have been called “Octobrists”. In this case, we are in the happy circumstance of being able to match the month of the announcement and institution of Buhari’s cabinet with a term that already exists in world history as a term with quite portentous significance. In other words, by their deeds ye shall know them: if Buhari’s cabinet proves to be exceptional in relation to all the cabinets we have ever had in this country, it will be our closest equivalent to the “Septemberists” of history.

    Last week, in his column in this newspaper, Tatalo Alamu declared assertively that we are more or less in “revolutionary times”. I do not wish to take issue with that declaration; I merely wish to reflect on it with specific regard to the issue of those who will be on the ramparts of the administrative machinery of governance for the next four years. Will they make a difference in the lives, the yearnings, the aspirations of the majority or generality of Nigerians? Will they make a substantial departure from the mediocrity, the corruption and the inefficiency of the PDP era that reached the peak in the Jonathan administration? If it is the case that we are now living in revolutionary times, like all revolutions the Buhari “revolution” must have its revolutionaries. But so far, in the National Assembly and in the agencies and parastatals for which the President has appointed managerial heads, no “revolutionaries” have surfaced. As a matter of fact, it could be argued that in the National Assembly, the exact opposite is what we have seen: the seizure of power by counter-revolutionaries.

    Concerning the President as head of state and head of government, Buhari has himself humorously and rather fetchingly acknowledged the fact that Nigerians have given him the nickname of “Baba Go-Slow”. He is difficult, he is challenging to read. He is not exactly like a closed book, but neither is he an open book. He contested for the presidency four times and only won the fourth time. Thus, he had all the time in the world to work out a vision of what he wanted to do, what he wanted to achieve with power. For unlike military coups where you seize power first and then scramble around trying to find out what to do with it, in an epic electoral quest lasting more than twelve years, Buhari should have come to office prepared from day one with a clear sense of what to do and where to go. And if we grant that with the doctrine and the practice of separation of powers Buhari could not have done much to avert the seizure of power in the National Assembly by the “counter-revolutionaries”, it has to be admitted that the President is in full control in the executive branch of government. If that is the case, nearly four months since his election is a long time to wait to find out what caliber of men and women he will select for his cabinet.

    Ben Nwabueze has suggested that the long delay in Buhari’s announcement of the members of his cabinet is nothing other than the manifestation of a lingering holdover of autocratic predilections from the time when the President was a military dictator. This may or may not be true. Definitely, there are other rather more mundane explanations for this long delay. One of such explanations is the fact that country was left so broke, so close to the edge of bankruptcy by the Jonathan administration that putting a cabinet in place right away after electoral victory was not one of the priorities of the new administration. This is certainly true of many of the state governors, many of whom, finding totally emptied treasuries in the state capitals when they took over from the departing former governors, actually “saved” a lot by deliberately being slow, being unhurried in appointing members of their cabinets: if you don’t have commissioners, special advisers, personal assistants and protocol officers, you don’t have to pay their huge salaries and allowances.

    Sooner or later, sooner rather than later, Buhari will announce the names of the members of his cabinet. I am not betting on it, but I hope that they will be like the “Septemberists” whose role in a short episode of European and world history I have invoked in this essay, together with their legacy. I am in particular looking forward to the people who will fill the slots for two Ministries, these being Justice and Education. In the last four weeks in this column, I have focused rather single-mindedly on how the law, through the agency of senior lawyers, magistrates and judges became the perfect and almost inviolable shield and protector of those who looted our national coffers on an unprecedented scale. With the passage of the Administration of Criminal Justice Act of 2015 into law, the new Minister of Justice and Attorney General will have a powerful, almost invincible weapon against this entrenchment of Bar and Bench in service of corruption in Nigeria. Only someone in the mold of the “Septemberists” can be expected to make this possible. Let us recall here what the “Septemberists” stood for:  a liberal, progressive and modernizing overhaul of the inefficiency, corruption and backwardness of the monarchical order of feudal Portugal.

    To the last of my days on this side of the grave, I shall remain in bafflement why not one of the Ministers of Education in the PDP era failed to declare a state of emergency at all levels and areas of our educational system – primary, secondary and tertiary; private and public; denominational and non-denominational. Pupils were failing at historically astronomically high rates and yet not once did any Minister of Education seriously express a sense of crisis. And ironically, some of the Ministers concerned were themselves members of the academic profession!

    These two Ministries are not alone, they do not stand apart from the general rot; they are indeed symptomatic. The last impression I wish to leave is that the cabinet, the ministries exist in isolation and can therefore be “saved” by supermen and women that in this essay I am calling “Septemberists”. The historical “Septemberists” were not individual technocrats or politicians seeking to make a name or a fortune for themselves; above all else, they were members of a movement in Portuguese politics, culture and society with a pronounced and consistent dedication to liberal, progressive and modernizing values and ideals. Do we have such a movement in our country at the present time? That is the question. I happen to think that we do; however, I also think that individuals who correspond to this type in our society tragically generally tend not to see themselves as part of a movement, a trend.

    Ultimately, the bottom line is this: Is Buhari himself cut in the mold of a truly progressive and modernizing statesman and will the Party of which he is Head by virtue of being the President be a party of destiny that will do what needs to be done at this particular moment of our history? In another month or two, we shall begin to have the outlines of a plausible answer to this tantalizing question.

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • In the war against corruption effective prosecutions not probes are the ultimate weapons (2)

    In the war against corruption effective prosecutions not probes are the ultimate weapons (2)

    As promised at the end of this column last week, this concluding essay in our series on effective prosecutions versus probes as weapons in the war against corruption in our country will focus on the Administration of Justice Act of 2015. Most Nigerians, including lawyers, seem either to be totally unaware of the existence of this Act or if they are aware of its existence, do not seem to have a grasp of what it would take to make it work. It was for these reasons that in my concluding remarks last week, I promised to bring a prominent member of the Bar to the conversation with a view to publicizing through this column, the difference that this Act could make in the fight against corruption in our society. The lawyer that I will bring into this conversation is none other than Femi Falana, SAN. I am sure most readers of this piece would agree that he needs no introduction other than the following: Femi Falana is Femi Falana! Before bringing him into the conversation directly through his responses to three questions that I posed to him, permit me in a few paragraphs to provide a historical and political context for the short interview with Falana.

    In a way, in our seemingly unending war against corruption, the coming to power of Buhari in 2015 is very much like the coming to power of Murtala Ramat Mohammed exactly forty years ago in 1975. Within weeks of coming to power, Mohammed instituted probes into corruption and malpractices in virtually all areas of public life in the country, with specific application to the government from which he took over, that of General Yakubu Gowon and the continuing influence and authority of Gowon’s appointees both at the federal and state levels. Buhari has also announced that his “probe” will be limited to the administration of his predecessor, Goodluck Jonathan. Though he is yet to actually and concretely “deliver”, Buhari, again like Mohammed before him, inspires great confidence in the generality of the Nigerian people that in this “war” he is serious, that he “means business”. Finally, almost in the same manner in which Mohammed did not spare members of his own “party” – the military – in his anti-corruption war, Buhari has also stated that no one would spared in the probe of the period of the Jonathan administration; he has promised that governors and public officeholders of all parties would be probed.

    However, having noted these similarities between the two men in the war against corruption, we must not be uncritical and too quick in coming to the apparent conclusions that these analogies between Mohammed and Buhari might seem to indicate. Mohammed went far beyond probes to both summary dismissals and criminal prosecutions of identified wrongdoers. It astonished Nigerians and the whole world that soldiers could deal with themselves in the war against corruption. Especially, it delighted Nigerians to be shown concretely that no one was so powerful, so “connected” that he or she could not be touched, could not be held accountable for looting government monies and public assets. Thus, the “essence” of Mohammed’s legacy is that probes are not enough; they must be backed with effective action; they must end with restitution for the wronged and deterring punishment for the wrongdoer. Mohammed made many mistakes and created many enemies for himself in that “war” (as he did in the civil war proper); but he was absolutely insistent that restitution and punishment must follow exposure of corrupt practices through probes.

    As a moral and practical benchmark for Buhari, Mohammed’s legacy in the war against corruption is a tough and complex act to follow. As a military ruler, Mohammed could make summary dismissals; Buhari, as an elected civilian president, cannot. Compared to its colossal scale now, corruption in the time of Mohammed was not unmanageable. That was why, in the criminal prosecution of named and identified wrongdoers, Mohammed did not have senior and distinguished lawyers and judges who use perpetual stay of proceedings to block successful prosecution of looters to contend with; Buhari does. Moreover, they constitute the cream of the Nigerian legal profession. What Buhari has that Mohammed did not have is the Administration of Justice Act of 2015 – if he and his administration, with massive support from the Nigerian public, can make it work. And on this note, we move to the short interview with Femi Falana.

    Question: What is “revolutionary” about this Act? What are its key provisions that everyone should know about?

    Falana: With regard to the specific issue of the war against corruption, the Act has far-reaching provisions that will make it impossible to unduly delay or permanently prolong the prosecution of criminal suspects. To ensure speedy trial, objections shall not be taken in criminal proceedings on the ground of an imperfect charge. All objections shall be considered along with the substantive issues at the time of delivery of judgment. An application for stay of proceedings pending appeal will not be entertained as the trial of the defendant shall proceed from day-to-day until conclusion. Where day-to-day trial is impracticable, no party shall be entitled to more than five adjournments provided that the interval between each adjournment shall not exceed 14 working days. The elevation of a high court judge to the Court of Appeal will not delay trial as the Judge shall have dispensation to continue to hear and conclude any part-heard criminal matter within a reasonable time.

    To really appreciate how far-reaching these provisions are, we have to go back to where and how frustration of successful prosecution of criminal cases against the rich and the powerful started. In Nigeria under colonial rule, trial by jury was part of the criminal justice system. By 1960 when Nigeria became independent that tradition was continued. Trial by jury was however stopped in 1975 on allegations of abuse of the procedure by many jurors. The impact of the abolition was not immediately felt as Nigeria was then under a military dictatorship which decreed that criminal offences be tried summarily by courts and tribunals.

    However, ultimately, the abolition of the jury system historically led to undue delay in criminal cases in the regular courts which also have to deal with many civil cases. The delay of criminal cases reached ridiculously high proportions in the year 2000 when suspects charged with corruption in the high courts had their trials stayed to await the decision of the Supreme Court in the case challenging the validity of the Independent and Corrupt Practices Offences Commission Act. Although the law was upheld by the Supreme Court, the trial of cases which had been suspended could not commence as fresh objections were filed by the defendants. That was how the procedural practice of suspending trials via stay of proceedings was smuggled into the Nigerian criminal judicial order, ultimately becoming perfected as a system.

     The system, the practice has since continued to the huge detriment of criminal justice in Nigeria. It is pertinent to note that the defence lawyers engaged by politically exposed persons and other members of the ruling class to manipulate the criminal justice system are senior lawyers. To show how pernicious the system has become, it is important to note that “fat cats” who could not be tried locally in Nigeria have been successfully prosecuted abroad. This has exposed the Nigerian criminal justice system to ridicule internationally.

    Beyond the specific issue of the war against corruption, the Administration of Criminal Justice Act, 2015 also has other far-reaching provisions that deal with justice and fairness in general to all accused persons, especially those who are too poor, too powerless to “buy” justice. It is important to note here that Nigerian prisons are full of thousands upon thousands of inmates who are “awaiting trial”. Under the new law a suspect is entitled to consult a lawyer of his/her choice or free legal representation by the Legal Aid Council of Nigeria before making a statement. Arrest of innocent persons in lieu of suspects or on a civil wrong or breach of contract is prohibited. To ensure that violence is not unleashed on suspects during interrogation and to avoid trial within trial, confessional statements of suspects shall be recorded electronically.

     An officer in charge of any detention facility shall report to the nearest Magistrate the cases of all suspects arrested without warrant within a month. The reports shall be forwarded to the Criminal Justice Monitoring Committee. All places of detention other than a prison shall be inspected at least once a month by a chief magistrate within a territorial jurisdiction. The Comptroller-General of Prisons shall make returns every 90 days to the head of the court in which the prison is situated and to the Attorney-General of the Federation of all persons awaiting trial beyond 180 days from the date of arraignment. The Nigeria Police Force shall have a Central Criminal Records Registry while the Attorney-General of the Federation shall establish an electronic and manual database of all records of arrests.

    Question: How was it possible to have this Act passed? Who were the major players in having it passed? How did they manage to succeed in having it passed?

    Falana: Well, the bill for this Act was submitted after Lagos State passed the Administration of Criminal Justice Law of 2007 upon which, as a matter if fact, this 2015 Act is based. The paths to the enactment of both Acts are rather circuitous. Following the conviction of Ex-Governor of Delta State, Chief James Ibori in London on the same charges for which he had been unsuccessfully prosecuted in Nigeria, together with the reckless grant of stay of proceedings in many corruption cases, the Human Rights community mounted great pressure on the National Assembly to pass the bill. It was passed and signed into law by President Jonathan on May 13, 2015. So in a way, the credit must go to the Human Rights community. Incidentally, the current Vice President, Professor Yemi Osinbajo, was the Attorney General of Lagos State who shepherded the passage from bill to law of the Administration of Criminal Justice Law of Lagos State 2007. We should hope that he will have a special interest in the success of the Administration of Justice Act of 2015 as a major weapon in Buhari’s war on corruption.

    Question: In what ways can the provisions of this Act be made widely known and enforced? Who will be the key players in this task?

    Falana: No doubt, the Administration of Justice Act, 2015 which came into force on May 13, 2015 is a revolutionary intervention in the criminal justice sector in Nigeria. To ensure the success of the law the federal government has to provide adequate funding for the justice sector. However, the Human Rights community should mobilize the Nigerian people’s support the enforcement of the provisions of the Act, with special regard to both the successful prosecution criminal suspects that have stolen government monies and assets and the defense of the rights of all suspects, poor and rich, guaranteed by the law.

    Biodun Jeyifo                                                                                             bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • In the war against corruption effective prosecutions not probes are the ultimate weapons

    In the war against corruption effective prosecutions not probes are the ultimate weapons

    I start my column this week with two separate but related questions and their answers, together with the known, documented effects of the answers. First question: what does a probe of probable or suspected cases of looting of government revenues or assets achieve? Answer: if successful, it will reveal the identities, the names of the culprits, together with the sums they might have stolen. Known and documented effects: in most cases no effect is achieved; there are no punishments, and no refund of stolen loot. Second question: what will vigorous and effective prosecution of identified and named culprits of looting of government or public funds and assets achieve? Answer: it will recover vast amounts of stolen loot; it will send culprits to long terms of imprisonment; and it will serve as a warning, a deterrent to others that corruption will be met with the full force of the law in our country. Known and documented effects: None, precisely because vigorous and effective prosecutions of criminal looters have been virtually absent in our law courts for at least the last decade and a half; our country is a looters’ paradise, the most redoubtable in the whole world.

    The causative background to this series of questions and answers is the controversy currently raging over the announcement of President Buhari that his administration’s probe of corruption in our country will be limited to only the administration of his immediate predecessor in office, Goodluck Jonathan. I am not uninterested in the controversy, but I confess that it is of very mild interest to me. If I had to take a clear and unambiguous position on the issue, it will be that Buhari ought not to limit the probe to the Jonathan administration, that all the administrations since the return to civilian rule in 1999 should be probed. This is because, absolutely without any exception, looting with impunity was a constant and invariant phenomenon as much in the Obasanjo and Yar’ Adua administrations as in the Jonathan government. For this reason, Buhari is playing into hands of those who, for their own self-interested reasons, have been making loud and acrimonious noises that the new administration’s intended probe is nothing but a witch-hunt directed solely at the Jonathan administration. And now having stated my own views on the matter, I wish to say with as much emphasis as I can muster that this controversy is a diversion away from the most serious area of the war against corruption and its ramifications for the survival of our country. This area is none other than vigorous and effective prosecution of criminal cases against our high and mighty class of “untouchable” looters. Permit me to make a few comments in support of this observation, this claim.

    It is an understatement to say that probes relating to official corruption are not lacking in Nigeria for indeed, there are few places on the planet with as many probes and investigations of corruption as in our country. Indeed, if probes had any positive connection to the war on corruption, Nigeria would have emerged more than a decade ago as one of the countries in the world with the lowest levels of official or governmental corruption. As a matter of historical fact, the tradition goes all the way back before 1999 to the period of military dictatorships. So endemic, so constant but so utterly of little or no use is the legal-administrative culture of probes into corruption in our country that there have been even probes to probe probes! In my recollection, the most recent of such uniquely Nigerian and endlessly redundant “probes-to-probe-probes” is the well known scandal-within-a-scandal involving the Hon Farouk Lawan. As readers of this piece may recall, in the probe into the oil subsidy mega scam of 2011 by a Committee of the House of Representatives that Lawan chaired, he was caught in a bribery setup that then attracted a probe of Lawan and his Committee by a Sub-Committee of the same House of Representatives. In that notorious case, neither the person being probed who bribed Lawan nor Lawan himself paid any significant price for the revelations of both the initial probe and the subsequent probe-to-probe-the-probe.

    Given this inglorious history of probes in the war against corruption in our country, the reader may wonder why so much discursive energy and political capital are invested in calls for probing either only the Jonathan administration or all the administrations since 1999. Is it because probes and their revelations act as a sort of shaming ritual against our “lootocrats”? Perhaps. On this account, deep down in the Nigerian collective psyche and popular imagination is the conviction that the law in general and most of our very senior lawyers, and a great number of our magistrates and judges are there to protect the lootocrats. On this account, the thinking is that at least if, thanks to the prevailing judicial system, you can’t jail them and you can’t make them pay back what they have looted, you can at least shame them by revealing through probes who they are and how much they have looted. If this underlying logic holds true, it means that ours is a society that has already lost the entire war against corruption even before the first battle – in the law courts – has been fought and lost. And there is also the fact that our looters are completely beyond shame; indeed to the contrary, they normatively wear their “shame” like a badge of honor, unfortunately with the connivance of the popular masses, the looted and the disenfranchised.

    The great challenge now is to shift the indisputably great public interest in the success of the war against corruption away from calls for or against probes to why it is that the battles are nearly always lost in our law courts and what we need to do to end the control of the law by the looters and their advocates. In making this particular observation, I ask the reader to please reflect on the fact that only a very tiny segment of civil society organizations and individuals, trade unions and professional associations, and students’ bodies and voluntary organizations pay careful and sustained attention to what goes on in our law courts with regard to how the high and mighty of the land who have looted and continue to loot our public coffers control senior lawyers, judges and magistrates. As I write these words, there are dozens, indeed scores of cases tied up in our law courts more or less permanently against successful prosecution. In the few cases where accused culprits are actually tried and found guilty, the “punishments” are so light as to be laughable in their ineffectiveness, either as punishment or as deterrent. I cite just a few of these. One: John Yakubu Yusuf who admitted to stealing more than 2 billion naira from Police Pension Funds; he was given only two years jail sentence but with an option of a fine of N750,000 naira which he paid and then walked away a free man. Two: the Judge who gave him this “handshake” of a sentence, Justice Abubakar Talba, was found compromised by the National Judicial Council (NJC). What punishment did the NJC give him? One year suspension from duties without pay! Three: a certain Justice Okechukwu Okeke of the Federal High Court who, in his appearance before the NJC, had no convincing defense against the numerous petitions against his judgments; he was not sanctioned at all but was let off the hook because his retirement was close at hand!

    I am not of course saying stop all probes; far from it. Probes have their uses, especially if and when they are complemented by vigorous and effective prosecutions. What I am saying is that beyond the calls for probes, please pay far greater attention to what is going on in the law courts! The names of the most active and notorious senior lawyers, magistrates and judges who provide cover and protection to the lootocrats should be publicized. Tear away the cloak of judicial respectability and personal anonymity from their “illustrious” careers! Don’t scapegoat them in place of the lootocrats themselves, but unmask the hidden symbiosis between the two groups! Above all else, pay attention to the Administration of Justice Act of 2015 and fight with all your moral energy and political imagination to make sure that the provisions of this new Act are enforced in our law courts.

    Naturally, the reader will wonder: what exactly is the Administration of Justice Act of 2015 about? Well, here I must confess that I have myself just come into knowledge of both its clearly revolutionary implications and the tremendous obstacles that we may expect from the forces both inside and outside our judicial system who benefit from the status quo that favors looters. For this reason, rather than give a summary or outline of the provisions and implications of this Act, I intend next week to invite one or two members of the judiciary to share the space of this column with me in discussion and explication of the Act. For now, let me close the present discussion with the following “last words”.

    One of the truly amazing ironies of the war against corruption in our country in the law courts is the fact that our looters have been far more widely successfully prosecuted outside the country than in Nigeria. In some really unbelievable cases, individuals who had been unsuccessfully prosecuted in Nigerian courts have been victoriously prosecuted abroad for the same crimes! This pattern has brought much ridicule and infamy to our judicial order in the court of international juridical onion. Right now, at this present historical moment when so many countries in the world have promised to help the new administration recover the untold loot hidden away in foreign countries and bank vaults, the very least we can begin to do is prosecute our looters vigorously and successfully at home. Charity, they say, begins at home. So does justice for the millions of the looted and impoverished in the land.

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Between Sagay and Falana: the law, the people and the social cannibalism of corruption (2)

    Between Sagay and Falana: the law, the people and the social cannibalism of corruption (2)

    Both in number and impact, the emails that I received in response to last week’s opening essay in this series constitute some of the most eye-opening responses I have ever received since I began regularly writing this column more than eight years ago, first in The Guardian under a slightly different name, and then in this paper, The Nation. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that after reading many of these responses, I began to feel like one of the unhappy souls in Plato’s celebrated Myth of the Cave! As those who have read this classic of ancient, Pre-Socratic Greek philosophy will remember, the hapless characters in Plato’s myth, after living their entire lives in a deep, underground cave shrouded in darkness, one day emerge from the cave and its miasmic darkness. But instead of feeling liberated by the brightness of the light that they find in the world outside the cave, they are utterly blinded by its incandescence. As it has been taught to innumerable generations of first year philosophy students, the moral of this myth is that in conditions where darkness, ignorance and mediocrity reign supreme, the sudden introduction of truth, enlightenment and probity may prove, not liberating, but confounding. Ergo, truth, justice and liberating knowledge must be introduced in small, manageable doses in a world in which their opposites – falsehood, injustice and cynicism – always have the upper hand, especially in the professions among which, for our purposes in this essay, we must highlight the law. In case all this sounds rather mysterious, let me briefly give some of the details of the emails I received before linking what they revealed to me with my concluding reflections in this series that began last week.

    Perhaps the most startling of the revelations that I received from the emails was the assertion that the problems and crises in the judicial system in Nigeria were far much deeper, wider and systemic than what was indicated in the essential critique I had made in last week’s article. Let me remind the reader that that critique of mine stated that both the law and its implementation in Nigerian courts constitute nearly impregnable accessories to the cynical, merciless and social-cannibalistic looting of our national, collective resources. Beyond this critique – which, I thought, was serious enough – I was told that Nigeria is the ONLY country in the world in which interlocutory injunctions intended to delay, prolong or even permanently defer successful prosecutions are not only allowed but widely practiced in criminal cases. In other words, in virtually all of the other nations of the world, interlocutory injunctions are allowed only in civil cases, and then only under clearly stipulated and limited circumstances. Only in our country do interlocutory injunctions operate as a weapon, a shield against successful prosecution of those charged with criminal offenses, especially offenses pertaining to looting and corruption. Who does not know that petty criminals do not have the money to hire lawyers, especially of SAN vintage, to tie up cases against them? Dear reader, think of this the next time that you read in the newspapers that an interlocutory injunction has been filed by a lawyer and accepted by a judge in a case of criminal prosecution: Only in Nigeria and for the most part only in cases pertaining to looting and corruption!

    In my utter stupefaction in being told of this fact, I asked some of my email correspondents when and how this incredible exceptionalism in our judicial system came into existence and I was informed that it was started about a decade and half ago. This makes its inception almost exactly coincident with the return to civilian “democracy” after the long and serial interregnum of military dictatorships in our country. In effect, this means that one of the most revealing marks of the kind of “democracy” reigning in post-1999 Nigeria is the legal convention and practice of giving protection, through the use of interlocutory injunctions, to criminal looters who have no equals in the world in the scale of their greed and impunity. This “democracy” is thus nothing but a looters’ paradise in which excessively predatory instincts and practices have the solid protection of the law. In the blinding light of this revelation, it becomes clear, all too clear why all the three presidents since 1999 before Buhari – Obasanjo, Yar’ Adua and Jonathan – constantly gave the excuse that their “fight” against corruption was hampered by their respect for the “rule of law”. What they never cared to reveal is that by this they meant their endorsement of and collusion with the use – the overuse really – of interlocutory injunctions. The point now is that the cat has been let out of the bag and Buhari does not have that excuse.

    I wish I didn’t have any more revelations of the stultifying nature of the uniqueness of interlocutory injunctions in criminal cases in Nigeria to report from the emails that I received this past week but alas, this is not the case. For it appears that “interlocutory injunctions” does have a slew of other siblings and cousins in the dysfunctional family that is our judicial system. It appears that beyond the specific instance of interlocutory injunctions, accumulation of wealth, status and prestige among our lawyers and judges are all solidly built around the extreme sluggishness, the extreme cumbersomeness of the administration and dispensation of justice in our country. For this reason, there seems to be an entrenched and almost immoveable resistance to change and reform among our lawyers and judges. Additionally, some of the problems in our judiciary are so comical, so absurd as to be beyond belief. My “favorite” in this regard is the fact that judges mandatorily have to write their judgments in long, hand-written texts; their judgments cannot, must not be typed!

    It says a lot that much of what I have written here about the terrible state of the judiciary in our country comes from lawyers themselves: there are reformers and would-be reformers in the profession. Unfortunately their ranks are thin and the weight of investment in wealth accumulation, achievement of prestige and maintenance of status and the pecking order among their colleagues works overwhelmingly against these reformers. In this, the legal profession in Nigeria is no different from other upper middle class professions like medicine (doctors and pharmacists); academia (the professoriate and the academic administrators); and surveyors, engineers and industrial chemists. Without exception, all these professions and their ranks are deeply infected with the rot that is endemic to the predators’ republic that our “democracy has been since the return to civilian rule in 1999. Thus, in all these cases, true and genuine reforms will not only come from within the judicial system itself; they will also be precipitated by reforms in and of the political order at large.

    The upshot of this preceding observation is that we cannot wait until the entire judicial order is reformed before we put a stop to the cover and protection that the judiciary provides for criminal looters who “kill” through the consequences and ramifications of the vast, mind-boggling sums they steal from our national coffers. It will take a vast and sustained project of reform to clean up the mess, the unwieldiness in our judicial order. Before then and right now, the stolen loot has to be recovered; and endemic corruption has to be halted in its tracks. The suffering, the hardship that it causes to millions of our peoples cannot, must not go on.  I believe that as indicated by Falana, the acts enacted by the 7th National Assembly just before its dissolution can provide at least a minimal basis both for recovering a substantial part of the monies looted and for at least curbing the excesses and the impunity of corruption in our country. This in effect means that beyond the enabling laws that will minimally make this possible, Buhari and his administration have to look beyond the law, beyond the cooperation of lawyers and judges for recovering the stolen loot and curbing corruption. What exactly do I have in mind in making this assertion?

    It is on record that many foreign governments and financial institutions have given strong indications that they are willing to give every assistance necessary to Buhari and his administration to recover the stolen monies that have been hidden away in foreign countries and bank vaults. Indeed, reportedly, the names and sums involved have been privately divulged to the new administration. But so far, how have the items of information been used, been acted upon? At best, they have been “revealed” to us, the Nigerian people, piecemeal, in a completely uncoordinated and haphazard manner, as if an open, detailed and comprehensive account to Nigeria and the world is either unnecessary or would be damaging to efforts to recover the looted sums. This is completely erroneous. If Buhari and his advisers don’t know it, let them know now, today, that so far on the interrelated issues of recovering stolen loot and curbing corruption, they have been acting like amateurs and inept improvisers. They have been throwing all sorts of figures around; and they have given no clear outlines or guidelines of what they are doing now and will be doing in the months and years ahead. And above all else, they are acting as if they regard the Nigerian people as passive bystanders in the whole project. We are not, both Nigerians at home and Nigerians abroad.

    I ask all who are reading this to please get involved. Write to your Governors and Senators and “Honourables”. Have the leaders of your professional associations to speak up on your behalf. Hold peaceful demonstrations and rallies asking the new administration to give a full account of what they are doing to recover the stolen loot and what they are going to do with it when it is recovered. In some accounts, the total sums involved are as much as $150 billion dollars. Even half of that, if wisely spent, will substantially reduce the suffering and the hardship in the land. So compatriots, don’t wait for them to deign, to condescend to let us know what is going on, at their pleasure. Demand to know as if the survival of our country depends on it because, as a matter of fact, it does.

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Between Sagay and Falana: the law, the people and the social cannibalism of corruption (1)

    Between Sagay and Falana: the law, the people and the social cannibalism of corruption (1)

    The first thing we do is kill all the lawyers. Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part 2

    Doctors are just the same as lawyers; the only difference is that lawyers merely rob you, whereas doctors rob you and kill you too.
    Anton Chekhov, Russian dramatist

    On Saturday, July 13, 2013, I gave a public lecture at the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA) under the auspices of the Wole Soyinka Centre for Investigative Journalism. The lecture was titled “The Freedom of Information Act and the Dictatorship of Corruption and Mediocrity”. In the extensive research that I conducted before writing and delivering the lecture, I came across many facts, figures and statistics that both depressed and enraged me to no end. Of these, no item among my discoveries was as depressing and infuriating as my finding that a Sub-Committee of the House of Representatives had issued a comprehensive report on the oil subsidy mega-scam of 2011 in which the names of all those who had wrongfully and illegally benefitted from the scam had been published, together with the astronomical sums that each of these Nigerians had looted. I swear that before conducting that research for my lecture, I had been completely unaware that the names of the mega-scam looters were known, that they were not shadowy figures who had forever disappeared into the night of personal anonymity and legalistic oblivion. But together with my astonishment that these men and women were known and indeed meticulously identified, there was also my greater frustration that they had all without exception tied up the cases pertaining to their prosecution in the law courts by all manner of so-called “interlocutory injunctions” and “stay of execution” writs. That was in the year 2013. Two years later, the cases are still tied up in the law courts and not a single one of the men and women indicted in that oil subsidy mega-scam has either paid a kobo back or gone to jail. Their lawyers and the judges before whom their cases are being tried have seen to that; they have provided what seems to be a permanent and impregnable juridical cover and protection for these men and women whose looting of our national coffers has caused untold suffering and hardship to millions of Nigerians. In this context, the law may be said to be the last refuge, the last redoubt of the looters who, as human vampires, are sucking the blood from the economic arteries of our national commonweal.

    If the language I am using here seems too emotive, too sensationalistic, I plead guilty to the charge. Even more, I plead guilty to the charge of deliberately clothing myself in a long tradition of savage linguistic and literary critique of lawyers and the law as moral cesspits wherein some of the most unscrupulous and cynical professionals can be found. This is the context that makes the extraordinarily ferocious attack on lawyers in Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part Two, that supplied the first of the two epigraphs to this piece seem not too harsh, not too extreme: “The first thing we do is kill all the lawyers”. This was said by a character in that play against the background of a looming uprising of the people against centuries of oppression by their social superiors in which lawyers had played a significant role in maintaining the legal infrastructures and practices of a dog-eat-dog social order. I quote the words here in the hope, the wish that the lawyers and the judges who have for long prevented the men and women bleeding our country and its resources dry may perhaps get a glimpse of the sentiments that some of the world’s greatest literary minds have expressed about them and their kind.

    The second epigraph from the great Russian dramatist, Anton Chekhov, seems a tad gentler in its critique of lawyers and the legal profession on the same count of being always prone to acting as accessories to cynical, merciless robbery: “Doctors are just the same as lawyers; the only difference is that lawyers merely rob you, whereas doctors rob you and kill you too”. However, if we juxtapose this ludic and playful Chekhovian quote with the one from Shakespeare’s play, we can see that lawyers, like incompetent and conscienceless doctors, kill too. They “kill”, not directly and interpersonally but by the indirect and epiphenomenal effects and consequences of the legalistic protection and cover that they give their clients, the looters who, it seems, can never be successfully prosecuted in the law courts of the land.

    If all this talk about “killing” seems unwarranted in its application to lawyers and judges that are, after all, merely practicing their lawful profession (no pun intended), please consider the N2.53 trillion naira that was looted in the oil subsidy mega-scam; consider too, the fact that thanks to lawyers and judges, not a kobo of that loot may ever be recovered; and finally, consider the number of lives that could have been saved or made richer and more fulfilled if a fraction of that N2.53 trillion naira had been productively spent to create jobs, build roads, improve hospitals and clinics and raise the quality of teaching in our primary and secondary schools. And indeed, there are no literal cannibals anymore, if ever they existed as a distinct social or “tribal” group; what we have now and have aplenty, thanks to many of our best trained lawyers and judges, are social cannibals who have not the slightest inkling that they are “killing” hundreds of thousands, millions through the sense of total protection that they feel when they loot, and loot, and loot yet again.

    At this stage, it is perhaps time in this discussion to bring into our conversation two lawyers who indeed recently have had much to say on these issues. Moreover, they are eminent, progressive and patriotic lawyers. These are none other than Professor Itse Sagay and Mr. Femi Falana, SAN. In an article published in The Nation on Sunday, July 19, 2015, titled “Politics, Public Service, Morality and Integrity in Nigeria”, Sagay more or less admitted that the law and the manner in which it is applied in our law courts at the present time make it near impossible to recover stolen loot and put an end to rampant corruption. Indeed, so sanguine was Sagay on this point that he was quite willing to go as far as to suspend the protection of the individual rights (of looters), if any headway is to be made in the struggle to recover stolen loot and curb corruption in our society. Perhaps it is best to hear directly from the Professor himself on this point:

    “There will a need to amend our laws to strengthen the state at the expense of individual liberty at least for a short while, if we are to get to redemption point. All legal provisions permitting preliminary objections to prosecutions for corruption must be repealed from our laws. The power of any court to issue an order of injunction against a trial for a crime, particularly corruption, should be repealed. Interlocutory applications, in cases concerning corruption, should be banned.

    You cannot read such words from the pen of a lawyer who is also a teacher of lawyers and still repeat, like a robot, the savage indictment from Shakespeare, “the first thing we do is kill all the lawyers”! For in the struggles against the social cannibalism that is at the root of the corruption that has penetrated so deep into the political, economic and juridical order in our country, some of the most eloquent voices have, in fact, been that of lawyers. As everyone knows, Sagay and Falana have been frontline professional and intellectual activists in those struggles.

    And indeed, the main point of my bringing Sagay and Falana together in this piece is precisely to try to reconcile what seems to me to be a tension, a contradiction between recent pronouncements of both men on this issue of the seemingly immovable obstacle that the law and its operations in our country pose to the fight against corruption by the new administration of President Buhari. On the one hand, Sagay says laws must be repealed and that we may even have to suspend protection of individual liberty, at least for a while. But on the other hand, Falana says that the enabling acts have now been enacted by the National Assembly and that all that is required now is for the bills to be forwarded to Buhari for them to be signed and made into effective laws. How did I come by this information? Well, Falana himself through an email forwarded to me a speech that he recently gave that contained these claims. The speech was a keynote address that he gave at the 7th Annual Distinguished Lecture of the Nigerian Institute of Quantity Surveyors (Lagos Chapter) on Tuesday, July 21, 2015. The lecture bore the title, “Involvement of the Nigerian people in the anti-corruption war”. Here’s a relevant quotation from the lecture:

    “While the decision of the Federation (sic) Government not to interfere in the work of the anti-graft agencies is a welcome development, the National Assembly should forward to President Buhari for his assent the Witness Protection Bill and the Whistle Blowers’ Bill. The National Assembly deserves commendation for enacting both laws together with the Administration of Justice, 2015.

    Under the new Act, the granting of stay of proceedings and other delay tactics have been banned in the trial of criminal cases. Accordingly, a criminal trial shall be concluded within 6 months unless there are exceptional circumstances which may prolong any trial beyond that period. Indeed, the elevation of trial judges to the Court of Appeal will no longer lead to fresh trial before other judges as judges will be given the fiat to conclude part heard matters.”

    Have the issues raised in Sagay’s article been resolved by the revelation of the passing of new laws by the National Assembly in Falana’s lecture? And is this a matter to be settled only by and among lawyers? These will be our starting points in next week’s concluding piece.

     

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Five irrefutable reasons against the privatization of the NNPC: an open letter to the Presidents of NLC and PENGASSAN

    Five irrefutable reasons against the privatization of the NNPC: an open letter to the Presidents of NLC and PENGASSAN

    Comrades and compatriots, greetings!

    Last week in this column, I addressed an open letter to the Governor of Kaduna State, H.E. Nasir Ahmad El-Rufai in which I took him up on his recent, widely reported call on President Buhari to privatize the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC). I am addressing this letter to you, not because Governor El-Rufai has not responded to my open letter, but because I believe that you, as representatives of workers in the oil industry in particular and Nigerian workers in all sectors of the economy in general, ought to wade in on this all important debate on the proposed privatization of the NNPC. This reason for this is, I think, fairly obvious; at any rate, it shall become even more obvious in the course of my elaboration of the essential points of this open letter to you. But for now, permit me to simply say that your silence on this matter will speak volumes. I am of course aware that the General Secretary of PENGASSAN (The Petroleum and Natural Gas Senior Staff Association of Nigeria) has already commented on El-Rufai’s devastating critique of the scale of corruption in NNPC. However, that response from the PENGASSAN General Secretary should, in my opinion, be regarded as only a first response in that it was far too defensive and it did not address the issue of the privatization of the national oil corporation. With these initial comments out of the way, permit me to now go directly to the FIVE weighty reasons against the privatization of NNPC.

    One

    NNPC is not The Daily Times, Transcorp or NEPA; it is NNPC

    Privatization of state-owned or public enterprises is not new in Nigeria. As a matter of fact, to the extent that there was any consistent ideological core in reign of the PDP in its sixteen years in power, it is the wholesale privatization of state-owned enterprises and utilities. Other than this, the erstwhile ruling party in particular and all ruling class parties in our country have no defining ideological and policy identities. This is why disputes, which are often extremely bitter and fractious between and within our political parties, are hardly ever about ideology, principle, or policy; they are nearly always about power sharing and the struggle for high and lucrative political offices. But with regard to the relentless and wholesale privatization of public enterprises, this is the bible of the PDP in particular and all our ruling class parties in general.

    However, while enterprises and utilities in all areas of the national economy have one by one fallen to the relentless axe of privatization, a line had hitherto been drawn around NNPC. That line is about to be erased, that is if El-Rufai and those who think like him in the APC have their way. NNPC is like no other enterprise or utility in our country in that, in a manner of speaking, it is the mother and father of all enterprises, public and private. This observation on the uniqueness of NNPC can be put in a quite simple language: the overwhelming bulk of the finances on which all the federal, state and local administrations in the country depend are handled at source by NNPC. But there is also a technical jargon for this uniqueness of our national oil corporation and it is this: Nigeria is, overwhelmingly a rentier state and NNPC is the single agency on which the rents that make the existence and viability of this sort of state possible at all depend. In other words, if Nigeria was not a rentier state, and if oil revenues constituted only an insignificant fraction of its operating finances, then NNPC would be like The Daily Times, NEPA, Transcorp or the moribund Nigerian Airways. But at least for the present period in the economic history of this country, NNPC is the lifeline on which the overwhelming bulk of the economic activities in both the private and public sectors depend.

    Comrades, the implications of this uniqueness, this singularity of NNPC for any plan to privatize it are fairly obvious and for this reason it cannot and should not be done without a full, widespread and nationwide debate has taken place. Indeed, if it does appear that the new ruling party is hell bent on this plan – and that is far from being clear or obvious at this point in time – nothing short of a referendum will be required. Your voices and the voices of the members of your unions should be loudest and clearest in the call for such a referendum – if El Rufai carries the President and the new ruling party with him on this crucial matter.

    Two

    Corruption and mediocre performance are afflictions of both private and public enterprises in Nigeria

    This factor is pretty unassailable. In many of the full blown capitalist countries of the world, the fundamental rationale for privatizing public enterprises has been the claim, the assertion that privately owned and run enterprises perform much better than state-owned or public enterprises. As the saying goes, the business of government is not business but governing. This claim is not, by the way, true or verifiable in all sectors of the national economies of the world. All the same, this claim has never been credibly or loudly made in our country, the simple reason for this being the fact that it would be quite laughable to make such a claim in Nigeria. When Daily Times was privatized, it became even worse than it had been before privatization. PHCN has performed more or less on the same level of satisfaction of consumers as the old ECN. Transcorp, the biggest multinational corporation ever started in our country, has been the laughing stock of multinational corporations all over the world; no sooner was it incorporated than it immediately began to flounder.

    The reason why both large scale private and public enterprises in our country are equally prone to corruption and poor performance is to be found in the fact that the wealthiest Nigerians make their wealth, not through profit-generating businesses but through primitive accumulation built on the appropriation or theft of public funds to “buy” state-owned enterprises that are then badly managed precisely because they were “bought” for nothing. There is absolutely no reason in the world to think or to hope that a privatized NNPC will depart from this historic norm of the Nigerian political economy under the rule of the PDP and before then the military autocrats.

    Three

    “Inland revenue” is different from “offshore revenue”; privatization of tax collection should not be a prequel to privatization of collection of rents from foreign-owned oil conglomerates.

    The privatization of tax collection and toll gate fees in Lagos State marked a decisive step in the privatization of state agencies and their money-generating functions in Nigeria. The connection between this and the call for the privatization of the NNPC has not yet been made, but we can be sure that it will in due course be made. The argument could or will be made that if the privatization of collection of taxes and toll gate fees was not only possible but seems apparently “successful”, why shouldn’t the same thing be successful if and when applied to the collection of revenues from the offshore activities of the big conglomerates in control of the extraction and exportation of crude oil from our country.

    This is a completely superficial and also false argument as there is little or no analogy that can be made between the two. Extractive industries constitute some of the biggest transnational economic enterprises of the world and of the modern economies of the planet in general. For this reason, comparing the simple collection of taxes and toll gate fees that require little or no investments, skills and a grasp of the finer and more arcane points of economic relations between the nations and regions of the planet to the work of NNPC is like comparing the activities of a street hawker or vendor in Lagos to the operations of the Dangote financial empire. Comrades and compatriots, please let us be ready for them if and when they make this analogy in justification of the drive to sell off the national oil corporation.

    Four

    The privatization of NNPC will set off ethnic and regional rivalries that will be nothing short of a civil war in the inner processes of the economic lifeline of the country.

    It is very naïve, or on the other hand, foolish and dangerous in the extreme to think that selling off NNPC will not raise bitter, divisive and nation-wrecking struggles over which zones, which “tribes” and which communities of “religionists” will get what percentage or share of the broken and parceled-out national oil corporation. The perennial controversies over the “principle of derivation” and “resource control” will resurface. In fact already, there are whispers and rumors that the privatization of NNPC is intended to once and for all “solve” the endless strife over “resource control”. The privatization of NNPC will not achieve this goal; as a matter of fact, it will exacerbate and raise to a new level the divisive struggles over the sharing of oil revenues between the different parts of the country.

    Five

    Recover the loot; end the corruption in private and public businesses; reorganize NNPC

    Comrades, I cannot end this open letter to you without relating all that I have written herein to the untold suffering and hardship that the monumental corruption in NNPC has caused and continues to cause to the overwhelming majority of our peoples throughout the length and the breadth of the country. This is the bottom line: the colossal dispossession of the Nigerian nation and peoples through corruption and abysmally poor performance of both governmental and non-governmental enterprises in our country.

    The new government and ruling party should be given a chance to get to grips with the gargantuan tasks that this entails. Already, Nigerians at home and abroad are getting jittery over the slow pace and poor starting actions of the new ruling party. Your voices and the voices of all patriotic organizations and individuals should rise now to ask the government to recover the hundreds of billions of dollars stolen from NNPC and other government coffers and give clear signs NOW that it will end the mind-boggling corruption that is ruining the country and the lives of our peoples. If there will be a nationwide debate and/or referendum on the privatization of NNPC, this should be the precondition for those national soul-searching processes. At this stage of our economic (mal)development, the essential thing is not private versus public businesses; it is regulated versus unregulated and unregulatable corruption and mediocrity in both the public and private sectors.

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • NNPC is not a parallel government; it is the heart and soul of the government: an open letter to Nasir Ahmad El-Rufai

    NNPC is not a parallel government; it is the heart and soul of the government: an open letter to Nasir Ahmad El-Rufai

    Dear Governor El-Rufai:

    Greetings! Your talk as the distinguished guest lecturer at the 7th Wole Soyinka Center Media Lecture Series in Abuja this past Monday has sent shock waves round the country and the Nigerian diaspora. “Kill NNPC!” you titled your lecture, adding at the climactic moment of the lecture that it is either Nigeria kills NNPC now or NNPC will eventually kill Nigeria. Although the figures that you gave in your lecture as an indication of the stupefying level of graft and corruption in NNPC are not new at all, they are worth repeating, quoting your own words directly:

    The long and short of the situation of our oil industry is best exemplified by the parallel government called the NNPC. In 2012, it sold N2.77tn of ‘domestic’ crude oil but paid only N1.66tn to the Federation Account. In 2013, it earned N2.66tn but paid N1.56tn to FAAC; in 2014, (it earned) N2.64tn, but remitted N1.44tn; while between January and May 2015, it earned N733.36bn and remitted only N473.2bn.

    “That means that the NNPC only remitted about 58 per cent of the monies earned between 2012 and the first half of 2015. A company with the audacity to retain 42 per cent of a country’s money has become a veritable parallel republic!”

    On any count, these are indeed staggering figures and this column, as well as many other columns of the Nigerian “commentariat” have written extensively on the same figures with anger, alarm and desperation and in a few cases, despair. For this reason, this open letter to you is not about the scale of the seriousness of the matter. Rather, my concern with the analysis and prognosis in your lecture pertains to two issues. The first of these is what, for want of better words, I can only describe as the dominant role of half-truths in your lecture, this being constructed around your claim that NNPC is a parallel republic or government, when in fact, NNPC is the very heart and soul of the government.

    The second of my two main issues in this letter is the call in your lecture for the privatization of the NNPC. Whether by accident or design, this call was not made explicit in your lecture, but it was nonetheless palpable enough that any attentive reader of the published text of your lecture could not have missed it.

    Before coming to brief discussions of each of these two issues, let me remark that, as reported and published in its entirety, your lecture was eloquent not only in language, but also in ideas, especially ideas crucial to the political and economic survival of our country with special regard to the dire poverty and insecurity that the vast majority of our peoples have to endure on account of the scale of the looting of our national wealth in the NNPC. My one big difference with you on this particular point is the figure of 70 million or 40% of our population for those living in extreme poverty. I don’t know from where you got this figure. Perhaps you’re quoting the figures given by the Jonathan administration and the PDP during the recent electioneering campaigns? They claimed they had reduced the absolute poverty rate down to 40% from 70% in four years, based on an additional claim that they had created millions of jobs. But everyone not in the PDP knew that these were cynically bogus figures. The wonder then is how and why you of all people should be repeating these same figures. But this is a minor point; I must now move to my main issues in this letter, issues of life and death for our country and its peoples, especially the dozens of millions of unemployed young people. As I have said earlier in this piece, the first and main issue is your claim that NNPC is a parallel government that Nigeria must destroy before it destroys Nigeria.

    Dear Governor El-Rufai, how in the world can you describe NNPC as a parallel republic or government when practically everyone in the country knows that the corruption and looting in the NNPC was directly linked to the presidency and the federal government itself? Are you pretending not know that corruption on that scale could never, never take place – in Nigeria or any other country in the world – if it was not linked, body and soul, to the government, the powers that be? Are you feigning ignorance of the fact that the Ministry of Finance and through that ministry, the Federal Government, has effective supervisory control over the NNPC? For a man of your intellect, one of the things that I found absolutely unbelievable in your lecture was the claim that, quoting your own words, “hundreds of employees of NNPC feed fat on Nigeria’s resources”? Haba, Governor! The upper managerial staff of the NNPC may be the highest remunerated workers in Nigeria, but are they the ones sharing the billions of dollars that were not remitted into our national public coffers? Are the employees of the NNPC the people that made away with the 2.53 trillion naira stolen in the 2011 oil subsidy mega scam? Wasn’t that scam a huge chunk of the monies expended by Goodluck Jonathan as the war chest for his 2011 presidential campaign? Aye you unaware of the fact that a Committee of the Senate probed that mega scam and when it published its reports and gave the names of people involved in the scam, not one of them was an employee of NNPC?

    I have posed these preceding questions rhetorically because I am sure that you know that the answer to each and everyone of the questions is a resounding no. Because I strongly believe that you do know that NNPC is not a parallel government but is a part of the government, I have pondered on why you chose to mischaracterize the parastatal as indeed a parallel government. My “generous” reading of your motivation is that since you know that NNPC is the biggest single source of uncontrollable, unregulated corruption and looting in the government, perhaps describing it as a parallel government might enhance the possibility of once and for all tackling and ending this biggest, gargantuan source of corruption in our country. On this account, if we can effectively end corruption in NNPC, all the other sites and locations of corruption in government can then be also engaged, based on the lessons learnt from the containment of the NNPC mega crisis.

    That is my “generous” reading of your probable motivations. However, I must confess that I do have an admittedly less “generous” reading that, in my opinion may be nearer the mark. This is none other than my suspicion that your true motivation is the privatization of NNPC, the single biggest and most critical parastatal in our country. You are now a member of the ruling party, one of its thinkers in fact, and you wish to accomplish now what you couldn’t when you were in the PDP and, as Director General of the Bureau of Public Enterprises, supervised the privatization of dozens of state owned enterprises and utilities. As a matter of fact, towards the tail end of your lecture, you openly stated this demand for the privatization of the NNPC, although you took care not to directly mention the word “privatization”.

    The privatization of the NNPC would constitute a big, momentous date in the economic history of our country. For this reason, it cannot, and should not be done without a thoroughgoing, public and nationwide review of what this would mean, especially in the light of the results of privatization in Nigeria in the last few decades, with special relevance to what transpired under your watch as the Director General of the Bureau of Public Enterprises. What have been the net results of the privatization carried out under your headship of that Bureau, Governor?

    Here I must confess that I used to be a total opponent of privatization of public enterprises in our country and still retain some of that intransigent opposition. However, I am realistic enough to acknowledge the fact that in Nigeria as in many other parts of Africa and the developing world, the ideological and pragmatic winds of economic development have swung decisively against nationalization in favor of privatization. But what has not has not changed, what indeed cannot be changed is the fact that whether public or private, enterprises must enhance the economic survival and consumer needs of the population.

    Dear Governor El-Rufai, please be explicit, unambiguous and honest about your real intensions and maybe the intensions of the APC of which you are a major intellectual and political figure: Are you floating a kite, the kite of the privatization of the NNPC? If so, please give a full report of the economic and social impact of the massive privatizations that took place under your tenure as Director General of the Bureau of Public Enterprises. You do know, don’t you, that at least on the anecdotal level, privatized public enterprises have not functioned better than they had done before they were privatized? The transformation of the old ECN into PHCN is a case in point. The experience of GSM users is another telling example: there is hardly any country in Africa and the world where consumers of the services of the GSM corporations suffer more at the hand of the monopolies than in Nigeria. More generally, Nigerian capitalism is largely unregulated or perhaps even unregulatable and the Nigerian consumer is completely at the mercy of the free and uncontrollable abuse of virtually all enterprises, public and private.

    The underlying cause of all of this is of course the unregulated and unregulatable nature of governance itself. As I have repeated many, many times in this column, the former Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister for the Economy, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, told The Economist in 2011 that corruption and waste in the Nigerian governmentwere so vast that she would feel satisfied if by the end of her tenure she had reduced the scope by a mere 4%. It would be a great act of opportunism to sell off NNPC without first significantly raising the bar of regulatory control of corrupt practices in government, in public enterprises and private businesses far above this Okonjo-Iweala benchmark of 4%. So far, Governor El-Rufai, you and other spokespersons for the APC have inundated the media with news of the unspeakable levels of corruption that you have discovered in the NNPC and other parts of governmental and parastatal institutions. Before selling off the NNPC, could you at least tell us what you are doing to (a) recover the stolen loot and (b) how you are going to substantially reduce the corruption, the looting, the waste?

    Biodun Jeyifobjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu