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Category: Biodun Jeyifo

  • ‘Stay blessed’: benediction or beatitude, sarcasm or seriousness? [A secular sermon]

    ‘Stay blessed’: benediction or beatitude, sarcasm or seriousness? [A secular sermon]

    Benediction: (1) an utterance of good wishes (2) the advantage conferred by blessing; a mercy or benefit
    Dictionary.com (online)

    Beatitude: (1) supreme blessedness, exalted happiness (2) any of the declarations of blessedness pronounced by Jesus Christ in the Sermon on the Mount [Matthew, 5:3-11]
    Dictionary.com (online)

    As our prayer warriors say, stay blessed”. It is only recently, as recent as two weeks ago, that I noticed that in some of my email correspondence with friends, acquaintances and family members, I have for some time now been ending my emails to them with these words: “as our prayer warriors say, stay blessed”.Indeed, when an email which carries this benediction is directed to a non-Nigerian, I usually say, “as the prayer warriors in my country say, stay blessed”.

    Human beings are the most imitative of all the living beings on our planet. As soon as this practice which started rather unconsciously came to my conscious attention, I immediately knew that I was imitating the action of some of my email correspondents who end their communication to me with those words, ‘stay blessed”. These are my “prayer warrior” relatives, acquaintances and friends. “Stay blessed, Uncle”. “Stay blessed, Prof”. “Stay blessed, BJ”. I think it was from responding sarcastically by ending my own emails to such “prayer warriors” that I began to end my emails to non-prayer warriors with the same benediction, ‘stay blessed’. But why direct sarcasm initially meant for prayer warriors to non-prayer warriors? In moving from one to the other, had I moved from sarcasm to seriousness? If so, was the seriousness also there, side by side with the sarcasm, in my emails to my prayer warrior friends and relatives? Dear reader, questions like these led to my decision to write my column this week as a sort of secular sermon that reflects on the gap between sarcasm and seriousness whenever I have used that phrase, ‘stay blessed’ to end my emails.

    I did not know it initially, but now that I am thinking consciously about the matter, I realize that it must have been the feeling, the intuition that more than a benediction which is an utterance of good wishes, the phrase, ‘stay blessed” had become a beatitude with our prayer warriors that led me to be sarcastic in my appropriation of the phrase in my responses to the emails of my prayer warrior relatives and acquaintances. As the second epigraph to this piece indicates, beatitude is a state of supreme blessedness, of exalted happiness. The word beatitude also refers, perhaps more commonly, to the declarations of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. We shall come to this connection later in this piece, this lay, secular sermon. For now, let us focus on beatitude as a state of supreme blessedness which, I contend, is what our prayer warriors have in mind when they say or write the phrase, ‘stay blessed’.

    I am neither a priest nor a theologian, but I think I am not mistaken when I assert that a state of supreme blessedness or exalted happiness is what happens to congregants who have just had a powerful, transcendent experience in an act of cathartic communal worship; to individuals who, through prayer or meditation, have just had an epiphany; or to anybody deeply spiritual who has just experienced a profound intimation of divinity or eternity. Now, I confess that except vicariously, through some books that I have read and a few films that I have watched, I have never experienced such states of supreme blessedness or exalted happiness. But I suspect very strongly that this is true of the great majority of human beings who are living now or have ever lived. For it is not part of our fate or experience to be in regular, prolonged and common states of supreme blessedness or exalted happiness. There is of course the false exception of those who apparently regularly achieve such states through drugs, orgiastic sex, severe clinical disorders and manipulative religious frenzy. But we know that it does not last; and there is always a heavy, sometimes terrible price to pay. Thus, sustained and regular states of supreme blessedness or exalted happiness do not constitute part of our spiritual and psychic common heritage as human beings. But this is not an inevitable, natural or metaphysical condition of humanity; it is a product of human action and inaction and very few places on the planet are as illustrative of this point as Nigeria.

    In our country at the present historical and political moment, who will contest that “supreme blessedness” or “exalted happiness” is far from the daily lives of the overwhelming majority of our peoples, rich and poor but especially the poor? Nollywood is an eloquent testimony to this grim fact, with its deep immersion in occult evil and devilry and their agents and the terrible emotional and moral havocs they wreak on human lives. But Nollywood is an ironic, reverse but deadly accurate reflection of life in our country. Boko Haram and their covert internal backers and external sponsors are not witches; they are people like you and me. The gangs of extortionate kidnappers who operate in many parts of the country putting safety and security of life in jeopardy for millions of Nigerians are not supernatural beings, even if many of them patronize occultists for “power”; they are high school dropouts and university graduates who can’t find work and turn to violent criminality as a default option. Those who are looting and squandering our national wealth and making the lives of the vast majority of our peoples hellish are ordinary human beings, not demons. Thus, there are very few instances of beatitude, of supreme blessedness in Nollywood films precisely because there are very few sources of supreme blessedness in Nigerian socio-political reality. But our prayer warriors continue to invoke their beloved, talismanic beatitude, “stay blessed”.

    The book of Matthew that contains the passage on the Sermon on the Mount and the beatitudes that Jesus declared is my favorite passage in the holy book of Christians. Interestingly, Jesus in that passage makes EIGHT declarations of beatitudes with specific designations of the groups and individuals that are deserving of them. Again, I state that I am neither a priest nor a theologian. By this I mean to emphasize that my commentary and reflections here are not theological; they are socially and morally diagnostic and prognostic. Ever since I first read this passage of the beatitudes in the book of Matthew, I have marked down in my mind those eight categories of individuals and groups that Jesus thought deserving. They are: (1) the poor; (2) the meek; (3) those that mourn; (4) the merciful; (5) the peacemakers; (6) the pure of heart; (7) those that thirst for justice and (8) those that are persecuted. Even the most casual review of this list will discern that overwhelmingly, the moral and spiritual solidarity of Jesus is with the disenfranchised and the disaffected of society. But he did not completely exclude the rich and the powerful, at least those among them who are merciful, who are peacemakers and who thirst for justice.

    As I have stated or even frankly admitted earlier in these reflections, when I use the phrase ‘stay blessed’ in my emails to my prayer warrior friends and relatives, I am mostly being sarcastic, though I know in my heart that I also think of my use of the phrase as a benediction, an utterance of good wishes. The sarcasm comes from the fact – let me state this rather bluntly – that when prayer warriors say to me or say to one another ‘stay blessed’, they are using it more than a benediction; they are using it as a mantra, as a pietistic and smug belief that they are in a state of supreme blessedness. But I look at contemporary Nigerian religiosity – Christian and Moslem – and I see nothing remotely in a state of supreme blessedness. What I see at the top is a deep, wide and self-serving plutocratic collusion with the contemporary money changers in the temple, the secular powers that are ruining our country and making life a hell on earth for the majority of our peoples. And what I see at the bottom of the explosion of religiosity in our country at the present time is a craven and idolatrous surrender of the masses of our peoples to fear, bigotry and superstition. I make exceptions, of course, for I have met many religious people of different faiths who are “pure of heart”, who are “meek” and who are “merciful”, the states of blessedness that Jesus extolled in his Sermon on the Mount.

    ‘Stay blessed”. In Jesus’ Name (IJN). To combine the two, one must look for inspiration in the radical solidarity with the dispossessed and the disenfranchised that Jesus expressed in the Sermon on the Mount. This in fact has been the historic role of all the religious movements of the past and the present that worked for – and are still working for – human progress in the different nations and regions of the world. At any rate, these are the things that come to my mind now any time that I use the phrase ‘stay blessed’ in my emails. Now that I have clarified for myself that my sarcasm when I use the phrase is not without genuine benediction for the recipient, I feel better and hope that at least those who know me well among my prayer warrior email correspondents know that I mean well towards them. I doubt, though, that they can feel the great anger that also comes with my sense that the phrase is largely used as a mantra, a talisman, a fetish that lures people into complacency in a time and a country in which only the greatest clarity about the sources of the real-world forces that make life so difficult for most of our peoples can save us. So, stay blessed, dear reader, but avoid the snares of complacent religiosity.

     

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

     

  • Nadine Gordimer, 1923-2014: white African, incandescent writer and revolutionary humanist

    Nadine Gordimer, 1923-2014: white African, incandescent writer and revolutionary humanist

    [A Tribute]

    Then I discovered the truth, which was that in Zambia I was regarded by black friends as a European stranger. It is only here (South Africa) that I can be what I am: a white African.
    Nadine Gordimer, in a BBC interview

    It is surely one of those great ironies of life that just as we were celebrating the 80th birthday anniversary of Wole Soyinka on our continent and the world was rejoicing with us, we would almost at the same time be mourning the death of Nadine Gordimer at the age of 90 and the whole world mourns with us. Like Soyinka, Gordimer was one of a kind. From very early in her life and career as a novelist and activist, she was completely on the side of justice, respect and dignity for all women and men, without any qualifications based on race, class, gender, nationality and ethnicity. To the very end, she stuck to this early intuition without ever wavering. And like Soyinka whose fight against injustice, abuse of human rights, corruption of political leaders and the terrible suffering of the majority of his fellow citizens was and is legendary, Gordimer was also an implacable foe of apartheid in her homeland who saw, with prophetic vision, that it was a doomed system.

    Her novels and short fiction are unmatched in their combination of radical or even revolutionary politics with extraordinarily well crafted, luminescent writing. Unlike J.M. Coetzee, her fellow South African Nobel Laureate, she wrote about real, everyday people and their struggles against, or witting or unwitting collusion with apartheid. As a matter of fact, she admitted that one of her most successful works of fiction, Burger’s Daughter, was partly based on the legendary Bram Fischer, the white lawyer that famously defended Nelson Mandela at his treason trial. This may be the explanation for the fact that during the apartheid era, many of her novels were banned and then unbanned and then banned again. She joined the ANC, significantly at the time when it was a banned organisation and became a lifelong friend of Nelson Mandela. She was quite easily one of the most prominent white members of the ANC. Characteristically, within the ANC both when it was a movement and when it became a governing party, Gordimer was a rallying point of criticism against and dissent from the party’s departures from many of its founding noble aims and ideals. She was very critical of Thabo Mbeki’s retrogressive ideas and policies about the HIV/AIDS pandemic and she has in particular been fiercely critical of the current President, Jacob Zuma.

    Personally, I was deeply drawn to and influenced by three of Gordimer’s novels, Burger’s Daughter, July’s People and The Late Bourgeois World which all explore both objective and subjective, subtle changes and transformations that revolutionaries and ordinary people experience in the struggle against apartheid. This pertained to both black and white protagonists but was more focused on whites who, in resolutely taking up the fight to end apartheid found that they both had to give up all their white privileges and, in effect, fight against their own people. In this respect, July’s People in particular, in my own opinion, is an extraordinarily powerful and enigmatic novel. Again in my own judgment, I think there is no book, fiction or non-fiction, as important as this book in exploring all the ramifications of what, historically, it means to be white and African, to be a white person who has not come to Africa to exploit it or is just passing through the continent as an exoticist or a flanneur. This observation brings me to the heart of this tribute which is based not only of my reading and teaching the works of Gordimer but also on my meetings with her.

    We met only twice. The first of these two meetings took place in 1992, two years before the formal end of apartheid and the inception of democratic majority rule in South Africa. A few years ago, I met her again at Harvard when she and other African, African American and Caribbean Nobel Laureates were honoured by Harvard’s Du Bois Institute in an unforgettable ceremony full of glitz but also of gravitas. Since she was in the midst of a great number of the Harvard and global intellectual and social glitterati during this second meeting, we hardly talked beyond exchanging greetings and a few pleasantries. Thus, it was the first meeting that left a lasting impression on me by confirming and solidifying all that I had expected Gordimer to be from reading her works.

    The meeting took place in Harare, Zimbabwe. Abiola Irele, Femi Osofisan, Kole Omotoso, Niyi Osundare and I had been invited as the Nigerian delegation to a UNESCO-sponsored conference that was meant to be an encounter between South African writers and intellectuals and their colleagues in other African countries to deliberate on what impact, what reconfigurations we could expect in African writing and thought with the end of apartheid. Thus, there were delegations from other African countries beside the Nigerian delegation. However, because at that time South Africa was embroiled in a terrible social and political turmoil, the South African delegation was very small, the smallest in fact from any country. But to my great satisfaction, Nadine Gordimer, who had the year before won the Nobel Literature Prize, was present.

    Simply stated, she was the most approachable world class writer I had ever met. And also a great conversationalist, completely frank in expressing her views and genuinely interested in whoever she was conversing with. It was a complete surprise and a revelation to me how very quickly and easily we fell into conversation about small and great things; about Nigeria and about South Africa; about African literature and writings from other parts of the world. When I told her which of her novels and stories I fairly regularly taught in my classes, she was very curious to know what my students made of each novel or short story. And she was very, very willing to discuss her own writings, something, by the way, that WS doesn’t much like to do. At some point during our conversation, I suddenly realised that Gordimer was actually saying things about her writings, about what to expect in a post-apartheid South Africa and about our world that other people, a much wider audience should hear or read. I then asked her if I could have a recorded interview with her the next day. Without the slightest hesitation she agreed – which further amazed me given the fact that we had just met and before the meeting she had never heard of me.

    We duly had the interview the next day and it was published in a special issue of the journal, Callaloo, the premier African Diaspora literary journal that publishes original creative works and critical studies of and by African and black writers worldwide. I mention this fact because in that published interview, the only important disagreement that I had with Gordimer arose from some comparative reflections that she made on the question of the uses and meanings of race among South Africans and black Americans. More precisely, the issue bears directly on an aspect of this tribute that is captured in two words in the title of this piece and is directly expressed in the epigraph to this article. The words are “white African”. Let me explain.

    Is there a difference between “non-racialism” and “multi-racialism”? In my published interview with her, both Gordimer and I agreed that there was indeed a difference between the two words and that that difference had everything to do with the pasts and futures of race respectively in South Africa and America. In the new constitution that was then being drafted for post-apartheid South Africa during that meeting with Gordimer in Harare in 1992, it was explicitly stated that the goal was to build a “non-racial” South Africa. In my comment on this, I pointed out to Gordimer that “non-racial” or “non-racialism” had been rejected in America by all those – black, white, Native American, Latino, Asian and others – struggling against historic racism and its contemporary legacies. This was because it was felt that non-racialism conceptually or definitionally denied the existence of race when so much in American society, economy and politics was still based on race and racism. For this reason, anti-racist Americans of all races and ethnicities preferred to talk of “multi-racialism” which, to them amounted to a frank recognition of the reality of race, of there being many races so that racial difference can be better understood as a way of coming to an embrace of the things that make all of us members of only one race – the human race.

    To her great credit, Gordimer in the interview conceded the validity of the argument about multi-racialism, only insisting that because the Boers had historically made use of the reality and existence of many races to keep South Africans apart and white-dominated, it would take a long time for South Africa to “evolve” to a concept of multi-racialism that could itself lead every South African to accepting and acting of the belief that we are all members of the same race. I cannot but think that Gordimer made this “concession” because this question was one that she personally and heroically had settled for herself decades ago, early in her career. She was white and she was African who belonged to the same single human race with all her fellow South Africans, black, white, brown, colored, Asian and others. In the long years and decades of the struggle against apartheid, there were many white South Africans who belonged to this illustrious group of proponents and activists of non-racialism, among them Bram Fischer, Joe Slovo, Ruth First and many others too numerous to name here. Nadine Gordimer was a towering presence within that group. She belonged first, proudly and responsibly, to our continent; from this, she took on some of the outstanding issues of our times and our common human community.

     

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • For WS @ 80: Baroka and the long road to and beyond his age

    For WS @ 80: Baroka and the long road to and beyond his age

    Last semester, I taught Wole Soyinka’s The Lion and the Jewel for the first time in about thirty years. Though I do like the play a lot, it is not one of my favourite Soyinka plays, not one of his dramatic writings that I regard as some of the best plays ever written. I believe that the last time that I actually read The Lion and the Jewel was around the late 1990s when I was completing the first draft of what would eventually become my full-length book on all the writings of Soyinka titled Wole Soyinka: Politics, Poetics, Postcolonialism. At any rate, when I re-read and taught the play recently, I was in no small measure tantalised by the fact that though I had long reached and passed the age of 60, I was startled by the realisation that I am much older than Baroka, the quintessential “old man” of all of Soyinka’s plays! To be exact, I felt at one and the same time shocked and elated: shocked that I am now and have been for a long time Baroka’s elder; elated by the rather deeply personal and existential proof of the old, hallowed Latin proverb concerning the relationship between art and life, “ars longa, vita brevis”. The phrase literally means “art is long, life is short”. The central meaning that has traditionally been ascribed to is the view that while life, lived human life, is short, art lasts for ever. Additionally, the phrase also implies that that the life of the artist and the epoch in which he or she lived is preserved permanently in his or her great works. In other words, let life be as short as it usually biologically is; great art makes life imperishable. More on these later in this short tribute to WS at 80; for now, back to my disbelief that I m now the “elder” of Baroka.

    Definitely, speaking for myself and those of my generation of writers, critics, actors, artistes and “groupies” who have been close to WS, from now on, any time that a discussion of the characters of Soyinka’s plays comes to a conversation about the crafty “lion’ of Ilujinle, some self-referential vibes will go through us when he is, yet again, identified as an “old man”! WS, why didn’t you make Baroka 80? A futile, perhaps even fatuous wish! For the fact is that Baroka will always be 60 anytime he is performed or read in the play. If Soyinka had made him 70 in 1963 when the play was published (it had been performed many years earlier before its formal publication) he would still be 70 today. He will always be, now and forever, any age that Soyinka had given him when he wrote the play – 70, 80 or 90, any age he was given at his imaginative “birthing” by WS.

    Perhaps the most astonishing thing of all in what I am here catachrestically calling Baroka’s “birthing” by WS is that Soyinka was a young man in his early 20s when he wrote the play and yet he wrote compellingly, memorably about an old man of 60. Let us set aside the fact that he wrote a self-serving craftiness with not a small amount of conservative power lust into Baroka’s captivating senescence. The point remains as indisputable as it is also astonishing that in his early 20s WS could enter so completely into the emotional, psychic world of an old man. To this we should counterpoise the fact that Lakunle, the young man who at that stage in Soyinka’ career was much closer in age to WS was made the butt of the jokes of all the other characters of the play and the hapless victim of Baroka’s wily stratagems. WS will have to both believe and forgive me for saying this, but since my very first reading of The Lion and the Jewel I have always thought that Soyinka took sides with Baroka against Lakunle not only because the foppish and naive village schoolteacher was everything WS did not want truly radical and progressive members of his generation to be but also because WS was looking well into the future and seeing himself in those aspects of Baroka that defy age when it comes to matters concerning members of the opposite sex! As a teacher of literature for five decades now, I know that characters should not be confused, not be conflated with their authors, but I am giving my honest opinion here. [If a libel suit is served on me for making this “aspersion”, I will have Femi Falana tie up the lawsuit in an endless, irresolvable knot in the law courts!]

    More seriously, it strikes me now – and only now – that some of the greatest and most memorable characters of Soyinka’s plays are all old men whom the playwright wrote into imperishable imaginative existence when he was a young man well under the age 40. Some of these are Forest Head of A Dance of the Forests; Professor of The Road; Oba Danlola of Kongi’s Harvest; Old Man of Madmen and Specialists; and Elesin Oba of Death and the King’s Horseman. Parenthetically, I might add here that there are two and only two old women in all of Soyinka’s plays that match the towering presence of the old men in the plays in which they appear and these are Iya Agba in Madmen and Specialists and Iyaloja in Death and the King’s Horseman. But maleness as such is not part of the essence of the old men of Soyinka’s great plays, with the exception perhaps of only Elesin Oba in Death and the King’s Horseman. Neither is age in and of itself the thing that stands out in the characterisation of the old, senescent protagonists of Soyinka’s great plays. It is something very tragic and at the same time very exhilarating, something in fact deeply aporetic: they all bear the burden of ironic truths and a dazzling wisdom which neither saves them personally nor those who surround them in the expectation that they will fulfill the messianic hopes they inspire.

    Now I first read all these plays and came across these characters when I was myself a young man, at a time when the formless, apolitical and post-adolescent, non-conformism of my teenage years was being gradually supplanted by a lifelong devotion to socialism in our country, our continent and our world. In that context, these characters of Soyinka’s great plays confused but also endlessly fascinated me. On the one hand, the characters all stood for or in the end inscribed a radical anti-messianism in social contexts that had a surfeit of evil, cruelty and suffering and therefore had a great, overwhelming need to be changed for the better. But on the other hand, the characters each took an unsparing and savagely corrosive look at the evil in themselves and in their world and refused totally to be “saviors”, even at the cost of being destroyed themselves.

    In a way, Soyinka can be described as a consistently non- or anti-didactic playwright but he does have some plays and many poems that can be described as quasi-didactic, plays like the “Jero” plays, The Beatification of an Area Boy and the sketches and revues of the “Before the Blackout” series. But the thing that confounded me when I first read and/or watched Soyinka’s plays in performance was the fact that it was the group of radically non-messianic and anti-didactic plays that far more fascinated me than the other group. Which is why, in the years of my young intellectual and political adulthood, when, without exactly knowing it, I was on my way to achieving a complex understanding of the role of contradiction and aporia in life, art and politics, those great plays of Soyinka and their larger-than-life “old men” characters were of immense help.

    WS is now biologically 80. But vicariously, through a life in art of ferocious and stunning imaginative power, he had already been 80 and older for many decades now, while all the time he retained a youthful energy and drive that were all the more amazing in that he combined many lives into his one single and exceptional life. His appetite for life is vast, like that of an okanjua, a glutton whose capacity for life and living is matched only by the vastness of his capacity for work and self-renewal. By the law of averages, he should have departed this life a long time ago. Sani Abacha was not the only dictator who sought mightily to terminate his life, Idi Dada Amin of Uganda having also been one who sought to end what he regarded as his torments at the hands of WS by plotting to have his life cut short. And the accounts are fully documented that Soyinka was not supposed to have survived his detention by Gowon’s regime during the Nigeria-Biafra war. But Abacha went further than any other megalomaniacal user of the weapon of killing implacable foes by having told confidantes that he would like to be the first ruler in history to have the satisfaction of hanging a Nobel Laureate. Abacha it is that died; WS is 80. And ko tii si iku lo ju e, Ahusubitrue!

     

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • You, your green passport and the world

    You, your green passport and the world

    You were not nervous about your green Nigerian passport at the Toulouse airport as you prepared to leave for Berlin. You had your passport in your bag but you knew that you would not be asked to produce it either on the French or the German side of the border by immigration control officers. You knew because two days earlier as you traveled from Germany to France no one had asked you to produce your passport. In fact, you had your passport out in your hand as you approached the security check point but the officers waived it aside as something they didn’t need to see. And when you got to Toulouse and told your hosts about the experience, they laughed in a good-natured way at your ignorance of the fact that when you travel between European Union countries under the so-called Schengen Pact, you travel without your passport, as if it is a local journey. You smile in return as you remembered the fact that though you need no visa to travel between the ECOWAS countries, you still have to produce your passport and have it stamped when you travel from, say, Nigeria to Ghana or Sierra Leone to Senegal. But why are you writing about this experience, indeed this whole essay in the second person voice and not the first, as is customary with columnists and as you have done so far in this column?

    You are writing in the second person voice because something totally unprecedented in your personal and professional career happened at Toulouse. You had gone to Toulouse to serve as an external examiner in the defense of a doctoral dissertation at the University of Toulouse. You, in conjunction with the other examiners, had found the dissertation brilliant. You had all praised the writer of the dissertation, recommending that he be awarded the doctorate with the highest distinctions. But then had come the shocker, to you anyway, because all the other examiners being part of the French system were completely unsurprised: the chairperson announced that in our reports, each of us had to write in the third person. Unbelieving, you had asked, “you mean I should write something of the order of Professor Biodun Jeyifo found the five chapters of the dissertation equally well conceptualised and written”? Yes, the Chairperson had replied, you must write your opinions and observations completely in the third person!

    The look on your face must have eloquently expressed your disbelief, your amazement for all the other examiners chimed in by admitting that, yes, the practice seems utterly outlandish but that’s how they write their reports after a doctoral dissertation defense – third person voice all the way. You listened bemused and unconvinced as one of the examiners gave the lame explanation that the rationale behind the practice is to make for complete objectivity in the writing of the report since the third person voice is the voice of self-objectification par excellence: writing about yourself and your opinions in the third person, you are forced both to become self-aware and self-distancing. You could have replied that the first, second and third person voices are all devices, all artificial rhetorical techniques and none of them is inherently closer to the truth than the others. But you kept quiet: when in Rome, do as the Romans do…

    That night, you wrote your report, all in the third person voice as requested. It was with great difficulty that you resisted the urge to be sarcastic, to stay within the third person rubric but break it up into contending parts as in “Professor Jeyifo thought that the methodology matched the subject matter of the dissertation, but then another part of Jeyifo thought that the candidate could have been a little more methodologically inventive while yet another part of Jeyifo thought that the whole point was irrelevant anyway”. But you resisted that urge. You resisted because as you wrote, you actually began to find the experience somewhat enthralling in that it began to feel like an other-body experience within your own body. In other words, it began to feel more than a mere change of rhetorical and stylistic register but something existential, embodied and therefore full of possibilities that the regular first person voice does not allow. And that was how that compulsory third person exercise in writing a self-objectified report led to this act of writing about the travails and misadventures of traveling in this world with the Nigerian green passport in the second person register. In plain language, it takes away the sting, the humiliations of the experience of traveling with a Nigerian passport when you write about it in the second and not first person voice.

    For the truth is that every time that an immigration official, having seen your green Nigerian passport and asks you to stand apart from all the other passengers with blue, black, burgundy, orange and other colors, you instinctively feel that the experience is not happening to you but to someone else. Perhaps the very worst of this kind of response that the green passport provoked when you presented the passport was in Istanbul, Turkey, 2010. You were not only stand apart, you were quickly surrounded by several immigration officials all armed and all unsmiling. You were then matched to an office far away from the queues of all the other passengers and made to sit in a waiting room for nearly an hour, no explanations given. At the end of that one hour, just as mysteriously, your passport was returned to you and you were asked to go. You tried to ask what had been the matter but one of the armed officials just barked at you, go! You went and as you joined your colleagues from other countries who had travelled with you for an international conference, everyone saw the look on your face and wisely knew not to ask you any questions for at least that moment, that day.

    In your line of work, you travel a lot. Also, do admit it: from childhood, you’ve been bitten by the travel bug and you do have a love affair with travelling. Once in the early 1970s in Brooklyn, New York, when you were a graduate student at New York University, you’d seen a huge billboard with the legend, “See the World Before You Leave It!” and you had instantly adopted it as one of your few non-political mottoes. Philosophically, you believe that this earth, this planet is the only home we have as a species and you must see as much of it as you can. And you believe that if a part of us earthlings ever migrates to another planet to colonize and live on it that part of the species would be nothing like what we are now. But progressively worse and worse since that time in the early 70s, our green passport has become a liability with which to “see the world before you leave it”. Perhaps it is useful to make what you are asserting here plainer: it is far more vexatious and taxing to the spirit now to apply for visas and to present your green passport at the immigration control borders of many countries in the world than it used to be two to three decades ago.

    You should also admit that it helps somewhat that you teach at a big-name institution but even that is often nullified by the negative talismanic power of the green passport. Recently – as recently as your application for a Schengen visa to Germany – you presented a letter from the Dean of your Faculty to you dated from late last year as proof that you are really an employee, a professor at the Institution in which you teach. Your letter was rejected and you were asked to produce a letter as recent as a week before your application. When you asked if you could have resigned in the middle of the same academic year, the stony response was – we just need a document with a more recent date, period! When you then went and asked the Chair of one of your two departments to write a letter of authentication for you, he said that no one, absolutely no one, had ever asked him for such a letter. He’d wanted to know why you were asked to produce such a letter of authentication, you’d said quietly to him, “you don’t what to know”. What you had in mind was of course you don’t want to know about the green passport and the headaches it generates when you want to and do travel.

    Dublin, 17 May 2009. You have that date down in your expired passport as the date on which a big and bold inscription, “Visa Warning” was stamped on your passport. Until the expiration of that passport, everywhere you went in the world, you were asked what “visa violation” had you committed in Dublin, Ireland. Because of missed connections due to the airline’s own fault, you were put aboard a flight going to New York via Dublin instead of the original direct flight to New York. You disembarked with other passengers in Dublin for a stopover of about an hour. As soon as this immigration control officer saw your green passport, she asked you to stand aside and for the next forty-five minutes completely ignored you regardless of your protestations that your flight would soon be leaving. Well, you finally snapped and loudly demanded to see a superior officer because you were not a would-be economic refugee to Ireland, you were a passenger in transit whose plane would be leaving in a quarter of an hour. In response the officer looked at you as if you both belonged to two different species, took hold of your passport, stamped “visa violation” on a page in the passport and then let you go and board your plane for your flight.

    You ask yourself: what are the headaches and inconveniences of traveling in the world with your green passport compared to the terrible hardships that most of our peoples face at home? Your response is clear and unambiguous: Nigerian fraudsters, scammers and con-artists have made nonsense of the value and worth of the green passport all over the world, just as looters, election riggers and state and non-state bandits have taken sovereign control over society, politics and economy at home. Whether you are at home or abroad, you carry Nigeria with you, their Nigeria, not the one we deserve and will achieve one day.

     

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Is the fundamental question a weakened centre or a just and workable centre? (2)

    Is the fundamental question a weakened centre or a just and workable centre? (2)

    Last week, I suggested a constitutional provision of the death penalty for public officeholders who loot 100 million or more from the public purse. But what constitutional sanctions must we make to end or substantially curb the myriad of legal and structural acts of looting and wasting of our national wealth. For instance, what are we to do about the humungous salaries and jumbo allowances that are paid out to the members of the National Assembly? What are we to do about the fact that an iron-clad cloak of secrecy has been officially thrown around the actual figures? By some accounts, the Senators and Honourables each receive about 23 million naira a month. Meanwhile, at 18,000 naira per month, the national minimum wage – which by the way, is yet to be implemented in many states of the federation – that puts the ratio between the lowest paid worker in our country to the sums paid out to the members of the National Assembly at 1 to 106. This is one of the worst income gaps in the world – if indeed it is not the very worst. How can a federation be founded on such an unconscionable social cannibalistic but legal looting of our national assets?

    As if the scandalous case of the Senators and Honourables is not enough, think of the other perfectly legal acts of brigandage that are rife in the processes of governance in Nigeria. One startling aspect of this fully legalised looting and wasting of our national assets is the freewheeling manner in which the President and the Executive Governors dip into public coffers to patronise and reward their followers, kinsmen and women and cronies. Take the case of Jonathan’s fleet of 12 presidential jets. Obviously, Jonathan cannot be so besotted with jets that he would use presidential prerogative to satisfy a rather childish whim. The present has 12 jets because he must let those on a small list of the most favored among his patrons and clients to use a presidential jet to travel within the country and on occasions, outside the country. Emirs, obas, obis, archbishops, chief imams and men and women of substance – it is a large band of patrons and clients of the President who regularly fly the skies of our country and the world gratis, all expenses paid. If the Governors do not have access to the magnitude of public funds to buy a dozen jets, they make up for this by the scale on which they dole out largesse to their clients.  The whole political order is built on clientilism, a clientilism that means in effect that what we have in our country is one head of state and 36 mini heads of state. No country in the world, least of all a poor, developing country that is deluded by flowing oil revenues to seeing itself as super rich country, no country in the world can afford the level and the impunity with which our President and the Chief Executives of the States routinely dip their hands in to the public purse to satisfy their patrons and clients. In one particularly otiose expression of this clientilism gone mad, Moslem and Christian pilgrims to Mecca and Jerusalem respectively are awarded “scholarships” that take them to and back from the “holy lands” gratis, all expensed paid. And this happens on an annual basis.

    Clientilism of one kind or another exists in all the countries of the world. It has always been a part of the processes of governance. But countries that have successfully modernized have found ways to curb it substantially, if not wipe it out. The sad, tragic fact is that in our country, far from being gradually brought under control, it is festering and it now pervades the entire system of governance. For this reason, the enlightened and progressive governors who know that clientilism exercises a crippling and wasting effect on governance think that they are trapped within a system from which they cannot extricate themselves.

    I would like to suggest that this is a false and misleading dilemma. The “solution” is in fact quite simple: the loud calls for reducing the constitutional power and authority of the President at the centre in Abuja must be extended to reducing the powers and authority of the Governors. Again I repeat the obvious: no nation on the planet can afford the waste and squandermania that has become entrenched in our country in the last three decades. In plain language, no nation can afford to have thirty-seven heads and mini heads of state. And the only rational way to do this is to simultaneously reduce the power and authority of the Presidency and the Governors. Since this seems to be such a wild, improbable aspiration at the present moment, it is imortant that we briefly explore the reasons why this is so.

    For Nigerians under the age of thirty, it may come as a surprise to discover that at one time in the postcolonial history of our country, both at the centre and in the regions, power and prestige was institutionally split between the head of government and the head of state. At the centre, the head of government was the Prime Minister while the head of state was the Governor General. In the regions, the head of state was the Governor while the head of government was the Premier. Thus, at both the centre and in the regions, the dignity and majesty of office was ceremonially attached to the Governor General and Governor while the Prime Minister and the Premiers shouldered the burden of governing. With the emergence of Governors in the states, the governance duties and the ceremonial majesties of both the old Premier and Governor were merged. Thus the new Governors are nothing remotely like the old Governors most of whom in fact embodied the institutional though purely ceremonial grandeur of their office.

    One of most objectionable features of the power, authority and prestige of the new Governors is a habit that they all indulge in, almost without exception, of a predilection for very large pools of cabinet members, special advisers, personal assistants and press liaison officers. The cost of maintaining such large cadres of highly paid officials is truly staggering, especially in light of the fact that most of these posts are redundancies and sinecures in which people collect money for doing next to nothing. With the old Premiers, between 10 to 12 cabinet members and advisers was the standard upper limit. Indeed, if you compare figures between the two periods, it will be amazing to discover how regions which were broken into states had less cabinet members that each of states that were created from them.

    In all the conversations on federalism in Nigeria, there is hardly any thought given to the fact that it is not only the centre whose power and authority should be reduced but that of the Governors. Somehow, we have all be conned or duped into believing that the Governors represent the dignity and sovereignty of their states: In Akwa Ibom, the Governor is an embodiment of the dignity and sovereignty of Akwa Ibomites; In the Oyo State Governor resides the dignity of Oyo state citizens. And so on and so forth. Meanwhile, in terms of actual lived experience of the populace  “dignity” and “sovereignty” mean for the vast majority of the states in our country poverty, insecurities of life and grim hardships in the future. And indeed, it can never be overstated: no country in the world can afford the governance costs of having thirty-seven heads and mini heads of state.

    Many pundits and commentators on federalism in Nigeria in the last three to four decades take the view that the fundamental cause of the problems and crises now is the change from a British-style parliamentary system with a Prime Minster who is elected into office with members of his cabinet and the new American-style Presidential system in which the Presidents and the Governors get elected on their own recognition and choose their cabinet members who are, for the most part, unelected. I contend that this is only part of the story. More central is the fact that when we had the cost-effective parliamentary system, we simply could not afford the Presidential system because the nation was run on a political economy of cash or export crops and there simply was not enough surplus extraction from the cash crop economy to sustain the phenomenally high cost of the Presidential system.

    What kind of constitutional provisions and institutional arrangements can bring the much-needed reform to this state of things? We need enforceable and justiciable constitutional provisions that will place severe limits on how much the President and the Governors can spend on the cost of governance and recurrent expenditures. In every state, the expenditure on capital projects should be at least three times the expenditure on recurrent expenditures. And instead of “Governors” we should give them a new designation to reflect their reduced power and authority. We could look to places like Ghana where their “Governors” are called “Regional Minister” or India where they are called “Chief Ministers”. If the vast sums of money that is flowing into our national coffers from oil revenues can be protected from the great looting and squandermania with which it is currently over-burned and put to good use, Nigeria will easily become the economic engine of the West Africa region. Such a vision ought to inspire our statesmen and thinkers among the political class but alas, alas, we look for such leaders in vain. The old adage comes to mind here: he on whose head a palm kernel is cracked will not live to be among those that will consume the kernel.

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Is the fundamental question a weakened centre or a just and workable centre? (1)

    Is the fundamental question a weakened centre or a just and workable centre? (1)

    The question that forms the title of this week’s essay comes from the underlying assumption of current debates concerning the survival of our country as a federation of many ethnic nationalities and a political and economic power that works for the good of the West Africa region in particular and the African continent in general. This is the underlying assumption: the center of power, authority and resources in the federalism currently in force in Nigeria is too strong, too bloated and needs to be dismantled and replaced with a center with greatly reduced concentration of wealth, power and authority. It is not that there are no advocates for a center that continues to be strong and powerful in relation to the federating units. The fact is they do not have a strong, compelling case. There are two separate but interconnected reasons for this. One, the strong center at Abuja is not working well at all, either for the political class itself or for the generality of Nigerians. Indeed, this is an understatement: the strong, bloated center of power at Abuja is one of the worst under-performers in governance in Africa and the world; it is so totally mired in mediocrity and corruption that but for the fact that oil revenues continue to sustain it, the abysmal quality of its bad governance would have doomed it a long time ago. Secondly, this strong and bloated center generates a destructive, endgame struggle for its control among our political elites, a struggle that is always and forever on the brink of destroying the country as a one federal unit; sooner or later, this endgame struggle will end and that end may very well be a calamity that is unprecedented in its scale in our part of the world. Already, the perpetual doomsayers of Nigeria’s inevitable demise as one country are projecting 2015 as the final battle in that endgame.

    This essay is based on another assumption that is completely different from the very bad case for a strong center for federalism in Nigeria as it has been entrenched and practiced in the last three or four decades. What is this assumption? It is the belief that because the case for a strong and bloated center is very weak, we do not have to think hard and creatively on what kind of centre should replace the existing behemoth at Abuja. More specifically, I am arguing, pleading in this piece that side by side with the case against the present bloated and dysfunctional center in Abuja, we must make a case for a just and workable center that can hold all our peoples together and at last begin to work for the economic wellbeing and social progress of all Nigerians and the peoples of the West Africa region.

    I make this plea, this argument on the strength of the simple but profound fact that a just and workable center of governance in Nigerian federalism will not automatically arise on the ashes of the current strong, bloated and corrupt centre in the manner in which, in the order of nature, day always comes after night. We are part of nature, we are in nature, but human political and social processes don’t operate as do the workings of nature. Everything that we have gained from, and in nature, we have had to work and fight for. The struggle for a just and workable centre of a reconstituted Nigerian federalism in the 21st century will be no different. This calls for some strong and perhaps rather extreme measures that are hardly ever discussed in the current national conversation on whither goes federalism in Nigeria of the present and the future. Let me give a few telling illustrations of this contention.

    It is apparent that corruption, waste and squandermania that are so rife in Nigerian federalism of the present political order will never, never go away unless and until some rather very drastic and effective constitutional provisions are made to substantially curtail, if not entirely banish them in the present order of governance in our country. Thus, it may seem harsh, but is it not as clear as day that corruption being so rife and perpetrated with such impunity in our country, only capital punishment for looting national or public coffers can stem the tidal waves of this cardinal crime and sin of our predatory republic? Any sum of money above 100 million naira should fetch the guilty public official the death penalty; guilt for lesser sums below 100 million naira should fetch long prison terms with hard labor. And it is fundamental that these provisions should be written into a new federal constitution. Philosophically, I happen to be against capital punishment. But also philosophically, I believe that the brazen and unconscionable looting of the national or public coffers is a form of social cannibalism: for every 100 million naira that is looted from the public purse, the lives of thousands of our peoples are made poorer to the point that the loss often extends to needless, avoidable deaths on roads that are death-traps and hospitals and clinics that are places in which to go not to be healed, but to die and be taken to the mortuary.

    It is very necessary for me to emphasize at this point in the present discussion that I am making this argument, some of whose implications go against some of my most dearly held philosophical beliefs, because I am convinced that we need both a just and workable centre for our federation and that we must think hard and deep about how to achieve it. There are those among progressive thinkers and activists in our country, especially in the South, who have given up entirely on the possibility, not talk of the necessity, of working for and bringing into being such a just and workable centre of governance in our country. In connection with this conviction, let me state as strongly as possible that it is not out of sentimental patriotism that I urge and plead that we should strive for a just and workable centre of governance in our country. Rather, it is out of what I deem a hard-nosed, hard-headed grappling with our given historical and political realities. Perhaps the most fundamental of these is the fact that for at least half a millennium now, all the peoples of our country and our region of the continent have been living together in strong ties of cooperation and competition in economic, commercial and cultural ties, so much so that it is not fanciful or mistaken to expect that these ties will remain for many millennia ahead of us.

    Let me express this last observation as a series of very simple assertions. First, we will always need a centre or centers; this is a fundamental law of history and politics. Second, it is good, it is beneficent that ours be a center or centers that are just and workable. Third, like all other peoples and places in history, we must work hard for such just and workable centre or centers. Fourth and lastly, just and workable center or centers of governance come either through peaceful means or as the consequence of bitter and disastrous warfare. We must seek the path of productive peaceful solutions over war and strife.

    The thing that worries me the most in reflecting on these matters concerning the nature, effects and ramifications of the tragic and predatory federalism that has been in force in our country in the last few decades is how very little interest those who are against the strong, bloated, dysfunctional and federation-wrecking centre in Abuja have shown in what I would call the unhappy unity of hardship, suffering and despair throughout the country, from north to south, east to west. It is true that some geopolitical and socio-economic zones are a little – and only a little – better off than others. And it is equally true that there is a bi-polar hegemony in political influence shared by two power blocs, these being the so-called “Core North” and the Southwest, with the Southeast that was a pre-civil war contender with them being for the present historical moment rather sidelined. Also, it is true that even after the frenzy of state creation that brought us dozens of additional  states within two decades disaffected “minorities” still exist everywhere in the country, again north and south. But hard and terrible poverty exists everywhere in the land and in gargantuan proportions. The educational system, especially at the secondary and tertiary levels, has collapsed utterly and now languishes in malign neglect, again everywhere in the country. Finally, what of the youths that constitute the human and demographic majority in all parts of the country without exception? Do they not have now in the present and as future prospects expectations of hardships the likes of which were unimaginable in our own youths, those of us at the late stages of life?

    No, compatriots, the fundamental argument is not between a strong, bloated centre and a centre with greatly reduced concentrations of power and authority. There are and will always be centers in the present-day federal political orders of the world, just as there have always been. Thus, the crucial question is how just and workable the centre or centers are. Beyond the proposed constitutional provision of the death penalty and long prison terms for, respectively, the big and the small looters of our national coffers, in next week’s continuation of the series I shall explore some other constitutional and institutional arrangements that can secure a just and workable centre of governance for the Nigerian federation of our dreams and aspirations. As we shall see, the underlying premise will be a re-federated Nigeria that works for the benefit of all Nigerians – especially the excluded and impoverished majority – and is also an economic powerhouse in the West Africa region.

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Federating units and suffering subjects: is the JNC in a quagmire of irrelevance? (2)

    Federating units and suffering subjects: is the JNC in a quagmire of irrelevance? (2)

    I ended last week’s beginning essay in this series with the assertion that the Jonathan National Conference (JNC) is premised upon and bases its deliberations entirely on one half of the story of federalism and its problems and challenges in Nigeria while completely ignoring the other half of the story. In the part of the story that drives all the deliberations at the JNC, we are told that the great problem with federalism in Nigeria in the last three or four decades is the fact that the center is too strong, too bloated, too “imperial” by contrast with the federating units comprising all the ethnic groups and religious communities of the country. But in the part of the story that is never told and has in fact been completely left out of the deliberations at the JNC, there is no “strong” centre in Nigerian political governance; where such a centre should be we find an extremely weak, mediocre and dysfunctional system that has been remarkably incapable of controlling itself let alone controlling all the challengers to its power and authority, be they political elites or marauding bandits and jihadists from the lowest social order. In this concluding piece in the series, I would like to start from this observation, this assertion of the two halves of the bitter and tragic story of federalism in our country.

    Every Nigerian knows only too well the first half of the story, together with its plotlines and themes. In the context of this discussion, let us highlight some of these plotlines and themes. First, the central government based at Abuja takes the lion’s share of oil wealth, the principal source of revenue for the country as a whole. Secondly, having done this, Abuja and its potentates then distribute what’s left to the states and the local governments of the federation. Nearly every month, all the states have to go cap in hand to Abuja to receive what the almighty centre gives to them within the terms of a sharing formula determined by the centre. Thirdly, the most important functions of governance, both within the country itself and in relation to the rest of the world, are exercised by this same central government. The armed forces, the police, the uniformed men and women guarding our borders, ports and airspace, together with public officials vested with powers to license companies, issues passports and travel documents, and certify the legal existence of  voluntary and civil society organizations, they are all controlled by this same central government.

    Even if it is only one part of the story of the kind of federalism that has been entrenched in Nigeria since oil wealth replaced cash or export crops as the principal source of revenue in our country, this story is valid and is not without some merits. This is because even in countries like Turkey or Lesotho that are, for the most part, nearly ethnically and linguistically homogenous, control over such over-concentration of resources and power at the centre of governance is full of potential for abuse and misuse. In a multiethnic, multilingual and culturally diverse country like Nigeria, a center of governance that is so strong in relation to the federating units is nothing but a recipe for economic and social crises so deep, so endemic that the nation is forever on the brink of disintegration. This is why we have been through a bitter civil war whose aftermath and legacies still haunt us. This is why our ethnic, regional and religious differences are so heavily politicized that it is part of normal political discourse for threats of war and catastrophe to be issued in the name of the diverse ethnic communities of the country. Finally, this is why 2015, the year of the next cycle of presidential, state and local elections in our country, has emerged as yet another horizon of great fear and anxiety about the survival of the country as a federation. This particular point brings us to the profile of the other half of the story of federalism in Nigeria in the last three or four decades.

    It takes no great powers of observation and discernment to see that where there is said to be a strong and imperial center in political governance in our country, there is a bottomless pit of weakness, ineptitude and mediocrity of the highest order. The signs and expressions of this state of affairs are legion. All the incumbents of the presidency since the return to formal democracy in 1999 have been exceptionally weak and indecisive in their execution of all the things that matter in the processes of governance. Yar’ Adua was at first satirically given the nickname of “Baba Go Slow”. By the time of his death while still in office, that nickname had been changed to “Baba Standstill”. Jonathan, as the whole world knows, is so clueless about how to contain challenges to his authority both within his party, the PDP and from other sources outside the formal or “legitimate” governing process that his wife has emerged as the “strongest” person in his administration. But far from being perceived as a “strong” person, she is for the most part seen as an object of ridicule and derision.

    Some might exclude Obasanjo from this pattern of weakness, mediocrity and ineptitude in the supposedly “strong” centre at Abuja, but this is only because they mistake his blustering, vindictive and megalomaniacal style of governance with strength and decisiveness. For in all the things that matter and matter greatly, Obasanjo was as weak as Yar’ Adua and Jonathan. At the beginning of his presidency, he boasted that inadequate and epileptic supply of power would be a thing of the past within two years; at the end of his two terms in office eight years later, the billions of dollars that he poured into the project had produced no change in power supply in the country because he simply could not deliver on this promise. The two elections that he supervised as President stand as the worst in brazen fraudulence, violence and vote rigging in the country’s political history. As a final measure of his ultimate weakness and ineptitude in things that really matter, there is the evidence of the failure of Obasanjo’s well publicized campaign against corruption, even though he had much help from the credibility and charisma and of his anti-corruption czar, Nuhu Ribadu.

    Dear reader, please remember this particular anticlimax to Obasanjo’s anti-corruption crusade: In the year 2006, he went to war with his Vice President, Atiku Abubakar, over allegations of corruption which Obasanjo backed up with a surfeit of documentary evidence; Atiku did not deny the charges; he simply countered with charges of Obasanjo’s own corruption that Atiku also backed up with copious documentary evidence published in prominent advertorials in the national press. After this, stories began to circulate both about Obasanjo’s own corruption and his embrace of the campaign against corruption, not because he was fundamentally against corruption, but as a tool against his real and imagined foes. No, Obasanjo was not a “strong” leader in the things that mattered; he was merely a pompous praetorian autocrat dressed in the garb of a born-again civilian democrat.

    It is not as difficult as it seems to bring these two contradictory halves of the tragic and also farcical story of federalism in our country together to form a whole. The basic requirement is that one must see that the fight for equality of opportunities and access to power and resources must be made simultaneously on two fronts: one, between all the federating ethnic groups and communities in the country; two, between the rich and the poor, the haves and the have-nots of all the communities in the land. If you concentrate on only one of these two fronts, your perception of the problems and challenges of federalism in our country will be skewed toward either the one or the other of the two halves of the story – a strong centre with weak federating units; or a weak and ineffectual centre that cannot guarantee, in a land flowing with oil wealth, even the barest minimum of the basic necessities of life to the vast majority of Nigerians in every part of the country.

    I would like to end these observations and reflections by using the example of the bitter opposition between the so-called “Core North” and the South-south as a way of bringing the two fragmented halves of the story of federalism in our country together. At the JNC confab, these two groups are the most antagonistic, the most seemingly irreconcilable on the issue of fiscal and administrative federalism. The “South-south” which more or less corresponds to the Niger Delta wants the share of the revenue that comes to it from oil wealth to be increased significantly; and it wants greater autonomy in resource control. All this boils down to a centre that is weaker than what we have now. In contrast to these positions, the “Core North” wants to abolish the principle of derivation in the sharing of our oil revenues; for this reason, it wants the “strong” centre of governance in Abuja to be preserved or even strengthened. Well, it so happens that these regions are the two poorest and most economically depressed areas of the country. The years and decades of a strong grip on power at the centre by the political elites of the “Core North” has enriched a few hundreds of enormously wealthy and powerful people but has done nothing to improve present conditions of life and prospects for the future for the vast majority of the peoples of the region. In the “South-south” the same pattern is beginning to emerge: the struggles of the militants of the Niger Delta, together with the principle of derivation, has brought untold wealth to a handful of people while the great majority of the peoples of the region continue to live in conditions of unimaginable immiseration and deprivation. Thus, the delegates from these two areas of the country should be natural allies, not bitter foes. But this is only on the condition that the “federalism” they are fighting for is a federalism founded on the solid rock of justice, with equality of opportunities and access to the necessities of life for all, not just for elites speaking for and on behalf of “federating” ethnic groups and regional communities while all the time cornering the good things of this life for themselves, their families and their cronies.

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Federating units and suffering subjects: is the JNC in a quagmire of irrelevance? (1)

    Federating units and suffering subjects: is the JNC in a quagmire of irrelevance? (1)

    The Jonathan National Conference (JNC) is not a people’s national conference. That was always clear, right from the announcement of the intention to convoke the conference to the determination of its agenda and the selection of the delegates to the confab. Men and women of conscience who are known to be progressive and patriotic that were selected as delegates had a hard time justifying acceptance of their selection. Now, more than ever, the confab, the JNC, is in a deep quandary. With the abduction of the Chibok schoolgirls by Boko Haram, the whole world’s attention is focused on Nigeria to a degree that is unprecedented. In that focus of the world’s attention on our country and its crises, nothing stands out more than the revelation of the weakness, ineptitude and total cluelessness of our government in its response to this particular crisis of the abducted children and, more generally, the security of life in our country. I may be wrong, but to my knowledge, the JNC, meeting on the fate of our country at this particular moment when the whole world is watching events in Nigeria has not, as a body, made any statement on the Chibok abductions. If it has and I can be directed to the place where such a statement was published, I will stand corrected.

    But this is not the real or main point of this article. Its main point is this: the central premise of the confab, of the JNC, is that we have a national government at Abuja, at the centre, that is too strong in comparison with the relative weakness of the federating states and zones of the country. But what the crisis precipitated by the Chibok abductions has shown to us in Nigeria and the whole world is that the central government, especially as concentrated in the presidency, is weak, indecisive and inept beyond belief. Right now as I write these words, you-tube videos of the First Lady, Dame Patience Jonathan – as the “strongest” person in the Jonathan administration – have gone viral on the internet. And the videos show not a strong and decisive person but a blundering, inarticulate figure of great ridicule. As for the President himself, he has never looked more utterly lacking in will, resolve and credibility as the ruler of the largest country on the African continent.   Thus, the JNC is caught on the horns of a dilemma, a contradiction it cannot resolve: its founding, driving premise is that the centre of governance in Nigeria is too strong, too imperial and imperious; but the whole world now knows – as many in our country have known for a long time – that what passes for a strong centre of governance in our country is actually very weak, very lackluster, and very mediocre. What is the basis of this contradiction in which the JNC finds itself trapped, perhaps inextricably?

    It is important to address this question with the greatest clarity possible. The JNC is premised fundamentally on reinventing federalism in our country in order to bring the benefits of federating, plural democracy to all the constituent parts of the country. Stated in this manner, there is nothing wrong at all with this idea; indeed, it a very worthwhile project. However, all federations in history past and present are made up not only of the federating units but also and perhaps more fundamentally, the subjects or persons that constitute the human and demographic majority of the given federation. Let us repeat this observation with as much emphasis as possible: without the living, working, suffering human beings in the federating units of any federal system in the world, a federation is little more than an abstraction. For this reason, federations must necessarily always look simultaneously at the federating units and the human beings that people those units. With this historic and normative context in mind, it is easy to see that the JNC confab is extraordinary in the extent to which, at least so far, it has for the most part ignored the suffering subjects that make up the human reality of the states and zones that make up our currently extremely imperfect federal system. Let me explain with a few telling illustrations.

    From reports of deliberations so far at the JNC confab, together with published interviews with some leading or very articulate delegates to the confab, it appears that fiscal and administrative relationships between the centre and the federating states and zones are being reorganized along the lines of taking some of the over-concentrated power and resources from the centre and giving them to the states and communities in the hinterland of the country. Well so far, so good: more financial resources and more responsibility for governance will go to the states. But the resources and power that will go to the federating units, will they be used for the benefit of the human communities of the federating states? There is not a word, not a policy or constitutional provision for this at the JNC confab. The feeling one gets is that the delegates conflate one with the other: more resources and administrative muscle for the states with better conditions of work, amenities and security of life and possessions for the people. But this is completely specious: that governors and chairmen of local government councils will get more resources and responsibilities will not automatically mean that life will become better for our peoples in states and local government areas across the country. As a matter of fact, the near total silence of the JNC on the actual living conditions and realities of our peoples is an eloquent indication that all the talk at the confab about fiscal and administrative federalism leaves completely intact the existing institutions, policies, practices and norms that vastly enrich our political and economic elites at the expense of the poor, the looted and the marginalized majority of the population in our country. A brief illustration of this observation, this claim is perhaps necessary.

    Well, perhaps it would have been hoping for too much to have expected that the JNC would have a committee on corruption, waste and mismanagement of resources on the colossal scale in which the whole world perceives their incidence in our country. With regard to politics, economy, society and morality in our country at the present moment in history, this is the number one issue. And indeed, how could any national conference in our country at the present time not have such a committee as one of its most crucial working sub-groups of delegates? But of course, no such committee, no such working sub-group emerged at the JNC. And for that very reason, all talk at the confab on corruption has been couched in generalities that do not touch on any actual cases and expressions of corruption and squandermania. The 2.5 trillion naira that vanished with the oil subsidy mega-scam of 2011? Not a word about it. The humungous salaries and jumbo allowances that members of our National Assembly enjoy while over 70% of Nigerians live below the absolute poverty line of $2 (or N320 naira) a day? Not a word about it. The President’s fleet of 12 planes that cost millions of dollars a year to maintain? Not a word about it. The billions of dollars that recently vanished from the account of the NNPC leaving no apparent trail behind? Not a word about it. The statement credited to Mrs. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala in the British newsmagazine, The Economist, that corruption and squandermania in Nigeria being so monumental she would be quite satisfied if, at the end of her current tenure as Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister for the Economy, she was able to achieve 4% clean up of the vast bog of wastage and looting? Not a word about it.

    No, compatriots, there has been no concrete talk whatsoever at the JNC on corruption and the corrupt. All the talk has been in broad, non-specific generalities. As a matter of fact, the committee that should have been named “Committee on Corruption, Waste and Squandermania” but was instead named “Committee on Politics and Governance” co-chaired by Professor Jerry Gana and Chief Olu Falae came up with a recommendation which it touted as the ultimate answer to official corruption in Nigeria. What was this recommendation? It is the removal of the so-called “immunity clause” in the 1999 Constitution that protects the President and Governors from prosecution for any crimes while they are in office. I was totally nonplussed when I read about this. Has prosecution of public officials in our country made the slightest dent on the scale of corruption in Nigeria? Do not public officeholders and other wealthy and powerful figures in Nigeria notoriously and endlessly delay the dispensation of justice in our law courts through the corruption that exists in the judicial system itself?

    A bloated, strong and imperial center confronting weak, often humiliated federating units to the detriment of true federalism and equality and unity between the different parts of our country: that is the central assumption of the JNC confab. But this is only half of the story. In the other half, that “strong” and “imperial” centre is actually extremely weak, ineffective and dysfunctional. And this is not only with regard to the present incumbent of the presidency and his administration. With all his characteristic bluster and bullish exercise of power, Obasanjo was actually very weak and indecisive in the things that matter the most in the present circumstances and future prospects of our country. For like all the other heads of state before and after him in our country, he presided over a predatory political order that could not impose discipline within its own ranks let alone on the forces of resentment and disunity, from above and from below. In next week’s concluding essay in this series, we shall take off from this proposition as we look at the JNC confab and its contradictions, even with the brilliant and progressive minds within its ranks.

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • On really bad days, electricity goes for only about five hours: ambiguous thoughts on an enclave of light in a sea of miasmic darkness

    On really bad days, electricity goes for only about five hours: ambiguous thoughts on an enclave of light in a sea of miasmic darkness

    I swear it. For a very, very long time, I have been meaning to write about this experience that I share with neighbours at my part of Oke-Bola in Ibadan: we have electricity supply nearly all the time, day and night, day in and day out, from week to week and month to month. And this has been going on for more than three years now. We are, you might say, an enclave of light in a sea of darkness that surrounds us once you get past an invisible line that separates us from Oke-Ado and other areas of the city along the Ijebu Bypass Road that leads out of Ibadan toward Lagos going by the old route that goes right through the city. It has been on my mind for a long time now to write about this experience in this column, but somehow, I have never got round to doing so until now.

    I hesitate to say why I have not written about this experience even though I have been dying, metaphorically speaking, to write about it. I hesitate because I am frankly embarrassed by the reason.  For the truth is that I have been somewhat superstitious, feeling rather irrationally that once I write publicly about it, then perhaps our great privilege in enjoying stable and regular power supply when other major areas and sections of the city are in darkness most of the time, will disappear. When you live in a country where very few good things happen, a country where life, daily life is very hard, very challenging for nearly everyone rich and poor, if one good thing happens and keeps happening, you worry deep down that it can’t and won’t last. More pointedly, you worry that if you talk about the good thing happening consistently to you and your neighborhood, if you as it were broadcast it to the whole world, then it will be taken away from you. Well, at last, I am writing about it now, superstition be damned! But getting rid of the superstition is easy, what of the myriad of other ambiguous feelings and thoughts that go with this unique privilege that I and my neighbours enjoy?

    Before I get into this question, it is perhaps necessary to give some real-life context for the discussion. You see, about six years ago, power supply in our neighborhood was as bad as anywhere else in Ibadan or in the country for that matter, with the exception of course of Aso Rock Villa and the Mansions of the Executive Governors of the states of the federation. The situation was so bad that I bought, at different times, three electricity generators. One was very large and could carry everything in my own small household and also keep the borehole that met our water needs running. The second generator was of medium scale and could keep all power-driven equipments and appliances working, with the exception of electric cookers and my microwave oven. The third and smallest generator was used to keep appliances like the fans, the radio and the television set running when NEPA struck, as it did all the time. On top of the three generators, I also invested in an inverter that was a sort of standby for the times when neither NEPA nor the generators were of any use. For sometimes, all the generators broke down from overuse. Discovering this, I bought the inverter so that when NEPA and the generators colluded with one another and plunged my house into darkness and unbearable heat, I could turn to the saving grace of the stored power in the inverter.

    That was about six years or so ago. Things were so bad then in my neighborhood with power outages – as in nearly all other neighborhoods in Ibadan and the country – that I even wrote about it in a series in this column which was then appearing in The Guardian on Sunday under a slightly different name. I wrote about it with some self-deprecating, self-directed irony in investing so heavily in generators and an inverter just so as to have the basic necessities of life in the 21st century. In the series, I wrote that all that investment in generators and an inverter was made not just for ease and comfort but because in my line of work, I have to have power supply all the time. This is because I read, write and do research nearly all the time. I must keep up with the state of knowledge in my fields of academic expertise and I must stay in touch with my students through the internet. This is true for all academics, at least the dedicated ones among them. And as a dedicated academic, when and if you’re prevented by power outages from doing your work, especially repeatedly and endlessly, you begin to, as the saying goes, “lose it”.

    In that same series about six years ago, I also wrote that having three generators and an inverter constituted only a part of something much larger and more portentous that was gradually happening nearly everywhere in our country without anyone paying much attention to it and pondering its consequences. Simply stated, I said that nearly every household in the country was gradually turning into a municipality in itself and for itself: you generate and supply your own electricity; you supply your own water through boreholes; you provide your sanitation services by contracting the collection and disposal of your waste and garbage through private contractors. And you even supply your own safety and security needs by hiring night guards and watchmen. In my youth and up to my young adulthood when I taught at the Universities of Ibadan and Ife, all these were municipal services that were met by public utilities and law and enforcement agencies. God bless the old PDW, the Public Works Department!

    Erratic and inadequate power generation and supply was at the base of that extreme and compulsory atomization and privatization of municipal services in our country. The cost in value added production to the economy is incalculable. The cost in needless, avoidable lack of human comfort, safety and security is simply beyond calculation. For those among us who in the course of our professional lives travel a lot around the world, it is extremely burdensome to come back again and again to one’s country to find daily life under the bondage of erratic and inadequate power supply. The private power generators are at work nearly all the time and are contributing their own share to the excessive noise pollution that reigns in our country. Night life, civilized, recreational night life in Ibadan has more or less disappeared. Not too long ago, Eddie and Bene Madunagu and I had cause to drive from one end of the city to another late at night because we had stayed too long in a visit to a friend. As we rode through the city, we all fell silent, awed by the sense that we were travelling through a ghost city, everyone indoors, nearly every area we passed through enveloped by a darkness that was so pristine, so miasmic that it felt as if we were back to the beginnings of time before creation. At last Bene broke the silence and asked me, “BJ, are we still in Ibadan”?

    My neighborhood in Oke-Bola is in Ibadan and we are in a state of euphoria because we have power supply most of the time, and nearly round the clock. On the bad days, the really bad days, electricity goes for at most five to six hours. And this has been the case, the reality for about three years now. I think I speak for everybody in the neighborhood when I say that while we are very happy that we are enjoying this euphoric privilege of having constant and regular power supply most of the time, we are not sure how long it will last. To tell the truth, we are all doubtful that it will last. In our country, hope and faith are not based on the assurances of the realities and amenities of 21st century civilization; they are based on the mantra that “God is in control, IJN”! In the face of the great uncertainties and hardships that the great majority of our peoples everywhere in the country face on a routine basis, hope and faith cannot be pinned on the performance of government and the utilities – unless and until people experience good performance as a constant, invariant reality.

    So, I am sure that I will be hearing from some of my neighbours after this essay appears in print. I can well imagine what they will be saying to me. “Ah, Professor, why have you written about this matter in your column? Why are you drawing attention to us? You want them to come and take it away from us? Don’t you expect that other neighborhoods will protest and NEPA or PHCN will have to take it away so that they don’t appear to be practicing favoritism to one area and dishing out discrimination and deprivation to other areas?” Well, I am preparing myself for such queries from my neighbours. Good fortune – if our constant and regular power supply is indeed a happenstance of good fortune – should not be hoarded and kept to oneself, one’s community only; it should be shared by all and for the benefit of everybody. Every religious faith and every secular ethical system preaches that profoundly humanistic expression of generosity of spirit. Le there be light – to every neighborhood, every corner of the land.

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Median age 19 and a great youth population bulge

    Median age 19 and a great youth population bulge

    Nigeria is not a poor country…If you talk about ownership of private jets, Nigeria will be among the first 10 countries, yet they are saying that Nigeria is among the five poorest countries.
    •Goodluck Jonathan, May Day 2014 Speech, Eagle Square, Abuja

    Most Nigerians don’t know the concept of national median age. In making this assertion, I include literate, generally well informed Nigerians. And when you explain what the concept means and what the median age for Nigeria is – as I have had occasion to do a few times – there is usually a profound surprise in the person to whom you have relayed the information. I confess that until about five years ago, I myself knew nothing at all about the concept. And when I did get to know about it and found out that Nigeria has a median age of 19, I was profoundly shaken by the discovery. As a matter of fact, it is more correct to say that I have not yet recovered from my shock, my discomfiture at discovering that half of all Nigerians are under the age of 19. For that is what the national median age concept and statistic means: whatever the figure is, it means half of the given country’s population is younger and half is older than the figure. A median age of 19!

    As a sort of general or global background for Nigeria’s median age of 19, think of the following fact: at the present moment in world history, the range of the national median age of the countries of the planet stands at15 as the lowest (Uganda) and 45 as the highest (Japan). The general pattern is that the rich countries of the world tend to have much higher median age figures than the poor countries of the global South. Additionally, countries with low median age figures tend to have, almost in equal measure, high fertility and death rates, as if births and deaths more or less cancel each other out. In other words, with low life expectancy figures, countries with low median age figures seem to “make up” for what they lose through deaths by very high birth rates. At any rate, the most important consequence of having a very low median age is what population studies experts call the “youth bulge” in some countries’ population profile.

    The best way to think of this “youth bulge” is to imagine a pyramid with a very wide base and a very narrow apex. As a matter of fact, the preferred image of population demographers in the graphic representation of the population profiles of the countries of the world is the pyramid. The reasoning behind this is obvious: at all times and in all the regions and nations of the world, younger people and generations tend to be more in numbers than the old and the aged. As we all know, as you go higher in a pyramid, you move from wider to narrower. So it seemed logical that the figure of the pyramid as we have come to know it over the ages in the materialized wonder of the pyramids of Egypt was the best figure for representing the population profiles of the countries of the world. That is until the recent past when, thanks largely to the combination of vastly improved standards of living and the miracles of medical science, a good number of the populations of the rich countries of the world are more and more living to ripe old age. This has led to interesting differences in the population pyramids of the countries of the planet. Some are very wide at the base and very narrow at the apex, while in some, the pyramid is neither unduly wide at the base nor particularly narrow at the apex.

    As abstract graphs and schematic profiles, it is fascinating to ponder the wide differences between the population pyramids of each of the countries of the planet. For instance, the population pyramids of most of present-day African countries look nothing like the famous ancient pyramids of Egypt which, as everyone knows, did not have very wide bases. Similarly, the population pyramids of the rich countries of the world also do not look like the ancient Egyptian pyramids because their apices (plural for apex) tend to be not as narrow as we’ve come to expect Egyptian pyramids to be. Only countries in the middle range of the median age figures for the nations of the world look anything like the ancient Egyptian pyramids and that is because they neither have wide bases nor broad apices.

    The most striking feature of the population pyramids of African countries is the very wide, very capacious bases that correspond to the over-concentration of young people at the base of the pyramid. Here are the median age figures for some African countries, from the highest to the lowest: Egypt, 24; Lesotho, 23; Ghana, 21; Nigeria, 19; Cote d’Ivoire, 19; Benin Republic, 17, Uganda, 15. In all these countries, the national population has an over-concentration among the younger generations. This over-concentration is what is known in development and population studies as the “youth bulge”. When one focuses one’s attention on this phenomenon of the “youth bulge” the fascination of abstract graphs vanishes and one confronts a statistic of potential doom. Let me explain the basis of this pessimistic assertion by indicating quite clearly what this “youth bulge” means in our present national and global historical and political circumstances.

    As we may have gleaned from my remarks and observations so far in this piece, the “youth bulge” literally means that the overall population of a country has its most dense and most concentrated segment among young people below the age of 30. For Nigeria, this “youth bulge” entails around 70% of the population. Now, for Neo-Malthusian development sociologists and economists, a “youth bulge” in the population profile of any country portends grave danger because the normal levels of social unrest and alienation that go with joblessness and insecurity  increase a hundredfold when the ranks of the unemployed are dominated by male youths. For such Neo-Malthusian thinkers, this holds true regardless of the economic system or political order: capitalist or socialist; democratic or fascist; rich or poor. While this generalization may in principle be true if only as a potentiality, it does not address the specifics of each national context of economy, politics and society. Thus, for us in Nigeria the question is, what does it mean to have a vast “youth bulge” in our national population when at a workers’ rally on May Day, President Jonathan can make the following declaration that serves as the epigraph to this essay: “Nigeria is not a poor country… If you talk about the ownership of private jets, Nigeria will be among the first 10 countries and yet they are saying that Nigeria is among the five poorest countries”.

    For truth in accurate reporting, it must be admitted here that in his speech to representatives of Nigerian workers at the May Day Rally in Abuja last week, Jonathan did say that if Nigeria is not a poor country and if it has dozens of citizens that are among the most wealthy jet-set billionaires of the planet, the country does have a big problem with the redistribution of wealth. But the precise nature of that admission is very damning to Jonathan, to his party, the PDP and, to a lesser extent, to all the ruling class parties in Nigeria. For make no mistake about it: when Jonathan and the PDP talk about redistribution of wealth in Nigeria, they mean no more and no less than redistribution strictly among the political and economic elites of the country. In other words, “redistribution” for Jonathan and for Obasanjo and Yar’ Adua, the two previous incumbents of Aso Rock Villa before him, means not redistribution between the small band of the haves of all the parts of the country and the teeming masses of the have-nots spread over the length and breadth of the land.

    As I write these words close to the conclusion of the Jonathan National Conference (JNC), the confab has come almost to a deadlock on the matter of resource allocation of our oil wealth from the centre to the parts of the federation. At one extreme end are the Northern delegations who are urging a scrapping of the principle of derivation through which the oil-producing states of the South-south currently get 13% of oil revenues. At the opposite end to the Northern delegation are those from the South-south and the South-east that are clamoring for an increase from 13% to 50%. Most commentators watching deliberations at the confab expect that the deadlock will eventually be broken by some compromise figure between 13% and 50%. But no commentator expects that whatever the figure eventually brokered as a compromise solution to the deadlock will even remotely affect the poverty that stalks and haunts all parts of the country, especially the North and the South-south, the two zones apparently prepared to go to war over the sharing out of the nation’s oil wealth.

    As far as I know, the “youth bulge”, together with the median age of 19, have not been mentioned even once at the deliberations of the JNC. This is because our politicians and political parties, like the proverbial ostrich, have their heads buried in the sand, even though that invisible “youth bulge” has begun to make its presence in our politics and society felt with great violence and equally great fanfare – through Boko Haram, through MEND, through the dozens of marauding gangs and militias terrorizing many parts of the land. It is beyond the pale of mindlessness for Jonathan to say to workers – among all people! – that Nigeria is not a poor country because if you talk of countries with jet-set billionaires Nigeria will be among the top ten countries in the world.  As the following two ubiquitous Nigerian pidgin proverbs have it, “monkey dey work, baboon dey chop” but “who no know go know.”

     

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu