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Category: Biodun Jeyifo

In the streets, the clarity of long PVC lines; in the Senate, a mix of technocratic and voodoo logic

I admit it. When I first read news reports that in his appearance before the Nigerian Senate on February 18, 2015, the INEC Chairman, Professor Jega, stoutly refused to give any assurance whatsoever that the elections would hold on the postponed dates of March 28 and April 11, I was greatly disturbed. I was as much disturbed by Jega’s refusal as by the reason that he gave for it, to wit that there were some things that were simply out of his control that made it impossible for him to give the nation his assurance that the elections would hold on the postponed dates. As a matter of fact, it turned out that I was not the only one greatly perturbed by this news. Within a day or two of this news report, I received dozens of emails expressing the same worry that I had. Indeed, some of these emails went as far as to assert bitterly that Jega, my old “comrade”, had sold out, had succumbed to the forces willing to scuttle Elections 2015 and plunge the country into uncertain but perilous months and years ahead. It was on the basis of what these emails said that I decided to check for myself what actually transpired during the INEC Chairman’s appearance before the Senate. For this, I had to listen to several audio and video recordings of the event. In one case – the longest of these internet clips – the audiovisual recording of the event lasts for more than three and half hours. I listened patiently to all of it. This piece is a digest of what I was able to garner from the recordings of Jega’s appearance before the Senate. My worry, my concern remains, but not in the same form before I very carefully went over many short and long recordings of the event.

In the interest of briskness, let me go directly to what my concerns, my worries are now. In the course of a hearing, a briefing that lasted more than three hours, the INEC Chairman gave an account of preparations for the elections that was truly amazing in its comprehensiveness, attention to details and frankness only to then say that regardless of these preparations, the one and only collective entity that could determine whether or not the elections would hold on the postponed dates are the Service Chiefs. Well, he did not actually put it this bluntly. What he literally said is that there are things beyond his control and when he was pressed on this he said “security”. In other words, what the INEC Chairman was in essence saying was this: concerning everything else minus “security” we are in full control and in spite of a few remaining difficulties and challenges, everything is going well and we are on course to conduct free, fair and credible elections on March 28 and April 11; if we can’t or don’t conduct elections on these postponed dates, not us but “security” will be the cause.

I don’t think I have ever encountered anything more tainted by voodoo logic and politics than this! In plain language, what this means is that concerning the current election cycle of 2015, “security” is the ultimate deity and the Service Chiefs are his high priests. Indeed, Jega at one point during this extraordinary briefing of the Senators more or less suggested that we should all get on our knees and pray that “security” take pity on us when he said – about himself and INEC – “we are hoping and praying that the Service Chiefs will accomplish their aim in the six weeks that they asked for”.

At this point, it may perhaps be useful for me to direct the reader to Jega’s briefing of the Senators on the technological aspects of INEC’s preparations for the coming elections. In a commanding, masterful presentation on the technological processes involved in the use of Permanent Voters Cards (PVC) and card readers, the INEC Chairman more or less demolished the opposition of the doubters and disbelievers among the Senators, incidentally most of them from the ruling party, the PDP. He demonstrated how the new technological tools and processes that would be deployed in the current electoral cycle would anticipate and frustrate those who will try to rig the elections, people like fraudsters who are already either stealing or purchasing PVC’s. Moreover, the INEC Chairman gave ample demonstration of his and INEC’s preparedness for both human errors and frailties. About the only item in which Jega at this briefing seems to have been less than convincing and impressive was his testimony on the collection of PVC’s. More on this later in this piece. In all other respects, the INEC Chairman gave a good, perhaps even excellent account of himself. Except of course on his occultation, his mystification of “security” and the Service Chiefs as the ultimate guarantors of whether or not elections will be held on the postponed dates, March 28 and April 11. For the last time in this piece, let me speak briefly in expatiation of this particular issue.

Neither “security” nor the “Service Chiefs” is an abstraction, an objectified and impersonal avatar like God, like symbolic representations of natural phenomena or like inevitable fate or destiny. Moreover, the will, the volition of the Service Chiefs is not unknowable and inscrutable like that of God and other divinities. They are not only human beings like you and me, they are in fact human agents who have shown how deeply they are tainted by an abject, unprofessional and self-serving deference to the powers that be, in effect to the ruling party. Revelations of their partiality, their spinelessness have left them unmoved and unrepentant. For these reasons, it is nothing short of the height of voodoo logic, of mumbo jumbo thinking to ask us to hope and pray that these same Service Chiefs will have accomplished their security objectives within the six weeks they demanded. Moreover, there is absolutely no legal and constitutional basis for giving these Service Chiefs the last word on whether or not the elections should take place on either the postponed dates or any other dates for that matter. Several times in his briefing of the Senators, Jega asserted that on every disputed item of his preparations for the elections, he had consulted legal and constitutional authorities. But significantly, not once did he say that he had consulted anyone on the legal and constitutional legitimacy of making the Service Chiefs the ultimate arbiter on if and when the elections will take place.

Concerning the distribution of PVC’s, some Senators disputed Jega’s interesting and confident assertion that the problem was not with “production: but with “collection”. By this, the INEC Chairman meant that although there is a shortfall in the production of PVC’s, there is a much greater problem with “collection”. To prove this, he asserted that to date, more than 66 million out of a total of 68 million PVC’s had been produced and that people are simply not collecting them. Moreover, Jega asserted that in both the Ekiti and Osun gubernatorial elections, less than one third of PVC’s produced were collected. Finally, the Chairman asserted that the 75.9% collected out of the 66 million PVC’s so far produced is an impressive figure, one on which valid elections can be held. So far, so good, it would seem. Except that some senators countered that distribution of PVC’s by INEC officials had in many cases been shoddy and incompetent and that in many places throughout the country people show up without being given PVC’s only for them to return again and again and leave each time empty-handed. On this count, it seems that those long PVC lines that have become ubiquitous this election cycle is an apt metaphor both for the determination of many of our peoples to vote and for their votes to make a difference in their present dire circumstances and gloomy future prospects. I admit that there is a tension between what Jega is saying about the rate of collection of the PVC’s and what the Senators are saying about the epic struggles and the determination of many on those long, long PVC lines. However, a tension is not a contradiction in which one term negates the other; rather, it is an invitation to think creatively, to accord such determination respect and legitimacy.

I wish to end these observations and reflections on an admittedly somber note. Like all other election cycles, violence has already begun to rear its head in many parts of the country in the run-up to the postponed elections. Only a few days ago, several dozens of people were slaughtered in Port Harcourt. This is both highly regrettable and condemnable. Thankfully, none of the reported cases of these election-related acts of violence remotely requires the deployment of the army. Indeed, in all true and functioning democracies of the world, the place of the army during elections is – the barracks! Even in countries where the regular armed forces are conducting full scale and nationwide counterinsurgency campaigns, the army is never brought in as the ultimate arbiter of when and if elections can and will be held.

Let us be perfectly clear on this point: if INEC yields ground to “security” and the Service Chiefs as the ultimate arbiters on when and if the elections will take place, this will be nothing other than a coup, a coup that may in the first instance be bloodless but in the long run – heavens help us! – may drown our country in oceans of blood. The epic struggle, the determination expressed in those long PVC lines will not simply fade away, Professor Jega. I say this not as an apostle of doom or a lover of violence but as a student of history and human affairs. In those long PVC queues is a deep, almost bottomless reservoir of controlled violence, this being the bottled up violence caused by suffering, deprivation and injustice.

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

March 1, 2015
General Momoh (unretired), NOT General Obasanjo (retired): an open letter to the Defence Headquarters, Attn: General Chris Olukolade

It has to be restated that the military as an institution is neither as inept in the discharge of its duties nor is it being misused for political ends in the manner the retired General Obasanjo … has probably been made to believe
From statement from Defence Headquarters, Monday, February 16, 2015

Dear General Olukolade:

On one level, General, you have my sympathy. As the General in charge of information at Defence Headquarters in Abuja, your job at the present time is not an easy one, no, not by a long stretch! The reputation of the Nigerian armed forces or more specifically, the collective reputation of the top brass, the Service Chiefs, is in tatters. The claim of our armed forces to professionalism of the highest order and to integrity and impartiality in the electoral process has been severely, some would say shamelessly compromised. This is why I start this open letter to you, General, with an expression of sympathy: yours is not an easy task, this task of retrieving the army’s honour, respect and integrity in the face of the near universal contempt of Nigerians and the international community for recent widely publicized unprofessional, corrupt and dishonourable actions of top members of the armed forces.

To those reading this piece who might think that I am being sarcastic in expressing sympathy for your onerous task, General, I wish to draw the attention of such readers to the Statement that you personally made about two weeks ago on behalf of our country’s armed forces. I have that Statement in front of me as I write this open letter to you, General. It is a dignified and well composed Statement. In it you unequivocally affirmed that the armed forces of our country will remain, in your own words, professional, apolitical and non-partisan in the present electoral cycle. You stated that there were no ulterior motives in the Service Chiefs’ letter to the INEC Chairman that caused the postponement of the elections from February 14 to March 28. In fact, in the Statement you made the following ringing assertion that I wish both to endorse and to bring to your attention and the attention of all Nigerians: “No excuse will be acceptable for any act of commission or omission that tends to compromise the law or the electoral process as well as decent conduct or judgment on the part of any service personnel while discharging duties related to elections in any part of the country”.

I have said that this Statement of yours, General, is dignified and well composed, adding that it makes affirmations of dedication to professionalism, integrity and decency which every patriotic Nigerian should endorse. However, this is only if your Statement is read in a de-contextualized act that ignores things that are happening in our country at the present time that make your assertions almost meaningless if not even hypocritical, General. In support of this strong observation, I will advert to two incidents both of which cast grave doubts on the sincerity of the assertions that you make in this dignified and well composed Statement of yours. Since the first incident is the milder of the two examples that I wish to discuss, I will deal with it first before coming to the second and far more damaging incident.

First then, is the incident at the National Peace Committee Meeting in Abuja on February 2, 2015, when the Chief of Defence Staff, Air Marshall Alex Badeh, stated for the whole country and the world to hear that the armed forces were in a state of complete readiness for the elections on February 14. Indeed, in order to underscore his point, Air Marshall Badeh stated further that though the armed forces were engaged in counter-insurgency campaigns against Boko Haram, they had capabilities to ensure security for the whole country. Moreover, one by one, the other Service Chiefs present at the occasion echoed Air Marshall Badeh’s assertions: Army Chief of Staff, General Kenneth Minimah and Chief of Air Staff, Air Marshall Adesola Amosun.

Here, it is necessary to state that the Service Chiefs made these assertions in order to quell rumours that were already circulating that the elections were going to be postponed, rumours that were so rife that the U.S. Secretary of State, John Kerry, came to Nigeria with the sole purpose of dissuading the Jonathan administration from postponing the elections. At any rate, on February 2 the Service Chiefs gave assurance that they were ready for the February 14 date for the elections. However, three days later, on February 5, these same Service Chiefs wrote the infamous letter to the INEC Chairman completely reversing themselves.

Up till now, none of these Service Chiefs has thought it fit and proper to explain to Nigerians why they reversed themselves, why within the space of 72 hours they moved from readiness for and commitment to elections on February 14 to a need for six weeks to quell the Boko Haram insurgency before they could be sure that they had the capability to assure security throughout the country. General Olukolade, you too have not thought it fit to give Nigerians the reason(s) for this volte face of the Service Chiefs between February 2 and 5. As a matter of fact, you have acted as if this about-turn did not happen and as if Nigerians do not remember that it happened. Believe, me Nigerians do remember it; moreover, they will recollect it if another about-face makes the Service Chiefs ask for another postponement of the elections beyond March 28.

I now come to the second and far more damaging occurrence that makes your Statement almost meaningless, to the point of hypocrisy and bad faith, General. I refer here to what is now known as “Ekiti-Gate”. Since I am sure that you do know what this alludes to, I will explain it very briefly here, principally for the benefit of those readers of this piece who may not have come across it on the Internet. Thus, “Ekiti-Gate” refers to an audio clip that has gone viral on the YouTube. In the clip, a currently serving Brigadier General in the Nigerian Army, Aliyu Momoh, is distinctly heard receiving instructions from Ayo Fayose and other chieftains of the PDP on how to play his own part as a representative of the Nigerian Army in rigging the Ekiti State gubernatorial elections for Fayose. It is bad enough that General Momoh features prominently in this damaging and treasonous conspiracy; what is even more incredible is the amount of disrespect and condescension that Momoh receives from politicians who are little more than glorified thugs. General Olukolade, do you think that the Nigerian Army can clean itself of the shame, the odium that General Momoh has brought to the armed forces if you do nothing about the incident?

For your information, General, though President Jonathan denounced this audio clip as a fabrication without having ordered any investigation to ascertain its authenticity, one of the principal figures in the clip, Ayo Fayose himself, has confirmed its veracity. In a statement issued this past Wednesday that was signed by Governor Fayose’s Special Assistant for Public Communications and New Media, one Lere Olayinka, Fayose admitted that it was indeed his voice that is heard in the clip and that he was merely rebuking Brigadier General Momoh for being partial to the APC. Moreover, we now know that the person who secretly recorded the clip and forwarded it to the Internet so that the country and the whole world can get to see the collusion of high placed elements within the Army with the PDP in the present electoral cycle is one Sagir Koli, a Captain in the Nigerian Army who has since gone AWOL and fled into exile in fear for his life. My question to you, General, is why are you silent about this audio clip? You are the Director of Information at Defence Headquarters: why are you silent on this scandal that has more or less made nonsense of the claims of professionalism, decency and impartiality in your Statement of two weeks ago?

In case you do not perceive the intent of these questions, General, let me point it out to you: if you remain silent on this Captain Sagir Koli affair, it means you are in collusion with what General Momoh did in the “Ekiti-Gate” outrage, you and the Service Chiefs and the military top brass. This past Monday a Statement came from Defence Headquarters that bitterly condemned General Obasanjo for daring to assert in public denunciations that the Service Chiefs were used by Jonathan to plot tenure extension for himself and, more generally, that the military has been politicized in the present electoral cycle. I do not know if you had a hand in that Statement, General Olukolade. I say this because that Statement was also silent on General Momoh and Captain Koli. In other words, a statement is made by Defence Headquarters savaging Obasanjo, a retired General for dragging the name of the army into mud; meanwhile, the same statement completely leaves unmentioned the name of a serving General who has actually rubbished the reputation of the army top brass by the way in which he was treated by political thugs like an errand boy for whom no amount of condescension was too much. Thus, it is the height of mendacity for the statement issued by Defence Headquarters this past Monday to have asserted the words that serve as the epigraph for this piece: “It has to be restated that the military as an institution is neither as inept in the discharge of its duties nor is it being misused for political ends in the manner the retired General Obasanjo… has probably been made to believe”.

Some final, open-ended questions for you, General. I pose them not to receive any responses from you as such but as teasers to the invisible or hidden state of politics within the armed forces of the country as we lurch to another round of fateful elections. How many Generals of the like of Aliyu Momoh are in the armed forces? Are they few or are the top echelons of the military brimful with officers that cannot stand up to corrupt, power-drunk, neo-fascist political thugs? Are the junior officers and other ranks full of the likes of Captain Sagir Koli? And is this why you are silent about “Ekiti-Gate”? Are political sentiments across the spectrum of officers and non-officers in the armed forces reflective of, on the one hand, the deep yearnings for justice, peace, security of life and possessions and above all else, better conditions of life for the majority of our peoples and, on the other hand, the forces that wish to keep us in darkness, injustice and stagnation? General, can you give assurance that the army will conduct an investigation into Brigadier General Aliyu Momoh’s role in “Ekiti-Gate”?

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

February 22, 2015
“We know those who will NOT succeed us”: An open letter to INEC Chairman, Professor Atahiru Jega

Insha Allah, we will hand over but while we don’t know those who will succeed us, we know those who will NOT succeed us”.
Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida, April 1993

Dear Atahiru,

This comes with greetings and solidarity to you at this very grave moment in both our country’s future and your own work as the Chairman of INEC. It is a very long time since I last saw you and talked with you and other colleagues about the state of affairs in our country within the context of our collective leadership of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU). I testify that then close to thirty years ago, as a lecturer who was perhaps the youngest of the members of the National Executive Council of ASUU, you exhibited the brilliance, the dedication and the courage that you have also shown in your work as INEC Chairman. You know me well, Atahiru: I do not give praise where praise is not due and I do not close my eyes to the faults of those I otherwise admire. So, this is not a song of praise; rather it is a frank expression of solidarity, concern and advice from someone who, I hope, you know to be forthright in all his dealings with his friends and comrades.

The country and indeed the whole world is rife with rumours, Atahiru, about what really led to your postponement of the 2015 elections by six weeks. Even from faraway in Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.A. from which I am writing this piece, “Jega” is on everybody’s mind! Yesterday, Thursday, February 12, 2015, I participated in a long and passionate discussion with a group of other Nigerians, Africans and non-Africans concerning what to expect at the end of March: will the elections take place or will they not? To the last man/woman in the group, everyone settled on YOU, Atahiru, as the man of the moment, the man who will answer to the country and the world if the elections do not take place. This is a grave, portentous burden for one person to carry; but it is also, fundamentally, a simple and uncomplicated obligation in which, as a matter of fact, you are in a much more impregnable position than the forces that do not want you to succeed, the forces that are perhaps using the postponement of the elections as one step towards the objective of so muddying the waters, so throwing everything into confusion that it will be impossible to hold the elections. I really mean that, Atahiru, you are in a much more invulnerable position than such forces and my main aim in this open letter to you is to demonstrate why this is so and to give you some advice on how you might make your position even more unassailable.

Of course, I do not ignore the stories, the rumours concerning the considerable arm-twisting, the behind-the-scene machinations that went on before you gave in to the Service Chiefs’ letter that more or less compelled you to postpone the elections. In the ripeness of time, you will be able to tell the country and the world your own side of the story and for the most part, I am content to leave it at that. There is only one aspect of the accounts given so far that I wish to highlight and this is the link, the equivalence that your detractors are making between the significant shortfall in the distribution of the Permanent Voter’s Cards (PVC) and the letter from the service chiefs that placed the burden of whether or not elections can be held in our country on their ability to provide security during the elections. While leaving it to time for you to be in a position to give a full account of how things unraveled last week forcing you to postpone the elections, you cannot, you must not Atahiru, delay for one week on the necessity to break the link, the equivalence between these two factors: the shortfall in the distribution of the PVC’s; the letter from the Service Chiefs. That is the central point that I wish to make in this letter, Atahiru.

In case the logical reason why these two factors must be quickly and effectively delinked is not clear, let me spell it out: one factor is completely under your schedule of duties and obligations and is putatively under your control; the other factor is not only completely beyond your control, it is in fact quite deliberately and cynically calculated to be so. Indeed, so incommensurable is the gap between these two factors that we might compare it to the gap between a man who is sick because he is severely dehydrated and must therefore be rehydrated as soon as possible and a man who is so massively stricken with throat cancer that he cannot drink water and must perforce be hydrated intravenously. To make the import of this analogy concrete, let me simply say that effective and complete distribution of the PVC’s throughout the country is not unlike bringing water to parched, thirsty throats and souls and God knows that across the length and breadth of the land, our peoples in their hundreds of thousands, in their millions, have been clamoring for these PVC’s as if their very lives depend on it. By contrast, just as the person who is not stricken with cancer would resist any attempt to treat him or her with the extremely dangerous drugs that are used to treat cancer, so do Nigerians everywhere in the country not see soldiers as the guarantors of their right and ability to vote and be voted for. Indeed, the very thought – which more or less amounts to the militarization of electoral practice in our country – is cancerous!

Unfortunately, logic will not be the deciding factor in what looms ahead of us come March 28, 2015, Atahiru. By this, I am not saying forget logic and do only what is right and just. Logically, you are on extremely weak grounds on the matter of the PVC’s. You and INEC had years to prepare for this election and you had the funding too but came far short of where things should be as close as two weeks to the elections. As a matter of fact, I must confess that I am in some anxiety here for if you and INEC could only score 65% of distribution of the PVC’s with years of preparation, what guarantee do we have that in just slightly over one month you will make up the shortfall of 35%? But you have promised the nation: this shortfall will be redeemed well before March 28. This is why not logic, not common sense per se will determine the course of events, but resolute, patriotic, courageous and, above all else, clear-headed action on your part. What exactly does this entail?

With complete clarity of thought, you must realize, Atahiru, that having once accorded the Service Chiefs an advisory role in our country’s electoral process that they do not have in the Constitution you have gone as far as you can without yourself becoming complicit in a bloodless coup against the Constitution and the Nation. The Service Chiefs asked for six weeks; you were under no obligation to give them six weeks; in fact, you needed no more than a couple of weeks to straighten out the shortfall in the distribution of the PVC’s; you cannot do it again without becoming complicit in a coup against the Constitution and the Nation. In case what I am saying here is not clear enough, let me spell it out very carefully, Atahiru: you cannot, on your own alone, prevent a coup by the Service Chiefs, acting on behalf of Jonathan and the PDP. What you can do, what indeed you MUST do, is prevent yourself from being made a tool of such a coup come March 28, 2015. If they ask for another postponement, let them, not you, make the announcement and the country and the whole world will know that you are not complicit in a coup against the Constitution and the Nation. But this is conditional upon doing your own duty by making up the PVC shortfall in the next couple of weeks at the most.

In bringing this open letter to a close, let me make some useful allusions to past and recent history in our country’s political affairs. Perhaps the most traumatic instance when our country’s electoral process has been autocratically removed from the will of the people and placed under military control is the instance signified by the epigraph to this piece in which, in April 1993, Babangida uttered those words that later proved to be a foreshadowing of the annulment of the June 1993 elections: “Insha Allah, we will hand over, but while we don’t know those that will succeed us, we know those that will not succeed us”. Even for a military dictatorship, this was extraordinary, this arrogant and hubristic assertion that not the Nigerian people but a cabal of ambitious and corrupt military officers will decide who will take over from them once they leave office.

This is more or less what Doyin Okupe in particular and many other proto-fascists in the Presidency have been saying for more than three months now in calling for both the postponement of the elections and the institution of a so-called Interim Government to take over from Jonathan. G.E. Jonathan, E.K. Clark, Chris Uba, Doyin Okupe, Femi Fani-Kayode and Ayo Fayose, none of these belongs to the military; they can act only with and through military proxies, meaning the Service Chiefs. If they want to postpone or cancel the elections come March 28, 2015, let them, acting through the Service Chiefs, announce the postponement or cancellation. I repeat: you cannot alone on your own prevent a coup, Atahiru. Only the Nigerian people can and will. Let them, not you, announce the further postponement or outright cancellation of the elections. Do not let them make you an instrument of a coup which, by the way, may be bloodless in the first instance but may in the end drown our country in rivers of blood and set us back into another cycle of deep and prolonged retrogression.

Comradely yours, BJ

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

February 15, 2015
Jonathan’s Supporters’ Predicament: Capitulation, Desperation or Armageddon?

Ojo gbogbo ni t’ole; ojo kan ni t’olohun [On one single fateful day, the thief who thinks that all days and nights belong to him in perpetuity will be caught by the owner] A Yoruba anti-barawo, anti-looting adage

In almost any other country in the world, or perhaps in almost all the other democracies on the planet – bourgeois, social-democratic or popular-revolutionary – the predicament of Jonathan’s diehard supporters would very simply be the fact that in the President, they have a hopelessly uninspired and uninspiring candidate, a candidate so handicapped that Dr. Mimiko, one of his staunchest supporters, called him the “most abused and negatively profiled President in the history of Nigeria”. But not in Nigeria at the present time where to our politicians, nothing evil or shameful is an embarrassment or a disadvantage to a candidate, no matter how high the political office being contested. In other words, for those who might think that Mimiko’s declaration that the masses of Nigerians across space and time have no love or respect for Jonathan constitutes a dilemma or a predicament for the PDP, they are mistaken. Except for token gestures and acts that do very little to alleviate the great suffering, the acute insecurity of life for the majority of our peoples, doing things that could truly make life better for Nigerians, things that could genuinely win the hearts and minds of the people has never been a priority of the PDP in particular and, more generally, virtually all the other ruling class parties in our country. No, compatriots, Jonathan and the PDP are not losing sleep, they do not feel any predicament at all because their man is not liked or respected. What then is the source of their predicament?

The answer to this question is simple, but only deceptively so: in the innermost core, in the deepest recesses of their minds and imaginations, Jonathan and the PDP feel that APC and Buhari are no different from themselves and therefore are not morally and ideologically more deserving of electoral victory than themselves. That is their predicament: the thought that they might lose to people who are no different from them, people who deserve the same treatment as themselves. This is of course a delusion, a psychological displacement of the PDP’s obsession with power. After all, the campaign slogan of the party is “PDP? Power! Power? PDP! But it is not an entirely fanciful or unfounded delusion. At one time or another, virtually all the mainstream politicians now in PDP, APC, ANPP or APGA have belonged to the same party. This is because, with few exceptions, political prostitution is one of the hallmarks, one of the defining aspects of our present political order. For this reason, all our political elites know one another inside out and body and soul, with an intimacy born of mutual predatoriness and cynicism.

There is also the fact that there are no decisive issues of policy and vision that separate the two main contending parties and between them and the other ruling class parties. Indeed, to the contrary, there are big and important areas of collaboration in the shameless and relentless looting and despoliation of our country’s oil wealth by all the political parties and mainstream politicians. One of the most telling examples of this extensive cooperation among all the main parties in looting our resources dry is the cult of secrecy and silence that all members of the National Assembly rigorously maintain over the exact figure of the combined salaries, allowances and emoluments that they are paid. The Nigerian masses have been crying out; activists have been crying out; and foreign correspondents have been wondering why Nigerian parliamentarians are the highest paid on the planet in a country where 7 out of every 10 Nigerians live in dire poverty. But not one party, not one politician has broken ranks from the cult to reveal the figure and/or refuse it. Well, let me correct myself here: Hon Dino Melaye broke ranks with the rest and attempted to spill the beans but look what they did to him: they threw him out from their ranks and the secrecy, the silence was restored. All the same, it is delusional of the PDP to think that the coming elections will be won or lost solely or mainly on the claim that no party, no candidate has a moral and ideological advantage over the other.

This whole subject of the delusionary brinksmanship of the PDP/Jonathan ticket interests me because I believe that as the day of reckoning approaches, we must try to get into the collective mind, into the roiling psychosis of a very desperate ruling party which feels, not without some justification, that its opponent is not more deserving of electoral victory than itself. I cannot tell about Jonathan himself, but with the likes of some of the most militant chieftains of the PDP – in their actions and utterances – we see nothing but psychotic desperation. This includes Femi Fani-Kayode, Ayodele Fayose, Bode George, Segun Mimiko and the Minister of Police Affairs, Abduljelili Adesiyan. And of course, there is the collective group of some of the ex-militants of the Niger Delta that have been “settled” by Jonathan and Yar’ Adua before him; they are threatening Armageddon if Jonathan loses. In such circumstances, why do I indicate the possibility of capitulation by the PDP in the title of this piece?

Capitulation is possible, perhaps even probable if somehow it finally percolates to the collective mind of Jonathan and the PDP that the forthcoming elections do not, in the first instance, rest on whether or not the APC and Buhari are more worthy than themselves. Jonathan and the PDP happen to be the incumbents, the hegemons of a rotten, wasteful and oppressive system and they must pay the price. If a mature, developed, legitimate and nationwide popular revolutionary movement existed in the country, all the ruling class parties would have been swept away – and good riddance! But that is not the case, alas. Regular elections to sustain a quasi-bourgeois democracy will be held and for the first time since 1999, the appearance, if not the robust reality, of a choice is being presented to the Nigerian people. So it matters little whether or not APC/Buhari is more morally and politically deserving of electoral victory than PDP/Jonathan; what matters is that the people perceive a choice. As a matter of fact, the possibility of the PDP’s capitulating to the force of historical necessity rather than resorting to Armageddon rests precisely on a recognition and acceptance by them of how this principle of choice has emerged this time around and not before, from 1999 to 2014. What does this mean?

I will try to respond to this question as simply and as concretely as possible. To put it mildly, the PDP that contested the 1999, 2003, 2007 and 2011 general elections is not the PDP that is contesting the 2015 elections. In number, size and electoral plurality, it has been vastly and fatally downsized. And internally, it has imploded. There are the mass defections from the party. There is the loss of status as the majority party in the House of Representatives. But for the neo-fascist tactics of the Senate President, David Mark, the same thing would have happened in that upper house of the National Assembly. There is also the fact that the PDP no longer nominally controls the largest number of states in the federation. Perhaps most significant of all in terms of electoral politics, the loss of nationwide advantage in plurality over the other parties took place because the North, or the most populous and ideologically driven parts of it, departed en masse from the PDP, leaving a gaping hole where that pivot of the party’s hegemony rested. Thus, on the eve of the 2015 elections, we are looking at a greatly hobbled, some would even say permanently crippled party. Most Nigerians know these facts; and all well-informed and interested foreign commentators, governments and organizations are also conversant with these facts. But not the PDP. Or at least, the party pretends not to recognize this fundamental fact that everyone else recognizes: it is no longer, as it used to brag and still brags, “the largest ruling party in Africa”. Perhaps if the saner and more realistic minds within the PDP come to the sober realization that the centre of its once real nationwide plurality has vanished for now and perhaps forever, the party will bow to the inevitable and not resort to the lure of Armageddon.

On one single fateful day, the thief who thinks that all days and nights belong to him in perpetuity will be caught by the owner, so goes the anti-barawo, anti-looting adage that serves as the epigraph to this essay. Permit the sardonic bent with which I will try to apply this adage to my observations and reflections in this essay. On the one fateful day of reckoning when owners finally catch thieves who have been plaguing them, not all the thieves are caught; indeed, the owners are pleased to catch the biggest thieves and leave the capture of other members of the gang to another day. Days of reckoning are not singular, they are multiple; they may occur in cycles that are few and far between one another, but they surely always come. This electoral cycle, things have come full circle for the PDP. I wish to end on the hopeful note that thieves and brigands that escape on one particular day of reckoning will thank their stars and mend their ways. But this “miracle” must not be left to the voluntary exercise of the will of the escaped thieves; only the popular will of a mobilized people can instigate such a change of heart, mind and practice in our endlessly predatory ruling class. For believe me, this predatoriness will not end, will not simply go away on its own after February 14, 2015.

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

February 8, 2015
Jonathan as “the most abused and negatively profiled President in the history of this country”: seeing beyond the man to the party and the era

“You are the most abused and negatively profiled President in the history of this country”.Dr. Olusegun Mimiko, at the launching of the Jonathan reelection campaign in Lagos, January 7, 2015

In all honesty and fairness, I should start this piece by admitting that when Dr. Mimiko, the outgoing Ondo State Governor, addressed President Jonathan with the words that I am using as the epigraph for this essay, he added the following words to complete the full intent of his declaration: “And yet, you have not sent anyone to prison for abusing you”. Thus, Mimiko’s full declaration was this: ‘Mr. President, you are the most abused and negatively profiled President in the history of this country and yet you have not sent anyone to prison for abusing you”. The point of Mimiko’s declaration was to contrast Jonathan with Buhari whom he accused of sending even people who hadn’t abused him, who had told the truth to prison when the APC presidential candidate was a military dictator. But in making this sidewise attack on Buhari, Mimiko made the extraordinary declaration that Jonathan is the most abused, the most reviled President in our political history.

In continuation of my invocation of honesty and fairness here, I should add that Mimiko did not give any reasons why Jonathan is in his view the most despised Head of State that this country has ever had bar none – bar even Sani Abacha. As a matter of fact, in that speech from which this declaration has been culled to serve as the epigraph to this essay, Mimiko went on to give very weak and forgettable reasons why, in spite of this universal dislike of their President, Nigerians should vote for Jonathan. But he made absolutely no effort to reflect on and give some explanation as to why Nigerians so much love to hate Jonathan.

It is a strange thing for someone like Mimiko who is very close to the President, someone who, body and soul, is devoted to Jonathan to declare to his face that he is the most hated and despised Nigerian Head of State in our political history. Indeed, as I watched that launching of Jonathan’s reelection campaign on TV, I looked to see if the cameras would pan to show Jonathan’s face at that particular moment when his chief promoter was declaring him a ruler for whom Nigerians have no respect, no love. Unfortunately, no camera showed what the President’s reaction was to this extraordinary declaration. At any rate, neither at the event itself nor since then has the Mimiko declaration drawn any commentary from the PDP campaign machine and its army of spokespersons. I suggest that the reason for this is quite easy to fathom: Mimiko was saying what everyone in the PDP already knows and knows only too well and this is the fact that their candidate draws contempt and hatred to himself the way excreta draws flies to itself. Thus, Mimiko’s declaration was merely a moment of slippage, a moment at which the pressure cooker of campaigning for a weak and unloved candidate reached boiling point and the truth came out unrestrained and unvarnished.

I am using the scatological metaphor of faeces here deliberately. In my view, the most appropriate metaphor for what it takes for most of our peoples to merely survive at the present time is not that of a vast pit latrine; rather, it is that of a vast refugee camp in a land where oil wealth is flowing in abundance. The excreta analogy is suited specifically to the moral and psychic condition of our country and the great majority of the populace. In line with this metaphor one can say that everywhere and anywhere that faeces reigns untreated and is left as an affront, a danger to public health and public good, there disease-carrying flies will flock. Not to mince words at all, I am suggesting here that the excreta of monumental corruption, colossal waste and squandermania and mediocre performance for which Jonathan is hated and despised by most Nigerians is symptomatic; it goes far beyond him to his party, the PDP. Beyond that party, it goes to virtually all the other ruling class parties; and it attaches to the whole political order that has been in place since 1999. This is the main point that I wish to reflect upon in this piece.

I do not of course wish to deflect attention from Mimiko’s hapless and unintended quarry, President Jonathan; he is the current chief occupant of the cesspit of Nigerian political misrule and he must bear full responsibility for the miasmic rot and decay in the land. But the rot, the decay goes far beyond Jonathan and I think in fact this awareness may have been the unconscious motivation for Mimiko’s extraordinary declaration. At any rate, in the rest of this piece, I wish to briefly pursue this line of thought that urges us to look beyond Jonathan to, first the PDP and then to the whole of the present era if we wish to usher in a tidal wave strong enough to clean up the vast reaches of the moral and psychic ordure that covers the whole land.

To see how the moral excrement that covers Jonathan has its roots in his party, the PDP, one need go no further than the fact that, as strange as it may seem, the strongest revelations and denunciations have come not from its opponents but from present and former party members themselves. As the list is long, we can only select a few telling instances. Item: in the year 2005, Obasanjo sent a letter to the Nigerian parliament asking for the impeachment of his Deputy, Atiku Abubakar, on charges of gross acts of stealing and embezzlement of state funds. In his letter, Obasanjo gave copious details of Atiku’s thievery. In a countermove that took everyone by surprise, Atiku did not deny the charges; rather, he produced his own document detailing Obasanjo’s extensive acts of looting and misuse of public funds. In the event, both men revealed enough about one another that could or should have led to their impeachment. Item: while getting rid of honest and generally respected people like Audu Ogbeh, Party Chairman, Obasanjo enthroned know-nothings and nonentities in positions of power at federal, state and local levels throughout the country, the most astounding of whom were Mrs. Ette, a semi-literate hair dresser, as Speaker of the House of Representatives; Chris Ubah, a person whom Chinua Achebe describes in his book, There Was A Country, as one of scores of “politicians with low IQ” as the godfather of Anambra state PDP; and Lamidi Adedibu, an illiterate enforcer and the infamous avatar of “amala politics” as the godfather of Oyo state PDP. Item: In the year 2011, a cardinal member of Jonathan’s cabinet, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, told an interviewer from the British newsmagazine, The Economist, that corruption and waste were so monumental and so entrenched in the federal government that she would be quite satisfied if by the end of her term in office she might have reduced the scale by as little as 4%. Thus, Jonathan is completely at home in this gargantuan moral cesspool, this landscape of untold psychic aridity.

But isn’t this profile applicable to the whole country in at least the last two to three decades? What exactly are thinking people in our country to feel, to imagine confronted with the grim fact that in this same period, the passing rate of our high school leavers has never risen above 35%? What are we to think, to feel about the fact that in one year, 2009, 98.2% actually failed in the NECO exams? What are we to think of the fact that no state of emergency has ever been declared to confront this extremely dispiriting crisis of the utter collapse of the education of our young people? And what of the widespread incidence of examination malpractices which are sometimes accompanied by great violence when attempts are made to expose or curb them? What of our universities and other tertiary institutions: doesn’t everyone say that, with few exceptions, they are all in a state of complete ruination? What of the universal fear and worry among our peoples at all levels of society that the man or woman who decides to be honest and hardworking, who refuses to bribe, cheat or lie is putting her/his life and the lives of relatives and friends at great risk? Jonathan is also at home in this universe of moral darkness for just as we love to hate the President, every thinking Nigerian loves to hate all these things about our country and its terribly anomalous moral and psychic state.

In conclusion, compatriots, as I urge that we kick Jonathan and the PDP out of office and into political and historical oblivion, I also urge that we please note that PDP is secreted deep, deep into the moral and psychological veins and arteries of the country. I would in fact suggest that three quarters of APC is PDP! Thus, Mimiko is right but not in the manner that he intended his declaration to be read. For if Jonathan is indeed the most reviled and despised President that we have ever had in this country, that is because the Nigeria we have been living through these past two decades is the most hateful and frightening expression of who we are. At almost every level this is far, far from who we would like to be, for now and for those that will come after us.

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

February 1, 2015
Voting against one’s interests: identity politics and the 70% in dire poverty (2)

The politics of identity will play a huge role in the forthcoming presidential elections in Nigeria. This is not unusual because identity politics is an important aspect of electoral politics in all the democracies in the world, especially in nations that are multiracial, multiethnic and multicultural. What is or will be unusual in the elections next month is that identity politics will operate in a way that is unprecedented in our country’s political history. This is because there is a vast disparity in how the politics of identity will be used by the two main contending parties, the PDP and the APC. Because this is a very crucial matter that also happens to be a subject that easily lends itself to being manipulated and distorted, I wish to write about it here concretely and with as much clarity as I can muster in the hope that nothing I write will be misinterpreted or misunderstood.

Concerning the APC, this is the main implication of identity politics as it is expected to structure the 2015 presidential election: the Presidency will return to the North and the Vice Presidency will go to the Southwest whereas within the scheme of things within the “zoning” politics of the PDP, neither the Presidency nor the Vice Presidency was expected to come to the Southwest in the next one decade – at the very least. Of course identity politics is not the only factor in the coming elections. There is also the universally contemned reality of colossal corruption that is mostly supervened by the PDP’s grip on power at the centre in the last sixteen years. Nigerians in general and the whole world as well is focused on corruption as a huge factor in the elections. And there is also the sublime mediocrity, the aimlessness and the mendacity of the ruling party’s bosses and operatives, particularly Goodluck Jonathan himself. While these are also important factors, there is not the slightest doubt that the main driving force of APC’s momentum and PDP’s crippling fear of defeat rest on this basic expression of identity politics: the Presidency returns to the North and the Vice Presidency, a heartbeat from the top position, goes to a Yoruba man, to a man from the Southwest. We shall see in fact that consistent with the normative problems associated with identity politics, things are in actuality far more complex than this. But for now, let us turn to the subject of PDP’s great disadvantage in identity politics as it will play itself out come February 14, 2015.

The plain fact is that identity politics is in total confusion in the PDP. True, much has been made by Jonathan’s most determined and militant supporters that as an Ijaw man from the oil-rich Niger Delta he is entitled to two full terms in the presidency. But Jonathan is the hapless victim of the abuses and misuses of the ruling party’s zoning politics. As the whole world knows, it was Obasanjo who first more or less rubbished the zoning principle of the PDP by reneging on his promise to be in office for only two terms and thereafter committing all the resources of the federal government to his third term bid. After Obasanjo, the zoning wahala in the PDP took a bizarre turn when Hajia Turai, Yar’ Adua’s widow, sought to cling to power after her husband’s death on the claim that the “North” had not yet finished the time in the presidency that her husband’s mandate entitles to the zone. It took the extra-constitutional measure of the so-called “doctrine of necessity” to restore constitutional order and confirm Jonathan as President for the last two years of Yar’ Adua’s term. And then, and then in his own fateful ensnarement by the twists and turns of the same zoning principle of the PDP, Jonathan went back on his own promise to serve for only one term of four years as a condition for getting PDP’s nomination for the 2011 presidential elections. So far, so good.

But what Jonathan and his supporters apparently did not know and seem incapable of appreciating is the fact that the North-South divide at the core of ruling class politics in our country is the heart and soul of the zoning principle in the PDP. Obasanjo rubbished it but could not quite overcome it; Turai mangled it but could not prevail in her bid to make it the basis of her unconstitutional hold on power; and then Jonathan tried to sidestep it altogether but it blew up in his face. It may well turn out that in the process he has also blown the ruling party into historical and political oblivion.

Could Jonathan have successfully sidestepped the zoning principle at the heart of PDP’s identity politics if he was an inspiring Head of State and Commander-in-Chief? Would his opponents within and outside the PDP have been able to prevail against him if there was not so much suffering, so much insecurity, so much loss of respect and credibility for our rulers at home and abroad? Let us put these same questions in a more positive register. What if Jonathan was a widely and deeply beloved President and not, according to Dr. Olusegun Mimiko, “the most abused and negatively profiled President in Nigerian history”, would he not have prevailed against the zoning principle as the PDP’s ultimate incarnation of identity politics?

For me, there is not the slightest doubt that the answer to all these questions is a resounding yes and yes again. Constitutionally, it is within Jonathan’s right to seek a second term in office. But both in his move from Acting President to President and in his bid to get his party’s nomination in 2011, he had benefitted from and irrevocably committed himself to extra-constitutional measures or instruments in which adherence to the zoning principle was a key element. Thus, the only way that he could have gotten around his dilemma and successfully actualized his constitutional right to a second term in office would have been through the achievement of a reputation for being a widely respected, high performing and beloved President. But as Nigerians know and the whole world concurs, Jonathan is the ultimate negation of such accomplishments. In other words, the collapse of identity politics around zoning within the PDP wouldn’t have in the end mattered if Nigeria under Jonathan was a much better and totally different country than the hellish nightmare from which the great majority of our peoples are trying to wake. The lesson that we can or must glean from this observation, this claim is that identity politics is a necessary but vastly insufficient force with which to engage all the problems, crises and challenges of any and all the nations of the word in the 21st century.

This lesson also applies as well to the APC, even if this is so prospectively since the party has not yet become Nigeria’s ruling party. There is absolutely no guarantee that the alliance of the mainstream politicians of the “core’ North and the Southwest, two of the most populous zones in the country, will automatically transform our country into the functioning, just, respected and peaceful land for which we are all yearning. For now, all that an APC victory guarantees and signifies is that you need a workable system of identity politics to become and remain the ruling party in a diverse multiethnic and multicultural country like Nigeria. Beyond that, things are extremely volatile, especially given the yawning and widening chasm between the haves and the have-nots in our country and the manner in which the present socio-economic environment sustains and even consistently expands that chasm. What does this portend for an APC victory next month that might very well launch us into a post-PDP political space?

All over the world, both in merely formal and institutionally substantial democracies, the history of electoral victories gained primarily through identity politics is rife with poor and marginalized people who end up voting against their own economic and political interests by voting only or primarily on the basis of thinking that once their “own son”, their own “people” are in office things will be better than when they didn’t have their own sons and daughters in power. Although much of the support for the APC in the North and the Southwest, the zones in which the party is expected to do very well, is based on this thinking, it is necessary to point out that many supporters of the party in these two zones are also driven by expectations that the policies and acts of the APC in power will be fairer and more progressive than anything we ever experienced from the PDP. However, there is a danger of complacency here. For lack of space, I will indicate only two crucial areas in which this complacency manifests itself.

The first and perhaps the more important one is a pervasive thinking in the Southwest that the region brings an inherent and even natural progressivism to the alliance that gave birth to the party. This is too simple for in reality, progressivism in the Southwest, as in all other zones and regions in the country was always constantly and bitterly fought for and consolidated. Things will not be different if the APC comes to power. Secondly, primitive accumulation through massive privatization is as much a driving force for leading figures within the APC as it was/is with the PDP. For me, the real sign that things will be different under the APC, that what we will get is not just a mere change in the cast of characters, is how curbing looting, waste and squandermania will be used as tools to mobilize the economy and our peoples for a Nigeria that is no longer under the heel of a barawo, agbero and “area boy” capitalist and capitalism.

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

January 25, 2015
Voting against one’s interests: identity politics and the 70% in dire poverty (1)

Be se tiwa, bee si se tiwa, Demo a wole! [Whether you’re with us or you’re not with us, Demo will win!] Chief Remi Fani-Kayode, on the eve of the 1965 Western Regional elections

The epigraph for this week’s column comes from perhaps the darkest hour in the turbulent history of electoral politics in Nigeria. Concerning that perilous moment, two events connected with two larger-than-life personalities stand out. The personalities were Chief Remi Fani-Kayode; he was the Deputy Premier in the Western Regional government of the then Premier, Chief S.L. Akintola. The other personality was Wole Soyinka. Since Wole Soyinka was and is Wole Soyinka, he needs no further introduction here. In the Western Regional elections of 1965, both men were indirectly locked in an epic battle whose ramifications and resonances go to the heart of the subject of this week’s column, this being identity politics as either a salvation and/or a graveyard for the interests of the poor and the disenfranchised that constitute the human and demographic majority in our country. What does this mean and how did Fani-Kayode and Wole Soyinka come to be the respective embodiments of the contradictions of identity politics in the Western Regional elections of 1965? And moreover, what does all this have to do with the forthcoming general elections of 2015? Let me explain.

For the benefit of the young readers of this piece who were either not yet born in 1965 or were below the age of 10, it is important to recall who Chief Remi Fani-Kayode, aka “Fani Power” was. A brilliant and professionally very successful lawyer, he achieved his highest prominence in politics when he became Deputy Premier of the Western Region and second-in-command to Chief S.L. Akintola as Party Leader of the Nigerian National Democratic Party that was universally known as “Demo”. “Demo” was a breakaway rump of the erstwhile Western Regional governing party, the Awolowo-led Action Group. “Demo” was also a widely feared and hated political party that played politics at the basest level of primordial, cynical and opportunistic sentiments. Its political calculations began and ended with what, in its view, were ostensibly in the best interests of Yorubas but were in actuality meant to maintain Demo’s fascist grip on power. Thus, in the light of such murky calculations, Akintola, “Fani Power” and the other bosses of “Demo” felt that, in essence, they had to do two things. What were these tow things?

One: The NNDP or “Demo” had to go into alliance as very junior partners with the most powerful conservative political forces in the country as institutionalized in the Northern People’s Congress (NPC) and its two legendary leaders, the late Sir Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto and the Nigerian Prime Minister, Abubakar Tafawa Balewa. Beside these two towering figures, Akintola and Fani-Kayode were and acted like political minions. Two: “Demo” had to disparage and tear down everything that Awolowo and the Action Group had achieved. Since the free education, free health services and other social-democratic policies of the Action Group were immensely popular in the Western Region, the only way that “Demo” could discredit them was to pass these programmes and policies off as evidence of Awolowo’s incipient, creeping “socialism” and “communism”. Thus, everything, “Demo” warned the people of the Western Region, would be shared by Awolowo: property and personal possessions; wives and concubines; the debts that citizens owed through reckless and irresponsible financial practices and activities; even the clothes in one’s wardrobe and one’s back. These ideological views, “Demo” asserted, were against the traditional culture and morality of the Yoruba people. Indeed, Akintola and “Fani Power” took their opportunistic politics of identity to the extent of forming a Pan-Yoruba socio-cultural organization that they named “Egbe Omo Olofin” as a counterforce to the much older “Egbe Omo Yoruba” that had historically had very close links to Awolowo and the Action Group. But all its tactics, all its oratory failed to win “Demo” popularity and legitimacy in the Western Region and it was against the background of this total failure that, on the eve of the 1965 regional elections and in an address that was broadcast on radio and television to the electorate that “Fani Power” uttered his infamous pronouncement: “whether you are with us or you’re not with us, Demo will win”. This was worse than rigging, worse than any heinous electoral fraud that Maurice Iwu and Olusegun Obasanjo ever perpetrated on Nigeria and Nigerians for in “Fani Power’s” declaration, victory had been declared before the elections took place.

The role of Wole Soyinka in that fateful electoral conjuncture can be summarily stated and is best summed up in the well known Radio Station holdup event. It is the very height of collective insult to declare to any people in the world that whatever they felt about any government or political party, that government, that party will achieve electoral victory in total and complete indifference to the wishes, the interests of the given people. Thus, it was this collective insult to the people of the Western Region that paved the way for Soyinka’s radical intervention. His heroism achieved legendary status in the Western Region precisely to the extent that it articulated a need, a will to tell “Fani Power” and “Demo” that the people of the Western Region are a people whose collective will and interests could not be so easily set aside.

This is identity politics at its most radical and uncompromising. Thus, it is very surprising that most accounts of Soyinka’s Radio Station holdup act have left out that prior pronouncement of “Fani Power” – whether you vote for us or you don’t vote for us, we will win. And please note that it was in the voice of a “free Nigeria” and not only a free Western Nigeria that the gunman at the Radio holdup spoke. This was contained in the pre-recorded message that the gunman substituted for the broadcast of the fake electoral victory of “Demo”. In effect, Soyinka moved, in the same act, the same event, from an insult to the people of the Western Region to the implications of “Demo’s” electoral superlative act of rigging for fascist, violent suppression of rights throughout the whole country. In other words, he moved from identity politics to the politics of popular, radical democracy for and in the whole country.

The great supposition of identity politics is that when one acts in the domain of politics one ought to act, first and foremost, in the interest of oneself and one’s own group of belonging, be that group racial, ethnic, regional or religious. On this account, only a Black man or woman can best speak for and represent Black people in the United States of America. In Nigeria only the Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF), only Ohaneze Ndigbo and only the Odua People’s Congress (OPC) can speak for and represent the interests of Northerners, Igbos and Yorubas respectively. Indeed, the often unspoken but unshakeable faith of proponents and practitioners of identity politics rests on the premise that only members of one’s own natal group can act best in the interest of the group. But this is a questionable assumption. As we have seen in the two cases embodied by “Fani Power” and Wole Soyinka in Western Regional elections of 1965, one protagonist whose party claimed to be acting for and in the interests of the Yorubas was actually confronting them with fascism and political enslavement while the other agent extended the sphere of his identity politics far beyond the Western Region to the whole country. This raises the fundamental question of how exactly identity politics combines the personal interests of, on the one hand, the professional politician and, on the other hand, the interests of the totality of members of the racial, ethnic or religious group to which the politician belongs. In coming to the conclusion of this piece, let us carefully examine the ramifications of this question.

The basic presupposition of identity politics is that the circles of interests between the politician and his “tribe”, region or religious community converge. But this is hardly ever the case. This question becomes even more complex and more fraught when, as in a country like Nigeria at the present time, virtually in all the communities in the given nation, the vast majority of the people are very, very poor. Poverty always makes nonsense of the presuppositions of identity politics and the more extreme and widespread the poverty, the more deeply problematic the play of identity politics. Let me put this observation in the form of some concrete questions. Are the Northern poor, the Southern poor, the Niger Delta poor, the Christian poor, the Moslem poor, the Ekiti State poor and the Akwa Ibom poor, the Kanuri poor and the Tiv poor each be best represented and spoken for by the big men and women, the professional politicians of each group? If not, who speaks for all the poor of the land, for the 7 out of every 10 Nigerians who live in abject poverty? What do each of the two main ruling class parties, the PDP and the APC, have in their composition and in their ideologies to give us an indication of the differences between them in the practice of identity politics? Are there in fact any significant differences between them on this particular point? What does the inherent identity politics in the alliance of the “core” North and the Southwest as the dominant formation within the APC portend for the interest of the poor of the land, if at all it portends anything by way of social, redistributive justice in our time? Finally the most basic question of all: Why do the poor, in our country, as in many other countries of the world, often vote and act against their own economic and political interests in the name of and under the sign of identity politics? These and other related questions and issues will provide our starting point in next week’s conclusion to the series.

[To be continued]

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

January 18, 2015
After the deluge: beyond corruption and regional realignment of forces in a post-PDP Nigeria (2)

My generation has failed… we are gone. We are a spent force.
President Jonathan, at the launching of his reelection campaign in Lagos

Paradoxically, the most eloquent testimony so far in giving an indication that we are very close to a post-PDP Nigeria came from no other person than President Goodluck Jonathan himself at the flag off for his reelection campaign in Lagos this past Wednesday. It is a universal phenomenon for all incumbent administrations in liberal democratic countries to be defensive in reelection bids, especially where such administrations – like that of Jonathan – have performed abysmally poorly. But at the launching of his campaign this past week, Jonathan went far beyond this norm. He was not only defensive, but he was pretty close to being defeatist; moreover, he gave a clear, unambiguous indication that the source of his defeat is not Buhari and the APC but nothing less than history itself. How did he, how could he make such a devastatingly negative summation of his political legacy at a rally to launch his reelection campaign? Let me explain.

Jonathan started his speech at the event by apologizing to government workers and contractors who have not been paid their salaries, wages or due recompense for work done. But he quickly went beyond this defensiveness and both in tone and substance he began to sound as if he was not only battling Buhari and the APC but against all past administrations before his own. He asked his audience at the event as well as the whole nation to ask all his predecessors what they had done with the nation’s wealth. On corruption he stated emphatically that if all the past governments we have had in Nigeria had played their parts in fighting corruption it would not have heightened beyond control today. It is of course very strange for an incumbent President to admit that corruption has gone beyond control in his time in office; far worse is it for the same President to declare that the failure was not only his own but, collectively, that of all past administrations and, indeed, his whole generation. Thus, while the Chief Host at the event, Dr. Segun Mimiko, described Jonathan as “the most abused and negatively profiled President in the history of this country”, the “oga patapata” himself made the declaration that serves as the epigraph for this piece about not only himself but his generation: “My generation has failed… we are gone. We are a spent force”.

It would of course be erroneous and misleading for me to give the impression that Jonathan at that launching of his campaign more or less conceded defeat by Buhari and the APC. Nothing could be further from the facts, the truth than such an observation, such a claim. Indeed, the essential point of my comments on what transpired at the PDP rally in Lagos this past Wednesday is to highlight the fact that Jonathan included Buhari, APC, Obasanjo and all past administrations in our country in the monumental failure that he admitted and bemoaned. In essence then, what Jonathan was saying amounts to a declaration that both he and Buhari, both the PDP and the APC, and both his administration and all past governments in our country put together are failures.

At this point, I take note here and draw the reader’s attention to the fact that Jonathan in his speech at that rally again and again compared himself to Buhari and logically, he presented his opponent as a worse failure himself, as indeed a previous ruler of the country unfit for being returned to the seat of power. That is the voice, the promptings of candidate Jonathan who wants to win at all costs and come what may. But we must, I urge, pay attention to the weight of historical and political contradictions bearing down on Jonathan as “the most abused and negatively profiled President in the history of this country”, as Mimiko put it. Thus, the essential point I am making here is that almost against his own conscious aspirations and desires, Jonathan at the rally to launch his reelection campaign gave more than a mere hint of a subconscious intimation, an involuntary presentiment that we are on the cusp of a political space, an order of governance that is post-PDP. If the PDP loses the coming elections – as it should and probably will – then we will be plunged into that new political space very soon. But if the PDP rigs itself into perpetuation of its admitted “failure” then of course the day of reckoning will be delayed yet again. In this series, I take the position that that day of reckoning, that new space of political discourse and possibility is at hand and we must prepare ourselves for it.

In last week’s opening essay in this series, I identified two factors as the twin pivots around which the defeat of Jonathan and the PDP in the coming elections revolve. These are, respectively, corruption and the coalition of mainstream politicians of the “core” North and the Southwest as the dominant formation within APC. In this concluding piece, I now add that these are expedient but not sufficient indices of a true post-PDP political order in our country; expediency, I am urging, is not the same thing as sufficiency. This is because neither the war on corruption nor a realignment of forces among our political elites, nor indeed a combination of the two factors will produce a political order that will clean up the colossal rot and end the great suffering and insecurity for millions of our peoples that the PDP has left as its political legacy for any successor government, any new ruling party in our country. Thus, the fundamental question is or will be the sort of capitalist or bourgeois democracy that comes into being in a post-PDP Nigeria. To put this in very blunt terms, the question is whether a post-PDP Nigeria will still be a pseudo-bourgeois, “agbero” or “area boy” capitalism with its thieves’ headquarters at Aso Rock or a people’s progressive capitalist democracy. How do the twin factors of corruption and the realignment of forces that will be at the centre of the coming elections relate to this fundamental question?

Concerning corruption, there is a joke making the rounds of elite political circles in the country at the present time that is very pertinent to the subject of our discussion in this piece. Here it is: at the very earliest indication that Jonathan and the PDP are losing the presidential contest, say a few hours into the vote count, many private jets will fly out of the country as the kleptocrats and “lootocrats” close to Jonathan and the PDP flee the country in terror of the punitive measures they expect from Buhari. To this, I add the following questions: What of the kleptocrats and “lootocrats” close to the APC and the other ruling class parties, will they also take off in their private jets or will they feel secure in the knowledge that only miscreants and felons close to the PDP will face the day of reckoning? Will the war on corruption extend to a much needed project to end the monumental waste and squandermania that are endemic to virtually all our ruling class political parties, state governments, National Assembly men and women, local government bureaucrats and their hundreds of thousands of cronies and supplicants? Will the privatization of national and public utilities and assets that are no more than another form of looting since they do not conduce to functioning capitalist enterprises continue or will a post-PDP administration undertake a massive review and revision of the privatization bonanza for the rich and the powerful of the land? And finally: corruption has many faces and wears many masks that hide its gaping wound on the body politick: will a post-PDP dispensation strip away the masks and get to the beating, pumping heart of the nation and its millions of looted lives or will it be business as usual with a mere change of the cast of characters?

The coalition of big political forces of the “core” North and the Southwest that is the dominant formation within the APC presents an even more complex factor in any preliminary projections into the political order of a post-PDP Nigeria. The popular view, the common assumption is that this is largely a Hausa/Fulani/Kanuri and Yoruba alliance to which politicians of the other zonal and ethnic groups of the country are very important and very volatile supplements. While this is not an entirely factitious view, it is nonetheless a massively oversimplified perspective on the politics of a post-PDP Nigeria. Nigeria is not different from virtually all the other multiethnic and multicultural democratic countries of the world in which any political plurality that confers hegemonic domination on a ruling party is usually necessarily based on alliances like the one that produced the APC. But what is lacking in the dominant political discourses in Nigeria is the recognition that in all the coalitions and alliances that produce ruling parties in the bourgeois democracies of the world, politicians not only represent their zonal, ethnic and religious groups but also their class interests, especially as these are based on the forces and means of production from which their wealth and power are derived.

Perhaps the most concrete way to express this is to pose the question as to whether the terms “centrist”, “center-right” or “centre-left” can be applied to the APC in particular and, more generally, the political order that will supplant the reign of the PDP. The answer is of course yes, a resounding yes. But the question is not being asked now, as we approach February 14, 2015. But it will be asked thereafter, no question about it, that is if the coming elections move us to a truly post-PDP Nigeria. Beyond the “corruption sublime” of the PDP era, and beyond the return of power or the presidency to the North, the fundamental question of redistributive justice for all our peoples will be raised; and it will be raised in a manner that was not possible when we were all so completely absorbed during the reign of the PDP by the social, moral and spiritual ravages of corruption. In other words, if and when corruption becomes reduced to a scale not higher or worse than we find in most countries of the African continent and the world, we will then face the real challenges and problems of producing a 21st century capitalist democracy that is either functional and bourgeois or social-democratic and popular or perhaps even a brand new combination of these two archetypal forms.

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

January 11, 2015
After the deluge: beyond corruption and regional realignment of forces in a post-PDP Nigeria

It is not hyperbolic to speak of a post-PDP Nigeria in mythic terms. To speak of our country as a land readying itself for cleansing and restitution after a great deluge that lasted for a long time and laid nearly everything to waste is to deploy the powers of language and symbolic logic to try to capture what Nigeria has gone through in the last sixteen years. This order of discourse moves us beyond the dry, conceptualist universe of political economy in which a country like Nigeria under the rule of the PDP is described as a failing state.

With the discourse of symbolic and mythic logic, we are much closer to the human and psychic realities of the nation and the masses of its peoples in a period of great travail. For there are parts of the country in which, quite literally, it is as if one is in a physical terrain that looks very much like a land washed over by a great flood, a massive tsunami. Parts of the Niger Delta and the North come to mind here: those parts of the Niger Delta in which farmlands, fishing waters and the entire physical environment have been blighted by oil spills that are never cleaned up; and those parts of the North that have been seized by the Boko Haram jihadist insurgency. But these are only the worst expressions of realities that confront us everywhere in the country in which great suffering and insecurity have become the daily experience of millions of our peoples and the majority of the young that see only bleak futures ahead of them. At any rate, beyond the relatively more benign biblical parable of seven fat years coming after seven lean years, I see a post-PDP Nigeria as a land gearing up for a massive cleanup after a political tsunami, a moral and spiritual valley of death. The only caveat to add here is the necessity of anchoring the symbolic discourse of floods and tsunamis in concrete observations concerning the probable course of capitalist democracy in a post-PDP Nigeria.

It is of course possible, though highly improbable, that the PDP will continue to rule after the general elections of 2015. In that case, I hasten to observe that my reflections in this piece will not have proved futile and delusory; rather, they would have turned out to be prescient in the sense that, by a reverse logic, the deluge will continue, the moral and psychic morass will not come to an end. This is because PDP cannot, and will never reform from within; it will never clean up the Augean stables of filth and rot it has created. If it rigs its way into perpetuation of its misrule, it will be emboldened to raise impunity to new levels and we and the whole world will be astonished by new forms of monumental corruption, waste and mismanagement of our natural and human resources. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala once said that she would be quite satisfied if she was able to reduce the scale of looting and squandermania in PDP’s Nigeria by 4%; in a post-2015 general elections era that maintains the PDP in power at the centre, that 4% will dip into the minus percentile range, that is if it has not already done so. The worst will never reach its bottom in PDP’s misrule for what we confront in it is an abyss, a bottomless cesspit. Dear readers, dear compatriots, do not withhold yourselves from dreaming about and working for a post-PDP, post-deluge Nigeria especially as it so happens that there are solid grounds on which to base projections of the PDP’s complete rout in next month’s elections, these being the roles that corruption and a new realignment of forces among our political elites, our ruling class will play in the presidential elections. Let me explain.

Barring the stealing of victory by the PDP through massive rigging and a will to use very costly repressive violence to contain mass resistance to rigging, the 2015 general elections will be fought primarily around the twin axes of corruption and the electoral alliance of mainstream politicians of the “core” North” and the Southwest. Corruption of course exists in all the ruling class political parties and is to be found at varying levels in virtually all the state and local governments of the country. As almost every commentator on corruption in Nigeria has stated, the scale of corruption in Nigeria is nothing short of systemic: it is the noxious glue that holds everything together among godfathers and clients among our political elites; and it is the nefarious bond that binds the rulers to the ruled with regard to the unofficial and manipulative redistribution of resources between the few thousands of the haves and the millions of the have-nots. Given these factors, the question arises as to how and why corruption has come to loom much larger in the coming February 2015 general elections than it had ever done in all previous elections since the return to formal, civilian democracy in 1999.

The answer to this question is simple and unambiguous: under the Jonathan presidency, more specifically under the Jonathan administration’s endgame to the PDP’s era of arrant misrule, corruption has far exceeded the systemic to become extra- or para- systemic; it no longer has rhyme or reason, method in madness, or logic in illogic. Trillions of naira and tens of billions of dollars vanish or are unaccounted for, even as government workers and contractors are unpaid; state governors go cap in hand to Abuja and return with near empty bowls, month after month. The looting frenzy has reached dizzying heights of impunity and this is why corruption is the first and perhaps main issue of the coming elections. Additionally, this is why short of massive and violent rigging, Jonathan and the PDP will lose as they more than deserve to do. Most Nigerians are focused on corruption as the main issue of the elections, especially given the myths, legends and facts concerning Buhari’s alleged distaste for corruption The U.S. and the European Union will in particular be keenly watching the outcome of the elections and the main reason for this is also the scale, the extra- and para-systemic nature of corruption in the Jonathan presidency and its offshoots around the country.

And of course the other big issue in the election is what is being described as the return of power or, more specifically the presidency, to the North, this in an alliance that brings large segments of mainstream political forces of the “core” North with those of the Southwest. This is an infinitely more complex issue than the unifying and idealizing “ABJ” (Anyone But Jonathan) battle against corruption. In the postindependence political history of the country, this is not the first time that this sort of alliance has happened, the NPC-NNDP alliance of the 1960s being the first time that a joining of forces between the North and the Southwest came to power in the center in our country. But this time around, the alliance will not be a simple repetition of history, a mere regrouping of similar ideological and programmatic tendencies. In the earlier case, the two parties did not completely merge, for the simple reason that neither the NPC nor the NNDP wanted to lose its regional identity in a single party in which regionalism was or could be completely subsumed into a national party whose regional currents took second place to a nation-wide plurality. Now the allied forces have merged into a single party of diverse and even contradictory ideological and policy orientations and as a consequence, we are about to enter into an almost totally unprecedented space of ruling class politics in our country.

The parameters for apprehending this new space are already being set around very familiar oversimplifying ideas and perspectives. Perhaps by far the most common among these is the view that the new President will be Northern and Muslim while the Vice President will be Southern and Christian. This will certainly be the dominant view in the Western press and even within the ruling circles in Europe and the United States. And to be very candid about this, the thoughts, the emotions and the aspirations of a very large segment of the Nigerian electorate are also driven by this particular perspective. But like the question of corruption, this subject of a balancing act between a Moslem North and a Christian South begs the question of how a post-PDP Nigerian ruling class will be different in policy, programmes and issues from the era of the PDP and the long military interregnums before it. This is quite apart from the fact that the North is neither wholly Moslem nor the South wholly Christian.

Perhaps the most important consideration of all is the fact that the APC being unlike any other merger of disparate ideological forces we have ever seen in the political history of this country, we are almost certainly on the cusp of a new order of political discourse in a post-PDP Nigeria. In this, our beginning observation is that the present coalition within the party is centre-right, with the proviso that a center-left formation is slumbering underneath the present dominant formation. There are some among those reading this piece who will think that these reflections are premature or perhaps even meaningless in the context of present-day ruling class politics in our country. These caveats, these objections will be our starting point in next week’s concluding essay in the series as we focus on what sort of capitalism a post-PDP ruling class party will institute as a replacement for the present vacuum that combines a looting frenzy with a thoughtless, fundamentalist and unregulated capitalism driven by a latter-day primitive accumulation of the basest and most unregenerate kind that the world has ever known.

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

January 4, 2015
Falling oil prices and Nigeria’s ‘blessed’ 36 mini heads of states: can we learn from the specter of fast dwindling revenues?

The house maketh the feasters merry; it is emptied out.
Bertolt Brecht, “Concerning Poor BB”

Professor Abiola Irele will be surprised to read this, but it was in his house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.A., that the conversation that eventually led to this piece took place sometime in mid-November. By that time, though global oil prices had not yet plummeted to slightly less than 50% of what they had been in August, I was still sufficiently troubled by the irony in the “good luck” in the increase in what dollars from my salary could fetch in exchange with the Naira. With this in mind, I thought of the bitter irony in the Ghanaian novelist, Ayi Kwei Armah’s Why Are We So Blest? In the novel’s symbolic plot and character structures, Africa’s economic and social elites are presented as a neocolonial glitterati doomed to achieve and enjoy their wealth and prestige, their “blessedness” at the expense of the terrifying poverty and squalor of the living conditions, the life chances of the great majority of their compatriots.

With this in mind, during that conversation with him in mid-November, I ruefully observed to Professor Irele that the gain in the value of my dollar-denominated salary at Harvard in exchange with the Naira is the other grim face of the downward spiral in the value of our national currency. In other words, my gain, my “blessedness”, is the result of the misery that the devaluation of the naira would cause to my country. Before I could finish my sentence, Professor Irele shot back at me: “Speak for yourself, BJ! You have to send dollars to Nigeria in exchange for the Naira; I have to send Naira to my family in the U.S. in exchange for the dollar”. From this short exchange and from Armah’s Why Are We So Blest?, it was a short step for me to identify who among our country’s political elites are, like me, protected from the freefall of the Naira in the face of rapidly falling world oil prices. The President and the Executive Governors of our 36 states: they are the most cushioned, the most insulated from what almost all Nigerians are feeling now and may perhaps feel even more sharply in the months ahead as the oil prices continue to tumble. The governors – the mini heads of state in Nigeria – in particular embody more than any other social group that word “blessed” as deployed with devastating irony in Armah’s novel: a state of benighted “blessedness” that is dependent on the hardship and suffering of the vast majority of the people. This is the subject of this week’s column, but before I come to it, permit me to dwell briefly on falling oil prices and what many progressive and patriotic commentators in Nigeria are saying about the alarming specter.

In the present discussion, space will allow me to reflect only on perhaps the two most important things that the most astute commentators are saying about the falling oil prices. First of all, they are saying that the hardships that are already here as well as those to come must make us learn, as many other oil-producing nations have learned, that we must diversify the national and local economies in our country and stop depending so overwhelmingly on oil. This argument which, by the way, has been around for at least two decades now, is buttressed by the fact that Nigeria has an abundance of many other natural resources that lie untapped because of the ease with which oil revenues flow into our national and state coffers. The second argument is newer but no less crucial: a country’s most valuable resources are its people. For this reason, far more than oil, far more than any other single or group of natural resources, it is the human beings and their capacities and potential that must constitute the resource base of our country. After all, there are countries on this planet that have little or no natural resources and therefore depend almost entirely on their human capital. For if you have developed human capital, if you mobilize and strengthen the productive and creative capacities of your people, you can get natural resources from other countries of the world, especially countries like Nigeria that fail to tap and develop the productive capacities of their peoples.

We all know that the least developed and therefore the most under-utilized resource that we have is precisely this one that pertains to both the capacities and potential of our people, most especially our young people that constitute the demographic majority of our populace. On the basis of this factor, we can see clearly that our massive and distorting overdependence on oil revenue has not only led to a looting frenzy, a systemic and collective kleptomania by our rulers, but far worse is the fact that it has led to wastage on a monumental scale of our most valuable asset as a nation, this being the productive potential of the teeming millions of our young people. The potential is there in our youths in whom the future of our survival as a nation and society depends; but that potential remains blighted and unrealized thanks to the “blessedness” of our leaders’ profligate overdependence on oil revenues. This brings us back to the issue of those in our country who, in their state of “blessedness”, are the most protected from the terrifying prospects of our dwindling oil revenues.

Now, it is true that in land size and population, most of the states in Nigeria are in fact like many of the countries of the world. But that is not why the governors of our 36 states feel and act like heads of states in their own right. The reason is simply and unambiguously a dependence on oil revenues that is like the dependence of human beings, human communities on water. Much in the manner in which no human community can survive without reasonably assured access to water sources, so can the system that has given us 36 mini heads of states in Nigeria not survive without our overdependence on oil revenues. In all but two or three of our 36 states, oil revenues constitute the only source, the only raison d’être of both the governor’s administrative legitimacy and symbolic, honorific prestige. Even in the exceptional states like Lagos and Rivers, the over-reliance on oil revenues is also decisive, if not overdetermining. For everyone knows that every month, the 36 states all head to Abuja to collect their respective allocations from national oil revenues and that this is the single most important activity of each of the 36 states. What is not duly or sufficiently recognized, in my opinion, is the fact that this activity also sets the tone and the agenda for all the governors, al the chief executives of the 36 states. For I think that it is not sufficiently recognized that if the monies monthly paid out to our mini heads of states are not paid to them but are, by a completely different order of governance than the one practiced now, diverted to developing the human capacities and potential of our peoples, the governorships, the mini heads of state syndrome would end tomorrow and absolutely nobody would mourn its demise.

As I stated at the beginning of this piece, the President and our 36 mini heads of state are, like me and millions of Nigerians who work abroad especially in the countries of the convertible currencies of the world, are protected from the dire prospects of the naira’s spiraling downward plunge. We are “blessed”. But the “blessings” are very illusory, more so for our mini heads of states than for Nigerians who live and/or work abroad. This is because the consequences of the falling value of the Naira in relation to the dollar and the convertible currencies of the world are more gradual and less immediate for Nigerians working abroad than for our mini heads of states. Their monthly trips to Abuja are becoming more and more fraught, more and frustrating. Sometimes, they return with empty bowls, with promissory notes whose future redemption is not assured. They are hanging on by the skin of their authority and legitimacy as all their clients, all their creditors pound on their doors, demanding both their just and unjust share of the largess from the overdependence on oil revenues.

There are many lessons to learn from our dwindling oil revenues. Hardship and suffering often serve to teach us about ourselves, about the world and about life. For me, the greatest lesson that we can learn from the current crisis of the downward spiral of oil prices on the world market is that oil revenues, as long as we continue to be able to garner them even if they decline, must go to meet the needs of the young and the most needy in our society. This calls for the abolition of the mini heads of states system of governance in our country, together with its chief hegemon – the strong, bloated presidency. I doubt that this is about to happen. But this is no reason not to herald its presence on the horizon of the present.

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

December 28, 2014