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Category: Biodun Jeyifo

The religion and science, faith and reason controversy – again (1)

I was rather pleasantly surprised by most of the emails that I received from the piece that I wrote for this column last week, this being my reflections on Dr. Adah Igonoh’s story about her survival in the battle against the Ebola Virus Disease (EVD). Many people wrote to tell me that they had also found Dr. Igonoh’s story very moving, very inspiring. I was pleased to read this, but quite frankly this was not what I found pleasantly surprising in the bulk of the emails that I received on last week’s column. What surprised and pleased me in the emails was this: virtually everyone who wrote informed me that, like me and academics of my type, they also think that there is no necessary and inevitable opposition or incompatibility between religion and science. Although it did occur to me that most of those who wrote the emails to me were probably people who generally share my views on many aspects of our country’s current crises and challenges, nonetheless it was pleasing to find that many readers of last week’s column also think that religion and science, faith and reason should not go their separate ways in any modern-day nation in our world. So far, so good, as the saying goes.

But then I noticed a pattern in these emails that rather disturbed me. This was because in nearly every case, those who wrote those emails to me felt that the need for religion and science to, as it were, “walk together” in any modern state was so obvious that anyone should be able to see and affirm that need. Why I found this disturbing is the subject of this week’s essay, thus making it something of an epilogue to last week’s column. My central argument in this piece is that though the need for religion and science to work together harmoniously in the modern world seems fairly obvious, that obviousness is not to be taken for granted, not to be assumed to be without any tension, any stress. The struggle of science against religion, more specifically against the fanatical dogma of organized, institutionalized religion, is one of the central themes of modern intellectual history. At the height of that struggle, brilliant and gifted scientists were burnt at the stakes. Those who were not burnt were made to recant on their scientific theories and were banned for life from the pursuit of their scientific vocation. We cannot go into the full details of this history, but in the end science prevailed and religion had to make its peace with the decisive, transformative role of science in modern life, in the specifically modern organization of society and its productive relations and activities.

Since our country and our continent are constituent parts of the modern world, we are heirs to that monumental struggle between religion and science. Nonetheless, that struggle never took place, never shook society to its foundations in our own part of the world. This is both good and bad. In this essay, I wish to reflect upon the good and bad parts of this historic fact that in our society, our own part of modernity, science and scientists never had to struggle against the powerful institutional, doctrinal and ideological authority of organized religion. Let’s deal first with the good part of this crucial fact that science and scientists in Africa never really had to wage fierce battles against the forces of organized religion and its historic opposition to rationality as a cardinal basis of life.

As reported by Chinua Achebe in his famous collection of essays, The Trouble with Nigeria, in the 1950s, the Minister of Education in the old Western Region, Dr. S.A. Awokoya, wrote a book titled Why Our Children Die. According to Achebe, Awokoya wrote that book as a medical scientist who took up arms against traditional African cultural beliefs and practices that wittingly or unwittingly caused or promoted high levels of infant mortality in our society. As I have not been able to lay my hands on that book by Dr. Awokoya, I am going by what Achebe says about it in his book. And what Achebe says is that Dr. Awokoya in his book took up arms in defence or promotion of science and rationality against beliefs and practices in our traditional cultures that militated against rational explanations and remedies for diseases, together with the practice of private and public hygiene, especially with regard to the great vulnerability of children to diseases and lack of hygiene.

The allusion to Achebe and Awokoya in this discussion helps us to see, I hope, that the “enemy” of science in Africa was not organized religion. More crucially, Achebe and Awokoya were careful to emphasize the fact that it was not the entirety of the African cultural heritage that was against science and rationality; rather, it was some specific and identifiable beliefs and practices that constituted the composite enemy. As a matter of fact, both Achebe and Awokoya were products of the schools of a rationalized, “modernized” form of Christianity that promoted science and the scientific spirit in our part of the world, even as theological and doctrinal branches of these same forms of Christianity waged holy wars against the entire heritage of culture on our continent. Achebe and Awokoya, as archetypal figures in the story of science, rationality and religion in our continent, showed us that this was and is a complex story in which organized religion, traditional cultures and the scientific spirit could not be divided into a simple pattern of opposites and negatives, illumination and mystification. Some parts of traditional cultures were not in opposition to the scientific enterprise, just as some doctrinal aspects of Christianity opposed all aspects of traditional cultures, not because they were against science but because they were thought to be the antithesis of the one true God of the Christians or Moslems. In other words, faith and rationality in modern Africa never got caught and fixated in the radical and uncompromising opposition that medieval, pre-modern Christianity in Europe mounted between religion and science. This is the good part of the overall narrative. We now move to the bad part.

For this, it helps to put matters in concrete and perhaps even dramatic terms. No scientists were ever burnt at the stakes on our continent. But this also means that no scientist ever achieved a heroic stature as the defender of the scientific spirit and enterprise against the forces of religious medievalism. For it was precisely because of these factors that science in Europe was able to win commerce, industry and the popular imagination to its side in the struggle against organized religion. There is another way to put this observation in terms that are perhaps even more graphic and it is this: we do not have a single man or woman of science to match the iconic stature of an Achebe or a Soyinka, none at all. Achebe, Soyinka, Clark, Okigbo and the other icons of modern Nigeria literature achieved their stature because they challenged and overcame the racist, colonialist canard that we did not have what it takes to produce works of literature that are equal to the best literary works from other regions of the world. In our celebration of the achievements of these icons of modern Nigerian writing, we often place too much emphasis on their talent, their genius and in the process underestimate the struggles that they had to wage. Thus, though talent and genius are very important, the central factor in this piece is struggle and effort, unceasing and unflagging struggle and effort.

It is perhaps useful at this point to bring these observations and reflections back to Dr. Adah Igonoh’s story. In doing this, I wish to place as much emphasis as I possibly can on the fact that in last week’s column, I made every effort to highlight and praise the determination and will with which Dr. Igonoh went in search of knowledge and information that could help her prevail over the EVD peril. Repeatedly, I stated that while she spent much time and invested great emotional and spiritual energy in prayers and divine favour, she was also relentless in her search for remedies available from medical science. Please remember that this all took place at a moment in her life when she faced great debilitation from a relentlessly destructive disease. At the risk of offending the sensibilities of many readers who are devout religionists, I wish to point out that at that moment in Dr. Igonoh’s battle with EVD, religion and faith were the easy, assured part of the struggle; far more onerous and demanding was the pursuit and absorption of scientific knowledge and information.

Knowledge and truth seeking, in all areas of life and experience, is not for the faint-hearted; this is even more so with regard to science. To be a successful and dedicated woman or man of science takes a lot of hard, grindingly demanding work. With the phenomenal rise and accession to dominance of Pentecostalism in our country and our continent in the last two or three decades, this crucial perspective on what science demands from scientists has been submerged by the belief that you must leave everything, everything, to God. The reason for this is not difficult to find: in many respects, Pentecostalism is medieval in its worldview. It does not exactly have the institutional power and authority that organized religion in medieval Europe had and so it cannot wage a direct assault on science and rationalism as Christianity did in the Middle Ages in Europe. Its assault is more indirect, more subtle in that it comprises the combination of intellectual laziness and fanatical religiosity in which the religiosity provides a cover, a refuge for the intellectual laziness. In next week’s concluding essay in this series, we shall explore how and why it has managed to capture many segments of our national intelligentsia that include men and women of science.

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

October 5, 2014
The EVD survivor at the intersection of faith and reason, religion and science

If you find yourself in a fast leaking boat far from the shoreline, pray to God but row with all your might towards the shore. A Russian proverb

It was my friend, Femi Osofisan, who forwarded the heartwarming and inspirational story of Dr. Adah Igonoh to me and some other friends by email, with a simple message: “a story worth reading and worth pondering upon”. I was to later find out that the story had actually “gone viral” on the internet after it first appeared in the online newsmagazine and social gossip journal, BellaNaija. But it was Femi who forwarded it to me because he had been very moved by the story.

On my own part, I don’t think that anything I have read this year has moved me as deeply as the story of Dr. Igonoh’s victory in the struggle for her life after she contracted the Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) from having been one of the senior medical staff who treated Patrick Sawyer, the Liberian who brought the disease to Nigeria. I was so profoundly moved by Dr. Igonoh’s story that for hours I could think of nothing else but the largeness of heart and depth of humaneness revealed in her story. Indeed, so moved was I after reading her story that, as I almost always do when I am gripped by very powerful emotions and thoughts, I went for a long walk along a river close to my apartment, this being the Charles River in Cambridge Massachusetts. On getting to the river, I made my way to a bend in the river whose bank is enveloped by a coolness created by the natural canopy of the branches and leaves of big, tall trees, this being my favorite spot for meditation. This piece is the product of that meditation.

In the first place, Dr. Igonoh’s story is extraordinarily well told. This is because it is told with a simplicity and a directness that seemed to be a perfect narrative frame for her unvarnished truth-telling. Since the story has been widely circulated on the internet, hundreds of thousands already have read about it. But it is necessary to recount the essence, the heart of the story for those who have not read or heard about it. In a brief summary here’s the story in its most important moments or episodes: Dr. Igonoh contracts the Ebola disease; she is quarantined in very insanitary and traumatic circumstances; she goes through the whole gamut of horrific symptoms and manifestations of the disease; in quarantine she meets and establishes powerful and sustaining emotional bonds with other patients of the disease; as the disease relentlessly consumes her and she is staring at the possibility of death, she commences a psychic struggle to marshal all her inner resources to confront the depredations of the disease; with a towering will she begins to gather as much information and knowledge as she can about the disease; from this she enters into a new sense, a new apprehension of herself as both a profoundly spiritual and at the same time a fully rational and inquisitive human being; and finally when, with a lot of help and support from her pastor (himself a medical doctor) and some foreign health specialists, she turns the corner and begins to see that she might survive, she attains an uncommon grace that enables her to achieve a deeply humane and mature perspective on life and its vicissitudes.

I would like to observe, indeed to insist that were it not for the fact that the story Dr. Igonoh tells is about an actual life-changing experience, it reads and feels like the work of a writer who is on her way to becoming an important realist storyteller. In other words, there is every indication in how Dr. Igonoh tells her story that it could very well be the germ, the beginning of a full-length nonfiction work that might well become a masterful account of how she was victorious in her battle against EVD. Indeed if she gets to read this piece, I would like to use this medium to suggest to her, to her family and her pastor that this is a story that our country and the world needs to hear in the more capacious version of a full length nonfiction work.

I do admit that this is the professional aspect of my response to Dr. Igonoh’s story; it is the opinion of a teacher of literature, a literary critic who cannot separate a story from the mode of its telling. But there is another dimension to Dr. Igonoh’s telling of her story that prompts me to suggest that the account she gives ought to be turned into a full length nonfiction prose work and this is the fact that in the fullness of the story that she tells, she touches on wider frames of reference that include the professionalism, dedication and courage of many of her supervisors and colleagues whom fate brought into the initial frontline engagement of EVD’s invasion of our country. More generally, this wider frame of reference enfolds the untold story of a nation’s encounter with the specter of a full-blown spread of the Ebola disease. In this respect, Dr. Ameyo Adadevoh about whom we have read so much, reappears in Dr. Igonoh’s story as perhaps the most heroic figure in the public and collective life of our country in at least the last one or two decades. There is also this factor: in these larger frames of reference that we see in Dr. Igonoh’s story, one is startled, indeed one is heartened to see Nigerians acting with total altruism and genuine civic mindedness. In effect, this is a story that is totally different from the stories we are accustomed to reading or hearing about our country in which villains always triumph over heroes, the corrupt and the cynical always prevail over just, selfless and fair-minded women and men.

For me, perhaps the most astounding aspect of Dr. Igonoh’s story of survival is precisely the one aspect that has not (yet) received notice, let alone commentary on the internet. This is the aspect that gives equal weight, equal narrative space to her faith as a Christian and her dedication to the rational, scientific ethos of her profession as a medical doctor. Again and again in her story, Dr. Igonoh tells how much prayer and spiritual counseling from her pastor, her family and members of her church helped to buoy up her spirit and her determination to survive. On this account, the story she tells seems to belong to the order of miraculous tales, of transcendental fables. But then, Dr. Igonoh’s story is also filled with repeated accounts of how she did everything possible to obtain knowledge and information about the disease, together with accounts of how much time and energy she spent doing this. Moreover, we also get repeated accounts of how she rigorously monitored the effects of the treatment she was receiving. On the basis of this strong secular strain in her story, it could be said that Dr. Igonoh survived because she used to the fullest extent possible her intelligence, her rationality, her trust in the help that medical science can provide for the gravely ill.

I think it is big misreading of Dr. Igonoh’s story of survival to see a dichotomy, a conflict between the so-called “miraculous tale” and the narrative of “secular, rational” will and intelligence. Such a dichotomy, such a conflict apparently does not exist in the worldview of Dr. Igonoh and for this reason she treasures and honors both traditions of thought and organized systems for beneficent intervention in human affairs. In this she reminds me of Nobel Prize laureates in the sciences, in Physics, Chemistry and Medicine, who believe in God and are also devout or pious followers of the Christian or Jewish faiths. Examples of this category of Nobel laureates are Max Planck (Physics); Werner Heisenberg (Physics); Alexis Carrel (Medicine and Physiology) and Joseph Murray (Medicine and Physiology).

It is impossible to overstate how significant this aspect of Dr. Igonoh’s story is for contemporary Nigerian intellectual and scientific endeavors. This is because for several decades now, a philistine, idolatrous and dangerously fanatical form of Christian and Moslem religiosity has captured large segments of the national intelligentsia in our country. Brilliant and gifted physicists become born-again Pentecostal pastors and completely abandon not only Physics but the scientific ethos. Historians and linguists of great renown become self-trained theologians and totally turn their backs on historical explanations and rational accounts of the movement of history in favour of grossly distorted accounts of the force of divine and miraculous intervention in human affairs. Vice Chancellors, Heads of Research Institutes and Directors of Studies in our tertiary institutions and public think tanks not only always start all their meetings and work with mandatory prayers, they effectively exclude all those who do not think as they do, all those who, though they may believe in God, also give science and rationality due acknowledgement and respect. The list goes on and on and at the end of the day, science and religion, faith and rationality are going their separate ways among our professoriate, our men and women of learning. The cost of this separation to our collective progress and welfare as a nation is incalculable.

I do not think that Dr. Igonoh consciously set out to make these large points that I am arguing in this essay. It would disappoint me somewhat but not surprise me if she were to come out against my central argument in this piece to declare for the world and her pastor and fellow churchgoers to hear that in all things she puts God first. I leave it to the reader to judge for themselves on the claim I am making here: on the strength of the testimony in her story, she is a very devout Christian and at the same time a rationalist who puts great trust in the power of human intelligence and institutions like medical science and the knowledge industry to make a difference in matters of life and death, matters of human helplessness before predatory diseases. One way to put this contention in its simplest form is to invoke the old adage: heaven helps only those who help themselves. This is a more common form of the Russian proverb that is the epigraph to this essay: If you find yourself in a fast leaking boat far from the shoreline, pray to God but row with all your might toward the shore.

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

September 28, 2014
Nigerians below the age of 50 and “the end of the world as we know it” syndrome

Out of relative obscurity, every generation must discover its mission and either fulfill or betray it.
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

Nigerians below the age of 50. Without any deliberate intention on my part, this has become a phrase that I often use in this column. In the series that preceded this week’s essay and ended last week, I went into great detail on the ramifications of that phrase for our country’s future. I gave many facts, anecdotes and figures to try to prove to “Nigerians below the age of 50” that far from being one of the most corruption-ridden nations on the planet, our country once experienced a period when corruption existed on a fairly low, manageable scale in our society. In other essays in the seven years since the column has been running, first under a slightly different name in The Guardian and now in The Nation, I have used this phrase, “Nigerians below the age of 50” with reference to other indications of the unending downward spiral in the quality of life for the great majority of Nigerians, with a corresponding decline in the moral and spiritual health of the nation, all of this in about the last four decades and half when an overwhelming majority of Nigerians alive now were either toddlers or were not yet born. In this week’s essay, I would like to now subject this phrase and the ways in which I have used it to a critical review.

In the first place, I would like to strongly assert that in most societies of the world and virtually throughout recorded history, nearly every generation has felt that things are not what they used to be, that values are in decline and that restorative actions have to be taken to salvage the sustaining and enduring aspects of the outer and inner lives of the collectivity. This phenomenon is what I call in the title of this piece, “the end of the world as we know it” syndrome. This syndrome or idea is a perennial one in the arts, literature and culture of all the societies of the world. As an idea, it pervades the social fabric depicted in the two great novels of Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God. In the former, which is set in the 19th century, I was once startled to read an observation of Okonkwo’s maternal uncle, Uchendu, that stated that the generation of Okonkwo was a generation of “stay-at-home” provincials that no longer travelled as constantly and as widely as his generation and that of Okonkwo’s father did. Indeed, the phrase, “the end of the world” hardly ever means the literal, physical end of time, history and experience; what it really nearly always means is “the end of the world as we, members of a particular generation, know it”.

Without knowing it, have I been using this phrase, “Nigerians below the age of 50” that is so ubiquitous in my column in the tradition of the other phrase, “the end of the world as we know it”? Perhaps, but I would argue that only very minimally so. There are some modes of behavior, some standards of comportment that were prevalent in my youth that I no longer see in the behavior and values of young people nowadays that I rather wish were still around. That’s about it. Definitely, I hope that my readers have not, consciously or unconsciously, been reading my use of the phrase, “Nigerians below 50” as a conservative tool with which to align the ways of today’s youth to the ways of my own youth. As I have always pointed out many times in this column, I write for the most part for “Nigerians below the age of 50” with a view to communicating to them my desperate hope that if things were once much better in our country, they could be better again, or indeed be much better than anything my generation ever experienced.

One of the most important points that I wish to put across in this review of my use of this phrase, “Nigerians below 50”, is the fact that generational differences don’t mean much to me, they don’t occupy a privileged place in my thought. For me, the differences that have been used to cause a lot of harm in our country and our world are not differences between generational cohorts. Rather the differences that have been used to prevent human progress and happiness in our country and across the world are those based on race, gender, ethnicity, religion, geopolitical region and especially, class and access to social power. In this regard, let me state clearly that it is not the fact of difference (or differences) in itself that cause lack of progress and unhappiness; rather it is the use, the manipulation of difference and/or differences that we have to contend with. Indeed, we can safely assert that generational differences as a cause of the crises that we currently face in this country is relatively very unimportant. The proof of this is the degree of cooperation across the generations within the political class in our country in colossal acts of looting, wastage and mismanagement that have become well known all over the world. At one stage not too long ago, there used to be talk of our need for a “new breed” of politicians. Well, the “new breed” came and they were in many respects as bad if not worse than the “old breed”. And indeed, one fundamental fact of human life and political reality is that within each and every generation there are good and rotten apples.

Think of the following concrete illustration of this assertion: Chris Uba, Rotimi Chibuike Amaechi, Dimeji Bankole, Raji Fashola, Nasir El Rufai and Modu Sheriff all belong to the same generational cohort! Chris Uba’s blatant godfatherism is so crude, so intellectually backward and politically retrograde that it often causes great embarrassment to his own political party, the PDP; Rotimi Chibuike Amaechi is one of the few shining lights of reform in the present political order. Dimeji Bankole speaks heavily – and sometimes with affectation – with an Oxbridge accent, but he was one of the worst and most wasteful Speakers of the House of Representatives we have ever had; Raji Fashola is quite easily the most able technocratic governor we have had in the country since 1999. And finally, Modu Sheriff and Nasir El Rufai. Sheriff, like Chris Uba, knows no distinction between lawfulness and lawlessness in governance; consequently, he has moved quite easily and effortlessly from one desperate and monstrous political brinksmanship to another. By contrast, El Rufai is doing everything he possibly can to prove to himself and to the country that a politician can break away and turn a new leaf from the worst parts of himself and his political comrades.

There is one sense in which my use of the phrase, “Nigerians below the age of 50” could legitimately be said to have distinct and perhaps even intentional generational connotations and this is the sense in which I place great value in conversations within and across generations. In concrete terms, often when I write in this column about prevalent realities, values and practices in the country when we were young, I try as much as I can not to be sentimental, not to be self-righteous on behalf of my generation. Indeed, in my mind, I think and hope that I am also addressing members of my generation who are still alive and who care about where the country is headed. The justification for this concern is that I fear very much that nostalgia and sentimentality dominate the ways in which members of my generation speak about the past amongst themselves and to members of the younger generations. “Ah, when King’s College was still King’s College”! “At U.I. of those days we used to have our rooms cleaned and our clothes laundered for us”! “The roads and bridges that used to be built by the old Public Works Department (PWD) are so much better than the roads that contractors build now”. “In those days, you could travel across the length and breadth of the country without fear of encountering any armed robbers on your journey”. “Do you know that there was a time in this country when electricity supply was not erratic?” These are all literally true, but the mode of their evocation completely decontextualizes them from the social relations of production that made them possible in the first place, especially relations of paternalism and inequality.

My greatest concern in my use of the phrase, “Nigerians below the age of 50” is thus that we should leave out nostalgia and sentimentality in the conversations we are having within and across the generations. It is perhaps symbolic of the argument that I am making here that History as a subject is no loner taught in many of our schools. For it is history, the passage from one period or epoch to another, that I have in mind when I use the phrase I have been reflecting upon in this essay. I am not entirely sure that we have moved from one era to another between the time of my youth and the present moment of my late or senescent adulthood. History is not the mere passage of time; it often simultaneously involves an advance and a retrogression – as in the phrase one step forward, two steps backward. At any rate, when I write to “Nigerians below the age of 50”, my hope is that what I write about will give them a bit of historical information or knowledge that will empower them. History also paradoxically sometimes involves one step backward and three steps forward. That pattern of historical change and dynamism always entails the empowerment of youthful generations with important lessons of history. Thus, I remain completely open to the possibility that out of the ranks of “Nigerians below the age of 50” there might arise the agents of this particular form of historical transcendence.

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

September 21, 2014
Ribadu’s defection, corruption and the unending disappearance of productive, modernising political elites in our country (2)

The thing that is coming is so strange that it has a head and also wears a hat.
Chinua Achebe, Arrow of God

The year was 1971. With my friend Professor Femi Osofisan, I was a graduate student resident of the Tafawa Balewa Postgraduate Hall at the University of Ibadan. Of course neither Femi nor I was then a professor. As a matter of fact, neither of us was remotely close to completing our Ph D studies for at that point, we were both preparing to go abroad to advance our doctoral studies, he to the University of Paris (Sorbonne) and myself to New York University. For this reason, that year at Balewa Hall was for us like a temporary holiday from academic studies of the most rigorous kind. He wrote plays and had them staged; I wrote reviews of books and theatre performances and literary journalism for the newspapers; and we both continued to act in stage plays and television dramas.

And we read, we devoured newspapers. And this is the point that I wish to highlight in this journey down memory lane to that year at Balewa Hall. For it was this daily activity of going to the newspaper vendors’ stalls in front of our Hall that drew the attention of Osofisan and myself to what must strike every single Nigerian now as an astonishing fact. This is the fact that people would stop by these stalls, take which papers they wanted to buy, and leave the monies for the often absent vendors in the absolute certainty that no one would steal the monies. Balewa Hall is at the junction where the roads leading to Sultan Bello, Kuti, Azikiwe and Independence Halls converged and so the daily traffic that went past our Hall was great. But we never heard of anyone having ever stolen a kobo from the monies left for absent newspaper vendors. Corruption was not unknown then, but it was nowhere close to the pandemic social and economic contagion that it has become in our country in about the last four decades.

I have said over and over again in this column that for the most part, I write the column with youthful Nigerians under the age of 50 as my main audience. Nigerians of my generation and those older are also welcome to the column and indeed, I often do get email responses to what I write in the column from elderly compatriots, women and men. But for the most part, it is the young that I think about, together with the future that we will leave for them. This is why I am starting this conclusion of the series that began with last week’s essay with this account of the relative low level and manageable scale of corruption in our country in my youth more than forty years ago. It is the great social tragedy, the great moral and political burden of members of my generation that are still alive and that are men and women of conscience, decency and compassion to see their country, their society descend into levels of corruption, rot and decadence that we could never have imagined and that cause unspeakable degrees of poverty, suffering and insecurity among most of our peoples, all this in a land flowing with vast wealth.

Among the multiple and diverse areas of our collective national life that I could use to illustrate this social tragedy, I choose only one – the infrastructures, practices and realities of our educational system. Nigerians under 50 may find this hard to believe or even comprehend now, but in my youth, examination malpractices were very, very rare. And when they happened they were severely punished. There were many poorly trained teachers in the primary and secondary schools, but they were for the most part very aware of their deficiencies and took every step necessary to improve themselves professionally. In the universities, standards of instruction, learning and research were very high and we took great pride in the fact that degrees from Nigerian tertiary institutions were respected all over the world.

Today, all of these accomplishments that set us firmly on the road to an equable and well adjusted modernity are in total shambles, consumed by and in an ethos in which corruption reigns with a sovereign power that has eaten deep into every sphere and level of society. Exam malpractices are so rife that they are like an epidemic of cultural and intellectual ete, leprosy. Hundreds of thousands of primary and secondary schoolteachers with certification as highly trained professionals are in reality barely literate. Moreover, they tend to be militantly opposed to retraining and self-improvement – as Governor Kayode Fayemi of Ekiti State found to his cost in the state’s last governorship elections. Our universities are so poorly ranked now that they not only rank lowly among the universities of the world but also among universities in Africa. The list goes on and on. And since the median age for Nigeria is only 19, this means that this dreadfully dispiriting list of rot and corruption at all levels of our society is all that the great majority of the living generations of Nigerians have ever known. From this fact, I extrapolate this sobering observation: as those of us of the generations that have known a Nigeria that was very different from the rot, the corruption that is now drowning our society watch for signs of what the future portends for us, we seem like the perfect example for the witty, laughable but deeply sardonic saying from Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God that serves as the epigraph to this piece: “The thing that is coming is so strange that it has a head and also wears a hat”.

For those of us who have known and experienced a Nigeria that was not among the ranks of the most corrupt societies of the world, a Nigeria in which, at Balewa Hall at the University of Ibadan in 1971, you could leave monies for absent newspaper vendors and no one would steal the monies, we should reflect on what lessons we can extrapolate from that period and pass on to the generations of our younger compatriots. That is a huge task that is, quite frankly, beyond the scope of this series of only two essays. In place of such a comprehensive review, I wish to end this series with only one example that I deem of extraordinary importance. This is the fact that we did have politicians, we did have significant factions among our ruling class political parties that made it a crucial aspect of their electoral manifestos and their policies and actions in governance to contain corruption lest it completely derail the requirements of economic and social development and the public good. This will no doubt seem like pure fantasy to most Nigerians under 50, but it is a sadly forgotten or even buried aspect of our political history. Let me draw the attention of the reader, especially the young reader, to some salient facts.

The three main ruling class parties of the First Republic, the NPC, the NCNC and the AG, were all very efficient in the management of their budgets as ruling parties in the regions and in the centre. At the Crown Agents in London in which the greater portions of their surpluses were banked, they maintained considerable reserves which were not stolen or looted by any political leader or chieftain. If, as an indigene of any of the regions, you got a scholarship to any Nigerian or foreign institution, you received your stipends in a timely fashion. All the regions were in a sort of healthy competition for growth and development of their peoples and this helped to severely curtail any impulses or temptations for looting public coffers. Above all else is this crucial fact: all these parties had within them sizeable factions of productive, modernizing elites that put regional or public interests far above personal self-aggrandizement. Even the NPC which was the most conservative of these parties had many such politicians at the helm of its affairs, for the NPC was not so much against modernization per se as it was against modernization that was too rapid and that was dominated by the South and Christianity. Perhaps the most interesting case of all is that of the combined impact of the AG and its leader, the late Chief Obafemi Awolowo, on the political economy of capitalist modernity and modernization in our country.

To put this case in a nutshell, Chief Awolowo amassed great personal fortune as a lawyer and businessman; at the same time, he zealously pursued economic and social programmes that benefitted the poor and the marginalised. He did not see one as the opposite of the other: great personal wealth; and policies and programmes that were welfarist or social democratic. Of especial significance was the fact that Awolowo took this stance into the innermost sanctum of his Party’s moral, ideological and political struggles. He knew those who were with him and those who were against him on this all-important issue of the distribution of the social surplus between the haves and the have-nots. Moreover, he formulated his political alliances outside the Western Region and his own Party around this distinction between those that merely wished to enrich and aggrandize themselves and those who were for both self-enrichment and the interests of the poor and the disenfranchised.

It is true that outside the Western Region, Awolowo was mostly seen as a Yoruba leader. Nonetheless, in virtually all the other regions of the country and among the diverse ethnic communities of the land, it was also known that he had deep quarrels with politicians in his own Party and in the other Parties that were for only their own self-enrichment. This was why he was the bellwether, the catalyst for all the productive, modernising political elites of the First Republic. At any rate, his significance for the present discussion is this: party politics in the modern world for Awolowo was not only about differences of ethnicity, region and religion, each party or politician representing his or her own part of the country; party politics for Awo was also about redistribution of wealth between the haves and the have-nots across the length and breadth of the land.

I was not and I am not now an “Awoist”. None of the ruling class parties in our country has ever moved close enough to my vision of consistent and principled progressive politics for me to feel inclined to join any of them. My concluding focus on Awolowo has one reason and one reason only and this can be put in the form of three questions. One: In the last four decades, have you, dear reader, seen, heard or read about major, bitter differences among our politicians and political parties that are primarily based on how to distribute our national wealth between the haves and the have-nots? Two: Are the emerging battle lines for the 2015 general elections not almost exclusively about where the Presidency will go? Three: Have you ever read the Preamble to the 1990 Constitution that states quite clearly that wealth accumulation and income redistribution cannot be simultaneously pursued in our country at its present stage of (mal)development?

Self-enrichment reigns supreme now, with systemic and miasmic corruption as its enabling, fructifying environment. Nigeria was not always like this. Armed with knowledge of our political history, we may yet be able to carry out reforms before it is too late.

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

September 14, 2014
Ribadu’s defection, corruption and the unending disappearance of productive, modernizing political elites in our country (1)

The fly that has no one to advise it follows the corpse to the grave.
Chinua Achebe, Arrow of God

Let me state from the very onset of this piece that what has brought me back to the subject of Nuhu Ribadu’s defection from the APC to the PDP about which I wrote in this column two weeks ago is the unusually high number of emails that I got in response to that column. In number and sheer emotional intensity, almost no other column that I have ever written in this newspaper comes close to the responses I received to the piece on Ribadu. The majority of such responses were, as I had expected, full of bitter disappointment, anger and derision. Some responses were thoughtful and measured, but these were very few.

A special category of emails among these responses concerns those that were full of sarcasm and invective. Perhaps the choicest among this group of responses were those that played satirical language games on Ribadu’s name, using the first two of the three syllables of the former anti-corruption czar’s name, “Ri-ba”, as a pivot for all kinds of printable and unprintable rubbishing of the character of the born-again PDP chieftain. “Riba” in the Yoruba language can be severally translated as bribery, graft or sleaze. From this, one particularly caustic email to me replaced the name Ribadu with the three-syllable word Ri-ba-dun, which literally means graft, bribery or sleaze is sweet, is profitable. I do not know if the same process is going among Nigerians who speak other languages and are as bitter as the person who coined “Ri-ba-dun”, but it would not surprise me in the least to discover that this is the case.

Ribadu’s defection to the PDP, the worst, the most corrupt and the most mediocre ruling party in Africa and perhaps in the world, has demonstrably increased the level of cynicism in our country. He enjoyed great respect and credibility across nearly all social and ethnic groups in the country, especially among the masses of ordinary Nigerians. True enough, he did very poorly in his bid for election as President in 2011, but the cause for that failure had more to do with the systemic nature of the massively monetized corruption of the electoral process in Nigeria than to any personal failings in the man himself. I was very aware of the contradictions and inconsistencies in Ribadu’s work as the volatile, energetic and outspoken Head of the EFFC, but I did have considerable admiration for him and some members of his staff. It is for this reason and this reason alone that I am returning again this week to the matter of his defection to the PDP, my intention being to open up an aspect of the consequences or ramifications of his defection that I think that, for the most part, many who have commented on his defection have ignored. That dimension is what I describe in the title of this piece as the unending disappearance of productive and modernizing political elites in Nigeria, with special reference to the commanding place that corruption now has in the political affairs of our country. Let me explain what I mean by this.

Beyond Ribadu himself, beyond the charisma and mystique that his work at the EFCC created around his personality in Nigeria and in the international community, and indeed beyond the moral implications, there is the crucial issue of what his defection to the ruling party says about the fundamental nature of our political elites in all the ruling class parties, especially the PDP and the APC but not excluding the other parties. Expressed in its simplest form, this is the view that our politicians, in all the parties and with only few individual exceptions, are soft, indeed even tolerant towards corruption. They may condemn it in the strongest of words and even make opposition to it a part of their electoral platforms and manifestos, but fundamentally, they do not have resolute, self-defining, self-constituting opposition to corruption. There are many signs and indicators of this but we can only highlight a few here.

One: Regardless of how much you are publicly known to have stolen from public coffers, you can defect from any party to another party and you will be welcomed with open arms, no questions asked. Two: Legislators from all the parties enjoy salaries and bonuses that, in being the highest in the world and therefore not affordable for a developing country like Nigeria, more or less amount to a form of legalized but totally corrupt looting of our national coffers. Three: All the ruling class political parties, without exception, participate in the massive monetization of electoral politics in our country. The consequence of this, both obvious and implicit, is the transformation of electoral politics into a form of “business” whose yield, whose profit, fuels corruption of a very high and grandiose order in the political affairs of our country.

It is on account of these and other manifestations of widespread and systemic corruption among the generality of our political elites that Ribadu’s defection to the PDP has been quite rightly seen as a confirmation, a revelation of the bitter fact that no matter how much they talk or seem to act against corruption, in the end virtually all our political elites, with only a few notable individual exceptions, are fundamentally tolerant toward corruption. Much in the way in which the dung beetle lives in and on excreta, they live and feed fat on corruption as the very medium of their existence as politicians. My main purpose in this series of two articles is to take this idea one step further from its emphasis on a moral critique of the scale of corruption in Nigerian politics to an emphasis, quite frankly and deliberately, on the prospects for reform and/or revolution in our country in the years ahead of us.

On this matter, let me go directly and unambiguously to some distinct but interconnected central theses. In the first place, the moral critique of the humungous scale of corruption in our country can have positive political results if and only if there are reasonably large numbers of political elites who do take the struggle against corruption seriously and are willing and able to base both their electoral politics and their policies and actions in political office on that struggle. Such politicians are those I have designated in the title of this series “productive, modernizing political elites”. Incidentally, in the First and Second Republics, political elites of this kind used to be quite numerous – in spite of the political crises of those periods. But they are now a fast disappearing breed within the ranks of our present political class. Let me restate this point carefully: we can preach and moralize on the scale of corruption in our country as much as we want, but if political elites that are willing to take the struggle against corruption seriously can be counted only in single digits and not in their dozens, hundreds or thousands, reform will never happen within the present political order and we are headed toward revolution – of the Right or the Left, either of which can be very bloody or extremely self-destructive.

Secondly, while corruption has probably for long existed and will perhaps forever exist in all forms and at all stages of human social development, and furthermore, while it has managed to coexist in one way or another with modernization and modernity throughout virtually all the regions of the world, there is a limit, a boundary beyond which corruption on a monumental scale is a great, crippling obstacle to progress, peace, sustainable development and well-adjusted modernity. Nigeria, under our former military dictators and now under the reign of the PDP – with some connivance from the other ruling class parties – has long gone well beyond such limits and boundaries. There are Nigerian economic or business moguls that make their wealth from productive, value-added and job-creating enterprises but by a wide margin, the great majority of our wealthy, propertied classes make their wealth from corruption-related connections to the state in ways that ultimately make their wealth non-productive. This is the economic or institutional basis of the rapidly disappearing breed of productive, modernizing political elites in our country.

Thirdly, Ribadu, in his defection to the PDP, is highly symptomatic of this disappearing breed of modernizing political elites in Nigeria. While in the APC, he was extreme in his savage attacks on corruption within the ranks of the PDP but since crossing over to the ruling Party, he has said not a word on whether he has either changed his mind on that score or hopes now to work from within the PDP to rid the Party of its endemic corruption. And while we are on the topic, we might as well note here that while in the APC, Ribadu saw and spoke about no corruption within that Party. This strongly indicates that either now or in the past, he has probably never really seen the struggle against corruption as fundamental to his or our country’s political future. Thus, like the fly in the adage from Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God that followed the corpse into the grave because it had no one to advise it, Ribadu has chosen to follow the PDP into what is almost certainly going to be the graveyard, the dung heap of history.

The struggle against corruption is fundamental to our country’s future, Ribadu or no Ribadu. Reform is still possible in our country, even if Ribadu’s defection to the PDP has dealt a nearly fatal moral blow to that possibility. In next week’s conclusion to the series, we shall explore past and present indications in Nigeria’s political history that provide a basis for hoping that before a revolution of the Right or the Left sweeps everything away, genuine, radical and humanistic reform has a chance in our country, even if it is the slimmest of chances.

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

September 7, 2014
Initial encounter with transformational grammar proved fateful: For Prof Ayo Banjo @ 80

Tt is many months now since my old teacher at the University of Ibadan, Professor Ayo Banjo, turned 80 and so this tribute should have been written long before now. Nonetheless, and as the saying goes, it is better late than never. And in a way, perhaps it is in fact appropriate that I should have taken my time to write this tribute to Professor Banjo since the nature, the meaning of my studentship under him took a very long time to achieve clarity in my mind. Since this observation goes to the heart of this tribute to my old teacher, I should perhaps clarify what the observation is about. This is all the more necessary since it is this very issue that supplied the title to this tribute which centers round the term, “transformational grammar” which is probably as intriguing to many who are reading this piece as it was to me when I first encountered it in Professor Banjo’s class. But before coming to this matter of my first, initial encounter with “transformational grammar” in Professor Banjo’s class that would later prove fateful to my intellectual development, I wish to say a few preliminary things about the man that set him apart from most people I have ever met.

Everyone reading this piece has, I suspect or hope, come across the saying, “speak no ill of the dead”. If there is a corollary to this saying which asks us to “speak no ill of the living”, I am yet to come across it. The reason for this is simple and it is this: none or few of us has ever met a living person of whom we cannot think of many wrong or evil things that they have, at one time or another and on a small or great scale, done to their fellow human beings. Indeed, so basic is this fact of life that to say “speak no ill of the living” would more or less make us all incurable hypocrites. But with only one other person who incidentally was also my teacher, Professor Banjo is one of the two persons I have ever met of whom it could be said “speak no ill of the living” without being hypocritical. That other person is Mr. Modupe Oduyoye, scholar, publisher and humanist, who was my English teacher in the upper forms of secondary school. Quite literally, I have never met anyone who has had an unkind or disparaging or dismissive word to say about the character and behaviour of Professor Banjo and Mr. Oduyoye and they are the only two people, especially in the world of learning, about whom I can make this assertion.

I have often pondered this fact anytime that my mind goes to these two former teachers of mine. In a terribly corrupt and cruel world, how is it possible to stay above the rot? In a country that is endlessly muddied by a seeming universality of cheating, lying and dissembling on a grandiose scale, how can anyone stay above it all? What inner qualities of spirit and psyche make this possible, this state of moral rectitude or equanimity that seems superhuman and otherworldly? And to be completely honest about this without taking anything away from the reputation of these two former teachers of mine, I have also sometimes wondered if indeed it is a desirable quality or achievement for any man or woman to stay above it all. This is because, as I know only too well from direct experience, it is nearly impossible to remain blameless and unsullied if and when you try to intervene to put an end to the rot, to the bog of decadence and suffering into which our country and our world are sinking almost inexorably and unstoppably. But in spite of these thoughts, Professor Banjo remains in my estimation one of the two avatars of whom one can indeed say “speak no ill of the living” and not be hypocritical. This leads me to the heart of the content of this tribute, the matter of “transformational grammar” as I fatefully encountered it as a student of Professor Banjo.

If my memory serves me right, I took only one class with Professor (then Dr.) Ayo Banjo in my undergraduate studies in the English Department at Ibadan and this was in my first year. He taught in the Language, not the Literature section of the Department. Overwhelmingly, the Literature program was the much larger and more established concentration; only a handful of students of the Department ever went on specialize in Language. [Niyi Osundare, who was two years behind me, is one of the few famous scholarly alumni of the Department who went on to specialize in Language] I entered the Department as a student fairly certain that, like most of my classmates, I would choose the Literature program. This was the major or primary reason why I took only one course – and in my first year – with Professor Banjo. The other reason, though secondary, is however more central to what I have to say in this tribute and it is this: after that one class with Professor Banjo, I became even more convinced of the choice of Literature as my concentration. And “transformational grammar”, as brilliantly but elaborately taught by Professor Banjo, was at the heart of this confirmation that the Language concentration was not for me. Let me explain.

In all my other courses in my first year, I felt fairly on top of the difficulties and challenges, probably because all these other courses had some narrative and imaginative dimensions to them. Incidentally, this included Sociology which was and still is officially classified as a science, albeit a social science. Only in Professor Banjo’s course were these dimensions missing, to be replaced by what seemed like a science that even seemed to me closer to the natural sciences than the social sciences. I had gone into Professor Banjo’s class expecting to have the kind of fun, the kind of excitement that I expected and received from my other courses, but lo and behold, it was as if I was back in my Physics class in high school which, of all the subjects we were taught, had given me the greatest – and for me – ultimately insurmountable challenge. And so from having received an “A” in English Language in School Certificate and GCE “O” level exams, I plummeted to a state of utter bafflement in Professor Banjo’s class on that same Language! And at the heart of it all were the expositions that he gave on, yes, “transformational grammar”.

At this point, it is perhaps time for me to get to what “transformational grammar” is and how my encounter with it in Professor Banjo’s class eventually proved very fateful in my intellectual development. Before that encounter, “grammar” was for me – as it probably still is for most people – the descriptive outline of the ground rules that govern correctness and mastery in language use. It essentially entails learning what the different aspects of language are and how to use them correctly. In “transformational grammar” the emphasis is displaced from descriptive to structural and from correctness to possibility. With “transformational grammar” a completely incorrect sentence can still be “grammatical” and Professor Banjo gave many examples in that class that I took with him. This in itself was exciting but prior to that, our teacher espoused on many concepts and ideas that were completely at variance with all we had learnt about or known as “grammar”. Perhaps the most startling of these was the proposition that transformational grammar was “generative”. What this means is that the great immensity of what could be done and is done with and in language rested on just a few basic principles or properties. In other words, the abundance, the endless possibilities of and in language actually rested on just a few basic structures in grammar.

The reader probably knows from this explanation of “transformational grammar” that my understanding came much, much later after my encounter with the subject in Professor Banjo’s class. And that is exactly what happened, but I have to explain that it was because of the way in which he taught it that made me decide that this was something I had to get to know, get to understand eventually. In other words, after the excitement of being told that a bad, ungrammatical sentence could be structurally grammatical, the rest of what he taught us about transformational grammar seemed to me so technical, so arcane that I was left with a powerful wish to get to the bottom of the matter. And so in graduate school in America, one of the first things I did was start reading everything I could on the subject. And when I did finally achieve an understanding of it, this was central, even decisive in helping me to understand many other extremely complex and challenging intellectual and theoretical currents of non-traditional, modern thought like Marxism, Poststructuralism and Deconstruction. Thus, in a very indirect way that could be likened to negative dialectics, many things that helped to shape my intellectual adulthood began in that class with Professor Banjo in my first year as an undergraduate at Ibadan.

In conclusion, I must confess that I was prompted to lay emphasis in this tribute on a specifically intellectual subject because most of the tributes to Professor Banjo on getting to 80 years that I have read have concentrated on his solid qualification for that rare phenomenon in which, without hypocrisy, one can “speak no ill of the living”. As I salute him on reaching this milestone and wish him a long(er) life with good health, I also want to acknowledge what I took away from my brief studentship under him. The young shall grow – especially if they have teachers like Professor Ayo Banjo.

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

August 31, 2014
Nuhu Ribadu’s defection: the instructive analogies of Sam Aluko and Nasir El-Rufai

Sometime in 1999 (or it may have been early 2000) I got an extraordinary personal note from Chief Ebenezer Babatope (“Ebino Topsy!) who had been Sani Abacha’s Aviation Minister and is now a PDP chieftain, being a member of the ruling party’s Board of Trustees. Before I come to the contents of this note, a few background facts and details are perhaps necessary.

With many others like Edwin Madunagu, the late M. Agunbiade (“Chairman Mao”), Yemi Adefulu and Dayo Abatan, Babatope and I had been stalwarts and comrades-in-arm in the radical students’ movement in Nigeria when we were undergraduates, he at the University of Lagos and I at the University of Ibadan. A self-declared and militant socialist like most of us, Babatope had also been a diehard supporter of Chief Obafemi Awolowo and was quite easily one of the most indefatigable “Awoists” in our youth. After graduating from Unilag, he went on to become a prolific pamphleteer and essayist whose passion for socialism and Pan Africanism bristled in all his writings. As I recall it now, the bottom line of all his revolutionary writings and activities could be captured in one single slogan: let the revolution come and let it come quickly; it did not matter through which way it came. From this, the reader can deduce why it wa such a surprise to many when Babatope not only agreed to serve in Abacha’s cabinet but actually served him loyally, actively, vociferously. This observation leads directly to the personal note that Babatope sent me in 1999.

Briefly, the note said please, BJ, don’t judge me on my service to Abacha before you read my new book and we have met to discuss the contents of the book. The note duly asked for the address to which he could mail the book to me and as a matter of fact, I did receive the book. I think between then and now he and I have met only once, but it was such a brief meeting that we didn’t have the opportunity to discuss his book and his experience as one of Abacha’s leftist loyalists. In my memory, the most noteworthy thing, indeed the most sensational thing in the contents of Babatope’s book was the part in which he bitterly asserted that many of those on the Left and among “progressives” who later turned round and vilified him for having served under Sani Abacha had in fact not only initially encouraged him to accept the appointment the dictator gave him but also had personally benefitted a lot from his ministerial job under Abacha. And as if to clinch the point he was trying to make though this allegation, Babatope gave the names of those he could name among such people; where, for one reason or another, he couldn’t or didn’t want to give the names of some particular personalities, he dropped unmistakable hints that let the knowledgeable reader know who they were.

On the road to Damascus Saul of Tarsus, the persecutor and nemesis of the early Christians, became Paul, the rock who would later serve as the foundation on which early Christianity was built. This is one of the most outstanding moral and spiritual metamorphoses in history. And indeed “on the road to Damascus” has become perhaps the most widely used metaphorical phrase in the English language for a change, a transformation from a lower, evil state to a higher, more beneficent plane of being. But imagine the reversal of this historic, celebrated apotheosis in which on the road to Damascus, Paul became Saul of Tarsus: the hero became the antihero; the revolutionist who formulated new ideas of religious worship and thought became the brute who used violence and repression to squelch new possibilities in human spirituality.

This, in essence, was the story that Babatope told in the book that he sent to me in 1999. The slight twist in his story was that he was not alone, that other “comrades” masquerading as St. Paul when they were really Saul of Tarsus encouraged him to serve under Abacha. More damningly, Babatope went on to add that in the depth and the secret of the night, these people often came to him for contracts and other forms of largesse. Biodun, do not judge me, Babatope said to me in his note to me in 1999, until you have read my book and found out just how many Sauls of Tarsus there are among those you and I have always thought of as progressives and revolutionaries.

Now I think that in one way, Babatope was absolutely right in this claim, this plea. In our country, they are literally uncountable, the politicians and activists who at one time or the other were “comrades”, radicals and progressives who have decamped and joined the camp of reactionaries, ethnic jingoists, religious zealots and plain political opportunists. Indeed, so deep and wide is this phenomenon, especially since 1999, that the line has been almost completely obliterated between progressives and reactionaries, between genuinely patriotic democrats and extremely cynical politicians for whom patriotism is no more than a path to unlimited self-enrichment. To use our opening metaphor of “on the road to Damascus”, this means that the line between Paul and Saul has been almost completely obliterated in our country’s political affairs, again especially since 1999. Please note that I said almost completely obliterated because in fact the line still exists because the society is yet to be created in human affairs in which the line between what is right and what is wrong, what is just and what is unjust, what is decent and what is ignoble has been completely wiped out. And that is where Babatope was wrong in his 1999 personal note to me. This observation brings us to the topic of this piece, Nuhu Ribadu’s defection to the PDP. But what does my claim that Babatope was wrong have to do with this topic?

It is extremely misleading to cast Babatope’s experience in the metaphorical framework of Saul becoming Paul on the road to Damascus. My old friend and comrade, “Ebino Topsy” will have to forgive me for saying this, but for many of us, his decision to serve under Abacha was saddening but it wasn’t that surprising. As a person, Babatope was – and I imagine still is – at heart, a warm, ebullient and caring person. But as an activist, as one who wanted justice, development and dignity for all women and men in our country and our continent, he always tended to place the means far above the ends. Please remember that I said earlier in this piece that if there was one slogan that captured the essence of Babatope’s progressivism it was “let the revolution come and let it come quickly; it did not matter how it came”. For men and women of conscience of this kind, any decision, any action at all can be justified one way or another. At any rate, I think Babatope has completely stopped trying to justify his prominence in the PDP as a way to hasten the revolution to bring better life for all in Nigerian and Africa: the “means” has completely swallowed the “ends”.

So, as I contemplate the shock with which many in Nigeria this week received the news of Ribadu’s defection to the PDP, it is not to the likes of Babatope’s defection from socialism, Pan Africanism and Awoism to Abacha loyalism and PDP militancy that mind turns. There are thousands of such defections going on all the time in the rot and the decadence of the political order in our country. This is why it is to the far more rare instances when a defection – from Saul to Paul or the reverse and imaginary one of from Paul to Saul – is made by one who is generally recognised as an outstanding public figure or a moral and spiritual touchstone that my mind turns. In this regard, the two instances that readily come to my mind are, one, the case of the late Sam Aluko and his loyal service to Sani Abacha which, to the end of his life he vigorously defended absolutely without any apologies and two, the case of Nasir El Rufai who, from being the most articulate defender of the policies and actions of Obasanjo as President and “statesman” became perhaps his most fiery and unrestrained traducer. I suggest, dear reader, that when you think about Ribadu’s defection to the PDP, it is to the rare kind of defection that we see in Aluko and El Rufai that you should think of rather than the far more commonplace kind of defection that we see in the Babatope case. In concluding this piece, let me give a brief explanation on why I make this suggestion.

It is very easy and also very tempting to see Ribadu’s defection as belonging to the Babatope type and from this to proceed directly to strong and emotion-laden condemnation. That is the pattern in much of what I have so far read in the reactions to Ribadu’s announcement of his departure from the APC to the PDP. For some people, this may provide some relief, some salve for deeply thwarted moral, emotional and political investment in Ribadu’s past and future career, but it does nothing by way of explanation or understanding. By contrast, when you think of the Aluko and El Rufai cases, you are immediately struck by the impression that there are no simple explanations and that you have to think hard to know what the defection portends for our country and its present circumstances and future prospects.

Although I think his standing and achievements as an economic thinker were vastly overrated, the late Professor Sam Aluko was without question a towering figure among his generation of Nigerian social scientists. Moreover, he had been highly respected for his application of his intellectualism to public policy by way of advice to many governments. Then came his stint with Abacha which had the added disadvantage of coming near the end of his life. He pronounced Abacha the greatest leader Nigeria had ever had and the man who would finally bring economic development to the country. His reasons for making these assertions were so puerile, so unconvincing that they were an embarrassment to even his supporters. In effect, he became a sadly ridiculous and tragicomic figure, with only the saving grace that he did not seem to have served Abacha for self-enrichment or power lust.

By contrast, El Rufai has given trenchant critiques of Obasanjo and his administration. The big question he faces is why he was silent on all the policies and activities for which he now berates Obasanjo when he was part of Obasanjo’s inner circle. Unlike Aluko and rather fortunately for him, the future still lies ahead of El Rufai and he will or may have the chance to prove to us and the world the worth of his defection from Obasanjo and the PDP. This also holds true for Ribadu, but in the first month of his defection to the PDP, what we have seen is more like the Aluko pattern: absolutely puerile and meaningless justification of his defection. Like Aluko’s absurd praise for Abacha as the greatest leader that Nigeria ever had, Ribadu this week hailed Jonathan as “a great achiever”. This would have been quite laughable if things were not so dire, so tragic for most of our people under the administration of Jonathan. When Paul becomes Saul, all bets are off, expect the worst but keep hope alive. For the society is yet to be created in human affairs in which the line between right and wrong has been completely wiped out.

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

August 24, 2014
Ogbeni’s victory; Omisore’s defeat: the 1965 Western Regional Elections Revisited

Be se tiwa, bee si se tiwa, Demo a wole [Whether you are with us or not, Demo will win]

Declaration on radio and television by Chief Remi Fani-Kayode on the eve of the 1965 Western Regional Elections

Ogbeni’s victory

Free, fair and credible elections are to a genuine democratic order what oxygenated blood that flows without blockages, clots and hemorrhages is to a healthy human body. In this case, the human body is like a nation’s body politic: a nation on the brink of becoming a failed state, a nation that hobbles from one nation-wrecking crisis to another is like a diseased human body whose arteries and veins are so blocked that the vascular and circulatory systems are prone to, and sometimes give way to cardiac arrest or stroke. Fortunately, and thanks largely to the wonders of modern medical science, cardiac arrest and stroke are not always fatal. A quick and effective intervention can bring a person stricken by stroke or heart attack back to life and the chance to gradually recover either completely or with a fairly good chance of a long and productive life. These thoughts were at the back of my mind on Sunday, July 10 when around 8 a.m. Berlin time (7 a.m. in Nigeria) I went online and discovered to my great relief and satisfaction that Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola had soundly defeated Iyiola Omisore in the recent Osun governorship elections. To me, the Ogbeni’s victory was like a successful triple bypass heart surgery to an electoral system that has hovered for a very long time on the edge of political cardiac arrest. Please note that I say that these thoughts comparing the diseased human body to a national body politick in a perpetual terminal crisis were at the back of my mind and not in the foreground of my consciousness. Let me explain.

Now, the regular reader of this column ought to know by now that I am not a supporter of any of the ruling class parties in Nigeria. I am resolutely against the ruling party, the PDP, which, in my opinion, is one of the worst, one of the most corrupt and one of the most mediocre ruling class parties in the world. But I do not consider any of the opposition ruling class parties a sufficiently consistently progressive and clean counterforce to the PDP. As political parties aspiring to power, the only claim that all the opposition parties have is the fact that any other group or party can and will do better in office than the PDP. The most telling fact of the absence of a real or true choice for voters between our ruling class parties is the quite phenomenonal scope of the perpetual crossing and re-crossing from one party to another by members of our political class. In other words, in the present political order in power at the centre and in the states in our country, you can never be so corrupt, so mediocre, so cynical and so devoid of any ideas as a politician that you cannot move from being a chieftain in one party to becoming a kingpin in another party. Nothing, absolutely nothing, disqualifies you from being a power broker in one party today and a strongman in another party tomorrow. This situation is similar to the phenomenon in the linguistic philosophy of the identity of the letters of the alphabet in which, say, the identity of the letter A is established, not by anything in itself, but by the fact that it is not B, or C, or D or any of the other letters in the alphabet. Thus, by the logic of this philosophy, in the Nigerian political context APC is APC not because of some things inherent in the party but because it is not PDP

But real choice for the voter in Nigeria is fortunately not completely absent. For if it is the case that, at least for now there is no real choice between the political parties as parties with programs, policies and worldviews that distinguish one from another, there is sometimes a choice between candidates. In the Osun State governorship elections last week, there was a real choice for the voter between the Ogbeni and Omisore, quite apart from the election being a pre-2015 showdown between the APC and the PDP. Indeed, so palpable, so stark was the choice between the two candidates that it was like a choice between day and night or between light and darkness. The most evident indicator of this is the fact that Aregbesola is quite possibly the most articulate governor on the ideals and practices of good governance in our country at the present time while Omisore, on the evidence of his unscripted speeches and impromptu pronouncements, cannot put two or three coherent thoughts together on responsible and accountable governance.

To expatiate a little more on this distinction, Aregbesola belongs to the rather rare order of politicians in our country at the present time who actually think; who actually have progressive and compassionate ideas about obligations that governments have for their constituents; and who actually have sophisticated knowledge regarding where our country and our continent stand in relation to the rest of the world and the contradictory forces of modernity, especially in the new millennium. By contrast, Omisore is a political operator whose vocation begins and ends with making the best for himself politically by following party diktats and carrying out the will of his superiors in the party apparatus.

Last week as I waited anxiously for the results of the Osun state elections, I began to think, rather subliminally about the analogies between a diseased human body and our national body politic. And as I did so, I worried greatly that the PDP might have completely buried the real choice between the Ogbeni and Omisore under the weight of pre-2015 showdown between the APC and the PDP. In the entirety of my experience as a Nigerian very much aware of the precarious nature of electoral politics in our country, no incident stands out more in my consciousness as the ultimate negation of the voter’s choice than the chilling declaration of the late Chief Remi Fani-Kayode on the eve of the legislative elections in the Western Region in October 1965. This is the declaration that I have appropriated as the epigraph to this piece: “Be se tiwa, bee si se tiwa, Demo a wole”. I have given an approximate translation of this declaration: “Whether you are with us or not, Demo will win”. By “Demo”, Fani-Kayode who was the Deputy Premier to Chief S.L. Akintola, meant the Nigerian National Democratic Party (NNDP), perhaps the most fascist, right-wing party this country’s politics has ever produced. But what does this observation have to do with last week’s Osun state elections? Again, let me explain.

Among other things, all fascist parties have this in common: the votes – and the will of the electorate – are always already subjugated to the control of the Party. Last week, the ghost of the fascist political legacy of the late Deputy Premier of the old Western Region in the mid-60s appeared and stalked the length and breadth of Osun State. The choice between Aregbesola and Omisore seemed about to be completely abrogated and denied the good people of the state. But Ogbeni’s victory sent it back to the shades of the netherworld of bad conscience and troubled and troubling memory where it belongs.

We must not be complacent. PDP is determined to make every election before the 2015 showdown a prologue, a foreshadowing of the total elimination of choice and popular will in our country’s electoral politics. The militarization of the electoral process is particularly apposite here. Most commentators have said of this phenomenon that it is meant to intimidate voters, especially those voters that wish to exercise their choice, not only between parties, but also between candidates. While this is true, I think there is something more sinister, more ominous in this militarization of the electoral process that Jonathan has taken to a far much bigger scale than we had hitherto ever seen in this country. The sheer size of the military presence can mean only one thing: anticipation of mass uprising, of widespread popular rejection of election(s) that people in their hundreds of thousands or even millions perceive as rigged, stolen. Ekiti and Osun: two gone, more still to come before 2015. I repeat: we must not be complacent; we must not tire of protesting to the high heavens and to the whole world that we reject the militarization of the electoral and political processes in our country. Ogbeni’s victory is enormously gratifying in itself; it had the additional advantage of reminding us that the popular will counts and must be defended.

Omisore’s defeat

“Congrat osun people, congrat APC, and congrat Nigerian, people have spoking and God have spoking too”

From a tweet by someone self-identified as “Musco”

I encountered the epigraph above when I was reading the reactions to the defeat of Omisore on the internet. The bizarre and colorful murder of language in the tweet made me laugh hard, very hard. It reminded me of the language of Chief Zebrudaya Okoroigwe Nwogbo, alias 4:30. The language of tweets on the internet is often so awful that it seems to come from undiagnosed cases of mental leprosy. But in the particular case of this tweet commenting on Omisore’s defeat, it seemed to come straight from the heart. And at any rate, it read like vintage Zebrudaya English. But consider the following strangulation of logic, syntax, tense and grammar from a letter that Omisore wrote to the press on the night of Saturday, July 9, to protest what he saw as premature release of elections results by the APC in order, according to him, to delegitimize the true results of the elections which he was confident would end up in his favour. The statement was personally signed by Omisore who, by the way, added the title “Dr.” to his name. Here goes:

“I hereby condemn the APC candidate, Raufu Aregbesola declaring his own version of the results without recourse to INEC. With the facts of results, its apparent the PDP candidate, Dr. Iyiola Omisore, is leading. This act of APC is in conflict with the provisions of Electoral Law 2010 whereby a candidate can concoct figures and released to confuse the public thus make this election inconclusive until facts behind the figures are released by the INEC. The peace and stability of this state is such under an unprecedented threat. The result so far by APC remained cancelled.”

A use of language protesting defeat that paradoxically ends up in a thorough defeat of language. It is unintended but is revealing, very revealing.

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

August 17, 2014
The model secondary schools of Governor Amaechi: a portentous conversation at Eleme

Barely two weeks ago, I was in Port Harcourt for the state banquet that the Rivers State Government held to mark the 80th birthday of Wole Soyinka. The last time that I visited Port Harcourt was about eight years ago and that was a private visit. Long before then, when I was the National President of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), I had visited the garden city many, many times. This was because like the University of Benin, the University of Port Harcourt had one of the strongest branches of ASUU. Although this was more than 30 years ago, those visits to Port Harcourt remained very fresh in my mind for the simple reason that we all in ASUU were then on a great mission to rescue tertiary education in our country from the consequences of vastly inadequate funding and coercive control by our military rulers and their civil service henchmen. This is why, from that period on, Port Harcourt has always conjured up in my mind struggles and efforts to make education in our country at par with the best and the most modern national educational systems in the world. This observation leads me directly to the subject of this piece, the widely discussed model secondary schools of Governor Rotimi Chibuike Amaechi.

Although I knew that I was going to be in Port Harcourt for only two days during this recent visit for the state banquet for Soyinka, before the visit I had specially requested that on one of my two days in the garden city I be taken to see some of these much talked about model secondary and primary schools of Rivers State. Our hosts graciously consented to my request and so on Wednesday, July 30, I was taken to three sites: the Model Secondary School outside Port Harcourt at Eleme on the Port Harcourt-Aba road; a model primary school and a primary health care centre both in the garden city itself. As a matter of fact, the plan had been for me to see about seven different sites but I was so engrossed both by what I saw at Eleme and my conversation with the Principal of the school that we ended up spending such a long time there that I could only be taken to three out of the many sites that I was meant to have been shown on that day.

Buildings and physical infrastructures do not necessarily make a school a showpiece of great educational achievement or possibility, but they do constitute a minimal condition for teaching of high quality. The Seventh-Day Adventist Primary School at Oke-Bola, Ibadan that I attended more than half a century ago is not far from my house. Anytime that I walk past the school I experience a great sadness. This is because things have fallen apart for the school in terms of buildings, infrastructures and the physical environment. The buildings are not only the same plastered mud structures in which I was schooled as a child, they are now in worse conditions. Moreover, all the surrounding space has been taken up by residential buildings and commercial enterprises such that the school playing ground and “farm” are gone. I state this not just as a matter of personal regret and angst but also as a mark of the great retrogression that has overtaken many of the primary and secondary schools of the city of Ibadan, the most dramatic of all being what now remains of the prestigious Government College, Ibadan, of old. And of course, this pattern is broadly true for many other parts of the country.

The Eleme Model Secondary School amazed, even dazzled me by the quality of the buildings and infrastructures. [And by the way, so did the model primary school that I visited in Port Harcourt]. The schoolrooms, the libraries, the IT rooms, the science laboratories, the auditorium, the dormitories, the sick bays, and the recreational grounds are models of impressive architectural design and sturdy, durable physical execution. It is no exaggeration to say that in physical infrastructure most of the new private universities in Nigeria, together with many of the older public universities are considerably inferior to what I saw at Eleme.

Given the fact that each of the 23 local government areas of Rivers State will ultimately have one of these model secondary schools, this is potentially one of the few great, positive legacies that oil wealth would, in the fullness of time, have left for future generations of Rivers State and Nigerian citizens. As I went through the Physics, Chemistry and Biology labs, I marveled at the fact that all the equipments and facilities were of the most up-to-date vintage such that if they are put to good and efficient use, it would not be mere fancifulness to dream of our first Nobel Prize laureates in Physics or Chemistry coming from these Eleme science labs!

I come now to the most crucial and critical part of the wonders that I saw at Eleme. This pertains to the physical or indeed, technological infrastructure of instruction and learning at the school. This is based almost entirely on what is known as the apparatus of the “smart class” and its very innovative approach to pedagogy. It has to be seen and carefully assessed to grasp its truly revolutionary and also controversial impact; one can only rather inadequately convey in words how it actually works. Perhaps the best approach to describe the “smart class” as a tool of instruction is to invoke the analogy of a booklet or manual that comes with a product, giving detailed, step-by-step instructions on how even a technologically challenged person can assemble and use the product. Thus, in the case of the “smart class”, every subject in the curriculum, indeed every branch of a subject, is packaged into modules that unfold as a teacher clicks on an icon on the computer screen. In other words, everything has been pre-packaged into the modules; all the teacher has to do is click on the icons on the computer screen as he or she takes the students through all the modules that make up a subject or a particular branch of a given subject. For instance, to teach students at a biology class the processes of photosynthesis, the teacher clicks on the icons of all the modules that make up full instruction on photosynthesis. Theoretically, this is learning made not only easy and up-to-date in terms of the latest knowledge in a subject, it is also learning made great fun and very interactive between teacher, students and the computer screen.

Unfortunately, the students were on holidays when I visited the Eleme Model Secondary School and for this reason, I could not see the apparatus of the “smart class” in operation with students in their learning environment. More generally, it would have been more rewarding to have had direct interactions with the pupils of this extraordinary school whose essence, as its name implies, is to act as a model for what secondary schools of the future in our country will or should be. This was why, in place of such a direct encounter with the students of the school, I had a long conversation, a long question-and-answer session with the school’s Principal. It is to this session that I now turn in my closing observations and reflections in this piece.

I did not need to ask, but it was clear to me that the reason why the Principal and nearly all the teachers of the Eleme Model Secondary School are from India is because of the centrality of the “smart class” to the pedagogical processes of teaching and learning at the school. The presumption, perhaps the reality here is that Nigerian universities and colleges of education are not (yet) producing teachers knowledgeable or versatile in the technology of the “smart class”. This may be true, but it does raise the fundamental question of shared cultural background between teacher and student, instructor and pupil in the uses of the “smart class”. Let me explain.

Teachers can never be mere instruments for operationalising the apparatus of the “smart class”. They share certain assumption, values, biases and even phobias with their pupils. This is not a mere nationalistic or jingoistic plea for replacing the Indian teachers at the Eleme Model School with Nigerians. Rather, it is a strong view that since the national systems of education of the world do not operate within a cultural vacuum, it is important to complement the introduction of the “smart class” technology into Nigerian secondary school education with teachers who have a shared cultural context with Nigerian students.

Tactfully, I did not raise this issue directly with the Principal of the Eleme Model Secondary School. Instead, what I did was to have a long conversation with him in which I tried to get his sense of the social background of his pupils. I am glad to report that he seemed to have taken a deep and sympathetic interest in the background of most of his wards. For instance, when he informed me that the ratio of students from very poor families to kids from relatively well-off families was about 70 to 30, I was both elated and dismayed. I was elated because this fact shows that the overwhelming majority of kids receiving quality, ultramodern schooling in Governor Amaechi’s model secondary schools are children who could never, remotely, have had the chance to receive any education at all, let alone high quality education. But I was also dismayed by the Principal’s information to me that because of their severely deprived economic and social backgrounds, many of his pupils seem unable to take full advantage of the benefits of the school because of their parents’ lack of interest in whether or not their children were doing well at school.

Will these model secondary and primary schools take root and grow to become standard bearers of the future of education in our country? Or will the next administration after the expiration of Amaechi’s tenure let them go to waste? Finally: the culture of maintenance in our country is one of the worst in the world, the forces of atavistic regression always hovering in the background of every progressive development in our country and our continent, thanks to the backwardness of our ruling pseudo-bourgeoisie. Thus, I wonder: if I come back to Eleme in another ten years, will the bush have taken over this splendid showcase of a profound belief in education and the right of everyone, especially the most needy, to quality education? I most certainly hope not!

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

August 10, 2014
Taking risks to enhance life, justice and human dignity; taking risks that waste human potential, create suffering and perpetuate insecurity

[Being an expanded version of remarks at a banquet for Wole Soyinka, Government House, Port Harcourt, July 30, 2014]

As we gather here tonight in celebration of Wole Soyinka’s 80th birthday, his first major play written when he was in his mid-twenties, A Dance of the Forests, is being rehearsed for performance in Tel Aviv in a Hebrew translation. About two weeks ago, the U.S.-based Nigerian theatre director who is in charge of the production, Segun Ojewuyi, sent an email to Soyinka and myself in which he gave a gripping account of life in Tel Aviv at the present moment and equally important, how this very early play of Soyinka had found a new and unbelievable relevance to the unfolding human tragedy in the struggle between the Palestinians in the Gaza strip and the state of Israel. A Dance of the Forests is a complex play whose theme or “message” cannot be rendered in one sentence, one paragraph even. But it is safe to say that at the heart of the drama of the play is a visionary projection of the tragedies and the suffering that a people – any people in the world – can expect that choose to ignore the lessons of their history. Soyinka wrote and staged this play over half a century ago and now in Gaza and Tel Aviv, in the West Bank and Jerusalem, it turns out that the play might have much to teach the Jewish and Palestinian peoples as they grapple with the disregarded lessons of their history. It is likely, tragically very likely, that another fifty years from now, in another part of the world, this same play will be performed under similar circumstances. Ladies and gentlemen, fellow Nigerians, that is the quality of the artistic vision in many of the works of the man whose 80th birthday anniversary we are marking at this state banquet tonight.

As excited as I am that A Dance of the Forests has found a new if poignant relevance in Tel Aviv and Gaza, that is not the primary reason why I use this fact to highlight the power of Soyinka’s artistic vision in this tribute. On the contrary, I cite the play and its current production experience in the Middle East for a completely different reason. Let me state this simply: almost more than any other literary work of Soyinka, A Dance of the Forests marks perhaps the most outstanding thing about WS as a dramatist, thinker and activist and this is the fact that he has a propensity for taking great risks, artistic and political. All his greatest works in drama, poetry and fictional prose are nothing if not works of considerable experimentation with form, ideas and modes of expression.

With regard to political activism, we know that he was charged, tried and acquitted for the radio incident of 1965 and so we cannot try him all over again, but we know he was the gunman! Compared to other risks he has since taken, that was indeed, only the beginning and rather small compared with other risks he went on to take. Anyone who has read the last three out of his five books of memoires, The Man Died; Ibadan, the ‘Penklemes’ Years; and You Must Set Forth at Dawn, knows what I am talking about here. Indeed, if Soyinka is one of the greatest avant-garde writers of African and world literature in the second half of the 20th century, this is largely because of the artistic risks he was always willing to take. Similarly, the risks he took as one of our continent’s great political activists and human rights campaigners have been nothing short of legendary.

But if WS was always naturally predisposed to taking artistic risks and making political gambles, the most important thing to note is that he took risks and made gambles for justice, equality of opportunity for all, and human dignity. This is the heart of my short tribute tonight. And so let me repeat it: the great artistic and political risks that Soyinka has taken in his 80 years have been in the cause of and for the advancement of justice, equality and human dignity. I say this, indeed I emphasize it deliberately and strongly, because human beings and communities take risks all the time. As a species, we are fundamentally predisposed to take risks all the time, small risks and huge risks. However, unfortunately, most of the risks that we take as individuals, groups and collectively as the human species are taken in the pursuit of selfish or petty interests that place us above others, siblings, relatives, friends, and co-workers.

More grandiosely, within the nations of the world, the rich and the powerful take risks in order to secure and consolidate their domination or even enslavement of their fellow men and women. In all these myriad cases of taking risks to secure unfair and immoral advantage or power over others that is a big part of human individual and collective life, the risks always come back to haunt the risk-takers. That is the big irony between taking risks for human progress and taking risks to perpetuate human suffering. Very few countries in the world show ample and graphic illustration of this point as does Nigeria.

It is not usual in the analysis of the terrible crises that bedevil our country at the present time to see these crises as the products of taking risks, not for justice, equality and human dignity but for entrenching suffering, insecurity and injustice. But we must start to see and fight these evils as the products of risk-taking of the most alarming and calamitous kind. Trillions of naira are looted with total impunity – what is that if not taking the risk of generating suffering for the generality of Nigerians? Billions of petrodollars are squandered – what is that if not taking the risk of a dire and bleak future for our youths and those yet unborn? In place of rational, enlightened and civilised discourse, what we get from both the official and unofficial megaphones of the powers that be is the tendency to rationalize and explain away the retrograde policies and actions of our rulers – what is that if not taking the risk of creating and maintaining bitter, self-destructive divisions between the ethnic and regional communities that make up this country?

Nobody is safe, nobody is protected from the suffering, injustice and insecurity that such negative and foolish risk taking creates, not even the wealthy and the powerful themselves. The Boko Haram insurgency is perhaps the ultimate proof of this. But there are legions of other “proofs” confronting us in this country. Don’t we all, rich and poor, face the same hazards of roads that are death-traps? Don’t we all face the shame and disgrace before the international community and the world caused by what foreign visitors in our midst see of the quality of life for the vast majority of the people in our country? Who is protected from the belief that Nigeria is one of the most corrupt and unregenerate countries in the world in spite of its oil wealth, indeed because of its oil wealth?

And yet this country has not been without women and men willing to take risks to make things better for their communities and all of us. In this very state where this banquet is being held tonight we have the supreme examples of Isaac Adaka Boro and Ken Saro Wiwa. In the colonial era, many radical politicians, labour leaders and intellectuals took risks to win our freedom from foreign rule. This tradition is even truer of the postindependence period. Gani Fawehinmi went to jail innumerable times in defense of the rights of the masses of ordinary Nigerians to a decent life and a secure future. I have mentioned the examples of Isaac Boro and Saro Wiwa. Bala Mohammed gave his life in the fight against the forces of reaction and misrule in our country, especially in the North. To the end, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti was unrelenting in his war against military autocracy and its civilian collaborators.

This profile is consistent with what obtains in other parts of the world and throughout human social and political history. I state this fact in order to underscore the need not to isolate the extraordinary case of WS, the need not to idolize him. He is part of a great tradition in our country and our world. At the heart of his turbulent life and career is the fact that he has always taken risks, as an artist, thinker and activist, for justice, equality and human dignity. He has been extraordinarily lucky to have survived the dire possibilities of many of those risks, so much so that one colleague, Professor Itse Sagay, has said that death is afraid of him. Well, I hope so. And I hope that 10 years from now, death will still be afraid of him and when we gather to celebrate his 90th birthday, the risks that WS has taken in his life and career for human progress and human dignity will be far more evident in the lives of most Nigerians, Africans and human beings all over the world than the risks that our rulers continue to make in the perpetuation of suffering, injustice and insecurity.

Biodun Jeyifo

Port Harcourt, July 30, 2014

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

August 3, 2014