The Nation Newspaper

Category: Biodun Jeyifo

  • Building nuclear power plants in Nigeria:absurd joke and/or sublime terror?

    Building nuclear power plants in Nigeria:absurd joke and/or sublime terror?

    The announcement this week that Nigeria has signed a multi-billion dollar agreement with Rosatom, a state-owned Russian multinational corporation that specializes in building, commissioning and maintaining nuclear energy plants around the world predictably generated considerable concern in Nigeria itself and in many other countries in Africa and the world. The announcement was made by no other person than the flamboyant Chairman and CEO of the Nigerian Atomic Energy Commission (NAEC), Dr. Franklin Erepamo Osaisai. It is no secret to Nigerians themselves and perhaps other denizens of planet earth that we are not exactly an advanced scientific and technological nation. Some would indeed argue that breakthroughs in science and technology being virtually nonexistent in our country, we are not even a developing scientific and technological nation. That fact, coupled with worldwide post-Chernobyl and post-Fukushima fears of horrific calamities that could happen in advanced scientific and technological nations when man-made or natural disasters cause nuclear power plants to malfunction has caused many people to tremble at the thought of building nuclear power plants in our country. Indeed, no less than half a dozen people have written me this past week urging me to please take up this issue in this week’s column.

    The case for not building any new nuclear power plants anywhere in our world is at the present time more powerful than it has been in decades. As a matter of fact, Germany has not only decided to put a stop to all plans to build new nuclear power plants, it has set itself the task of gradually decommissioning the existing plants. In France which has the highest number of these plants in Europe, there is an intense soul-searching debate on the frightening, unspeakable risks of the country’s overdependence on nuclear-generated electricity. And in post-Fukushima Japan, the promoters of nuclear power plants are losing out in the debate between them and the rest of the country who are asking for a phased-out decommissioning of the country’s nuclear plants. This is the broad international and global context for the extremely aggressive push by Rosatom to find customers for newly built and commissioned atomic power plants in Africa and the developing world. Apparently, Rosatom has found a willing partner in our own NAEC and its nuclear-obsessed CEO, Dr. Osaisai. Dear reader, please find out as much as you can about both Rosatom and our own NAEC. I warn you in advance that you won’t find much in what they say and do to assure you that building and commissioning nuclear power plants in our country will be safe and is therefore desirable as the final answer to our perennially frustrating abiku/ogbanje generation and distribution of electricity.

    Everything about NAEC since its formation in 1976 indicates that its pursuit of nuclear-generated electricity in our country is nothing short of an absurd joke. If you visit the Commission’s website you will find that other than its CEO giving enthusiastic speeches around the world about the future of nuclear power plants in Nigeria and the African continent, there is virtually nothing on the ground to show as practical proof or demonstration of NAEC’s achievements. True enough, it has three so-called research centers, these being the Center for Energy Research and Training (CERT) Zaria; the Center for Energy Research Development (CERD), Ife; and the Nuclear Technology Center (NTC), Sheda. And it is also true that NAEC occasionally conducts what it calls 3-month Bridging Programmes (3MBP) that offer training in basic nuclear science and engineering for a few selected graduates of physical sciences and engineering from our universities. But these are all projects that are more real on paper than in real life against the background of the complete absence of nuclear technology in the economy of our country. In fact, so unreal is nuclear capacity of any appreciable scale in Nigeria that in the agreement that NAEC just signed with Rosatom, the Russian corporation will provide virtually everything in the process of building, commissioning, maintaining and possibly decommissioning nuclear power plants in our country. As a matter of fact, Rosatom will have majority shares in the ownership of the nuclear power plants that will be built under the agreement. Without wishing to stir any demagogic xenophobia in the reader, I would like to suggest that the perfect slogan for the signed agreement between NAEC and Rosatom ought to be “the Russians of Putin’s Dreams of Global Power Are Coming, They Are Coming”!

    I admit it. Apart from my total opposition to the building of any more nuclear power plants in Nigeria or any part of the African continent and the world, I also suspect that the agreement between NAEC and Rosatom is a scam and that no power plants will ever eventuate from the deal. In the first place, the first nuclear facility under the agreement will not be built until the year 2025, ten years from now. The ostensible reason for this is the fact that it takes time to plan for and build nuclear power plants. But we know also that in the course of a decade, cost estimates will be continually revised upwards. Secondly, Rosatom will be responsible for finding and generating financing for the joint venture – making the deal not so much a “joint venture” but the monopoly of a state-owned Russian multinational corporation. Thus, there are things about the whole venture that make it highly dubious, much like the absurd and astronomical wastefulness of steel production in Nigeria which, by the way, was also partnered with state-owned Russian companies.

    In ending this piece, I must also admit that I am worried, deeply worried that against all my suspicions, it might just happen that thanks to our legendary complacency, Rosatom and NAEC might eventually foist a nuclear power plant on us in Nigeria. This essay is based on the premise and the wish that this should never happen without a debate, without a struggle that involves every community, every stakeholder in our country’s economic and technological future. Perhaps the ultimate question in this debate, compatriots, is this: would you allow a nuclear power plant to be built in your part of the country? Beyond this ultimate question, there is the more rational issue of the many alternatives to nuclear-generated power that we have not exploited with adequate management acumen. And if we have been so utterly incapable of managing much safer forms of power generation and distribution, what absurd logic is driving us to try nuclear power plants?

    Could you please respond to this question Dr. Franklin Erepamo Osaisai?

    The calumny of Soyinka’s alleged diatribe against Igbos at Harvard: how lying morons are able to play on Nigerians’ worst divisive instincts 

                   First, a statement of fact: I was not only present at Soyinka’s lecture at Harvard on April 29, 2015 I was in fact the person that introduced him before his talk. Thus, I can attest to the fact that Soyinka did not say anything remotely close or similar to the vile and contemptible diatribe against Igbos that one unnamed reporter ascribed to him. Furthermore, I wish to assert the following things before I come to the more substantive section of this short piece.

    First of all, if Soyinka had said any such things about Igbos or any other ethnic group in our country, I would have walked out of the lecture and I am absolutely certain that dozens, scores of other people at the lecture would have done the same thing. Secondly, no writer or intellectual of Soyinka’s stature could and would have come to a place like Harvard to express the kind of hateful and despicable things that he was alleged to have said. True, Harvard has a past that contained a lot of racism, anti-Semitism and discrimination against women and Native Americans. But from the about the mid-20th century on, the University has been a place that is extremely inhospitable to hate speeches of any kind, so much so that when Larry Summers, a former president of Harvard expressed arrogantly derogatory remarks about women in science, he lost his job. In other words, Harvard is not Ajegunle; it is not the kind of place that a writer of Soyinka’s stature and knowledge would have come to if he wanted to insult Ndigbo. And finally, as a public lecture, Soyinka’s talk was recorded and has gone into the archives of the University. It is therefore accessible to any researcher who presents valid credentials for access to the University’s archival holdings of recorded public lectures.

    I now come to the more crucial, the more disturbing part of this piece. To my mind, the unnamed person who ascribed those derisive anti-Igbo words to Soyinka – and in quotes, no less! – must him or herself be either a virulently anti-Igbo person or a moronic ethnic jingoist. Why did he or she not identify him or herself? Why hide in anonymity? Why could not this person see that the direct quotes she or he ascribed to Soyinka, in being so linguistically and grammatically crude, would not be credible to people aware that Soyinka is one of the greatest users of the English language in the world?

    This is the real issue in this carefully manufactured and orchestrated scandal: linguistic, grammatical, philosophical, moral and even simple factual veracity does not count one jot in the millennial internet. The originator of the calumny against Soyinka must have known this fundamental fact, perhaps subliminally, about the proliferation of inanities and imbecilities on the 21st century internet. For the simple fact is that unthinkingly, hordes of twitter and facebook users fell for the calumny against Soyinka, as improbable as it was and as easily disproved as it is.

    For me, perhaps the single most disturbing thing is the number of people who welcomed the diatribe ascribed to Soyinka, claiming to share the same sentiments about Igbos and defending Soyinka’s right to say openly what he presumably thinks about them in secret! The devil loves the company of good, beneficent souls! While the case of defenders of Igbo honor and dignity who rushed to condemn Soyinka was perhaps somewhat understandable, they also stand guilty of recklessness. In the face of such thoughtlessness, how are we to distinguish between genuine cases of condemnable Igbophobia like the ones expressed by the Oba of Lagos a few weeks ago during the run-up to the gubernatorial elections in Lagos from the entirely spurious and cynical case of this anonymous moron who ascribed to Soyinka palpably and demonstrably false allegations of hatred of Ndigbo?

    I end this piece on what I consider nothing short of a tragic irony. Soyinka’s lecture at Harvard on April 29, 2015 was quite easily one of the best lectures he had ever given on the political and past and future of our country. Please don’t take my word for this, those among the readers of this piece who can visit the archives at Harvard and see and hear for yourselves. Moreover as he had done in the past, Soyinka spoke with respect and barely hidden approval of MASSOB and its pursuit of the seemingly lost cause of Biafra. To a questioner, he even categorically reaffirmed the right of Biafra to have sought complete or con-federal self-determination. How ironic then that what has dominated the discussion of this superb lecture has been the inane and cynical calumny of one anonymous moron!

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Jega, Ekiti-Gate and the highly suspicious election results from the South-south and the Southeast

    Jega, Ekiti-Gate and the highly suspicious election results from the South-south and the Southeast

    In response to last week’s column, I got a long email from one of our country’s most respected professors of law and an eminent voice for egalitarian democracy in Nigeria. In essence, in his email this legal and civil rights luminary expressed great dismay at the praise I gave the INEC Chairman, Atahiru Jega. He drew my attention to the murderous violence and charade of the elections in Rivers State. How could Jega have accepted the results of the elections in that state, my dismayed interlocutor asked me? And what of the open, crude and barbaric rigging of votes in Akwa Ibom states, as shown in many video clips that have indeed gone viral on the internet? What of the absurdly inflated results from many of the South-south and Southeast states that gave PDP winners million-plus votes and opposition parties losers a few hundreds or thousands of votes? As a final expression of his great dismay, the writer of this email to me posed the following question : given these happenings and circumstances in Rivers and Akwa Ibom states in particular and many other states of the two identified zones in general, how could I have gone ahead to shower praise on Jega in last week’s piece in this column? In this piece, I am making public and expanding the scope the response that I gave to this passionate email that raised many issues concerning the recent presidential and gubernatorial elections that we cannot ignore.

    In the first place, the column last week quite deliberately linked Jega with the late Senator Uche Chukwumerije, thereby – I had hoped – giving an indication that the piece was dealing with an issue that is much bigger than the 2015 election cycle. In essence, that issue is this: how have Nigerians who have let it be known that they belong to the Left and have committed themselves to values and practices that work selflessly for equality, social justice, peace and unity between our peoples and communities, and the interests of the majority of the looted and disenfranchised in our country, how have such Nigerians actually behaved when they have found themselves in the moral and psychological wasteland of our political elites, especially since the end of the Nigerian-Biafran war? My unequivocal answer to this question was that consistently, such Nigerians have found themselves isolated in the morass of the values, attitudes and behavior of our political elites. As a result of this isolation, these otherwise idealistic and dedicated Nigerians have often been overwhelmed by the problems and crises that they have confronted.

    This was the essential issue that I explored with a great deal of moroseness in last week’s column. Thus, everything that I said both in praise and in criticism of Jega concerning his performance before and during the recent elections was framed by my concern with this larger issue. Permit me to now concretely and specifically deal with how this very broad issue pertains to the specific issues of murderous violence and blatant and crude election rigging that took place in some parts of the country during the recent elections. Specifically, we might ask the following questions: What could or should Jega have done about the violently murderous election charade in the Rivers State? Why was Jega not only silent about the revelations in the Ekiti-Gate scandal, but actually went ahead to assure the nation and the world that the 2015 elections would be free, fair and credible when the revelations of Ekiti-Gate gave clear indications that the same electoral malpractices and atrocities would be repeated in 2015? Finally, why was Jega silent about the crude voting charades involving collusion between INEC officials, the police and PDP thugs that the whole world saw on the internet in the Akwa Ibom elections, with the INEC Chairman actually accepting the results declared by the Resident Electoral Commissioner of that state?

    In a literal understanding of the term responsibility, the only person who can and perhaps hopefully will one day answer these questions is Jega himself. While we await that possibility, we can only speculate. For myself, I divide my speculation philosophically between the imperatives of “ought” and the actualities and limitations of “could”. In life, in lived experience while we are constantly and forever beset by the imperatives of what we “ought” to do, we often settle for what we “could” do among a variety of options. For the most morally upright among us, this constitutes a real dilemma. Unfortunately, most human beings of past and living generations easily settle for options available to them beyond the imperatives of what they “ought” to do. In societies dominated by political elites who operate with impunities of brutal, callous and cynical predatoriness, the scope for doing what one “ought” to is severely restricted to the point that it becomes almost non-existent in official or institutional settings. Which country in the world typifies this state of affairs in which “ought” has been almost completely eliminated from official affairs than the Nigeria of the PDP era?

    From these abstract musings, let me come to very concrete observations. Let us not be complacent in our thinking on these issues. The most that we can say in criticism of Jega’s effective non-response to the violent and fraudulent electoral charades in Rivers and Akwa Ibom states is that he “could” have stated his regrets and dismay about them more forcefully than he did. Beyond that, if he had rejected the results from these and other states “won” by the PDP where the “victories” were laughably suspicious, he would have played into the hands of the PDP hawks that had control of the party and wanted nothing more than the scuttling of the entire cycle of the 2015 elections. The organized calls by official PDP spokespersons and paid hacks, the protests and demonstrations all alleging Jega’s partiality against the PDP and asking for his removal were deliberately calculated to make use of any “blunder” by the INEC Chairman. And nothing would have served more as a “blunder” than Jega’s rejection of the victories claimed by the PDP no matter how absurdly improbable the “victories” were. The Ekiti-Gate revelations constitute the ultimate proof of this assertion. Didn’t Fayose admit that his voice was the one heard in the audio clip of Ekiti-Gate and didn’t he declare that there was nothing anyone could do about the rigging revealed in the audio clip?

    For me, one of the most crucial fictions of the recent elections was the belief, the faith that Jega, as INEC Chairman, was in control of things and as such would or could completely deliver on his promises and desires for clean, fair and credible elections. How much Jega himself believed in this fiction, I do not know. But INEC was and is not located in a netherworld in which the institutional bases exist for delivering promises made for credible and fair elections; INEC was and is still located in PDP’s Nigeria in which the entire institutional order is in an advanced state of decay. This was reflected in many of the surprising shortcomings of INEC in its organization of the recent elections, especially the considerable delay in production of the PVC’s and glitches that occurred with the card readers. To this day, I am still in great shock as to why Lagos, one of the world’s most populous cities with an estimated population of 21 million, recorded votes that were fewer than the votes returned in many states that have less than a quarter of the population of Lagos. These are all signs of the fact that INEC is a part of the dysfunctional institutional order in PDP’s Nigeria. And in a way, most of the things that baffle us about what Jega could do and did not do as INEC Chairman pertains to this perverse institutional context.

    I have been deliberately using the term “PDP’s Nigeria” in this piece. This is because I believe and hope that significant institutional reforms should and can be made in a post-PDP Nigeria. As part of such wide-ranging reform, INEC can and should become completely insulated both from control by incumbent governments and intimidation by the police, the army and their agents. This in fact will be one of the cardinal indicators of the genuineness of the APC’s promise for change and reform: will it let go of all forms and expressions of control or manipulation of the electoral process in our country or will it stick to what every single government in this country has always done, that is use incumbency in one way or another for electoral advantage over its opponents?

    Meanwhile of course, there remain the concrete and unacceptable cases of what happened in Rivers State and the revelations of the Ekiti-Gate scandal. They must not be allowed to stand as evils that we have to live with as relatively tolerable prices we had to pay for the overall victory of the sound defeat of the PDP. I suggest that their cancellation, through due judicial processes, should be first signs of the reforms that we demand and hopefully will get in the months and years ahead.

    Erratum:

    In last week’s column, I erroneously stated that I arrived at the University of Ibadan as an undergraduate in 1968. 1967, not 1968 was my year of matriculation. I have no idea where this error came from as my class of 1967 is actually the most dynamic and vibrant among all the sets of the alumni of UI. It was my friend, Dr./Chief/Chairman Yemi Ogunbiyi who arrived at UI in 1968. Perhaps I was thinking of him because he has been accorded honorary membership of our class of 1967 through sponsorship by his wife, Mrs. Sade Ogunbiyi and myself. Apologies to my co-members of the class of 1967; I have not migrated to the class of 1968!

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Uche Chukwumerije and Atahiru Jega: honouring the departed and the living of the Nigerian left – complexly

    Uche Chukwumerije and Atahiru Jega: honouring the departed and the living of the Nigerian left – complexly

    I solemnly swear to it: just a few days before the news of his death came to me, I was thinking a lot about the late Senator Uche Chukwumerije. The reasons for this were both very specific and general. With regard to the specific reason, I was thinking of the late Senator in connection with the known and unknown ramifications of the defeat of the PDP as our country’s ruling party. Of the admittedly few intellectuals and progressives in the PDP, Chukwumerije was the only one who, to the very end, I resolutely refused to see as being “naturally PDP”. Indeed, since 1999 when the PDP came to power, anytime that I thought of Chukwumerije my mind went to something Lenin famously said about the British playwright, George Bernard Shaw: “a good man fallen among the Fabians!” Lenin considered Fabians and their form of socialism fake and delusionary while for Shaw he had a deep respect for the dramatist’s intellect and politics. On account of this analogy between Shaw among Fabians and Chukwumerije in the PDP, as I reflected on what more or less seems to me to be the historic end of the road for the defeated ruling party, I felt quite keenly that this was something that I would like to discuss with Chukwumerije – though I had not seen him or spoken with him in about forty years and without knowing in fact that at that precise moment he was either dying or had died.

    In this context, the news of his death startled and saddened me immensely. This sadness was made even sharper by the controversy that almost immediately erupted with the announcement of Chukwumerije’s passing. Very few of those writing about him cared for his decades as one of our country’s most prominent, brilliant and dedicated socialists and Pan Africanists. More importantly, almost no commentator tried to wrestle with the ambiguities, contradictions and imponderables of the connection between his decades as a passionate and influential voice of the Nigerian and African Left and his deep embroilment in the last stage of his life in the often rank and decadent bourgeois politics of the PDP. For me of course there is no question that this delicate or perhaps even explosive issue has to be engaged as we mourn his passing and honour his memory.

    It was my acceptance of this difficult task that led me to the recognition that we face the same kind of challenge as we honour Atahiru Jega for the heroic role that he played in the recent 2015 election cycle. This is because, as far as I am aware, as with the life circumstances of Chukwumerije, no one has raised the possibility of there being any connection between Jega’s years as a radical, leftist academic and both the missteps that nearly ruined the performance of his duties and obligations as INEC Chairman and the courageous steps that he took to peacefully resolve a near calamitous crisis for the nation’s political survival. It is this analogy, this comparison that explains the title of this piece: we must honour these two men, one living and one freshly departed, at a moment when a landmark election once again raises for us the specter of the bad faith and self-negation that attend all who move from radical and progressive politics to the extremely divisive, corrupt and unregenerate politics of the ruling political elites of our country. For tactical reasons, I shall deliberately approach this topic from very personal encounters with the living and the departed, Jega and Chukwumerije. First then, I turn to the late Senator.

    In all, Chukwumerije and I personally met only about three or four times. Moreover, these meetings all took place in the mid-1970s. Of course our relationship continued beyond the period of these personal meetings through the short pieces I wrote for his famous newsmagazine Afriscope. Of the encounters themselves, these took place through the agency of Kole Omotoso. Before my arrival at the University of Ibadan as a young lecturer in 1975, Kole had regularly paid visits to Chukwumerije and his family at Anthony Village on the Lagos Mainland. Kole had been a junior and slightly younger contemporary of Chukwumerije as an undergraduate of the University of Ibadan. Of course, the late Senator had graduated long before I arrived for my studies in 1968. But this did not prevent me from hearing inspiring stories of his radicalism and being greatly affected by the stories. And there was Afriscope, unquestionably the most influential and professionally best produced newsmagazine of the Left in Africa in the period. For these reasons, when Kole asked me one weekend to come along with him to meet Comrade Uche, I jumped at the opportunity. And that was how the encounters started.

    These occasional weekend visits that Kole and I made to what were the combined offices of Afriscope and the home of the Chukwumerijes were, in total, only about three or four times in number. Moreover, they took place almost forty years ago and eventually marked a hiatus in which between then and now when the Senator-Comrade is gone, we never personally met again. But our conversations, our interactions left a deep and lasting impact on me. The hospitableness of Chukwumerije himself, his wife and children was of the very essence of care and solicitude in the extremely cramped space of a home that was also the offices of an important newsmagazine. Kole and I would talk with Chukwumerije late into the night, only to resume our discussions the next morning after breakfast. This round of early morning discussions would typically last until we then had lunch in the early afternoon after which Kole and I would set out on our journey to back to Ibadan.

    I remember Chukwumerije very vividly from those conversations as a brilliant man, an extremely well read and knowledgeable intellectual and a passionately committed socialist and Pan Africanist. As a matter of fact, in matters of intellect and passion for the radical and progressive traditions of the Left in Africa and around the world, when I think of Chukwumerije, almost simultaneously I think of the late Omafume Onoge. This is because in their presence, in the keen perception of their deeply ingrained and extensively researched knowledge concerning revolutionary movements of the past and the present, of Africa and around the world, you could not but be infected with their resolve and their optimism. Intellectualism of a very high order, unpretentious but deep and wide in its commitment to liberation from all the forces of reaction, injustice and darkness in our country and Africa, this was what drew me so powerfully to the late Senator in those visits to his home and editorial offices in Lagos in the mid-1970s.

    Did Chukwumerije take his radical and dedicated leftist socialism into his passionate embrace of the Biafran cause during the civil war? I frankly don’t know. My guess is that he probably did, though in the end like all others on the Biafran side who were leftists, he was for the most part quite ineffective strictly speaking as a leftist because collective struggles around trauma and survival trumped ideology in the secessionist republic. This negative dialectic became worse for Chukwumerije and other Leftists in post civil-war Nigeria. This was because in almost every instance, comrades found out that the socialism of one man or of one woman could not but be hopelessly isolated and compromised within ruling class parties that were crassly based on the lowest common denominators of excessive self-enrichment, ethnic divisiveness and opportunistic capitulation to foreign domination of the country’s economy.

    Famously, Chukwumerije was militantly and even derisively against the June 12 mandate of M.K.O. Abiola; and he served in both the Shonekan interregnum and the Abacha administration though for very brief periods in both cases. To the end, he did deny that his opposition to Abiola was based on ethnic animosity. The reason that he gave happened to coincide with the reason that Fela Kuti, to the very end of his life, gave as his opposition to Abiola, this being that his ITT connections made him an agent of the imperialist domination of our continent. As for Chukwumerije’s support of the Shonekan and Abacha administrations, we might do well to remember that other prominent Leftists also lent their support and services to those regimes. The case of the late Sam Aluko comes to mind here with his imponderable claim that Abacha was the greatest Head of State that Nigeria ever had. A lone socialist or leftist surviving with his or her convictions uncompromised in the moral wilderness, the ideological wasteland of Nigeria’s ruling class parties? Not a single exemplar of this “survival” has been thrown up by our political history and Chukwumerije was no exception to this norm. We must mourn him and honor his memory with the burden of this bitter truism.

    Atahiru Jega was, symbolically and psychically almost consumed by this negative dialectic. I had met him and worked closely with him within the collective leadership of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) in the early to mid-1980s. Like all other members of that collective, I had been greatly impressed by his brilliance, seriousness and dedication as a radical intellectual of the Left. Which is why after my initial surprise that Jonathan replaced Maurice Iwu with Jega, I came to the conclusion that Jonathan and the collective mind of the ruling party had probably chosen Jega based on their wily recognition that once leftist academics joined ruling class parties or took up positions of great authority and influence under the state, they consistently or perhaps even inevitably became tamed, domesticated. For by the time Jega was appointed INEC Chairman, he had moved from the ranks of the foot soldiers of ASUU to being one of the most highly respected Vice Chancellors in the Nigerian university system.

    Many of Jega’s missteps as INEC Chairman arose from this contradiction. I will identify only two in this discussion. One was his willingness to conduct elections with at least one-third of the electorate disenfranchised on the basis of deprivation of permanent voters’ cards. Jega’s rationalization of this decision is not unreasonable, but it is profoundly non-democratic and perhaps even counter-revolutionary. This was his explanation that in many of the gubernatorial elections before the presidential elections, only around 30% of the electorates had voted. The second great misstep pertains to Jega’s capitulation to the manipulation of the Service Chiefs, especially as this almost came to being repeated on March 28. In fact, it was precisely at that moment that Jega’s heroism emerged. For once he saw that Nigerians in their millions and the international community through very powerful spokespersons were against repetition of the postponement of the elections, Jega saw that his isolation was more apparent than real. In a literal sense he was still a lone voice in the gaggle of forces closing in on him and working for his downfall or failure. But in a symbolic sense, he recognized that the weight of the survival of the country rested on his composure under fire, his courage under the extreme provocation of desperate and ruthless nation-wreckers.

    I admit it. I have barely touched the full scope of this negative dialectic in which Chukwumerije and Jega, each standing for a departed and living comrade, conducted their affairs and engaged the challenges they confronted in the broken and destructive wilderness of Nigerian ruling class politics. But if I have achieved anything in this piece, I hope that this will be seen as having laid to rest the myth of the isolated leftist or socialist who believes that he or she remains consistent or even credible in his or her embodiment of the dreams and aspirations of a just and egalitarian social order in our country while cavorting with the looters, the wastrels, the nation-wreckers.

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Beyond May 29: as one ruling party replaces another, five things to keep in mind

    Beyond May 29: as one ruling party replaces another, five things to keep in mind

    On May 29, 2015, the Jonathan administration will hand over to the Buhari administration and the APC will replace the PDP as the ruling party. As everyone knows, this will be a historic occasion in our country’s political history because it will mark the very first time that a ruling party at the centre of power in Abuja would have been replaced, not by a military coup but through relatively free and credible elections. There were profound doubts that this could ever happen in Nigeria but all things being equal, it will literally come to pass on the 29th of May.

    For a long time, this column has been asserting vigorously that an eventual replacement of the PDP by the APC through an electoral victory would be a replacement of the party, the government in power but not of the class in power, the ruling class. I lent my support to this eventuality by relentlessly calling for the defeat of the PDP, but in a decidedly critical spirit. This is because history abundantly teaches us that when a ruling class throws out a ruling party and replaces it with another ruling party, there will be changes which may or may not be significant but which will not lead to a fundamental reordering and redistribution of power and resources between the rulers and the ruled, the haves and the have-nots. With this historic caveat in mind, I offer the following FIVE points as things to keep in mind as we move with euphoria and hope towards May 29, 2015. As a final prefatory note to these five points, let me add that the first TWO will substantially move us away from the worst and most nation-wrecking aspects of the PDP era while the last THREE points will, in all probability, prove to be very daunting and perhaps even insuperable challenges to the APC as Nigeria’s new ruling party.

    One:

    We can expect and will probably get a great reduction in the levels of corruption, waste and squandermania of the PDP era, especially at its terminal point in the Jonathan administration. Nigerians expect it and the whole world waits for it; our country’s notoriety as one of the most corrupt nations on the planet has in the last three decades been truly global in scale. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala infamously asserted that corruption in Nigeria is so deep and wide, so endemic that it could be reduced by no more than 4%. Expect Buhari and the APC to do much better than that! Expect a reduction in the fleet of the presidential jets. Expect a massive reduction in the size of the entourage that used to accompany Jonathan and the other PDP presidents to international meetings. Even expect the wasteful sponsorship of private citizens to pilgrimages to Mecca and Jerusalem by state and federal governments to be discontinued, not gradually but “with immediate effect”.

    Do not expect, but don’t be surprised if Buhari moves to slash the astronomical salaries, allowances and emoluments paid to our law-makers, these being the highest in the world. Finally, don’t expect but do not be surprised if Buhari also moves to substantially reduce the recurrent expenditures of the state and federal governments while concomitantly increasing capital expenditures for development projects. Expect these changes in the scale of the culture of corruption and waste of the PDP era because these are the “easy” challenges that corruption poses to us as a people. Don’t expect that Buhari and the APC will take on, and if they do, will be able to successfully engage the structural aspects of corruption at the present time. For that, compatriots, you must wait for a future stage in the emergence and evolution of the APC as a new and truly progressive ruling party in our country – if that ever happens.

    Two

    Expect a noticeable change in the style and culture of governance in a post-PDP Nigeria. We are rid, hopefully forever, of the thugs, the nonentities and the glorified “area boys” who more or less represented the expressive face of power and sovereignty in the PDP era. The Fayoses, the Fani-Kayodes, the Obanikoros, the Orubebes, the Ubahs and the Okupes will go into the night and vanish from the seat of power in Abuja after May 29 and it is highly improbable that APC will promote its own large corps of thugs into the same kind of eminence that they had in the PDP era. It is highly unlikely that Aisha Buhari will be anything like Patience Jonathan, since in fact no Nigerian “First Lady” ever remotely approached the level of uncouth and maniacal love and display of power of by the infamous author of “dia ris god o”.

    The new rulers are no saints; indeed, many of them decamped from the moral sinkholes of the PDP only at the very last moment and so they carry with them the miasmic scent of the ordure within which they wallowed for so long in the defeated ruling party. But don’t expect the level of barefaced, cynical lying and deceitfulness of Jonathan himself, the chieftains of the PDP and the official and unofficial spokesmen of the party and the government. We will not get from the APC ringing declarations that millions of jobs are being created while, in fact, scores of millions of our youths are jobless. Hopefully too, we will not get from Buhari and the APC the level of impunity with which the PDP responded to the revelations of the Ekiti-Gate scandal, an impunity which I converted to the phrase, “wetin una fit do?” from Nigerian Pidgin. We are unlikely to get true bourgeois or even traditional African civility with the coming into power of the new ruling party, but at least we will not have a new breed of neo-fascist megalomaniacs in Aso Rock.

    Three    

                   The change in the relationship between the incumbent president and the presidency as an institution will not change much if at all in the months and years after May 29. This is because the APC does not present us with a meaningful departure from the degeneration that has completely overwhelmed political parties and the party system in Nigeria in the last three or four decades. Perhaps the most consequential effect of this decay is the fact that incumbent presidents in our country since the end of military dictatorships in 1999 have all had far greater power and authority than both the ruling party and the presidency as an institution. This highly personalized and patrimonial structure of governance, this extreme concentration of power, authority and patronage in one man will not change significantly under the APC, unless of course the party undergoes a profound transformation from its origins and antecedents. I may be wrong, but nothing that the APC has said and done so far convinces me that this will happen. The only slightly hopeful portent that we have is the fact that there are a few genuinely bright and humanistic thinkers and visionaries in the party. But their ranks within the party are too thin, their critical mass too insubstantial.

    Perchance Buhari will smile more often than he did as a military dictator; perchance he will listen more to his advisers and be more accountable to the populace than he was when he governed as an unelected, absolutist ruler. But such hopes rest dangerously on the unspoken and unacknowledged acceptance of the supremacy of the president over the presidency and the ruling party. This is more or less a feudal, pseudo-bourgeois conception and practice of democracy. The big question here is: will Nigerian democracy move into the modern bourgeois or post-bourgeois age under the APC?

    There is also the feeling that with Buhari’s victory, power has returned, so to speak, to the North having stayed in the South for more than a decade since the return to formal civilian democracy in 1999. Coupled with this is the fact that one of the three historic power blocs in the country, the Southeast, is largely absent from the electoral plurality that enabled the political victory of the APC over the PDP. If the party system remains unreformed, if the president remains supreme over the ruling party and the presidency, and if the presidency itself remains unreconstructed, these two particular issues will prove extremely fraught for the peaceful, united and equitable functioning of democracy in the post-PDP period.

    Four

                   Ultimately, everything comes down to genuine and far-reaching economic and social reforms in the post-PDP era. The most apparent and urgent site of these reforms pertains to the complete overhaul of our infrastructures, with special regard for the generation and distribution of power and the construction and maintenance of good, motorable roads across the length and breadth of the country. Don’t we all dream of the day when modernity would have finally taken root in our country and power would be reliably and affordably available to all our peoples?

    Beyond such fond dreams, infrastructural transformation in the power and transportation sectors of the economy can act as the ultimate guarantor of job, food and health security for the vast majority of our peoples beyond the narrow circles of the economic and political elites. In other words, beyond the inherent and incalculable benefits of complete and effective electrification of all our towns and cities, all our villages and hamlets, cheap and available power can and should act as the engine of growth and development for the entire West Africa region.

    The great obstacles to this potential are the relentless looting and the squandermania through which “legal” and illegal massive transfers of the bulk of our national or collective wealth are made to the private coffers of the few at the expense of the vast majority of our peoples. The classic economic term for this is primitive accumulation. Can the APC as a ruling party historically take Nigeria and its economy outside and beyond primitive accumulation? This question is not as abstract as it seems. Posed differently and concretely, the question asks us to wonder when the day will come when the vast majority of our men and women of great wealth will make their fortunes from genuine and productive entrepreneurial activities and not from legal and illegal handouts from government. No policy statement, no vision of economic growth and development that I have personally read of or heard about from the policy wonks and spokesmen of new ruling party indicates that the APC recognizes that the ‘legal”, structural forms of corruption are just as harmful and condemnable as  the illegal, sleazy and much talked about forms.

    Five

              Nigeria in the post-PDP era will command respectful and beneficial attention from the oil conglomerates working in our extractive industries and the world of global capitalism in general if and when our oil resources are converted into engines of growth and development in our country and in our region of the African continent. In the short run, the inanities of the PDP era will perhaps be overcome and both our trading partners and the world at large will stop taking advantage of our self-inflicted weaknesses while staring in mocking unbelief at the scale of our rulers’ corruptibility and mediocrity. But at this point in time, it is a debatable proposition whether under our new ruling party we will become one of the national economic powerhouses in Africa and the developing world, one of the truly just and egalitarian bourgeois or post-bourgeois democracies on the planet.

    In the weeks and months ahead, this column will return in greater detail to each of these five points. Meanwhile, let us hope that May 29 will at least lead to the eradication of the worst features of the long misrule of the PDP at the centre of power in our country.

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Democracy armed and hooded; time to begin to disarm and strip away the hood

    Democracy armed and hooded; time to begin to disarm and strip away the hood

    It took me a long time to get a full grasp of why the heavily armed and hooded civilian thugs and paramilitary operatives of the Department of Security Services (DSS) that were used by the PDP to cow the opposition and intimidate the general electorate in the Ekiti and Osun states’ gubernatorial elections of 2014 angered and revolted me beyond what words could express. At the time of these elections, I was far away in Germany as a Senior Research Fellow at the Free University of Berlin. For this reason, the distance from home perhaps greatly accentuated the emotions stirred in me by the accounts that I read and the images that I saw on the internet of these armed and hooded civilian and paramilitary thugs. It was bad enough, I thought, to use the privilege of incumbency to deploy men of the DSS to overwhelm the opposition. But why use hooded disguises? Did it not matter to the PDP that hooded and heavily armed men in the uniform of the state’s security services looked completely out of place in elections meant to be free, fair and open?

    Indeed, many questions raged in my mind. Why did the government, the PDP need to hide the faces of some operatives and not of others?  Were the hooded men actual members of a special unit in the DSS who had to be masked, who had to be hooded precisely because they were placed above all professional, legal and constitutional constraints – as some opposition politicians alleged? Were the hooded men even members of the DSS? Were they not civilian thugs deliberately hooded to hide their clearly illegal and sinister deployment within the DSS? After all, at the height of the Ekiti and Osun 2014 elections, many PDP chieftains went around with heavily armed and hooded thugs. What sort of democracy is it that openly and brazenly paraded and used hooded thugs right in the storm centre of armed state security operatives at the critical moment of elections intended to consolidate the moral and constitutional legitimacy of our democracy?

    It is important to emphasize here the fact that all these questions and the brooding musing that they stirred in my mind in mid-2014 all occurred before the revelations of the Ekiti-Gate scandal. With Ekiti-Gate, we finally found out that to the now defeated ruling party, there were absolutely no demarcations in the use of the army, the police, the DSS and the personal thugs of PDP chieftains to rig the Ekiti governorship elections; they were all not only interchangeable but closely coordinated. In other words, things that had baffled me in the images of the armed hooded goons of the DSS and the chieftains of the PDP became palpably understandable after the revelations of Ekiti-Gate. What do I mean by this assertion?

    Remarkably, the PDP was not only completely unembarrassed by Ekiti-Gate, the party in fact became emboldened by the revelations. After an initial denial, Fayose quickly admitted that it was his voice that the world could hear in the audio clip of Ekiti-Gate. He asked the opposition party to take the matter to court and see what happens. Jonathan went one step further and sent the name of one of the election riggers identified in the audio clip to the Senate for confirmation as a Minister in his outgoing cabinet. It was at that point that I came to the realization that the figure of the armed hooded thug, in uniform or in mufti, is the quintessential sign or symbol of democracy as incarnated by in PDP in general and Goodluck Ebele Jonathan in particular. Before bringing this piece to its conclusion with a succinct profile of this armed and hooded democracy of the PDP era, perhaps it might be helpful to deal briefly with the semiotic presuppositions of my reflections in this essay.

    In cultural theory and literary criticism as the principal areas of my professional, academic specialization, the field of semiotics interests me a lot but I confess that I am not a specialist in the field. This is why, as a sort of amateur semiotician, I limit myself to perusal of only the most resonant and iconic signs and symbols down the ages. Some of these include the Christian Crucifix, the Crescent of Islam and the Star of David of Judaism. To the adherents of these religions, these symbols evoke deep, even transcendental intimations of the ineffable. Far more secular but almost as soul-stirring for hundreds of millions of people for much of the 20th century was the Sickle and Hammer of the Communist movement, especially when supplanted on the normative bright flag of the movement. The Nazis reached all the way back to European antiquity to pluck the stultifying symbol of the swastika and it became nearly unprecedented in the symbolic power it could evoke both among fervent supporters of the Nazi movement and its most implacable opponents. In each and every one of these symbols, the image became so naturalized that the very moment one sees the symbol, like an automaton one thinks of the religion or the political movement.

    As a final word on this short review of the place of signs and symbols in some of the most influential religious and political mass movements in ancient and modern history, consider the following fact in the rather peculiar history of the Christian crucifix. Initially in Judea as a province of imperial Rome, the crucifix was regarded as the ultimate sign of a death, a fate that was so shameful, so full of ignominy that relatives and friends of anyone crucified in line with the universal perception that this was the colony’s worst from of capital punishment was more or less disowned by all connected by blood or friendship with the unfortunate victim who comes to his end on the cross. No form of death was considered more unfortunate, more destructive of one’s life and the memory of that life. It is thus one of the greatest ironies of religious and cultural history that this same symbol has been transformed into a potent and transcendent symbol of hope, redemption and grace.

    No such miraculous transformation will ever come to the image of the hooded, sinister thug in uniform or mufti as the quintessential symbol of the time of the PDP in power as the ruling party in our country. This is no doubt due to the fact that the official symbol of the PDP is the umbrella. But of greater significance is the fact that, at least as far as I am aware, no clear and indisputable image has emerged, has crystallized as the defining symbol of the years and decades of the PDP in power. There is the image of hundreds of people blown to bits in explosions that take place while the masses of poor people are scooping petrol from burst pipelines. But this image predates the coming to power of the PDP. There is also the image of the countless incidents of mass carnage on our roads. But this also did not begin with the coming of the PDP even if arguably, it rose to unprecedented levels in the PDP years.

    But think, compatriots, of the heavily armed and hooded men of the Boko Haram. That, indisputably belongs squarely and unambiguously to the PDP era. And it not only belongs to the era of the defeated ruling party, it in fact was appropriated by the PDP and used, as we have seen, by both the security operatives of the state and the thuggish chieftains of the PDP. Thus, I confidently predict that in the years and decades ahead when people think about the PDP, especially at the end of the line in Goodluck Ebele Jonathan, it is to this image of the armed and hooded thug that their minds will revert.

    It is symptomatic of the moral and functional bankruptcy of the hooded democracy of the PDP and Jonathan years that the recent successes and gains of the counterinsurgency campaigns of our armed forces were made possible primarily by hired foreign mercenaries and not through the work of the men and materiel of the armed forces themselves. The PDP and the DSS appropriated the hooded masks of the Boko Haram but lacked the morale and the effectiveness of that jihadist terror campaign. This bankruptcy, this lackluster non-achieving mediocrity was replicated on virtually every level and front of governance. The party, the government claimed to be fighting and defeating corruption even as the scope of corruption ballooned beyond all preceding levels. Claims of the creation of millions of jobs were made even as unemployment levels rose exponentially, especially among the youths, the human and demographic majority of our populace. Jonathan tirelessly mouthed his respect for law and order even as surrounded himself with an inner circle of lieutenants who showed and expressed maximum contempt for legality. Even as Jonathan himself and many of his megaphones touted his dedication to curbing waste, mismanagement and squandermania, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the most powerful and authoritative technocrat in Jonathan’s cabinet, stuck to her assertion that corruption was so endemic, so vastly entrenched in the government that she would be satisfied if by the end of her term in office she might have reduced the level of waste and corruption by 4%.

    Is it symptomatic of things to come that the President-Elect, Muhammadu Buhari, has expressed open contempt for the use of mercenaries to defeat the Boko Haram insurgency? I suggest that we must see the use of mercenaries by the military under Jonathan as another form or variant of the deployment of hooded and armed men in elections. The “hood” in this case is symbolic, not literal: most knowing commentators are aware of the existence of the foreign mercenaries but very few are talking about them. It is a very high benchmark for the dismantling of Jonathan’s hooded democracy that Buhari is setting himself by asserting that his administration will defeat the Boko Haram insurgents not with foreign mercenaries, but with reorganized Nigerian armed forces. One thing is clear and that is the fact that Buhari and the incoming administration will have to take the stripping away of the “hood” beyond the armed forces and its confrontation with Boko Haram to virtually all the other areas of governance and accountability in our country. This monumental challenge will be the topic of our reflections in the coming months and years as one ruling party succeeds another and clears the path for its own successes and or failures.

     

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Democracy reached a new and higher level with the elections, but at what cost and who bore the scars of the trauma?

    Democracy reached a new and higher level with the elections, but at what cost and who bore the scars of the trauma?

    We have to admit it. President Jonathan surprised everyone in Nigeria and across the world with the readiness and the grace with which he conceded defeat and called Buhari to congratulate him on his victory. Just the day before this happened, Femi Fani-Kayode, the megalomaniacal and evil-tongued Director General of the Jonathan Campaign Organization had been saying that the results being cumulatively and unofficially announced by local and international media organizations that put Buhari well ahead of Jonathan were all false. He had vigorously and falsely claimed that Jonathan and the PDP were in fact more than two to three million votes ahead of Buhari and the APC. And as if that was not enough, Fani-Kayode added that the internal figures collated by PDP field operatives showed that the party and Jonathan had won in 23 out of the 36 states in the country. Moreover, one so-called Elder Orubebe, PDP’s representative at the national election results collation centre in Abuja, had on the final day of the release of the election results and with extremely violent language, attacked the INEC Chairman, Jega for an alleged bias against his party, threatening that the PDP would not accept INEC’s figures for the results. These and other actions and words of PDP hawks gave a clear indication that Jonathan and the PDP would perhaps not accept defeat and that in all likelihood, the country was once again being deliberately set on the path of a debacle of post-election paroxysm of bloodbath and nation-wrecking mayhem.

    It is against the background of such actions and words from key figures in his campaign organization that Jonathan’s speedy and gracious concession of defeat caught most people and news organizations by total surprise. And let us bear in mind also that on the day of the election, Saturday, March 28 when the electronic card reader in the polling booth at his hometown failed to authenticate his encoded biometric identity, Jonathan had asked for patience; he had asked Nigerians to recognize that the card reader hitches were just that – hitches that did not amount to an overall condemnation of the elections. Finally, still on that same day, Jonathan had urged Nigerians to accept the results of the elections regardless of who won or lost.

    Those who are familiar with the extremely negative profile that this column has painted of Jonathan and his administration over the years would no doubt be surprised by the fact that I am hereby joining my voice to the voices of the great number of people that have given the President high praise for the magnanimity of his acceptance of defeat rather than following the inclinations of the fascist hawks in his party to plunge the country into chaos and bloodshed by a rejection of the will of the Nigerian people as expressed in the decisive victory they gave Buhari and the APC. So why then am I myself now singing the praise of Jonathan? Have I, like my good friend of many, many decades, Odia Ofeimun, seen the light and have come to realize that, as Odia put it, Jonathan is the very best president we have ever had in this country? Absolutely not! My reason for sincerely acknowledging and praising the generosity and maturity of Jonathan’s repudiation of the nation-wrecking desperadoes in his party and campaign organization is precisely to do just that: give the man his due and acknowledge that he will perhaps always be remembered for this extremely gracious final political or electoral act of his time in power. But there is another reason for joining the chorus of praises for the president on this one decisive act and it is the fact that I want to use that acknowledgment to raise the wider question what it cost Nigeria and Nigerians to be taken through desperation of national survival of such extremity that only Jonathan’s gracious act and nothing else could have averted great catastrophe. Moreover, I wish to raise the issue of who paid the price and will in future bear the cost of the kind of post-election trauma that we have just gone through. Is it likely to happen again? If not, what should we do to make its recurrence unlikely or perhaps even impossible? So while we all give praise to Jonathan for that act of great maturity and statesmanship, these are the sorts of issues that we must not ignore, that we must not bury under the psychic weight of relief that we all felt when Jonathan chose not take the preferred destructive path of the Fayoses, the Fani-Kayodes, the Orubebes and the Obanikoros of his party.  I think it is best to explain what I have in mind here by using the analogy of what the costs are and what is at stake when a patient survives a life-threatening surgical operation for a deadly cancer.

    The hope of all cancer survivors is that the survival will last and that the cancer will not come back. For this, the lucky patient must do everything possible to avoid carcinogenic agents and lifestyle habits that encourage cancer. And of course he or she must continue to take the prescribed medications. Now, it takes no great act of wisdom or perceptiveness for anyone to see that it has been a deeply and widely cancerous democracy that we have been having since the return to formal democratic governance in 1999. In the present discussion, I will limit myself to only the electoral process.

    We all remember the elections held under the supervision of the previous INEC Chairman, Maurice Iwu and his boss, Olusegun Obasanjo. In that evil collaboration, there was a crucial division of labor between the two men. Obasanjo’s part was to use money and the police and the army to either buy votes or intimidate opponents and the electorate into fear or submission. For his part, Iwu’s role was to deliver the votes and deliver them big. Now let us be clear that Jonathan not only continued this party tradition of using funds from our national coffers to buy votes, but he took the practice to absolutely new and unprecedented levels. For instance, most of the 2.53 trillion naira oil subsidy mega-scam of 2011 went to the slush funds for Jonathan’s 2011 election campaign. In the current electoral cycle of 2015, it appears that the President went far beyond that already extraordinary scale of 2.53 trillion naira since dollars, not the depreciated naira, was the currency of vote buying. Now my central point here is, regardless of the praise for Jonathan for his post-election magnanimity, we MUST know how much of our money he spent this time around. For not a kobo – or cent – of that money is his father’s money; it is yours and mine and we have a right to know. In the exercise of that right, perhaps we might finally come to a constitutional ban on the use of public funds by all present and future incumbent governments to buy votes. This practice of the unrestricted use of public or state funds for election campaigns is without doubt one of the most carcinogenic agents afflicting or threatening our fledgling democracy. And the cost to the economic and social wellbeing of our peoples is incalculable.

    Equally carcinogenic is the use of the police, the army and all kinds of quasi-official militias by Jonathan and the PDP to intimidate and cow both opponents and the general electorate. The scale of this abuse of incumbency for political or electoral advantage must be fully revealed. There is the specific case of Ekiti-Gate. That case must now be formally opened and brought to a conclusion that will serve to strengthen our democracy. The incoming administration must not be blackmailed by charges of witch-hunting or revenge mongering, especially when and if such charges are couched in the form of accusations of bad or mean spirited recompense for Jonathan’s act of magnanimity in that swift and decisive concession of victory to Buhari. The one does not cancel the other: yes, we must praise Jonathan for that one act; no, we cannot, we must not let any incumbent government ever again use the police and the army to pervert and distort the electoral process. Let us not forget that it is the people, in their tens of millions who bore the brunt of the state sanctioned violence that the PDP, in the years of its rule, routinely used as one of its choicest means of staying in power.

    The thing that personally nauseates me the most is the use by Jonathan and his campaign hawks of hooded paramilitary operatives side by side with the regular units of the army and the police. I do not know if these spectral and sinister forces were used in the elections of last weekend, but they were widely used in the 2014 gubernatorial elections in Ekiti and Osun States. Hooded paramilitary operatives? It seemed to have come from the lowest common denominator of the melodramatic imagination of Nollywood scriptwriters and film directors. But it was real enough and it came from Jonathan’s Aso Rock.

    These are all preliminary observations and reflections on the presidential elections of 2015. We are all greatly relieved that it ended well and there are no looming specters of bitter and divisive verbal and physical warfare on the horizon. In the weeks and months ahead, there will be time enough to turn our attention to the more weighty problems and challenges that the change from one ruling party to another will bring to our country and our peoples throughout the length and breadth of the land. I cannot end this piece without saying this: for me the real heroes of what happened last weekend are not Jonathan or Buhari; they are the millions of Nigerians who resisted intimidation, force, coercion and bribery to send the PDP packing. Let APC take note of this. What has been done to the PDP may or can be done to the new ruling party if no real or meaningful change takes place in the years ahead.

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Between ourselves and our institutions and between Marx and Rousseau: election eve reflections (2)

    Between ourselves and our institutions and between Marx and Rousseau: election eve reflections (2)

    Man’s conceiving is fathomless. His community will rise beyond the present reaches of the mind. Orisa reveals destiny as – self-destination
    Wole Soyinka

    What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared with what lies within us.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson

    At the end of last week’s beginning essay in this series, I posed the following question with the promise that it would b the starting point for this week’s concluding piece: Who among genuine, independent-minded patriots in our country today think that we first have to change the character, the morality of a Fayose, a Chris Ubah or a Musiliu Obanikoro from within before we can make our present constitutional and institutional arrangements give us free, fair and credible elections? In case the basis for my citing these particular persons is either not clear or is perceived as a reflection of a partisan promotion of the electoral interests  of the APC, the main opposition party, let me  quickly make some clarifications that would better reveal my purposes in this series.

    As nearly every knows, Fayose, Ubah and Obanikoro are the main anti-heroes of the Ekiti-Gate electoral mega-fraud.  Well then, consider the following developments after the exposure of these men as cynical and ruthless election riggers, developments which, in almost any other country in the world, would be almost unthinkable. First, after initially denouncing the Ekiti-Gate audio clips as fake, Fayose later admitted that it was indeed himself, it was indeed his voice that was so prominent in the clip. From that admission, Fayose then declared for the whole country and the world to hear that he was not taking anything back from what people heard him say in the audio clip and that if it likes the opposition party, the APC, could take the matter to the law courts. This completely leaves out of account the fact that far more than the APC, it was the people of Ekiti State that suffered the terrible criminal wrongs revealed in the Ekiti-Gate audio clip.

    In the second significant post-Ekiti-Gate development, Goodluck Jonathan himself first said the audio clip of Ekiti-Gate was a fake. But after Fayose’s authentication of the audio clip, Jonathan then said he and his administration could and would not do anything about it because the man who secretly recorded the clip, Captain Sagir Koli of the Nigerian Army, had fled the country instead of staying to defend the authenticity of the audio clip. This is exactly what Jonathan said: “How can we do anything about it when the man who recorded it ran away”? As everyone knows, Captain Koli fled for his life. In his absence, his junior brother was arrested, kept in prison for seven months where he was severely tortured. This leaves us to wonder what would have been done to Koli himself if he had not fled for his life. To cap the series of impunities that followed the original mega-impunity of the Ekiti-Gate electoral fraud itself, Jonathan then sent Obanikoro’s name to the Senate for confirmation as Minister of State in the Foreign Ministry. And of course, against the hue and cry of both opposition Senators and the Nigerian public, the Senate President, David Mark, had Obanikoro confirmed.

    In all this we must remember that without Captain Sagir Koli, we would never have known anything about the revelations of Ekiti-Gate. The impunity with which the use of the army, the police and electoral officers to rig the June 2014 Ekiti State governorship elections for Fayose and the PDP was perpetrated in secret. Like all institutions and organs of the Nigerian state, the army, the police and the election commission, together with the women and men who serve in them, are expected to be above undue and illegal control and manipulation by anybody, no matter how highly placed. This, indeed, is the moral and functional foundation of state and public institutions in all modern societies: rational, objective, impersonal and tested bodies before which all persons whether rich or poor, educated or uneducated get equal, lawful treatment. This is why, initially, the impunity revealed by Ekiti-Gate had to be done in secret. Thus, it is a mark of the utterly corrupt and dysfunctional state of our institutions that when the secret impunity was exposed, the impunity became even more brazen and cynical. Fayose said “I am the one who said everything you heard in the tape; go to court if you wish”. Jonathan rewarded Obanikoro with a ministerial appointment which he had David Mark confirm in the Senate, in spite of the universal condemnation of the move. Nigerian Pidgin English has a wonderfully resonant term for this level of impunity and it is – wetin una fit do?

    No Nigerian Head of State has taken “wetin una fit do” to a baser, more odious and more rapacious level than Goodluck Jonathan. This says a lot because without exception, all our military dictators were, in various ways, embodiments of “wetin una fit do”. By the way, this includes Muhammadu Buhari when he was a military dictator. But Jonathan beats them all in the culture, practice and consolidation of “wetin una fit do”, whether the subject is looting and mismanagement on a grandiose scale by his appointees and cronies (remember the 2.3 trillion naira oil subsidy mega-scam?); lies and deceit to cover up mediocre achievements and lack of vision (remember the claim of having created millions of new jobs in an economy in which joblessness is at a historic high?); and gross spinelessness in meeting security challenges and the resultant crippling sense of despair in the country (remember his use of the slogan of the Chibok activists’ “Bring Back Our Girls” at the beginning of his campaign for reelection?).

    Like President, like party. Thus, no political party in our country has come close to the PDP in taking “wetin una fit do” to forms and levels that even the regime of Sani Abacha, the most deranged in our political history, did not or could not go. These include but are not limited to scrambling for political office that is as internally fierce and anti-democratic in party primaries as in local, state and federal elections; a semi-literate former hair dresser as Speaker of the House of Representatives; an illiterate political kingpin whom Chinua Achebe called “a politician with low IQ”  as the political godfather of Anambra state which has one of the highest concentrations of educated elites in the country; a thug who was rigged into office as the governor of a state and immediately proceeded to perpetrate atrocities like publicly slapping and humiliating a high court judge and making 7 members of the state assembly hegemonic over 19 members of the same assembly who belong to the opposition party.

    To this dispiriting profile of the rule of “wetin una fit do” under Jonathan in particular and the PDP in general, we must make two very crucial qualifications. One: PDP and Jonathan may be the worst incarnations, but they do not have a monopoly of the culture, practice and consolidation of “wetin una fit do”. With a few notable exceptions, all our politicians and all our ruling class political parties are implicated in the impunity of misrule, mismanagement of resources and plain and arrant looting of public coffers that PDP and Jonathan have to taken to the depths of moral cynicism. Secondly, there are areas of public institutions, utilities and services in this country that, no matter how miniscule, are resistant to the culture and practice of “wetin una fit do”. I would like to conclude this series of what I am calling “election eve reflections” with a brief discussion of these two points.

    The first point can be very easily and summarily engaged. For me, by far the most telling index of the reign of “wetin una fit do” among the generality of our politicians and political parties is the fact that it is not only the case that there are no important ideological and issue-based differences between them, they are in fact remarkably adept in moving in and out of one party to another. As I once observed in this column, in my estimation, APC is nearly three-fourths composed of former PDP members. As the particularly notable case of Nuhu Ribadu proves, part of PDP is also former APC or other opposition political parties. In concrete terms, perhaps the most eloquent illustration is the fact that, without exception, all the ruling class political parties actively and voluntarily participate in the cult of silence and secrecy around the unjust and wasteful salaries, allowances and emoluments that our legislators receive that, compositely rates as the highest that any group of legislators are paid in the world. All the governments in the country, at all levels spend far more on recurrent expenditure than on capital expenditure for development projects that could extend the national wealth to the masses of our people. Anyone who thinks that without unceasing struggle an APC victory will change this fundamental aspect of political rule in our country at the present time is in for a rude shock if the party is victorious in the coming elections.

    Nigerians in the main don’t pay much attention to this fact, but there are three crucial institutional, regulated aspects of our national economy that are, relatively speaking, free of the impunities of “wetin una fit do”. For this reason, they are worthy of our attention, of our prognoses for the future in terms of building and sustaining modern institutions that work efficiently and work for the benefit of most if not all Nigerians, regardless of ethnicity, religion, age, gender or party affiliation. These are, in a random order of iteration, the financial services industry; the communication and information IT industry; and the air travel industry, especially in conjunction with the infrastructures of airports around the state capitals and major cities and towns in the country. I do not wish to give the reader the impression that I overlook the imperfections and frustrations that Nigerians, as costumers and consumers, experience from these particular sectors of the national economy. What I am saying, what I am emphasizing is the fact that compared with almost any other institutions of the Nigerian state and society at the present time, these three sectors are relatively free of “wetin una fit do”.

    One last word in these deliberately open-ended and inconclusive “eve of elections reflections” and I am done. Please pay attention, dear reader, to the fact that these three sectors of our national economy are for the most part and in all parts of the world, vital areas of the institutional life of bourgeois democracy. Some theorists and commentators have begun to argue that Nigeria is already a developing country with a middle income economy. I don’t think we are there yet. But we are on our way there. The point is that with Jonathan and the PDP and the excesses of their “wetin una fit do” profligacy, we would never have gotten there. I mean, the likes of Fayose, Obanikoro, Ubah and oga patapata himself are nothing but incarnations of a barawo, area boy lumpen-bourgeoisie. The point now is, first, whether an APC victory would take us there and, secondly whether an APC-led bourgeois democracy can incorporate social democratic policies and initiatives that would bring unity, true federalism and social justice to our country in the years ahead. From military dictator to a bourgeois democrat with a dash of populist inclination toward social democratic leanings – this is a tall order for General Buhari (rtd.) to fulfill.

     

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Between ourselves and our institutions and between Marx and Rousseau: election eve reflections (1)

    Between ourselves and our institutions and between Marx and Rousseau: election eve reflections (1)

    Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances but under existing circumstances
    Karl Marx

    Man is born free but he is everywhere in chains. One man thinks himself the master of others, but he remains more of a slave than they are.
    Jean Jacques Rousseau

    The thing caught in Nte’s trap is much bigger than Nte.
    Chinua Achebe

    It is of course pure guesswork whether or not we are actually on the eve of the 2015 election cycle in our country. On December 24 every year – and after year – we know we are at the eve of Christmas. But there is no such natural certainty with the current election cycle in Nigeria. We were on the eve of the institutionally fixed presidential election on February 13, 2015. But ten days before that date, the elections were postponed for six weeks. Now as we move closer to the postponed dates of March 28 and April 11 for the presidential and governorship elections, the only certainty we know is that institutionally, the elections can be further postponed only at the risk of moving too dangerously close to open and blatant flouting of the Nigerian Constitution. This is because constitutionally, elections in our country MUST be held no less than 30 days before May 29 that is the date for the reinstatement of the incumbent government if it is returned to power or the inauguration of a new administration if the opposition candidate wins.

    In a country in which the institutional foundations of governance and accountability are so weak as to be virtually non-existent and so dysfunctional as to be close to what we see in the failed states of the world, we cannot be certain that we are now finally on the eve of the 2015 elections. The question that arises from this tragic dilemma on which the future, indeed the very survival of our country depends is the classic one of whether the problem is with our institutions or with us as Nigerians and, more fundamentally, as human beings. Put differently, the question we might ask is this: Is it in ourselves as Nigerians in particular and human beings in general, or is it in our institutions that must look for the reason why, with all our wealth in human and natural resources, there is so much violence, insecurity and suffering in our country, especially for the majority of our peoples? If we improve our institutions, will Nigerians behave differently and be on the whole a happier people, or do we first have to change who and what we are before we can expect to see meaningful and beneficial changes in the functioning of our institutions?

    It is very important to raise the discussion of this question to the level of the phenomenon of humanity itself because Nigerians are, for perfectly understandable reasons, quite often too predisposed to see all the things that are wrong with us as a people and with the functioning of our institutions in isolation from what has happened and is happening in the rest of the world. We may not be used to hearing this said or written about us, but we are part and parcel of some of the worst things in human beings all over the world and in the functioning of the institutions of society in modern history. Let me explain what I mean by this observation.

    Although for a completely different set of reasons and with also very different ends in mind, I am for instance struck by just how similar Republican politicians in the United States are to Nigerian politicians in general in how far they were willing to go beyond and against their country’s political institutions when they recently brought the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to address the U.S. Congress in order to both embarrass Obama and weaken or even cripple the Presidency. As I write these words, I have in mind the last ditch battles that the Presidents of both Brazil and Argentina are waging to save their careers from the gargantuan political and moral corruption that has totally engulfed their administrations. It is true that that neither of these two ladies – yes, the incumbent Presidents of Brazil and Argentina are both female – has gone as far as Goodluck Jonathan in corruption, waste and squandermania, but the similarities in the weaknesses of both human and institutional foundations of governance and accountability are quite striking. And if it is the Nigerian military on which you wish to focus for the brazenness with which it has allowed itself to be used by thugs, charlatans and moral cretins in power, there are many countries around the world in which you will find fellow travelers with our corrupt generals, Pakistan, Yemen, the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan being examples that come readily to mind. And on perhaps the most important issue of all, this being the terrible and often unspeakable suffering that the great majority of the citizens of a country experience from the combination of human and institutional failings of a cynical and criminal nature, Nigeria is in an unholy league with other countries of Africa and the world as the Central African Republic, South Sudan, Libya, South Africa, Haiti, Syria, Pakistan and Iraq to name just a few countries which might be deemed to logically belong in this particular morally and institutionally maladjusted league of nations.

    I make these comparisons for both pragmatic and philosophical reasons that actually happen to be closely linked. On the level of pragmatics, it is very important, I believe, to trim the likes of Ayo Fayose, Musiliu Obanikoro, Doyin Okupe and Chris Ubah to size. These are among the most arrant of the self-identified, maniacal kingpins of the nefarious PDP struggle to make our country’s 2015 election cycle either a non-event or a total failure. It is important, I believe, to let Nigerians know that such power-crazed people have surfaced in other countries of the past and the present throughout the world and have often been soundly defeated. When you tear off their masks of invincibility and reveal the mere human faces and failings of such unconscionable brokers of unjust, corrupt and brutish power, you raise the bar of their success far above their capabilities. Philosophically, it is important, I think, to realize that much has been said throughout modern history about the question that drives these reflections, the question of which do we change first, ourselves or our institutions. For this reason, we do not have to start from scratch; we do not have to reinvent the wheel. All we have to do is add to the inherited discourses. Permit me, then, to approach this topic through the three epigraphs of this essay from Marx, Rousseau and Achebe respectively. Since charity, as the saying goes, begins at home, let us begin with our own writer and thinker, Chinua Achebe, and his fascinating parable of Nte and the thing caught in his trap.

    The symbolic brilliance of Achebe’s parable of Nte and the thing caught by his trap that is far bigger than himself is revealed by the fact that in the novelistic setting of this parable, the character in the tale sees things only or primarily through his or her own perspectives and interests – as we all do in life. This is why what starts as a potential good fortune – catching a very big quarry in his trap – turns into a nightmare for Nte because the trap is his and his alone. However, if Nte is willing to share the meat of the ensnared quarry with his neighbors, he can call them to his aid and the quarry is no longer frightening. Before the collective will, guile and wisdom of the entire community, the thing that is caught in Nte’s trap loses its terror. Projecting to a wider frame of reference from this particular reading of the parable, we can say that like Nte, nations and the human community as a whole will always catch something in our trap that is bigger than anyone among us. In the crises of the 2015 election cycle in Nigeria we seem to be deeply afflicted by this Nte conundrum in which the collective unity that could avert a potential catastrophe eludes us. This where Marx and Rousseau come into the discussion.

    It used to be thought that Marx and Rousseau stand at two extreme polar opposites in the debates over which is more primary, human nature or the institutions of society, in how happy or unhappy we are. Marx, as may be seen from the quote from his famous monograph, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, placed the emphasis on objective circumstances: we do not make history, we do not achieve our happiness as political and historical subjects on the basis of our individual wills or desires. On the other hand, Rousseau in the famous opening sentences of The Social Contract emphasized an original freedom in our natural condition which, having been ensnared by social institutions, must be won back by a new social contract that places maximum value on this original freedom. We know now that things are far more complicated than the dichotomy between these two views indicates. We know now that we are both objects and subjects of history and politics. Furthermore, we know that being object and subject each entails both positive and negative things. For this reason, our opening or driving question turns out not to be a matter of “either or”. In other words, it is not a matter of you have to change from within before you can change social institutions or vice versa.

    I hope I am wrong, but in my opinion, far many more Nigerians think that the change has to come first from within before we can get our rulers and our compatriots in their tens of millions to obey laws and act justly, decently and in the public good. I see the present moment as a uniquely auspicious moment in which to begin to change this unspoken but iron-clad predisposition of Nigerians. Thus, concretely, I pose the question of who among genuine, independent-minded patriots in our country today think that we first have to change a Fayose, a Chris Ubah or a Musiliu Obanikoro from within before we can make the constitutional and institutional arrangements that we have give us fair, clean and credible elections? This will be our starting point in next week’s concluding essay in the series.

     

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • The bibliophile and the exegete as exemplary teacher: for Modupe Oduyoye @ 80

    The bibliophile and the exegete as exemplary teacher: for Modupe Oduyoye @ 80

    Ko si ede ti Olorun ko gbo [There is no language that is incomprehensible to God]
    A Yoruba adage on the philosophy of language

    When word came to me just this week that a symposium is to be held at the University of Ibadan next week to mark the 80th birthday anniversary of Mr. Modupe Oduyoye, my initial thought was one of profound regret that because the notice came so late, it will not be possible for me to be at the event. Then in the manner in which after night comes daylight, my feelings of regret turned to the deep feelings of reverence that I had always had for my old teacher ever since, for about three years, he taught me at Ibadan Boys High School (IBHS) in the 1960s. I am of course not the only old boy of that school that holds Mr. Oduyoye in reverence for the impact he had in the school when he taught there between 1959 and 1963. I have never met a single old boy of the school from that period who does not regard our old teacher’s impact on us as anything less than legendary. Moreover, the circle of Mr. Oduyoye’s fervent admirers is nothing short of astonishing in its breadth and reach, in Nigeria, in Africa and in other parts of the world. This is all the more remarkable given the fact that, shunning all attractions and seductions of intellectual glamour, Mr. Oduyoye has consistently been far more devoted to carrying on his monumental work on historical and comparative linguistics as a basis for unraveling some of the thorniest problems of the African past in relation to the past of the entirety of the human race. In this tribute to my old and revered teacher, I will follow the path of almost everyone I know when they talk about Mr. Oduyoye which is to tell the story from the vantage point of their own particular encounter with the teacher, the man, the intellectual.

    Of course I did not know that Mr. Oduyoye was a “bibliophile” and an “exegete” of the highest order when I first encountered him as my teacher in Forms Two, Three and Four. In fact, at that time, these words, these terms did not exist in the achieved vocabulary of my studentship at that stage of my education. All I knew was the fact that from the very first time that I sat in his English Language and English Literature classes, I felt an instant, greatly empowering validation of my love of books, reading and writing. The love of books and of reading had started in primary school days and had been greatly facilitated by my membership of the old Western Region Library close to the Gbagi commercial district of Ibadan. As I have said in a tribute to the late Professor Dapo Adelugba when he turned 70 in 2009, he and a friend of his, one Nelson Olawaye, had greatly encouraged my reading habits while I was still in primary school.

    But what Adelugba and Olawaye did not know was the fact that at home, in a very large polygamous family setting in which, at any one time, there were close to twenty children, I did not exactly have auspicious conditions for the fulfillment of my passion for reading books. Indeed, my father took the position that my “escape” into books was a way of avoiding my share of household chores – which was perhaps partly true. Thus, without being in the least aware of it at the time, by the time I entered secondary school I was in a great, almost consuming need for both the space and the validation for my passion for reading. Since Mr. Oduyoye was not the only teacher of English Language and English Literature that I had in my five years at IBHS, the thing that needs explaining is why it was he and not any of the other teachers that had such a deeply formative influence on me and most of my classmates.

    Founded in 1938, ten years before the founding of University College, Ibadan (UCI), IBHS used to have many fresh graduates from UCI as either permanent or temporary members of its teaching staff. In my recollection, none of these graduates of UCI had anything remotely close to the impact that Mr. Oduyoye had on us. He not only taught Language and Literature better than anyone else, he was in charge of virtually all the cultural and intellectual extra-curricular life of the students. He was in charge of the school library, the school’s literary and debating society, the school’s literary magazine, “Triumph”, and the school’s Students’ Christian Movement. On top of this, he dressed simply and for the five years when he was our teacher he followed the same invariant dress code of white short-sleeved shirt over white shorts. Perhaps above all else, Mr. Oduyoye was about the only teacher who, though he never used the cane, yet had the greatest moral and psychological authority with us. Certainly speaking for myself, it mattered a great deal to me that he made me one of the school’s librarians, a member of the editorial board of the school magazine, and the leading representative of the school’s literary and debating society in our contests against the other secondary schools in Ibadan. As incredible as this may sound now, none of this made me feel that I was a favorite of our beloved and respected teacher; in fact, we all knew that nobody was Mr. Oduyoye’s favorite since we all knew that he gave equal attention, equal recognition to each and every student. Rather, the positions to which he appointed me made me feel vindicated in intimations that I was then gradually and imperceptibly feeling that my future career lay in English Language and Literature in particular and more generally, the profession of an exegete, an interpreter of literary and cultural texts.

    In 1964, the year after Mr. Oduyoye left IBHS for Yale University for studies toward a Bachelor of Divinity degree which was also my last year in secondary school, I was expelled from IBHS for leading a student revolt against the school authorities. Luckily for me, my name had already been sent as one of the school’s West African School Certificate Examinations registrants, although the school authorities tried to have my name withdrawn, fortunately unsuccessfully. Although I was fairly sure I would pass the exams even though I would be taking them as an expelled student, I was in utter despair about the future. I mention this fact in this tribute to Mr. Oduyoye because his response to the letter of despair that I wrote to him at Yale about my expulsion did a lot to assure me that beyond my expulsion, in the final analysis what mattered was my belief in my abilities and my determination; as long as those were intact, he wrote to me, I could go as far as my talent and will could take me.

    The Young Shall Grow: so goes the well-known name and inscription on the buses of one of the leading transport enterprises in our country. In time, as I grew older intellectually and professionally, I began to have a clearer and deeper understanding of what Mr. Oduyoye had meant to me and my schoolmates in that most formative period of our intellectual development. This was in no small measure aided by encountering the nearly endless string of the published works of our old master himself in the fields of Biblical studies, Yoruba language, names and culture, African antiquity and historical and comparative linguistics. As author and publisher, Mr. Oduyoye is almost unparalleled in his distinctiveness among our country’s intelligentsia. At one time he was the Literature Secretary of the Christian Council of Nigeria and the publisher in charge of Daystar Press, the Council’s publishing outfit. When he retired from that position, he moved to Lagos and became the publisher of Sefer Books. In these two positions in which Mr. Oduyoye’s work as publisher and author achieved full flowering, it at last became clear to me how bibliophilia and exegesis – respectively the love or veneration of books and the interpretation of texts, especially scriptural texts – had been so central both to Mr. Oduyoye’s legitimation of my passion for books and reading at IBHS and to my eventual career as an academic. Let me explain what I mean by this, even if in a rather roundabout manner.

    Every time that I speak to a new class of graduate students, I tell them that for my doctoral dissertation at New York University, I read over five hundred plays on and by African Americans, all produced in a period of over two centuries. In addition to these plays, I read hundreds of secondary critical books and thousands of essays and articles. I then ask the almost always astonished freshmen grad students how in the world I could have managed to read so many plays, books, essays and articles in order to write just that one “book” that was my doctoral dissertation. To this question, my students typically do not know what to say. But lo and behold, the mystery, the astonishment is lifted when I tell them that the only way in the world that this seemingly incredible feat was possible was the simple fact that I loved reading so much that far from being a burdensome task, reading hundreds of books and thousands of articles was actually for me a multiplication of reading pleasure, again and again and again. This view goes to the heart of what Mr. Oduyoye contributed to my intellectual development at a very formative time in my life. It also goes to the heart of the rich legacy of his published books and monographs that will be the subject of the symposium to be held in his honor next week.

    Working in modern languages of Africa and the wider world like Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, Arabic, English and French together with ancient languages like Greek, Latin Aramaic and Hebrew, Mr. Oduyoye has for decades now been challenging seemingly settled orthodoxies on the peopling of our continent and the role of language inter- and comingling in that history. The number of texts that he traverses in this vast project are literally uncountable. More staggering are the intricacies of transformations that he uncovers between what he calls cognate forms in languages ancient and modern, African and non-African. If there is one grand theme in this vast and endlessly varied work, it is Mr. Oduyoye’s strong thesis that our languages prove that we are all far more related than we know or care to admit. This is why, for the epigraph for this tribute I have chosen the Yoruba adage that states that there is no language that is incomprehensible to God. This is, surely, a utopian philosophical proposition. But it is also something that Mr. Oduyoye takes great pains to demonstrate through the vastness of his work as one of our country’s greatest bibliophiles and exegetes. I was immensely fortunate to have been his pupil and to have very early in my studentship been bitten by the bugs of his bibliophilia and exegesis. In my time, I have proudly but diligently infected others with these bugs. Long life and health to you, old master!

     

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Election cold feet: the dying gasp of a ruling party or of the Nigerian predators’ republic?

    Election cold feet: the dying gasp of a ruling party or of the Nigerian predators’ republic?

    Cold feet: (1) apprehension or doubt strong enough to prevent a planned course of action. (2) to have ‘cold feet’ is to be fearful to undertake or complete an action.
    Dictionary.com (online)

    One of the most interesting revelations made by the INEC Chairman, Professor Atahiru Jega, during his appearance at the Senate on February 18, 2015 was the fact that for the Ekiti State gubernatorial elections in June 2014, only about a third of the Permanent Voters’ Cards produced for the election was collected by registered voters. This, in effect, means that les than 35% of PVC’s produced were collected. Although this revelation is interesting for many reasons, I will mention only three of such reasons.

    First, it shows a depressing level of voter apathy in EkKiti state, an apathy so vast that it more or less constitutes a danger to the survival of democracy in that particular state, if not indeed in the whole of our country. Secondly, it shows that in Ekiti State as in many other states of Nigeria and many other countries of the world, voter apathy provides no justification for the postponement or cancellation of elections. It is not an inspiring thing to say, but voter apathy is an aspect of electoral politics in the world, including even the most stable bourgeois democracies on the planet. The antidote for it is not postponement or cancellation of scheduled elections; rather, it is the institution of policies and actions that expand popular participation of all segments of the population in democratic governance, most especially in economic and social affairs. If the benefits of democracy reach the most marginalized, if the gap between the haves and the have-nots are significantly decreased, if people across the board feel satisfied that they have rulers who listen to them, voter apathy substantially decreases. The third and perhaps the most important reason why Jega’s revelation about the low collection rate of PVC’s in the Ekiti State gubernatorial elections of June 2014 is of great interest today is the fact that the PDP at that time was quite satisfied to go ahead with the elections despite the extremely low rate of PVC collection. Today, the story is very different and that is the thing that I wish to reflect upon in this piece.

    Of all the registered parties in the country, the PDP is the only party at the present time making noises about the collection of PVC’s. Two weeks before the formerly scheduled date of February 14 for the presidential elections, collection of PVC’s had already reached 65%, a figure more than twice the figure for the June 2014 Ekiti State governorship elections. At the present time and as revealed during Jega’s appearance before the Senate on February 18, collection of PVC’s countrywide has reached 75.9%. And yet, the PDP is shouting to the high heavens that presumably unless collection of PVC’s reaches 100%, the elections cannot and must not be held. If, dear reader, you wish to know why it was okay with the PDP to go ahead with the Ekiti State elections in June 2014 with less than 35% of PVC’s collected and why it is not okay now for the same party to go ahead with elections with 75.9% PVC collection rate, look no further than what in the title of this piece I am calling “election cold feet”. Permit me to give a few other indications beside PVC collection rate of this malaise of “election cold feet’ that, in our own symbolic Ides of March, has suddenly stricken the ruling party.

    The most dramatic dates in the etiology of this malaise that now afflicts the ruling party are February 2 and 5, 2015. As I have previously written in this column, on February 2 in Abuja and before a world press conference, the Chief of Defence Staff, Air Marshall Alex Badeh, the Chief of Army Staff, General Kenneth Minimah and the Chief of Air Staff, Air Vice Marshall Adesola Amosu all affirmed that the Nigerian armed forces were in a state of complete readiness for February 14, the scheduled date for the 2015 presidential election. They made this assertion in response to then growing rumours that the elections were going to be postponed. However, three days later, on February 5, these same men, together with the Chief of Naval Staff, Vice Admiral Usman Jibrin, completely reversed themselves and wrote the infamous letter to Jega saying that the armed forces were not ready for the scheduled February 14 date and needed six weeks in which to bring the Boko Haram insurgency to the minimum level of containment that could free the armed forces to assure countrywide security during the elections. To date, these Service Chiefs have given no reason, no justification whatsoever for why they reversed themselves. The reason for this is not difficult to discern for in what language, in what rational codes of military strategy and tactics can they explain the “election cold feet” of their Commander-in-Chief, Goodluck Jonathan. For this is what explains the gap between those fateful dates, February 2 and 5, 2015: about slightly more than a week to February 14, the President realized that the collection rate of PVC’s was not enough as an excuse to postpone or scuttle the elections and assuage his growing election cold feet; something more “weighty” and more inscrutable was needed. And for that the Service Chiefs willingly reversed the assurances they had given on February 2.

    I may be wrong, but I don’t think we have ever encountered “election cold feet” in the history of electoral politics in our country. Massive, messy and violent rigging of elections, yes. Election returns in which the figure recorded for actual voters is higher than the figure of registered voters, yes. Elections in which a declared or eventual victor happened not to have been on the ballot, yes. But never, never “election cold feet”. Thus, as the new or postponed dates of March 28 and April 11 draw nearer, the “cold feet” of the PDP, as a unique and special kind of electoral malaise, has risen to the level of a raging, feverish inferno of total unwillingness to have elections or to have elections only on terms completely controlled by the ruling party. Thus, this very week, Ayo Fayose, the Ekiti State Governor, the antihero of Ekiti-Gate, a man for whom the level of impunity in obscenity and bad faith is bottomless, Ayo Fayose has this week been screaming “sack Atahiru Jega and the skies will not fall!”

    For obvious reasons, for most people in our country and among interested forces in the larger international community, “election cold feet” is all too transparent as the disease of a ruling party that is so terrified of a resounding electoral defeat that it will do everything possible not to face the electorate. For this reason, there have been speculations as to just what it is that makes the PDP so terrified of going before the Nigerian electorate. Some talk of a power lust that is fueled by the money lust of an administration that has overtaken all previous records in the looting and mismanagement of the nation’s wealth and the public purse. Others talk of the terror of what a new administration will do to the kingpins of the PDP, the revelations, the exposures with which, for months and years, we will be inundated after May 29, 2015, the inauguration date for the new administration. Others talk of the fear, the certitude even of the bosses of the PDP that once the party loses its hold on federal or central power in Abuja, it will simply wither away as a national party since it has never forged any organic or viable links to hold it together as a party beyond the sharing of loot, the spoils of office and the actual and symbolic uses of power. All this is true and especially of characters like the Ekiti State Governor, Fayose. Where in the world can he run to after May 29, 2015?

    I suggest that we need to look well beyond the anxieties and fears of the ruling party as we ponder the ramifications of the PDP’s election cold feet. There are many reasons for this. In the first place, in the intensity of the current fierce struggles to defeat the PDP’s desperate efforts to scuttle the elections, many people are beginning to slide ever so slightly into a terribly complacent presupposition that because we are all determined to have the elections against the PDP’s calculations, we are all APC diehards. I speak for myself but I hope that I speak for many others in asserting most vigorously that my total commitment against the PDP’s efforts to deprive the Nigerian electorate of the civic and constitutional right to exercise their choice directly through the ballot box and not at the behest of the Service Chiefs is a value in itself and is not attached to the electoral fortunes of the APC or any other party. Let me express this idea in a more concrete form: I wish, oh how I wish that the PDP’s election fever is the last, dying gasp, not just of the ruling party, the PDP, but of the entire Nigerian predators’ republic that has been at the helm of affairs in our country at the center in Abuja and in the states since 1999. But I know that this is not the case. The road to that will be long and hard. This brings to my mind the Chinese adage which states that the journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step. Defeating the PDP’s election cold feet is, in the light of this Chinese adage, the first step in a long, long journey. Let that first step commence, firmly and resolutely.

     

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu