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Category: Biodun Jeyifo

  • The premier university is (now) Nigeria’s highest ranked university? So what?

    The premier university is (now) Nigeria’s highest ranked university? So what?

    Last Saturday in an email directed to me personally, I received the news from JournalsConsortium.org itself: the University of Ibadan, my alma mater, is the new highest ranked research university in Nigeria; and it is the eighth ranked on the African continent. I don’t know whether JournalsConsortium.org sent the memo to me because they knew that I am a product of UI or because I am one of the academics they specially targeted. Whatever their reasoning might have been, I was very surprised to receive the notification. There are two reasons for this: one, it had never happened before; two, it is not the usual practice for any of the dozens of organizations dedicated to collecting, computing and disseminating data on the ranking of universities to send their findings to individual academics.

    I confess that my first reaction to this memo from JournalsConsortium.org was that of elation. This is because I have warm and admittedly somewhat very sentimental memories of my years as an undergraduate at UI.We received very sound university education from the UI of those years, even if this high quality education was based on a very elitist conception of access to higher learning in a developing country like ours. Moreover, to the soundness of the education, add the very comfortable physical and social conditions within which the high quality learning was dispensed to us. Later on, I would discover that that sound education was compromised by the enormously crucial fact that if had little relevance to the cultural and social dimensions of any truly progressive and liberating intellectualism in the world we live in, especially in the developing nations of the global South. This critical knowledge about the kind of learning that my mates and I had received at UI was crucial to the emergence of my intellectual adulthood. But all the same, it did not erase, indeed could not erase the value, the fondness that I had and still have for the learning I received as an undergraduate at Ibadan. And this is why the email from JournalsConortium.org last Saturday gave me a strong sense of pride in my alma mater. But this elation did not last. In fact, it was so short that altogether, it must have been less than ten minutes in duration! What is the reason for this?

    Perhaps the best way to express the complex and ambiguous feelings of great unease that followed my initial happiness in this matter is to invoke the analogy provided by the sublime satire and parody of both the title and the plot of the late Nkem Nwakwo’s novel, My Mercedes Is Bigger than Yours.The passion and the anxieties over rankings that we now see everywhere in the universities of Nigeria and the world seem to come from the same social and psychological etiology of the magical or fetishistic spell that the Mercedes Benz car or brand used to exercise over all segments of our society. People who did (not yet) have it used to look with deep admiration and envy at those who (already) had it. People who could afford to buy a Mercedes but chose not to were mercilessly hounded by their relatives and friends until they succumbed to the pressure and bought a Mercedes. Even people who could not and would never in their lifetimes be able to buy that fetish of a car exulted in its powerful, seemingly occult hold over the popular imagination. And so it is now with university rankings and the magical hold they exercise over virtually all the universities of the world, especially universities in our country and our continent.

    One particularly illustrative fact might serve to underscore the analogy that I am making in this discussion between university rankings and “Mesi oloye”. If my memory serves me right, not too long ago, the University of Ilorin was ranked the highest in Nigeria. Before that, I remember that Uniben occupied the spotlight. In the case of Unilorin as now with UI, the spotlight was beamed across the length and breadth of the land.There were secret and not-so-secret whispers that Unilorin had achieved that spotlight by questionable means having to do with computational mumbo jumbo. We can very well imagine that UI’s present claim over the spotlight will also be disputed, if not on the same grounds then on some other comparable grounds having to do with methodology. At any rate, the most important point that I wish to draw attention to here is the highly distorted and exaggerated value that university rakings have come to have in our society over and above real value in teaching, learning and research precisely because of the ruinous state of teaching and learning in virtually all our universities without a single exception.

    In the present discussion, I do not wish to rehash all over again as I have done many times in this column the many terrible things wrong with both the content and the environment for basic teaching and learning in all our universities and other tertiary institutions. Suffice it to say that apart from the perennial complaints of would-be employers of highly educated, highly skilled labour that the products of our universities are so badly trained as to be “unemployable”, there is the very important fact that late last year, under the initiating direction of ASUU, all the unions in our tertiary institutions collaborated to convene a so-called National Educational Summit (NES) to address all the problems contributing to the regressive state of our universities, colleges of education and polytechnics. I had the honor of being the Chairman at that important Summit. While we await its final document which will be issued under the title of a “National Charter on Education”, I can report here that the ranking of Nigerian universities, whether in Africa or in the rest of the world, was not a major theme at the Summit. To simplify a lot, that theme had two distinct but interlocking ideas: relevant and quality education; and liberating education whose effect would be to develop critical skills indispensable for a developing nation like ours. In other words, the Summit focused squarely on two things. One of these is the fact that in all modern societies and economies, education has become an intellectual capital of great importance in which great investments must be made. The other thing is the recognition that education is more than a sellable or marketable commodity; it is also a means of self-liberation on both the individual and national levels.

    The University in Ruins, that is the title of a book written by the late Bill Readings, a brilliant poststructuralist theorist and critic of millennial capitalism and its educational institutions. The “ruins” that Readings discusses in this book is of course not exactly of the same kind of “ruins” that have overtaken the UI that trained me as an undergraduate; and neither is it of exactly the same kind of “ruins” of physical infrastructures and teaching and research facilities that we see everywhere in virtually all our universities in Nigeria today. Readings had in mind in his book the “ruins” that have come in the wake of the take-over of North American universities by superannuated administrators and managers who run universities exactly like profit-making corporations, with the attendant almost complete marginalization of the professoriate. In other words, when professors, when women and men of great learning are no longer in control of what happens in teaching and research in the major universities of the heartland of global capitalism, the university is, for Readings, historically in “ruins”.

    It is time to begin to bring these reflections to a close.In Readings’ deployment of the trope of “ruins” university rankings derive their rationale and power from the “branding’ that they give to universities in order to make them more competitive in the marketplaces of higher education. In our own historic case in Nigeria and Africa, things have not gotten that far down the road of the corporatization of universities. As a matter of fact, the obverse is true: the private, for-profit universities in Nigeria and Africa are now far more numerous than “national” or public-funded universities, but they are extremely parasitic on the public universities without which, in fact, they could not survive. For this reason, the “ruins”, the extremely deplorable conditions under which teaching and research take place in our universities, come from pseudo-capitalist political and economic conditions in which the private preys on the public, the rich prey on the poor, economics preys on politics, primitive accumulation preys on sustainable development  – andthe ranking system preys and feeds on the need of our universities to keep up the appearance of quality and relevance. My Mercedes is bigger than yours, even though all our roads and highways are barely motorable; the ranking of my university is higher than yours, even if we are all in a terrible state of ruination.

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Mixed signals and ambiguities galore: scattered reflections

    Mixed signals and ambiguities galore: scattered reflections

    Ko pasi, ko faili, ko kuro lojukan! [He neither passed nor failed; he was neither promoted nor demoted!]
    Moses Olaiya, aka “Baba Sala”

    The joke that stands as the epigraph for this week’s column comes from a far more ordinary human predicament than the one on which I will be reflecting this week. In the joke which is rendered in the linguistic idiom that the late Professor Dapo Adelugba gave the term “Yorubanglish”, the comic maestro, Moses Olaiya, laments the underachieving sluggishness of his son in school. Most parents are familiar with this theme in the drama of the preparation of the young for the future through schooling: as much as we all want to succeed in life, we take great comfort if it appears that our children will have much better lives than we have had. Alas, oftentimes this does not come to pass and younger generations sometimes face much more dire circumstances than the generations of their parents and grandparents. It is the predicament that results from the thwarting of this universal desire of all parents that leads Moses Olaiya in our joke to ruefully squeeze relief from the near impossible phenomenon of an offspring that is neither passing nor failing in school.

    More than two months after being elected and some five weeks after being formally inaugurated into office, President Buhari and the new ruling party, the APC, maybe said to be in the same circumstance as the son in Baba Sala’s joke: if it is still too early to say that they are passing, it is equally too early to say that they are failing. Moreover, like the son in Moses Olaiya’s joke, we do know that Buhari and the APC have barely moved Nigeria and its teeming millions of desperately hopeful citizens one jot from the spot of very dire material impoverishment and confounding psychological insecurities in which Jonathan and the PDP left the country throughout the length and breadth of the land. The question that arises from this state of affairs is this: do the President and the new ruling party have a clear and pressing sense of the problems and dilemmas they inherited from the previous administration and ruling party? Here’s another question that arises from the analogy with the predicament of Baba Sala’s son: Buhari and the APC promised that they would hit the ground of governance running hard and strong from Day One; do they think that Nigerians and the world have either forgotten that promise or will not hold them answerable for its non-fulfillment?

    Two

    It may be useful to recall here that the inauguration of Obasanjo as President and the PDP as the ruling party in 1999 was, like the present time of the coming into power of Buhari and the APC, marked by an almost unquantifiable quotient of hope and goodwill all around, at home and abroad, in Africa and the world at large. True, the sudden and still largely unexplained death of M.K.O. Abiola in Abacha’s dungeons left millions of Nigerians at home and in the diaspora bitter, confused and almost unwilling to simply “move on”. But it is also incontestable that outside the core Southwest geopolitical zone, other parts of the country were indeed not only willing, but quite eager to “move on”. At any rate, with regard to the international community, especially the Americans and the European Union, the support, the goodwill that Obasanjo and the PDP got was almost limitless. And in this connection, it is instructive to recall now that just as the goodwill that Buhari and the APC now enjoy throughout Africa and the international community comes from relief that the 2015 elections did not lead to civil strife or worse, so was the support given to Obasanjo and the PDP in 1999 based on great relief that the annulment of Abiola’s electoral mandate and his mysterious death in prison had not led to the fragmentation of Nigeria.

    Did Obasanjo and the PDP know and fully appreciate the hopes that millions in our country and throughout Africa and the rest of the world placed on their success, their promise to unite our peoples and end the long reign of military and civilian rulers that had bled the country dry at the expense of the tens of millions of the dispossessed and the disenfranchised? I testify then that I knew then, right then at that moment, that Obasanjo and the PDP would never be equal to the hopes that the country and the rest of the world placed on their shoulders. I testify that I was not alone in this presentiment of the coming historic failures of Obasanjo and the PDP. I testify that even their Euro-American backers knew or suspected that they were pinning their hopes on people who could not – and eventually would not – perform. At any rate, we have the evidence of the annual American State Department Reports on Obasanjo and the PDP’s Nigeria in which, year after year, we read a catalogue of misuse and abuse of power and the nation’s wealth all pointing to the probable end of the country as one national entity. From having been one of the PDP’s strongest backers, the Americans, by the end, had become one of the party’s most unrelenting external foes.

    Do Buhari and the APC recognize how uncannily similar are the expressions of the goodwill and hope that they now command around the African continent and the international community to what the PDP used to command around Africa and the world when the party came to power in 1999? Do the new President and the ruling party have a sense of history of the kind that would make them avert the fate that overtook the PDP? More than a sense of history is of course the inclination and the will to truly unite our peoples and redress the terrible injustices to the millions of the poor and the looted that the PDP left in the wake of its ejection from the seat of governance and power. This point leads directly to our closing section on the mixed signals and myriad of ambiguities that are indicated in the title of this piece, all relating to the performance of Buhari and the APC in the first few months of their ascension to power.

    Three 

    Unquestionably, the most troubling expression of ambiguity is in the pace, the almost inertial rate in announcing acts and policies that would give strong and clear indications of what Nigerians and the world can expect from the new powers that be in Aso Rock and the National Assembly. On the one hand, on this point, it could be said that Buhari is taking his time both with regard to forming his cabinet and actually putting into effect policies that depart from the wasteful and thieving status quo that Jonathan and the PDP left behind. On the other hand, this same slow and over-deliberate pace may very well be an indication that Nigerians and the world will wait in vain for decisive, game-changing and life-enhancing policies from the new president and ruling party. Supporters of the APC and the President point to several things that could arguably be said to be major departures from the existing status quo: the sale of NINE planes in the presidential fleet of Jonathan; the already announced downward review of the salaries and allowances paid to our lawmakers; and the downscaling of the number of cabinet ministers in the new president’s Executive Council. On these points, it does say a lot that there seems to be broad agreement or consensus between all factions of the new ruling party.

    But could it not be equally argued that there is consensus on these particular initiatives precisely because though they are significant, they do not cut deep into the structural foundations of squandermania and economic injustice in Nigeria? During his electioneering campaign, Buhari promised that he would make expenditure on capital projects for growth and development much bigger than expenditure for recurrent aspects of federal and state budgets. Every president under the PDP also made this promise but not one ever even began serious policy discussions within the ruling party about it, let alone put it into effect. So the question that arises here is this: when will Buhari put this benchmark policy change into effect and will he be able to carry all factions within his party with him?

              How does the successful Saraki anti-party and anti-democratic “coup” that gave him the Senate Presidency figure into these reflections? On the surface, it doesn’t. That is because Saraki did what nearly politicians in all our ruling class parties does and that is fight with every weapon of deceit, treachery and cynicism that he or she can get, not for the good of the party, not for the good of the Nigerian people but in the pursuit of naked self-interest. Saraki’s great miscalculation was to have done this at a far more cynical and blatant level and at a time when possibilities for real change were/are there. But on the other hand, Saraki and his band of cynical desperados fit perfectly into these reflections. This is because as far as anyone can tell from the bitter recriminations between the factions for and against Saraki, there doesn’t seem to have been any ideological or policy implications in what Saraki did; all that was at stake was the sacrifice of party cohesion and party discipline on the altar of the naked pursuit of office and power. Since politicians everywhere in the world engage in this sort of opportunistic brinksmanship, there is nothing peculiarly Nigerian about it. What is peculiar to our political order and what will haunt the President and our new ruling party in this period when it is still too early to say whether they are passing or failing is the fact that this is the sole and exclusive axis of factionalism and internal bickering in all our political parties.

    We wait for the time when the factions within the new ruling party will be structured around policy and ideological differences, together with where the President will throw his weight when this happens. What if this development never takes place? Well, then, Baba Sala’s joke would have found its true political incarnation in a party which comes to power on the winds of change but remains rooted to one spot of neither passing nor failing, neither being promoted nor demoted. The suffering and the hardship of the majority of Nigerians would continue. Let us hope that their resolve to take their destiny in their hands will still be strong, resolute, unwavering.

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • The ruling party and the president: for the sake of Nigeria and the talakawa, will the APC and Buhari be different? (2)

    The ruling party and the president: for the sake of Nigeria and the talakawa, will the APC and Buhari be different? (2)

    When this column used to appear in The Guardian under a slightly different name, I wrote something about the inauguration of Umar Musa Yar’ Adua as successor president to Olusegun Obasanjo on May 29, 2011 that I recall now with an acute awareness that what I wrote then is very pertinent to what I am writing about now in this series on the established pattern of the complete subordination of the ruling party in our country to the incumbent president. In essence, what I said then was this: Yar’ Adua’s inauguration marked the first time ever that an elected civilian president was succeeding another elected ruler without the “interregnum” of a military dictatorship coming between them. I was not of course the only commentator who made this observation at the time. What may have been peculiar about what I wrote then was my emphasis on the fact that, one, the succession of one elected ruler by another was taking place within the same ruling party and, two, that the elections that brought Yar’ Adua to the presidency had been deeply flawed, so much so that Yar’ Adua himself ultimately admitted that this was the case. To those observations, I now wish to add some remarks that are more pertinent to the present discussion. What are these remarks?

    Virtually the whole world has rejoiced that in Buhari’s election and inauguration, we have the fact that for the very first time in our country, an elected president from an opposition party has replaced the incumbent president from the ruling party. There is of course not the slightest doubt that this indeed does mark an historic moment that is of far greater significance than the succession of Obasanjo by Yar’ Adua in 2011. However, there is another aspect of this historic fact that has been almost completely ignored and this is the fact that how Buhari became president through the victory of the new ruling party, the APC, is absolutely without precedent in the entire post-independent political history of our country. Indeed, so fundamental is this point that it ought to be a great teachable experience for all Nigerians at home and abroad, especially Nigerians younger than the age of forty. This is the central issue that I wish to reflect upon, if only very briefly, in this concluding piece to the series that began in last week’s column. But before I come to the point, there is a need for me to make some clarifications about where I stand in relation to the APC as the new ruling party at the centre in our country, especially with regard to the chieftains and bosses of this new ruling party. In making these clarifications, I shall be very brief but also very clear, very unambiguous.

    Since I am not a member of any political party in Nigeria or any other place in the world, it stands to reason that I am not a member of the APC. Indeed, although I do very sincerely wish the party well as our new ruling party, strictly speaking, I am not a supporter of the party. The ONLY party in Nigeria that would have had my support if it had control of any state in the country and became one of the  opposition ruling class parties would be the party founded by the late Gani Fawehinmi, this being the National Conscience Party. And even then, this would have been a highly critical support. In the entire postcolonial political history of our country, the ruling class party that has had my greatest support – not my membership – was the People’s Redemption Party (PRP), the same party to which Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka belonged for some time. In my view, the APC does not remotely come close to the egalitarian and people-oriented programmes and policies, together with the consistency of moral and ideological practice of this sadly moribund party. Our new ruling party may yet evolve gradually toward these achievements or may even surpass them, but that is yet to be seen. One decisive step that would indicate such progressive evolution of the APC would be a very clear, a very palpable move away from the widely held and not exactly incorrect view that the party is the brainchild and thus effectively in the pocket of a single political godfather, Bola Tinubu.

    One more point of clarification, and I shall resume the central issue in this piece – the precedent-setting manner in which APC became our new ruling party, together with how Buhari became an elected president whose electoral path to the presidency is also unprecedented in our country’s political history. Here is this last point of clarification. This column, the Talakawa Liberation Herald is published in a newspaper which, as everyone knows, has strong ties to both the APC and its party leader, Tinubu. It is a mark of the largeness of vision of the proprietors and editors of the newspaper that I and a few other completely independent columnists feel welcomed within the stable corps of this newspaper’s columnists that are loyal to the party and its leadership. I am deeply appreciative of the opportunity and the privilege to write for and in this newspaper, with the solid assurance that my independence is recognized and respected. Long may this last! May the relationship between columnist and newspaper never come to the sorry state that it did in The Guardian when the combination of the overthrow of independent journalism by a disproportionate concern for the profit margin with the institution of a philistine and reactionary management sent me and other columnists migrating away from that newspaper!

    And now to the big issue of the precedent-setting nature of how Buhari became president through the APC, together with the fact that I consider it a very teachable moment in our country’s political history. In last week’s opening piece in this series, I drew attention to the fact that Buhari is the only person in our country who has sought the office of president FOUR times. I also asserted that even though the elections were massively rigged by the PDP in each of the three times when he lost, he could not have won if the elections had been clean, free and fair. This is because his party, the CPC, was a regionalist party that could never have garnered the nation-wide plurality needed for election as president of the republic in our country. Please remember that Nasir el Rufai who is now in the APC and has become an ardent follower of Buhari once remarked that Buhari was “permanently unelectable”. What Rufai did not know or could not know at the time was that the APC would emerge and he and Buhari would find new political life on the platform of – the APC.

    I now wish to add that in the ACN, Tinubu and his Southwest base could also never have produced a winning candidate for the presidency for exactly the same reason that Buhari in the CPC could have stood for election as president a dozen times and he would not have won a single time. Beyond these initial remarks, I now make the most important observation of all: nobody has ever won the post of president in Nigeria on a true and not imposed or rigged nationwide plurality. In the First and Second Republics, the post of elected Head of State was won through alliances between political parties that were all regionalist, the major ones as well as the minor ones. In the Fourth Republic inaugurated in 1999, this absolutely crucial nationwide plurality was concocted by the outgoing military government of General Abubakar Abdulsalami, with significant help from former military and civilian Heads of States, the Americans, the European Union, the African Union, and the United Nations. In this respect, it might be true to say that the only election that ever credibly confirmed the then new ruling party’s imposed nationwide plurality were the 1999 elections. But it did not last, for even before the end of his first term as President, the makeshift plurality had cracked and Obasanjo was nearly impeached as a result of the fracturing of what was touted as “the biggest ruling party in Africa”. The rest, as the saying goes, is history: the 2003, 2007 and 2011 elections were all massively and violently rigged, and with maximum impunity too.

    There are important lessons for the APC and all of us to learn in this unedifying story. First, the experience of winning control of power at the centre through a genuine nationwide plurality that you then have to nurture and consolidate is very new in our country. The prevailing pattern has been that of a plurality that is imposed from above and maintained through rigged elections, the use of state violence and terror to cow both the opposition and the populace, and the massive monetization of politics. In the last days of the PDP era, monetization became more specifically dollarization of politics. Under such conditions, the ruling party is completely subordinated to the presidency and its enormous machinery of power and patronage. In such circumstances, as a politician, your fortunes or, conversely, your misfortunes, are dependent on how close or how distant you position yourself to the president. And if a sufficiently large and expanding number of politicians feel distanced from the presidency, the ruling party begins to fragment and implode, with dire consequences, not only for the ruling party but for the nation itself.

    Will APC and Buhari abjure the pattern that has so far prevailed in our country’s ruling class politics wherein, in a multiethnic and pluralistic nation in which 7 out of every 10 Nigerians live in abject poverty and/or joblessness, the ruling party has never felt that it had to work for and earn the nationwide plurality which, in theory, is absolutely necessary to win control of power at the centre? Perhaps what this question ultimately boils down to is this: in our constitutional and political order, the presidency we know much about, but what of the ruling party, what of its relationship to the presidency? In my view, so far in our country’s political history, the ruling party at the centre is to the presidency and the country what used and retreaded tyres are to hundreds of thousands of cars in our part of the developing world: without such tyres, the car will not move, but among all the parts of the car, these retreaded tyres are the cheapest and the most easily replaceable. It is time that we began to think of the ruling party and indeed all our political parties as the central engine block of the car.

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • The ruling party and the president: for the sake of Nigeria and the talakawa, will the APC and Buhari be different? (1)

    The ruling party and the president: for the sake of Nigeria and the talakawa, will the APC and Buhari be different? (1)

    The ruling party and the president? Why not the president and the ruling party? The answer to this question is simple, at least in the Nigerian political context. I am directly changing the order of things in our country where, at least under the reign of the PDP, it was unquestionably the president and the ruling party, not the ruling party and the president. In the PDP formulation, the president came first and overwhelmingly so, while the party came second, by a wide, long and deep margin. As we shall see later in the series of which this piece is the first installment, this caused great havoc for the political and constitutional order; and it was also a principal cause and means of the dispossession of the great majority of our peoples in every corner of the land. The president and the ruling party – may this formulation and all that it entails sink into the dungheap of history with the defeat of the PDP as our ruling party, amin yarabi!

    As we know, there were three presidents during the reign of the PDP: Olusegun Obasanjo, Umar Musa Yar’ Adua and Goodluck Ebele Jonathan. Without exception, these men all completely subordinated the ruling party to the total and jealous control of themselves and their henchmen. Yar’ Adua and Jonathan were, relatively speaking, weak, indecisive and clueless men but even they succeeded in bringing the ruling party, the PDP, under the complete sway of the self-interest and self-aggrandizement of themselves and their minions. With Obasanjo, this tradition of complete and unrestrained subordination of the ruling party to the control of the sitting president reached its apogee, its apotheosis. In perhaps the very worst expression of this total imposition of his self-interest, his anxieties and insecurities on the ruling party, Obasanjo forced virtually all independent minded, thinking and progressive leaders out of the party while promoting people described by the late Chinua Achebe as “politicians with low IQs” that he could manipulate to positions of power and influence within the party. With these observations in mind, I hope the reader will recognize that it is in order to subject this legacy of the PDP for the Nigerian political order to scrutiny that I have jettisoned the formulation “the president and the ruling party” and opted instead for “the ruling party and the president”. If this is the case, the question that arises is, what led me to this issue and what do I have to say about it that the reader and all compatriots in general might find informative or even thought-provoking, whether or not they are supporters of the new ruling party, the APC?

    I confess that for me, this issue arose from Abubakar Bukola Saraki’s election as Senate President by majority votes that he received, not from his party, the APC, but from the defeated former ruling party, the PDP. Concerning this act that I described in last week’s column as an ‘anti-party and anti-democratic coup of impunity”, two considerations stand out. The first consideration pertains to Bukola Saraki while the second one pertains to the President, Muhammadu Buhari. This is the first consideration:  immediately after he had secured victory by dumping his party and turning to the PDP for the majority votes that he could not get from the APC, Saraki quickly dismissed allegations that he was leaving the APC for the PDP. As a matter of fact, he vigorously reaffirmed his loyalty to the APC and scheduled a courtesy visit to the Abuja Headquarters of the Party. Nobody could miss the implications of these post-victory acts of Saraki: he had merely dumped his party temporarily; once he had obtained the high office he desperately wanted, he came back into the APC fold as if the pact with the PDP that won him the Senate Presidency was a matter of mere convenience made possible by the well-known fact that this was – and presumably still is – what the PDP is there for.

    The second consideration that pertains to Buhari is a bit more complicated. It arises from the fact that the President was completely unperturbed that Saraki dumped the APC – even if this was “temporary” – and went to the PDP for the majority votes for his election as Senate President. True enough, the President did make mild remarks of regret through his spokespersons, but on the fundamental issue of how party leaders may or may not use the party in pursuit of their political ambitions, Buhari was completely silent, so much so that as of now, Sunday, June 21, 2015, we do not know where he stands on the matter. In other words, we do know where Bukola Saraki stands on the matter: political parties are there as means of obtaining and consolidating the quest for power; whether the instrument is PDP or APC, it does not really matter as long as one’s driving ambition and goals are achieved.

    Let us be very clear and unambiguous on this observation: everyone knows that Bukola Saraki is, even by the standards of professional politicians, an inordinately ambitious man whose real and ultimate goal is the Presidency itself. He is in the APC today; if the PDP, by some stroke of unimaginable reversal of political fortunes for the country, comes back to power, Saraki will be back in that resurrected PDP, absolutely without any qualms whatsoever. That is why Saraki stands. But we do not know where Buhari stands on the mater. And we need to know. Will he be like the PDP Presidents all of who regarded the ruling party as the extension, the objectification of their personal and political grip on power? Or will he depart from that tradition and create a different order of relationship between the presidency and the ruling party in which each is a joint partner, a collaborator in the enormous tasks of uniting our peoples and redressing the terrible and unregenerate imbalance between the haves and the have-nots in our country?

    There is of course much that we do know about the President. Some things we know by facts, others we know through myths, legends and hearsay. We know that he was one of the war commanders that fought to keep the country one, this in a civil war that forever changed the nature of the country, for good and/or ill. We know also that he was one of the eight military dictators that have ruled this country. Significantly, we know that he wanted very, very much to become President, that it was only on the last of the FOUR times that he put himself in competition for the presidency that he finally won. From legends and hearsay, we learn that he leads a simple and disciplined life, devoid of the lavish and ostentatious lifestyle made possible by the enormous wealth and fortune that some of the other living former military dictators took with them when they left or were forced out of office. We know also that among all the former military autocrats, Buhari is the only one with a credible claim to economic and political populism, though whether this populism is right-wing or popular-democratic or a mix of both, it is hard to tell. Finally, we know that Buhari hated the PDP with a great passion, not only because that former ruling party kept him from power at the center by rigging itself into power each of the three previous times before the 2015 elections, but also because corruption, indiscipline and squandermania grew completely out of control in the last years of the reign of the PDP. Reflecting on this conditioned animosity toward the PDP and all it stood for, will Buhari use the awesome powers of authority, influence and patronage attached to the Nigerian presidency in a way that takes the APC away from the PDP pattern of complete subordination of the party to the president and his personal and political self-interest, anxieties, fears and obsessions?

    In the political history of our country, Muhammadu Buhari is the only man who has stood for election to the Presidency FOUR times. There is absolutely no doubt that the elections were massively rigged on each of the three previous times when he did not win. But we know also that had the elections been free, clean and fair on any of those three occasions, Buhari could not have won for the simple reason that he did not have the nation-wide plurality that is needed to win the Nigerian presidency. In other words, he could never have won on the ticket of his former party, the Congress for Progressive Change (CPC). Only with the mergers that created the APC was he finally able to win the presidency. Apart from his own former party, two other political formations, among others, made the founding of the APC possible. These were the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) and a large critical mass of defectors from the PDP. This means that in a manner that promises to be different from how the PDP became Nigeria’s ruling party and went on to produce three presidents before it was finally consumed by its internal contradictions and the electoral anger of the Nigerian people, the APC and Buhari not only have to govern far more democratically and justly than the PDP ever did, they have to do this on the basis of hitherto unprecedented patterns of genuine partnership and collaboration between the party and the presidency.

    Buhari’s response to the Saraki “coup” against the party in the Senate President elections last week does not offer any sign that the President fully appreciates this fact, this necessity. In next week’s concluding piece in the series, we shall explore this proposition at much greater length, basing the central argument on the simple but profound contention that if the APC and the President are on the same page in turning our economy, politics and society around from the ravages of the PDP years, the fears and anxieties that currently act like impediments to forming a strong, vibrant and regenerative partnership between the new ruling party and the presidency will disappear.

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • 49PDP + 8APC + 1Buhari = Saraki’s anti-party, anti-democratic ‘coup’ of impunity

    49PDP + 8APC + 1Buhari = Saraki’s anti-party, anti-democratic ‘coup’ of impunity

    Friday, May 12, 2015: as I write this column, a meeting is being held between the President, Muhammadu Buhari, all elected members of the APC in the Senate and the national leaders of the new ruling party. The intention is to resolve the crisis sparked by the ‘coup’ carried out against the party by Senator Abubakar Bukola Saraki through the brazen manner in which he aligned himself with the defeated former ruling party, the PDP, to get himself elected Senate President. It is likely that by the time this column is published on Sunday, May 14, the crisis would have been resolved to the satisfaction of the bickering parties involved in the crisis. This is unlikely, but it is not completely impossible. We are still very close to the era of the PDP’s rule, together with its accustomed habit of lurching endlessly from one crisis to another. Thus, if this particular crisis is resolved, the new ruling party may very well lurch into another one and this will continue until the ghosts of the PDP years have been laid to rest or sent permanently into the netherworld of historical oblivion. Meanwhile, in this article, I wish to reflect on some rather extraordinary aspects of Saraki’s “coup”. As we shall see, the big lesson, the important “take-away” from this ‘coup’ is the frank and sober recognition that though PDP was electorally defeated, the defeat is yet to extend to the party’s deep roots in the subsoil of the endlessly amoral ethos of political elites in all our ruling class parties.

    As the details of the Saraki ‘coup’ have been widely reported, I shall draw attention in this article only to those aspects that I consider the highlights. For me, perhaps the most salient of these highlights are those indicated in the bizarre ‘arithmetic’ in the title of this article: 49PDP + 8APC + 1Buhari. Saraki belongs to the APC, though of course he was once a chieftain of the PDP. Because a caucus of his new party, the APC, chose someone else to support for the Senate Presidency, Saraki dumped his party and went to the PDP from which he got the overwhelming majority of the votes that gave him the Senate Presidency. But please note that even with 49 votes, the PDP could not have secured the position for Saraki precisely because 49 is 6 votes shy of the simple majority of 55 that any contestant needs to win the Senate Presidency. This in effect means that in this bizarre “arithmetic”, 8 is at the very least as important as 49: Saraki absolutely needed those 8 defectors from the APC that linked up with the 49 PDP Senators to produce the winning majority of 57. But then, along comes the most critical number in this “arithmetic” of electoral sleaze, this being Buhari’s 1. Before I come to a discussion of this most significant number in this “arithmetic” permit me to briefly dwell on a few other details of Saraki’s pact with the PDP in open defiance of his party and its electoral victory in the recent general elections.

    As part of his pact with his former party, the PDP, Saraki and his 8 APC accomplices rewarded the PDP with the posts of the Deputy Senate President (Ike Ekweremadu, Enugu-West) and Senate Leader (David Mark, former Senate President). It should be noted here that as soon as the leadership of the PDP sensed that the APC senatorial body had fragmented into factions jockeying for leadership posts, it instructed all its members to act together to align with Saraki’s disgruntled faction and exploit the situation to the maximum extent possible. In the event, the capture of the posts of Senate Leader and Senate Deputy President by a party still licking the wounds of a massive electoral rejection by Nigerians is nothing short of spectacular. This has to be one of the exceptions in modern political history in which a defeated party that has less than half of the total number of seats in a legislative chamber nonetheless wins the posts of Senate Leader and Deputy Senate President. Indeed, as Buhari meets with the two bickering factions today with a view to mending broken fences, this anomaly in which the Nigerian people elected APC only for the PDP to defeat the APC in the Senate will be on everyone’s mind.

    This leads directly to the issue of the most important number or integer in our strange ‘arithmetic’, this being Buhari’s 1 that combined with PDP’s 49 and APC’s 8 to make Saraki’s ‘coup’ possible. Admittedly, this was/is a non-casting vote for the simple reason that the President is not a member of the Senate. With regard to this single all-powerful Buhari vote that is more virtual than actual, perhaps the most important observation to make here is that in the course of this week when this crisis has unraveled, Buhari’s position has evolved gradually to the point where today he is meeting with both the Saraki and Lawan factions. His very first view, as expressed by his Special Adviser (Media and Publicity), Femi Adesina, was that though regrettable and against the interest of the party, Saraki’s election as Senate President was a fait accompli that had to be accepted if only because it “appeared to have followed due constitutional process”. Indeed, Buhari in this first response to the crisis went as far as to assert that he was willing to work with whoever the lawmakers elected.

    To say the least, these were astonishing remarks from the President. The first observation is completely erroneous since close to half of Senate members were absent when Saraki’s election took place, a situation that has about it all the marks of the many infamous instances when the PDP conducted its primaries or impeached state governors and assemblymen with only a fraction of members present. Particularly troubling in this first response of Buhari was the assertion that he had no preferred candidate for any leadership posts in the National Assembly and was willing to work with whoever the lawmakers elected. Please note that this assertion was not made in a vacuum; it was made after the PDP had aligned with Saraki’s minority faction within his own Party, the APC and as part of the deal elected David Mark as Senate Leader and Ike Ekweremadu as Deputy Senate Leader. Above all else, please note that Buhari expressed these initial views after the entire leadership of his own party, the APC, had rejected Saraki’s ‘coup’ absolutely without any equivocation. Indeed, note too, that Saraki has thanked the President again and again for not siding with the Party leaders in rejecting his election as Senate President.

    There is a more sinister view of Buhari’s role in Saraki’s “49PDP + 8APC + 1Buhari” coup against his party, but I remain unsure whether or not there is any credence to it. This is the view that Buhari and the Presidency may have as a matter of fact deliberately lured most of the APC Senators away from the Senate when the inauguration of the 8th National Assembly and the vote on the Senate Presidency took place. The story is that the inauguration of the new National Assembly had been postponed and Buhari was instead going to meet all the APC Senators at the National Conference Centre to try to resolve the crisis between the two factions. Saraki and his defectors stayed at the National Assembly and went on with the election; meanwhile, the President never showed up at the National Conference Centre to meet the Lawan Unity Group. This story, this view is not implausible. For me, it just stops short of providing elements of action and reaction, words and deeds that would indicate that this early in his administration, Buhari is already so wary of the constraints of party discipline and party supremacy on the presidency that he was willing to clear the path for Saraki to go outside the APC to clinch the post of Senate President.

    At any rate, by the end of the week, definitely by Thursday evening, indications were coming from the Presidency that Buhari was moving away from regarding Saraki’s coup as a fait accompli and also that the President is a party loyalist. And so in place of Femi Adesina, Special Adviser (Media and Publicity), one so-called Presidential Spokesman, Garba Shehu, did the rounds of media outlets to express a distance between Buhari and Saraki, together with the staff of the National Assembly that had participated in Saraki’s election. Mr. Shehu indeed went as far as to assert vigorously that Buhari respects and would uphold the supremacy of the party that brought him to power. Moreover, Shehu asked the public to take note of the fact that the President had not called Saraki or any of the other putative winners of the National Assembly leadership posts to congratulate them.

    It is deeply symptomatic of how much this crisis within the APC is embedded in the legacy of the PDP that Buhari himself has not personally uttered a word on the crisis. This is, quintessentially, the PDP style, from presidents to governors: responses to crises rocking the party and the nation to their foundations are left to special assistants and spokespersons. This is meant to leave all guessing, all musing on exactly where the boss stands. Buhari even appears in this matter to have directly copied Jonathan’s distribution of duties between Doyin Okupe and Rueben Abati in his own two “voices” this week, Femi Adesina and Garba Shehu. In this pair of media stand-ins for the President, one person, like Okupe, was blunt, bullish and simplistic while the other, like Abati, was more media-friendly, nuanced and conciliatory. In the end, both but represent two sides of the same coin, this being the “coin” of a conception and a practice of power that stands sovereign over party, nation and the people.

    This is part of the PDP legacy. If by the end of this week we still do not know exactly where Buhari stands in this Saraki ‘coup’ against the APC, if we still have to get his feelings and thoughts from his double-headed media representatives, know, dear reader, that the PDP’s astonishing gains in the Senate elections this week run much wider and deeper than we realize.

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Dateline June 5, 2015, Bayreuth, Germany: the future of Nigeria and of Africa

    Dateline June 5, 2015, Bayreuth, Germany: the future of Nigeria and of Africa

    As the title of this piece indicates, I am in Bayreuth in Germany and it is exactly a week after the inauguration of the new administration of Muhammadu Buhari. It is the day of the deadline for sending my piece for the week in this column. I am here for the 41st annual conference of the African Literature Association (ALA), the largest professional association of scholars and critics of African literatures in the world. Femi Osofisan is also here, as are many other Nigerian scholars and artists. As a matter of fact, Soyinka put in a brief appearance as a special guest on the first day of the conference on Wednesday. He gave a short and characteristically very sharp and witty informal speech at the formal opening ceremonies, a speech in which he called the assembled confreres and the world’s scholars in general to become more proactive, more “fundamentalist” in the defense of freedom and life, given the opposing “fundamentalism” of terrorists and jihadists in their assault on life and freedom of thought and religion in many parts of the world.

    This is the first time in more than a decade that I am attending an annual conference of the ALA. This is because I stopped going to conferences of all professional associations a long time ago. In this piece, I cannot go into why I took that decision. But I can reveal the fact that I finally made an exception for this particular conference because I happen to be in Germany for another reason at the same time. As a matter of fact, when one of the conference organizers heard that I would be in Germany at the time of the conference, she contacted me and persuaded me that whatever my reasons for stopping going to conferences were, it would be unthinkable and unacceptable that I would stay away from this conference that coincides with the time of my stay in Germany this summer. Also, I was easily persuaded because the theme of the conference this year interests me a lot. It is “African Futures and Beyond: Visions in Transition”. When you are getting into the eighth decade of your life, the future interests you a lot. This is not because very little of it will occur in what is left of your biological existence but because you want to think, you want to project far ahead into what you and the present living generations will leave for unborn, future generations, for posterity.

    Not unexpectedly, many at this ALA conference have been asking me and other Nigerians present here what the future holds for our country with regard to the relatively peaceful transfer of power from one running party to another and the inauguration of Muhammadu Buhari as Nigeria’s new President. I am sure that if the theme of the conference had nothing to do with the future they would still have been asking Nigerians here present the same question. All the same, one recognizes the fact that the questions that we are being asked at this conference are in part sparked by the theme of the conference. In other words, while for a long time now nothing in our country has been a source of hope for the future of Africans at home and abroad, this ALA conference on Africa and its future is taking place at precisely an historical moment when Nigeria is at last sending out signs of hope for the future of the country and the continent. This piece is about this portentous convergence between the theme of the conference and the unfolding events in Nigeria. Concretely, I deal with what I have been saying to people at this conference who have been asking me what to expect with the changed circumstances in Nigeria, especially with regard to the new ruler, Muhammadu Buhari. In other words, what I have been saying to people at this ALA conference is what I am now weaving into the expanded text of this piece on futurity in the “new” Nigeria.

    The future looks promising in the “new” Nigeria, I have been telling people at this ALA conference, but only with the caveat that we bear in mind the fact that the change from the erstwhile ruling party and President provides a new space for fresh starts and initiatives that we did not have before now, that in fact had been almost completely blocked. Other than that, there is nothing inherently hopeful and full of bright portents for the future in the mere change from one ruling party to another. Indeed, on the very specific theme of futurity itself, Nigerians have to be doubly, even triply cautious. This is because while the ousted ruling party in particular and Nigerian political elites in general had been very vocal in espousing the dream of a Nigeria that would have one of the largest economies in the world, they had done everything possible to make the realization of that dream impossible. Of course, no one at the ALA conference had ever read about or heard of “Vision 2020”. This did not surprise me in the least because I know that in the years of the rule of the PDP, the great majority of Nigerians also knew little or nothing about “Vision 2020”. When life in the present is so full of a great and ever expanding scale of a lack in the basic necessities of life – jobs, amenities and security of life and possessions – the last thing that you think about is a document, a construct promising on paper a Nigeria that will be one of economic powerhouses of the world. This is symptomatic of a larger problem that I now wish to address, this being the willful and almost irrational negative orientation toward futurity among our political and intellectual elites.

    Perhaps the single most expressive sign of this negative orientation toward futurity among our elites is the speed with which many outgoing governors went after foreign debts with only a few months, in some cases weeks, before their departure from office. This is of course first and foremost a cynical manifestation of the predatory greediness of many of our rulers: a governor who will not be in office when the crushing burdens of servicing and paying off the loans are being extracted need not worry about such burdens. But beyond this, it also shows that the future is negatively configured in the collective minds of our elites and perhaps also, our peoples themselves, thanks to the power of ruling class ideologies and practices. The basic thinking behind this seems to be why worry now about a future that is not yet here, a future that lacks any definable, concrete features, a future, finally, that will either take care of itself or be taken care of by God, IJN?

    It would of course be a mistake to think that a positive and empowering orientation toward futurity is totally absent in our country – as if that was even possible in any nation on the planet. After all, like nearly all other governments in the world, Nigerian governments are obliged to outline the development process in accordance with mandatory Five-Year or Ten-Year Development Plans that are periodically released to the nation and the world. What I have in mind here is the suggestion that in the end, a positive and empowering orientation toward futurity is a joint venture between the rulers and the ruled; in the best of circumstances, the people, the ruled, provide the motive force for this partnership between the rulers and the ruled. Let me be very clear about what I mean by this: the rulers, the governments at the centre and the states are not in the driver’s seat of history and the future; no one is. On account of this fact which some consider tragic and others consider ironic, God or some other avatar, sacred or secular, fills in the void. I personally consider this a hopeful portent for if no one is really in the driver’s seat of history and the future that fact ought to impel us to become proactive in the movement toward a future that always and forever looms on the horizon of the present.

    This is why I believe that a strong, self-aware lobby on behalf of the future must come into being and flourish in our country if the space of possibilities that have opened up in Buhari’s “new” Nigeria is to take root and bear fruit in the fullness of time. You might say that such a lobby could emerge if only there existed traditions of positive orientation toward futurity in our country. I happen to believe that this is in fact the case. For contrary to the view of some racist European philosophers, African languages, philosophies and religions were not lacking in a robustly positive orientation toward futurity. Moreover, the idea is not as abstract and contentless as it seems. It is best seen perhaps in ideas pertaining to significations and practices around sacrifice. Parents sacrifice a lot to put their children through school; they give up satisfactions and conveniences that make life in the present livable not to talk of enjoyable, so that in the future their offspring may have better lives than theirs. Small communities impose heavy financial levies that they can ill afford so that a new hospital or clinic may be built in a village. Finally, national wealth is saved in robust currency reserves, not consumed in orgies of conspicuous consumption by elites besotted by squandermania; those reserves are put to use in times of need in the future.

    Let that lobby on behalf of the future emerge and emerge quickly in Buhari’s “new” Nigeria. It may well be our final guarantee that the new space of possibilities will bear fruit. One of the first tasks of such a lobby or pressure group is the reversal of priorities away from recurrent expenditures toward capital projects in the annual budgets of all the federal, state and local governments in the country. As a matter of fact, Buhari has promised that this is something that is very much on his mind, something he will try to implement early in his administration. But the truth is that without a powerful movement of the people for its implementation, Buhari will not and can never be able to implement the kind of administrative revolution that this will require for its consummation.

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • May 29, 2015: Scattered, cautiously optimistic reflections on an historic turning point

    May 29, 2015: Scattered, cautiously optimistic reflections on an historic turning point

    It is May 29, 2015. This is the first time since I began writing this column that the subject and the title of the column coincide exactly with the date of the actual writing of the column. The column will of course not appear in print and online until two days later on Sunday, May 31. But for me it is a massively consequential and symbolic fact that on the very day that I am writing about it, a great historical turning point is taking place in our country’s history.

    Physically, I am far away from home but in spirit and imagination, every part of my being is at home. I confess that I am deliberately giving myself over to the sense and spirit of euphoria that the vast majority of Nigerians at home and abroad will be feeling today. Indeed, I will permit myself to celebrate the occasion, sorry that where I am, I will be celebrating alone. If I were in Nigeria today, I would of course not be enjoying the occasion, the historic moment alone. I would be doing so with a small group of friends and comrades who, like me, know only too well that though we have cause to celebrate, we should do fully aware that our celebration, our optimism ought to be cautious. But again I must confess: although the caution is there, it is the celebration, the thankfulness that is the stronger aspect of what I am feeling today, even if one part of me suspects that our cause for celebration may turn out rather short-lived. This brings to my mind, an old sardonic one-sentence joke that Kole Omotoso used to occasionally tell when were undergraduates at the University of Ibadan: “Today, let us eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow, we may diet!”…

    And indeed, many Nigerians will be celebrating today with the crushing weight of present injustices and insecure and uncertain futures on their minds. Hundreds of thousands of workers across the length and breadth of the land have not been paid their salaries and wages for months. With the sharp decline in the generation and distribution of electricity in already vastly inadequate national, regional and local power grids, many factories and enterprises are folding up. For these reasons, joblessness which was already very high has worsened immeasurably. The new Vice President, Professor Yemi Osinbanjo, has stated that the outgoing Jonathan administration left a totally ruined economy for the new administration to deal with. And he is right, so right indeed that if Nigeria were a company, it would have had to declare bankruptcy and be put into receivership. In effect, if this is the case, then the outgoing administration not only left behind a ruined economy, it also left a ruined, broken country of millions of souls in the grip of a totally preventable immensity of hardship and suffering. Fela’s bitterly sardonic question comes to mind here: Are we a people forever doomed to be ‘shuffering’ and ‘shmiling’?

    For most Nigerians and perhaps the rest of the world, the case for celebration today even in the midst of the pervasiveness of hardship and suffering in the country is very strong. This rests on the unspoken philosophical premise that hardship and suffering in human life and experience tragically have no limits; when you think you have seen the worst, the abyss in suffering and hardship, other cases emerge as if from the black holes of the universe to tell you that “you aint seen nothing yet”, as the Americans put it.   Translated into concrete terms pertinent to the subject of these reflections, this means that as bad and terrible as life was for most Nigerians in the last years of the PDP/Jonathan rule, things would have been far worse if at the end of the recent elections in our country the world saw yet another African national electoral exercise slide into a savage, fragmenting civil war and the collapse of all institutions of orderly and cohesive governance.

    I accept this rationale for our celebrations today, May 29, 2015. And I add that we ought to celebrate some new and almost unprecedented things that follow logically from it. Of these, two things, two principles which, though distinct are inseparable, are in my opinion, fundamental. One: The principle is now made clear that Nigerians can kick their rulers out of office and elect another set of rulers who can also, if they misrule and despoil the nation, be kicked out of office. Two: Only on the basis of true and not bogus electoral pluralities that reflect the nation’s ethnic, regional and religious diversity can such exercises of effective and consequential electoral choice be realized and consummated. This is the fundamental rationale of all the bourgeois-liberal democracies of the world and of modern political history: if one set of rulers are barawos, you can throw the bums out of office and choose another set, on and on and on until the right group comes into power and does what is right and just by the entire citizenry.

    Obviously, Muhammadu Buhari is the man of the moment. The cheering, salaaming phrase of his most ardent of supporters, North and South, during the electioneering campaigns was “Sai Buhari!” I first tried to count the number of times that I encountered this phrase on twitter accounts on the internet during the electoral season and gave up when I saw that many Nigerian youths, including many in the diaspora, had embraced the phrase as a victory slogan. “Sai Buhari”! The phrase intrigues me almost endlessly. The over-concentration of power and authority in the current presidential order in our country is almost without equal among the liberal democracies of the world. In this column and in other sites and locations of critical political commentary, I have long opposed this over-concentration of power in the Nigerian presidency. I now raise that critique again, prompted this time by this phrase, “Sai Buhari!” “All Hail, Buhari!”

    I once again ask that constitutional and institutional constraints be placed on the over-concentration of power in the Nigerian presidency. It would surprise and delight me no end if the initiative for this comes from Buhari himself. But I doubt that it can and will. It is very rare in the history of human political institutions for rulers to trim down the scope of their power and authority to govern. And let us not forget that though he has now asked that the title, “General” be dropped from all public and private references to him, Buhari was once a military dictator. I may be wrong, but I think he will be nothing like what he was when he was an absolute military ruler. But all the same, the move to curb his power and authority as President will not come from him. Neither will it come from the politicians of both the new ruling party and the opposition parties. This is because almost without exception, all our politicians and political parties live and feed on the patrimonial order that vast concentration of power and authority in the presidency and the state governorships makes possible. Thus, the move to cut down the powers of our rulers, starting from the Presidency, must start from us, the people.

    As we celebrate in moderation and with cautious optimism today, May 29, 2015, let us reflect on the fact that the task of pulling the economy and the country out of the almost bottomless pit of hardship and suffering into which the PDP era has plunged them will demand sacrifices, huge and protean sacrifices. This is indeed the thought that most troubles me in these reflections. Let me explain what I mean by this observation.

    First of all, I do not think that most Nigerians recognize the sheer scale of the sacrifices that need to be made to turn the country and the economy around. Wastefulness and squandermania reside not only among the political and economic elites; they have percolated into the ranks of the masses of our people. There is little appreciation of the fact that the wealth of the nation, when not socially reproduced through the expansion of value-added economic production, is close to the poverty of the nation and all its peoples, the rich and the poor, the elites and the masses. I mean, what is the value of “wealth” for any and all the citizens of a country in which the most elementary amenities of modern life are grossly inadequate, both in supply and in quality?

    The most important point of these reflections is my deeply troubling regret that our peoples and the organizations that stand in solidarity with their hardships and sufferings do not emphasize strongly enough that the sacrifices that have to be made at this historic turning point of our country’s political affairs should come primarily from the rulers. How validly can you ask a people who have been doing nothing else but make compelled sacrifices to their rulers’ endless greed to get ready to make yet more sacrifices? Indeed, what moral authority, what spiritual capital do politicians and political parties in our country have for them to call our peoples to make sacrifices?

    I make this point especially in the context of the cultural and symbolic significance of the value of sacrifice and sacrificial themes in all our religious and metaphysical traditions, both the traditional religions and the Abrahamic traditions of Islam and Christianity. In these traditions, our peoples are perpetually called upon to make offerings, to make sacrifices in order to obtain divine or providential grace and favour. Well, for once and in the real world of this new and historic turning point, let us ask the new rulers what sacrifices THEY will make first before asking the people to get ready to tighten their belts. For believe me, if they haven’t already started to do so, they will sooner or later be asking YOU to get ready to make sacrifices.

    And so today I celebrate – in moderation and with cautious optimism. And I ask: this time around, who will be doing the sacrificing? Who will be the “sacrificer”; who will be the “sacrificed”?

  • How large will Buhari’s Federal Executive Council be and what will this portend?

    How large will Buhari’s Federal Executive Council be and what will this portend?

    Morning shows the day 

    Traditional aphorism common to all cultures

    With 31 Ministries and 39 Ministers and/or Ministers of State in the outgoing Jonathan Federal Executive Council (FEC), Nigeria has one of the largest Councils of Ministers in the world. Consider the following comparative figures: China, with a population of 1.4 billion, about 20 Ministries; United States, population 320 million, 17 Ministries; Russia, population 142 million, about 22 Ministries; Brazil, population 200 million, 24 Ministries; United Kingdom, population 64 million, about 23 Ministries. Meanwhile, please note that without exception, all of these countries have GDP’s and per capita incomes that dwarf Nigeria’s figures, even with all of our oil wealth. Also, with the exception of only the United Kingdom and Russia, all of these countries have populations that are larger than our own 170 million. Moreover, please note that with every Minister or Minister of State in our country, there is a phalanx of auxiliary staff ranging from highly paid PA’s to low-wage personnel, all maintained at public expense. With all these figures and facts in mind, it becomes pertinent to ask whether a bloated Federal Executive Council has come to stay for good in our governmental system such that when the incoming President after May 29 announces the members of his cabinet we will not be surprised at all if they are as large or even larger than Jonathan’s FEC.

    There is a particular historical and ideological dimension to this profile of our bloated and costly federal ministerial system that is worthy of note. Simply put, this is the fact that we have not always had a bloated FEC; more precisely, we have not always felt that we needed a bloated FEC. Anyone over 50 will remember a time in our country when Federal Ministers were less than a dozen. Some might of course argue that 50 years ago, we were far less than 170 million people and did not have as much of the oil wealth that we now have. But that argument does hold up to standards of rigour at all since increase in population and wealth are not the main reasons usually given for the expansion of the FEC in Nigeria. That reason, that logic is, simply, that we must have an FEC that reflects the “federal character” of our country and its government, thus making it mandatory to have at least one representative from each of the 36 states of the federation.

    Now, I don’t think that this has the status of a constitutional mandate, but this has not stopped it from being the ultimate weapon against calls for scaling down the size of the FEC. In other words, “a Minister or a Minister of State from every state in the federation”: that is the rationale, the logic of the literal-minded and spurious “federalism” that undergirds Nigeria’s bloated federal ministerial order. Who does not know that even as this piece is being read upon its first publication on Sunday, May 24, 2015, delegations have been going from all corners of the country to Buhari and his Transition Committee to lobby for the appointment of their “sons” or “daughters” to positions in the FEC and other plum federal parastatals?

    The big question is this: will Buhari continue this false and wasteful “federalism” of a Minister or Minister of State from every state in the nation? Will his FEC be as big or be even bigger than Jonathan’s? And behind that question is this more revealing question: what does the size of the FEC – whether expanded or reduced – portend for what we may expect from our new ruling party, the APC? Since this will be one of the earliest consequential actions of Buhari as the new President and the APC as the new ruling party, what portents can we discern one way or another if the FEC after May 29 is significantly smaller or bigger than Jonathan’s outgoing FEC of 39 members?

    Since our present presidential system of government was very deliberately patterned on the American system, it might be helpful to reflect on the vast disparity between the Americans’ 17 Ministries or Portfolios and our own 31 under Jonathan. [By the way, 31 is not the absolute upper limit for our FEC; that number was exceeded many times during the reign of the PDP from 1999 to 2015] With a landmass much bigger than ours (3.8 million square miles to 356,700 square miles) and a population figure much higher than ours (320 million to 170 million), the Americans make do with only 17 ministerial portfolios. A simple answer to this disparity might be a suggestion that the Americans have a nation whose long historical evolution has placed way beyond the need to reflect its federal character in the number and representativeness of its Federal Ministers or, as they are called, “Secretaries”. But this argument is false and unsatisfactory.

    Like us, the Americans also have great expectations that their country’s public institutions should reflect the multiplicity and diversity, the “federal character” if you wish, of their country’s peoples and communities. But they don’t use this need, this compulsion as a means to sacrifice efficiency, public good and perhaps above all else, the creation and accumulation of wealth. Let us be very, very plain speaking about this: in America, any “Secretary” in the Federal Administration who, in one way or another, places wealth creation in jeopardy would not last long in his or her position.

    The greatest indictment against the bloated size of the FEC under the reign of the PDP is that its size was inversely related to the negligible quantum of wealth and public good that it produced. All over the world, the mark of the worth of every national executive or ministerial council is the effective delivery of services and the enhancement of public good. Other than rigorously reflecting the “federal character” of the country, Obasanjo’s, Yar’ Adua’s and Jonathan’s FEC’s, with few exceptions, were all remarkable in under-achievement and mediocrity. Wealth was not only not created by them, it was dissipated on a colossal basis. We recall here the portentous words of Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, arguably the brightest and most technocratic of the PDP FEC’s, that corruption and mismanagement were so endemic in the government of which she was a member that she would be quite satisfied if by the end of her term in office she had managed to reduce the scope of the waste by a mere 4%. In the years of PDP’s reign, the performance of secondary school leavers at NECO and WAEC exams were abysmal in failure rates; and yet not a single Federal Minister of Education raised an alarm at the precipitous crisis, not to talk of resigning as an honourable act of acceptance of responsibility.

    Apart from the received or perceived need to reflect the federal character of the country, in forming his FEC Buhari will be labouring under the immense weight and pressure of rewarding Party faithfuls and benefactors. Hopefully, he will also be looking across the length and breadth of the land for the best brains, the most requisite incarnations of expertise and the most dedicated patriots. The driving logic of this essay is the thought, the wish that Buhari ought to know that he has no obligation whatsoever to have a bloated FEC. As I showed in the beginning section of this piece, there are many nations on this planet with much larger landmasses and much higher populations that do quite well with ministerial councils half the number or size of our own FEC. This is not asking us to do away with the need to reflect the federal character of our country. Rather, it is an argument that there are much better and more productive ways of expressing and consolidating our constitutive federalism. One of these is the equitable distribution of development projects and enterprise zones to all parts of the country. Against the logic of such projects, having an FEC of 39 members or more is a myopic and backward form of “federalism”.

    In bringing this piece to a conclusion, I would like to draw the reader’s attention to perhaps the most expressive and visual justification of our seeming need to have bloated FEC’s as a confirmation of the “federal character” of our government. I am sure that everyone reading this essay has seen it many times, perhaps without reflecting too much on it. This is nothing other than the glitzy photo-ops that every meeting of the FEC provides for the gratification of its members and the edification of the whole country and perhaps the world. In these photographs, the sartorial elegance, brilliance and diversity of the country is on display. Flowing, billowing babarigas and agbadas in dark shades of blue and black stage a dalliance with bright, flaming tones of red, yellow and green smocks interlaced with golden or silvery embroideries. We are indeed a people whose cultures of dressing and sartorial display bespeak self-respect, dignity and power. Nothing captures this better than the photo-ops provided by the opening meetings of the FEC. But behind the scenes of splendor are of course the sordid realities of our FEC’s stultifying mediocrity. Buhari has a reputation for simplicity and self-restraint, but I do not know whether he will extend this to a parting of ways with the specular extravagance of the PDP’s FEC meetings. We shall see!

    So compatriots, watch out: if Buhari puts in place an FEC swarming with new portfolios and higher numbers, know that this will in no way constitute a definitive and irreversible commentary on his administration; but it will be a portent, an eloquent one at that.

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Even as it goes into the darkness of oblivion, PDP is turning on all the lights of wanton, catastrophic misrule

    Even as it goes into the darkness of oblivion, PDP is turning on all the lights of wanton, catastrophic misrule

    Will the last person to leave please turn off all the lights?
    Universal mantra of energy-conserving organizations and enterprises

    You see it as a slogan, a legend boldly written on the walls of many rooms of energy-conserving organizations or enterprises: will the last person to leave please turn off all the lights? Sometimes, it is expressed, not as a question but as a categorical demand: will the last person to leave please turn off all the lights! High energy bills cut into the profit margin of enterprises. With organizations that are not profit making, the underlying logic is the same: the operating capital of the organization must be spent wisely otherwise the organization’s future may be compromised irreparably. More generally, this slogan or mantra is part of the “Green” culture and thought of conservationists all over the world: the resources of our planet, though renewable, are not infinite in supply; we must use them with consideration for the needs of those who will come after us, just as those who came before us did a lot of conservation so that we of present, living generations could have resources to consume. In other words, the logic of our mantra is this: turn off all the lights when you leave at the end of the day so that tomorrow there will still be lights to turn on. Our defeated ruling party seems either utterly unaware of or completely indifferent to this wisdom of prudent organizations and enterprises, this wisdom, indeed, of the ages.

    The most rampant and notable manifestations of this reverse or counter-logic of the PDP to conservation of resources for the incoming, successor administration and future generations of Nigerians can be seen in the spate of last minute projects and procurement of foreign loans that the party, both at the federal and state levels began to launch or announce after its defeat by the APC. Coupled with these are last minute appointments of its chieftains to posts that carry with them, explicitly or implicitly, considerable financial remuneration. A case in point in this regard was the announcement two weeks ago of the appointment of a large group of new Pro-Chancellors and Chairmen of Councils to our federal universities. I shall come back to this particular item later in this piece. For now, let me turn my attention to what I consider the most portentous and unconscionable item of all, this being the announcement barely three weeks ago of the commitment of our country to the construction and commissioning of nuclear power plants through the signing of a joint venture agreement between the Nigerian Atomic Energy Commission (NAEC) and Rosatom, a Russian state-owned corporation that builds, commissions and maintains atomic energy power plants in many parts of the planet, especially in the developing world. Readers will remember, I hope, that I dealt with this issue in last week’s column. I return to it this week from a new and very urgent perspective.

    This new perspective can be indicated with this question: why is it the case that NAEC made the announcement of Nigeria’s commitment to a “nuclear future” in electricity power generation at the very end of the life of the Jonathan administration and the rule of the PDP? As I revealed in last week’s column, NAEC came into existence in 1976; and for years now its CEO, Dr. Franklin Osaisai, has been going around Africa and the world making flowery and improbable declarations about a rosy and necessary future for atomic power plants in Nigeria and Africa. But for more than four decades, nothing concrete, practical and definitive was done about these declarations until less than a month to the end of the PDP as a ruling party. From this, we are left with no other conclusion but this: atomic power plants are the last and most cynical bequest of the defeated ruling party to a country that has finally rejected its long period of wasteful, catastrophic misrule.

    I base this conclusion on the presupposition that Dr. Osaisai and NAEC could never have entered the agreement with Rosatom and committed Nigeria to a frightening future of atomic power plants without the knowledge and approval of the Jonathan administration. Statutorily, NAEC is responsible and reports to the Federal Ministry of Science and Technology; it cannot and does not take any actions and decisions without that Ministry’s approval. So far, at least in media reporting of the agreement between NAEC and Rosatom, no mention has been made at all of the Ministry’s involvement in the brokering of the agreement. But neither has a disclaimer come from the Ministry. Knowing how terribly dysfunctional, messy and rudderless administrative processes have been in Jonathan’s governance style and culture, it is not improbable that the decision to commit our country to a future of nuclear power plants was made completely without any due and proper administrative processes. My guess is this (and I admit that it is only a guess): having dreamed and talked for years and decades about nuclear power plants in Nigeria, NAEC and Dr. Osaisai finally saw their chance in the redoubled messiness and chaos of the dying days and weeks of the PDP and the Jonathan administration. It is this guess that furnished the metaphors of darkness and light in the title of this piece: even as the PDP slips irreversibly into the darkness of historic oblivion, it has turned on the full, frightening and spectral lights of atomic power plants in Nigeria.

    Fortunately, the lights can be turned off on the agreement between NAEC and Rosatom. In other words, a decision to commit our country to a future of nuclear power plants is a decision that should go into the darkness that will soon consume the PDP. Ordinarily, all decisions hastily and haphazardly made by an outgoing administration in the last few weeks of its life are not considered binding on the incoming administration – unless they are deemed beneficial to the country. At any rate, going nuclear in power generation when we have an abundance of natural gas and hydrological resources is nothing short of irrationalism, not to talk of the historic worldwide turning away from nuclear power plants. Thus, one of the very first things that the new administration should do is terminate the agreement with Rosatom and open the matter for full debate and review by the Nigerian public. Indeed, it is surprising that a country, any country can go nuclear without a full debate having taken place among lawmakers, civil society organizations and all interested stakeholders.

    Similar considerations apply to the appointments in the last few weeks of PDP chieftains as Pro-Chancellors and Chairmen of Councils of federal universities. On this particular issue we come to one of the most crucial things that will indicate whether the APC will be a different ruling party from the PDP. Here, nothing but the complete depoliticization of the appointment of Chairmen and members of the governing councils of our universities will show that the APC wants to establish a break with the decadent “ilabe” mentality and culture of the PDP as a ruling party. Mark my words, compatriots: if the chairmen and council members recently appointed by the PDP are removed and replaced with APC chieftains and benefactors, that will be a sure sign that things in general will not change fundamentally from the period of the reign of the PDP to that of the APC.  It is no secret in our federal and state universities that the majority of the chairmen and members of the governing councils of our tertiary institutions regard their appointments as juicy, lucrative rewards for their positions in the ruling party. For long, ASUU and all the other unions in our tertiary institutions have decried this tradition and called for its termination. This will be one of the most eloquent indicators of the genuineness of the “change” manifesto of the APC.

  • So what if Harvard is not Ajegunle?

    Ha, the travails of deadline pressures on writers of weekly columns! The deadline for this columnist is 6:00 pm every Friday. Now, I am an unretired, full-time teacher and researcher, with full responsibilities for teaching and mentoring both undergraduates and graduate students. In order to be able to keep writing this column and, especially meet my deadline, I have more or less trained myself to compartmentalize my work and time. Thus, for about four to six hours every Friday morning wherever I am in the world, I set aside everything and concentrate completely on writing my column and sending it off before the deadline. But immediately after that, I shut out the column and turn to other things in my life and my work. In general, this arrangement has worked well and productively for me. But occasionally, things don’t go so smoothly as was the case last week. How so?

    Well, last week, in a phrase that I recognized as rather unfortunate not long after I had sent off my contribution to the Editor of this newspaper, I compared Harvard University to Ajegunle, more or less implying that the rabidly obnoxious statements that were maliciously credited to Wole Soyinka in the lecture he gave on April 29 at Harvard were far more likely to be made at Ajegunle than at Harvard. By the time that that realization came to me, it was past my deadline and therefore too late for me to have the unfortunate phrase removed or changed. Well, as I feared, along came an email to me from a resident of Ajegunle taking strong exception to my invidious comparison of Ajegunle to Harvard. This proud denizen of Ajegunle was not impolite or unkind to me; rather, he merely wanted to have me know that Ajegunle is the abode of hardworking, upright citizens most of whom are not prone to expressing the sort of hateful sentiments that I wrote about in my column. To cap his remonstrating comments, our doughty Ajegunle resident offered to be my host should I be moved to come to Ajegunle and get to know the place better!

    Well, I wrote back to say that the offending phrase is much regretted. In innate human worth and dignity, Harvard has no advantages over Ajegunle, none whatsoever! My point in making the comparison was simply that in places like Ajegunle in comparison with places like Harvard, people generally don’t watch and monitor what they say, what they express about their neighbors. Harvard is, you might say, a cathedral of learning. As in cathedrals of worship, in cathedrals of learning, you don’t simply open your mouth and say anything at all that pleases you, especially in a public lecture. But that also means that what you gain in propriety you lose in human spontaneity and perhaps also camaraderie and solidarity. At any rate, let it be known that throughout my adult life, I have been equally at home in places like Ajegunle and Harvard. Indeed, Oke-Bola in Ibadan where I reside when I am in Nigeria has become in the decades since I was born and raised there, an “Ajegunle” in miniature!

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu