The Nation Newspaper

Category: Biodun Jeyifo

  • Boko Haram, sex slavery and mass rape: what can a predatory, dysfunctional and patriarchal state do about this particular atrocity?

    Boko Haram, sex slavery and mass rape: what can a predatory, dysfunctional and patriarchal state do about this particular atrocity?

    As  I write this column two days before it will appear in print and online, the whole world waits in desperate, anxious hope that the schoolgirls of Chibok, Borno State that were abducted by Boko Haram two weeks ago will ultimately, indeed sooner than later be released from captivity. But the sad fact is that Boko Haram is totally pitiless. Among the right-wing, jihadist terror groups of the contemporary world, Boko Haram has achieved a notoriety that is right there among the most heinous in calculated, maximum savagery. Take for example this fact: while the Taliban, one of the most cruel jihadist terror groups in the world, targets schoolgirls, it has never abducted them and then enslaved the abductees in so-called “marriages” as Boko Haram has reportedly done with some of the Chibok schoolgirls.

    The so-called “marriages” are nothing but acts of mass rape since a “marriage” entitles the man to conjugal rights to the “bride”. In the extremity of this atrocious act, Boko Haram has now lost any visionary claims it ever had to a utopian Islamic state to replace the present decadent and dysfunctional Nigerian state, especially in the North. Indeed, with this act of sex slavery and mass rape, Boko Haram is now less like the Taliban and more like John Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) of Uganda. One of the regular terrorist acts of the LRA in the high tide of its insurrectionary operations in the forests of northern Uganda is mass abduction of schoolgirls to serve the all-male members of LRA as sex slaves and servants. The LRA is a violent fundamentalist Christian sect while Boko Haram is a fundamentalist jihadist Moslem group: in the perverse moral universe of 21st century terrorist movements around the world, religion is a mere excuse for self-serving, reactionary insurgencies in which faith is transmogrified into an opportunistic heresy to induce droves of disaffected male youths into their ranks.

    As we pray and hope that the abducted schoolgirls may regain their freedom soon, I suggest that the atrocity provides us with a unique opportunity to begin to focus on the startling resemblances and links between the essential and pathological maleness of the Boko Haram insurgents on the one hand, and on the other hand, the backward patriarchal tendencies produced by the policies and acts of the dysfunctional and predatory Nigerian state that the group seeks to overthrow. At the heart of this uncanny link between the patriarchy of the Boko Haram insurgents and that of the patriarchy of the hegemons of the Nigerian predatory state is the fact that male youths have become the most restless and volatile social group in our country while, to the contrary, female youths have become either sidelined in the scheme of things or have become occasional victims of male violence through acts of rape, physical abuse, intimidation and disrespect. Moreover, in the general and widespread of reign of poverty in the land among teeming millions of a dispossessed populace, women bear the brunt of poverty far more than men. This is because as in all the developing societies of the world in which there are no social safety nets for poverty and its ravages, in our country women as mothers and caregivers have become the social safety nets for children and the sick.

    In development sociology, this phenomenon is in fact known as the feminization of poverty. Sadly, tragically, there are few places in the developing world more stricken by this phenomenon than Nigeria, a land awash with oil wealth. I suggest that one reason for this is the fact that an opposing trend to the feminization of poverty is at work in our country, a trend that for want of a better term I call the masculinization of violence, by the Nigerian state, and outside the state in the scores of militias and marauding gangs spread across all the regions of the country. What are the symptoms and expressions of this phenomenon that reveal startling resemblances between Boko Haram and the dysfunctional and predatory Nigerian state?

    Before I go into an exploration of the more complex and subtle manifestations of this masculinization of violence that links Boko Haram to the Nigerian predatory state, it is necessary to emphasize that for most people either in support of or indifferent to women’s rights, the key challenge that women face in our society is their marginalization at the manifold sites of political, economic and social power in our country: too few in government, parliament, industry, and middle class professions with the exception perhaps of lawyers; and too few as leaders and opinion molders in both parastatals and voluntary organizations with perhaps the exception of women’s own organizations. Women constitute at least half of the population; some statistics actually put them at slightly more than men. But in nearly all the sites and locations of political power and economic muscle in our country, men call the shots. There are of course many outstanding women who shine and hold their own in all fields of endeavor in our country. But they are the exceptions and for the most part they operate in a world dominated by men. Indeed, this particular group of women are sometimes perceived as “honorary men” that are clearly distinguishable from all other women, the vast majority of whom are excluded or marginalized from the levers of governance and the corridors of power.

    The world of men: a world dominated by men, excluding and marginalizing most women and consigning them to poverty, disenfranchisement and almost lifelong hardship, this in a land flowing with oil wealth. A world whose overwhelming male dominance is obscured by our fixation on real and manufactured differences based on religion, ethnicity and regionalism. But this world of men also excludes and marginalizes other men in their tens of millions. To this, add the fact that the median age for Nigeria is 19 and you get the startling fact that the great majority of the men excluded from “the world of men” of wealth, power and substance are young men in their teens and early adulthood.

    In all human societies of the past and the present, the exclusion of large segments of the population from power and wealth has always been a recipe for instability and social unrest. When this is compounded by the fact that the vast, teeming masses of those so excluded and marginalized are male youths that constitute the human and demographic majority of the society, social unrest gives way to worse forms of crises beyond mere instability. These brutal and bizarre forms of social unrest are perpetrated mostly by and through marginalized young males: cruel and barbaric forms of extortionate gangs that kidnap people for huge ransoms and often slay those kidnapped any way after the ransom is collected; private militias that use ethnicity to pursue their own self-serving agendas; high incidence of insubordination and anarchic rebelliousness of youths toward all forms and levels of authority.

    Psychobiologists would look for an explanation of this development in our society in the combination of typically high levels of the male hormone, testosterone, in young males with joblessness, lack of sustaining positive hopes for the future and plain restlessness that comes from having nothing of value and worth to occupy one’s time and energies. But this, I suggest, is only one part of the story. Beyond psychobiology, there is the grim, sobering fact that violence is the tool by which the “world of men” of the corrupt and dysfunctional Nigerian state keeps so many in our society deprived, frustrated and powerless; consequently, violence is the response of that other “world of the men” of our millions of disaffected male youths who, in one way or another, are refusing their exclusion and marginalization.

    In bringing this piece to its conclusion, let me reiterate that at the present moment as I am writing this piece, the most important thing is my solidarity and the solidarity of women and men of goodwill and conscience in our country and in the world at large with the young abducted schoolgirls of Chibok and their families. We are at a new crossroads in the engagement with this savage and barbaric insurgency that is Boko Haram. The captivity of the girls is our shame and a mirror of our collective helplessness in being ourselves captives of the Nigerian predatory republic.

    But this helplessness pertains to the Nigerian dysfunctional and predatory state itself. For the truth is that the nearly all-male operatives of the Nigerian security forces combating the all-male Boko Haram insurgents are ill equipped and poorly paid; and for the most part, they are as demoralized as the rest of the Nigerian peoples in their ten of millions. Against the stark reality of the manifest helplessness and ineptitude of the Nigerian state in securing the freedom of the abducted girls, the masses of women and men seeking their freedom are beginning to organize and to look to their own communal resources to meet the terror of Boko Haram – without letting the Nigerian state off the hook. The portents are clear: Boko Haram will be defeated if and only if the Nigerian inept and corrupt Nigerian state is itself defeated by the will of the Nigerian peoples. What needs to be done is to convert the surfeit of male-dominant violence that is fuelling both the Boko Haram insurgency and the Nigerian state to patriotic, democratic ends. These tens of millions of young males that are jobless, restless and volatile, what else can or must we do about or with them?

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Seshat revived: further thoughts on the state of reading and writing in our country

    Seshat revived: further thoughts on the state of reading and writing in our country

    In the second segment of last week’s essay in this column, I joined my voice to the voices of thousands of those greatly excited by the declaration by UNESCO of Port Harcourt as the Book Week Capital for this year. In a move calculated to indicate how long and deep are the roots of writing on our continent, I pressed a drawing of Seshat, the Egyptian goddess of writing, knowledge and wisdom, into service as a photographic frame for my celebration of the achievement of the Rainbow Book Club and its efforts to revive reading and writing among schoolchildren and our youths. In order to reflect more deeply on the significance of that invocation of the Egyptian goddess of writing in last week’s essay, I wish this week to explore what it means in the contemporary period to go all the way back to ancient Egypt in order to give resonance to my encouragement of the yeoman efforts being made at the present time to revive reading and writing in our country.

    I am sure that it could not have escaped many readers that it is because ancient Egyptian civilization was literate, indeed greatly treasured writing, that I invoked the goddess Seshat in last week’s essay. Shamanistic or miracle rainmakers are not found in desert communities and cultures; where rain hardly ever falls, a rainmaker will strive in vain and will starve. Although our continent invented some of the earliest writing systems and their enabling scripts, until the beginnings of the modern age, writing was not widely distributed in the vast majority of the societies and cultures of our continent. That is why gods and goddesses of writing do not exist in cultures in which writing does not exist. To give an apt and epigrammatic illustration of this observation, Orunmila of the Yoruba pantheon is the god of knowledge and wisdom; his divine patronage of culture and the arts does not include writing and writers.

    Historically, Egyptian and Ethiopic writing systems were the main cultures of literacy and writing on our continent. Writing systems and scripts like Vai and Nsibidi in our own region of the continent did not develop into full scale and widely distributed regimes of writing and reading with consolidated extensions to processes and institutions for recording and preserving knowledge. In sum then, writing is both very ancient and very new in our continent, depending on which regions and cultures of Africa one is talking about. But this is not the main point that I wish to emphasize in this piece.

    The main point that I wish to emphasize and develop into a full discussion in this essay is this: in the modern world, while it helps to have a long and ancient tradition of writing and literacy in one’s culture, it is not, and need not become a permanent cultural disability not to have had an ancient writing and literate tradition in one’s society. The deep historical truth is that once writing is introduced into any society, it becomes a considerably powerful means of recording and transmitting knowledge and experience across time and the generations; and it also becomes a powerful force for progress and the advancement of learning. But we must recognize that writing does not perpetuate itself, does not become a force for progress just by the force of its own intrinsic value. And writing systems change all the time; they are reinvented perpetually and in fact sometimes superseded by other writing systems and thereby go into oblivion. One graphic illustration of this historic reality is the fact that all the writing systems and scripts of ancient Africa have gone into oblivion and all the ideographic scripts like Vai and Nsibidi indigenous to West Africa before the introduction of the currently globally hegemonic Latin script have massively declined in the limited value and currency they once had. To put this observation across in concrete terms, other than cultural pride and the memorializing of past greatness, the Ethiopic scripts of Geez and Amharic confer no special advantages to modern Ethiopia and Eritrea over present-day Ghana and Nigeria. We must celebrate the achievements that produced the ancient writing scripts of Africa, even if they all now belong in the metaphoric museum of history, but what we make of writing and literacy in our age lies completely in our hands. This is why the title of this essay starts with the phrase, “Seshat revived”.

    Let me give a concrete illustration of this phrase by alluding to my own experience and the experience of my generation with regard to reading and writing as inestimable vectors of pleasure, learning, enlightenment and progress, personal and collective. Today, the bookshops of the University of Ibadan and the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ife, look like ghostly hulks of what they once were when I was an undergraduate at the former and a teacher and researcher at the latter. It used to entail such cultural and emotional anguish for me to visit these bookshops that I have completely stopped entering them. Indeed, the anguish has become so deeply ingrained in relation to the U.I. bookshop that I often quickly walk past it when, over a weekend, I am staying with the Osofisans on the campus of the University.

    On a larger scale, with the exception of perhaps only Lagos and Abuja, bookshops in all Nigerian cities are today like gutted, emptied versions of what they once were. When I was reading for my GCE “A” levels, there was no book on my required texts that I couldn’t get in several bookshops in Ibadan. This is apart from books that I regularly bought just for my reading pleasure – the bookshops were well stocked with them. And yet the Nigeria of today, the country of my late adult life is immensely wealthier than the Nigeria of my early life and young adulthood. Bookshops throughout the country should be bursting with a cornucopia of books on all subjects as bookshops tend to be in the nations of the world that truly value writing and reading. But for the herculean efforts of intrepid and dedicated dealers in the book trade like Booksellers of Ibadan and Glendora of Lagos (and others very thinly spread throughout Nigeria whose existence is unknown to me), we would still be going through the book drought that prevailed through much of the late 80s and early to mid-90s.

    Let me come to the heart of what I am trying to put across in this essay. The great decline in reading among our children and youths and the equally catastrophic fall in standards of writing in books and newspapers in our country have many causes. But the chief cause is the fact that instead of giving a big boost to reading and writing, our oil wealth bonanza has done the exact opposite: it has fostered a pervasive philistine indifference to the great role that writing – and writing well – plays in all modern societies. In this respect, the very poor state of bookshops all over the country and the mediocre levels of writing that pervade much of what is published in virtually all our newspapers, are both symptoms and causes of the poverty that reigns supreme in our country today.

    I do not wish to be misunderstood. It is not writing and reading as such that produced the grim statistic of 7 out of every 10 Nigerians living below the poverty line; it is gargantuan corruption, mismanagement and squandermania on a colossal scale that bear the responsibility for such an abysmal level of widespread poverty in the midst of vast oil wealth. But a decline in the quality of writing such as we are seeing now carries with it a disastrous fall in the quality of the intellectual life of the nation and is thus epiphenomenal to corruption and squandermania as the primary causes of poverty on such a large scale. Moreover, let us keep this in mind: for good or ill, we live now in the highly competitive world of a fully globalized capitalism in which intellectual capital and property occupy a pivotal place in the distribution of wealth and poverty between and within the nations of the planet. If by a revolutionary stroke of good fortune looting, waste and squandermania were to be terminated in our country next month, next year or the year after that, we would still have the task of a complete reform of our educational system, our reading habits and the quality of writing in our country to meet the challenges of 21st century global capitalism. Let me put this in the form of a pointed question: how can we ever become big players in the continental and global economies if our educational systems and the intellectual level indicated in the general quality of writing in our country remain so abysmally low?

    I testify that at one time in the not-too distant past in this country reading and writing among the literati, as cultural habits and intellectual attainments, were of world class standard. I testify also that as that national literati expanded in number and demographics, highbrow, mid-brow and lowbrow levels in reading and writing emerged as they have done in nearly all modern societies; but mediocrity did not swamp and overwhelm writing and reading in the country. But now, except in a few locations or oases where reading and writing are still encouraged and nourished, “lowbrow” has completely eaten up both “mid-brow” and “highbrow”.

    But all is not lost. Apart from the Rainbow Book Club whose activities I highlighted in last week’s column, I know of several other groups around the country where reading of novels and poetry and lively discussions on the state of writing and reading in the country are held regularly. I know of bookshops that are now relatively well-stocked and publishers that are once again giving superb, professionally competent editing to the books they are now publishing. But these are little streams, they are rivulets where we should have mighty seas of renewal – as we once did in this country. Seshat revived: writing has a long and hallowed history on our continent. But that history amounts to nothing if our present and our posterity are completely under the shadow of the prevailing and dominant philistinism in the intellectual and cultural affairs of Nigeria, the like and the scale of which was once foreign to this country.

     

     

    Erratum:

    In last week’s column, where I should have described the dictionary entry on the Latin phrase in extremis as the epigraph to the essay, I mistakenly called it the epilogue. The error is due to insufficient self-correction after the completion of the essay. This is a risk, a specter that all columnists face: sometimes, you miss obvious errors in your own essay that others would easily spot.

     

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

     

  • Writing in extremis: the TLH column in the context of life, personal and collective

    Writing in extremis: the TLH column in the context of life, personal and collective

    It number 61, this column named Talakawa Liberation Herald reaches one year, two months and three weeks since it started appearing in The Nation on Sunday without missing a single week. As some of the regular or devoted readers of the column know, before The Nation, the column was appearing in The Guardian on Sunday under a slightly different name, Talakawa Liberation Courier. In that incarnation, the column appeared for about five years and eight months. Unlike The Nation where the column has not failed to appear week in week out, the column in The Guardian failed to appear in about five times in the more than five years that I wrote the column for that newspaper. That failure was not my fault; I never failed to send my contribution every week. It was The Guardian which, for one reason or the other, failed to publish the column in about five times while I wrote for the paper. [That was in fact one of the reasons why I left The Guardian, but it was not the most important reason. Some day, I shall write a full account of the reasons why I left that newspaper in which, from its very inception, I was one of the most dependable among the small group of academics that played a major role in its rise to prominence among Nigerian newspapers]

    Since I have a full time job as a university teacher and researcher, many of my friends, themselves university teachers and researchers, regularly ask me how I am able to write the column every week unfailingly. The answer to that question is both simple and complicated, both direct and complex. The simple and direct factor can be briefly stated. I have a passion for reading and writing, a passion that is almost lifelong since it started in primary school more than half a century ago. With that kind of background, producing a weekly newspaper unfailing year in year out turns out to be not as daunting as it seems. With the tremendous advantage of that kind of background, all I have had to do really is organize my weekly duties, obligations and habits in such a way that it leaves the period of from early Friday morning to noon free to write the column. This was difficult at first, especially on the occasions when I was traveling in other countries, other continents. But after the first few months, this practice not only became routine, it actually became something that I looked forward to every week, so much so that the time spent writing the column became one of the most treasured experiences of the week for me. How I wish this was all there is to say about why I write the column!

    The fact is also that I write the column in extremis. I think that most regular readers of the column will readily agree that for the most part, I write on topics, events and experiences that reflect profoundly disturbing, frightening or depressing things relating to how life is massively (dis)organized and made extremely burdensome for most of the peoples of our country, our continent and our world. In particular, I write about the present political order in our country and its capacity for corruption and predatoriness of the most unconscionable kind. But I also write about how the ethos, the rot that starts from the rulers have tragically taken deep roots in our peoples themselves in their tens of millions. Most especially I write, often in desperation, to indicate that I have lived long enough to know that things were not always what they are now in our country and our world. Without nostalgia and sentimentality, I write about a different time and an almost different world from my childhood through my early adulthood – at Oke-Bola, Ibadan; at the University of Ibadan as an undergraduate; and at both Ibadan and Ife as a teacher and researcher – when there was a basis for real hope for the country and for Africa, even with all the crises that we experienced in that long period. I write with an almost maniacal urgency and certainly with a desperate hope that our youths, those who have not lived long enough to know a different Nigeria, do not become overwhelmed by the dire prospects confronting them and succumb to despair, cynicism and, worse, nihilism. This is what I have in mind when I say that I write in extremis.

    As the dictionary meaning of the phrase, in extremis, that serves as the epilogue to this piece indicates, in its medical use the phrase means “at the point of death”. I hope that I have written enough in this column to indicate that this “death” is not literal; it relates neither to my own death nor the death of my society, my country. Rather, it is the death of the spirit which takes many forms. One of the most prevalent forms of this death of the spirit in our country at the present time is the fact that a frightening, terrifying future looms large on the historical horizon for our peoples, especially our young people and yet we seem completely unable to do even the minimum of what it will take to avert that looming, gloomy future. Of course, our indomitable prayer warriors are at work to redeem that future for us. Apparently, there is no death of the spirit for them. But scratch beneath the surface of this spiritual buoyancy of the prayer warriors and you will find a hysterical and crippling fear of legions of nameless enemies which is but an ironic form of spiritual death.

    There is another dimension to writing in extremis that perturbs me a lot and this is the fact that I am a full time teacher and researcher first, and a columnist second. As much as I have tried to organize my weekly life and affairs to make the writing of the column both assured and pleasurable, I still find it enormously challenging to combine my work as a fully employed academic with the demands and opportunities that come with being a columnist. The most regrettable expression of this conflict, this split is the fact that I serve two consistencies whose pressures on my time, my energies are unequal. Simply stated, my students, both undergraduate and graduate, exert a more immediate and a more embodied demand on me than the readers of my column. This is only partly due to the fact that I see my students all the time while, for the most part, the readers of my column encounter me only through the impersonal medium of print journalism. More significant is the fact that I have to attend virtually all the time to the writing of my students, leaving me no time at all for the writing of my readers who, responding to things that have greatly intrigued or inspired them in my column, reach out to me through emails to start a conversation. To all such readers, my apologies. There are only 24 hours in a day and seven days in a week and one can only do half or even less of what one would really like to do in the little time that one has. This is part of the great dissatisfaction of writing in extremis, under seemingly dire and impossible conditions. But then, as the next segment of this week’s column implies, hope spring eternal in the human heart….

  • Pitakwa, our own cherished Pitakwa: Port Harcourt World Book Capital 2014

    In its desperate optimism, this column is always on the lookout for hopeful signs of social, cultural and educational advancement in our country. The festivities that will next week mark the declaration by the UNESCO of Port Harcourt as the World Book Capital for the year 2014 is one such great achievement. With a keynote address by Nobel Literature Laureate, Wole Soyinka and the attendance of many front rank writers and artists from Nigeria, Africa and the world, the celebrations in Port Harcourt next week will be second to no other event in the cultural calendar of our country and the African continent this year. Set you gaze on Port Harcourt next week compatriots, but not for eruptions of political brigandage in the ruling party!

    Festivities and celebrations are one thing, the activities and programs that give birth to and sustain them is another thing that is of far greater import than celebrations. Thus, behind the World Book Capital celebrations in Port Harcourt next week is the Rainbow Book Club and its indefatigable founder and director, Koko Kalango, together with the unstinting and enlightened support of the Rivers State Governor, Rotimi Odili Amaechi. For quite a long time, the Rainbow Book Club has been doing a lot to encourage reading in Port Harcourt and Rivers State in particular and across the regions and states of Nigeria. It has sponsored “Reading Weeks and Months” among schoolchildren. It has organised literary festivals that bring together older and younger Nigerian writers, thereby sponsoring a much-needed intergenerational conversation among the country’s literati. And it has published books and manuals that highlight the importance of reading in a country and a world in which reading has its back to the wall of survival against the depredations of the culture of the internet and smart phones and the philistine tendencies in their “texting” and “twitting” inducements to the young. Will reading and writing as powerful means of cultural and educational advancement in our country survive the challenges of the barbarisms of the digital age? I think they will, though the road ahead is going to be rough and tough. The Rainbow Book Club is one of the most important bases of this hope. Hearty congratulations to the Rainbow Book Club and the Rivers State Governor.

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Will it be watched at home with fresh eyes and open minds?

    Will it be watched at home with fresh eyes and open minds?

    It was with great expectations and even much greater anxieties that on Wednesday this week I went to a private screening of Biyi Bandele’s film adaptation of Chimamanda Adichie’s prize-winning novel on the Nigeria-Biafra war, Half of a Yellow Sun. The “expectations” can be quickly or summarily expressed. Both the filmmaker and the novelist rank very high in my estimation. Adichie is now one of the most deservedly world famous authors in contemporary literature and Half of a Yellow Sun is one of her best works. The occasion of its adaptation for the big screen of cinema in the highways and upper levels of popular culture and not the alleyways and side streets of video films is therefore an occasion that excites great expectation. Add to this the fact that though Biyi Bandele who adopted the novel for the screen is an accomplished playwright, this is his debut film, his first venture into the rarefied world of movies optioned by very influential producers and made with big-name actors. [For truth in public discourse, I must state here that Biyi Bandele was my student at the University of Ibadan in the mid-1970s]

    For these reasons, I was immensely pleased that my great expectations were not disappointed and I left the cinema on Wednesday night very glad, very gratified that the film version of Adichie’s great novel is also a delightful and absorbing work. I understand that it will premiere in Lagos next week and bearing this in mind, I strongly recommend that everyone reading this piece should see the film if they happen to be in Lagos during its run there. It is precisely on the basis of this “recommendation” that I now go to the matter of the anxieties with which, side by side with the expectations, I set out to watch the film last Wednesday, especially since even after watching the films, the anxieties still remain. But before dealing with this issue, permit me to briefly discuss the things that I found delightful and compelling about the film.

    Most of those who watched the private screening of the films at Harvard on Wednesday had all almost certainly read Adichie’s novel. But in the marketplaces of popular cinema in the world at large, the vast majority of those who will see the film will not have read the novel. For this reason, the film must and will stand or fall on its own and cannot bank on the celebrity status of the novel and its writer. I am glad to report that it succeeds in doing this wonderfully, so much so that I expect that after watching the film, many of those who have not read Half of a Yellow Sun will be sufficiently piqued by how close to or different from novel is Bandele’s film that they will rush to read the novel. They will of course discover, either to their pleasure or disappointment, that the novel is far more complex than its film version. But that is beside the essential point being argued here. With very few exceptions, nearly all film adaptations of great works of literature do not match the depth and complexity, the unique perturbations and intimations in the original literary works. This is why, in the last instance, film versions of works of literature must stand or fall on their own. Not paying sufficient attention to this categorical imperative, many adapters of literary works for film use the reputation of the work or its author as a crutch to lean on and in the process fail woefully. Perhaps the most notorious example of this phenomenon is Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and its many film adaptations, not one of which is successful as film, as a work dependent on the mastery of the medium of film and its demands and satisfactions.

    Perhaps at the base of Bandele’s success in his film is his recognition that though its subject is an epochal historical event, Adichie’s novel is not a historical novel. This is because though it is fiercely faithful to depicting the harrowing and unforgettable effects of the historical event of the Nigeria-Biafra war on those who had to live through the war, the real strength of Adichie’s novel lies elsewhere. It lies in its ineffable ability to both capture the quotidian realities of life in the midst of devastating war and to plumb the depths of the conflicting inner drives and motivations of characters in whom the war brings out the best and the worst in them. In Bandele’s film these two aspects of the novel – the terrifying banality or ordinariness of the ravages of war and singularly driven characters for whom the war serves as a backdrop to who they really are and who they are striving to become – are realized powerfully without the slightest hint of exoticism, the bane of films made from novels on Africa or by Africans. Thus, where films on such novels as Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe), Cry the Beloved Country (Alan Paton), A Good Man in Africa (William Boyd) and Out of Africa (Karen Blixen) all failed to rise above the level of cliché and exoticism in depicting Africa as background and Africans as human subjects, Bandele’s film is, in my opinion, the first film in the genre to soar exultantly into the realm of unforced plausibility and warm, funny, intriguing and compelling presence of all the characters, African and European. Nollywood directors and actors will find a lot to learn from this film. This, in fact is the point of departure for the anxieties that I had about this film, anxieties that have not disappeared with the great pleasure and delight that I had in watching the film.

    If Bandele’s film succeeded in assuaging my anxiety about the tendency in Hollywood or British films based on novels on Africa or by Africans to exoticize the continent and its peoples, alas it did not allay my worries concerning the baleful effects of the popularity and influence of Nollywood on cinema audiences in Nigeria, the African continent and the Diaspora. At the screening of the film at Harvard where slightly under half of the audience was African or black, this influence of Nollywood was very palpable, very disconcerting. Every time that the Mother of Odenigbo, (the main male character in the novel and the film played by Chiwetel Ejiofor) spoke, the majority of the Africans in the audience either burst into raucous laughter or tittered uncontrollably, even though how she spoke and what she spoke about did not entail comedy. In time, I became very conscious in the “racial” division in the audience response to this character’s role in the film: blacks laughed all the time; the whites were silent or perhaps mystified and querulous about the laughter. Personally, I was greatly inconvenienced by the fact that one of the loudest of the laughers was sitting right next to me! It did not matter that this role of the Mother was played by Onyeka Onwenu with verve but also with nuance and with dignity in the second half of the film; every time the Mother appeared laughter erupted. There is not the slightest doubt in my mind that the voluble, completely unselfconscious laughers did not and could not see Onyeka in the role; what they saw was Patience Ozokwor, the Nollywood essence of Mothers and Mother-in-laws as insufferable shrewish termagants.

    Let me hasten to say that I am not making too much of this laughter around one single character. What I saw, what troubled me was the fact that, as soon as she appeared in the film, this character’s presumed essence became the benchmark for the response to the whole film. Laugher, loud comments, voluble talking back to characters became commonplace in the response to the film. And in nearly all cases, these responses trivialized the film and its brilliant, compelling probing of existential and social issues of great moral and psychological weight that the war bequeathed to us, as represented by Adichie’s novel and Bandele’s adaptation of it for film. In this particular case, my anxiety is this: after Nollywood, can serious and engaging cinema in our country hope for and get popular audiences who will watch films with fresh eyes and open minds?

    This question, which indeed provides the title for this piece, is all the more vital given the fact that the film is after all about the Biafra-Nigeria civil war which is second to no other historical event or crisis in postindependence Nigeria in causing wrenching divisions between us concerning both its prosecution and its legacies for the present and the future. The concrete terms in which this pertains to Bandele’s film can be gauged by the controversies that erupted after the publication of Achebe’s last book, There Was A Country. Thus, following those controversies around Achebe’s book, the question that is the title of this piece can be applied to the film: will it be watched at home in Nigeria with fresh eyes and open minds where Achebe’s last book failed to produce such freshness and openness? I certainly hope that it does.

    Like Adichie’s novel, Bandele’s film is pro-Biafra. But also like Adichie’s novel this film cannot be reduced to a pro-Biafra tract. As in Adichie’s wonderful novel in which only the most narrow and intractable anti-Biafra and anti-Igbo zealot will fail to respond to the evocation and probing of common, universal failures and strengths, Bandele’s film takes us beyond narrow and intractable divisions of ethnicity, religion and region to inner recesses of the heart and the mind that are common to all of us. If this film can take its audiences at home to these regions of the heart and the mind, perhaps, but only perhaps we might be able to seriously begin to engage the legacies of the civil war with fresh eyes and open minds.

    But then, first of all, Bandele’s film has to get past the invisible but impregnable obstacles set up by Nollywood. Oh, Patience Ozokwor and your countless Nollywood partners-in-cinema-yamayama, what great obstacles thou hath all unwittingly wrought in separating complexity from healthy laughter, depth from comic frivolity and nuance from mindless joviality!

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • How ASUU joined the NLC: a footnote to an underground and unwritten history

    How ASUU joined the NLC: a footnote to an underground and unwritten history

    When in 2007 Patrick F. Wilmot published his explosive book, Nigeria: the Nightmare Scenario, I was startled beyond all measure when I came across his bald and bold claim in the book that it was he, Wilmot, who was responsible for the historic merger of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) with the Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC). As a radical, Pan Africanist senior lecturer at Ahmadu Bello University (ABU) for many years, the Jamaican-born Wilmot who was married to a Nigerian had been a member of the ABU branch of ASUU. I was the National President of ASUU for part of the period when Dr. Wilmot was at ABU and we did meet a few times during my innumerable visits to Zaria. But even though he was known as one of the ‘campus radicals’ of ABU, in my perception of what was happening at the time, Wilmot was not particularly active in ASUU-ABU. Thus, I was startled when I read the claim in his 2007 book that he had been the man responsible for ASUU joining the NLC by suggesting the move to the late Mahmud Modibbo Tukur who had succeeded me as ASUU National President. Wilmot’s claim is completely false and I shall have more clarifications to make on it later in this piece when I write about Tukur’s reluctance or reservations about taking ASUU into the NLC.

    The matter of who was responsible for ASUU joining the NLC in 1983 or 1984 (I don’t have my notes and papers with me in Cambridge, Massachusetts to verify the exact date) came up again last year when my friend and fellow writer, Odia Ofeimun, in his moving and eloquent tribute to Festus Iyayi claimed that it was Iyayi who made the historic move when he was President of ASUU. This also is not true and I called Ofeimun both to congratulate him on the brilliance and eloquence of his eulogy to Iyayi and to correct his mistaken claim that Festus had been the man who took ASUU into the NLC. Ofeimun thanked me for the correction and said that he wished that I had seen the draft of his eulogy before it was delivered so that the error could have been averted.

    There was another case of inaccurate attribution of responsibility for the ASUU-NLC merger that was both far more complicated than these other cases of Wilmot and Ofeimun and throws considerable light on the whole matter and this had to do with Dr. Segun Osoba, formerly of the University of Ife, a great historian and a pillar of strength, courage and consistency in the radical movement at OAU Ife in particular and Nigerian universities in general. In a speech that he delivered to a national conference of ASUU after the death of Mahmud Tukur, Osoba asserted that Tukur himself had been the person who took ASUU into the NLC.

    When I read the speech I smiled ruefully at the unintended ironies in Dr. Osoba’s claim. This is because while Osoba was factually correct in stating that it was during the presidency of Tukur that ASUU joined the NLC, what he did not know, or perhaps what he had forgotten is that fact that Tukur was actually not keen on the move and it took a lot of persuasion for him to agree to the NLC-ASUU merger. Moreover, Tukur’s reluctance or lack of enthusiasm was based on solid theoretical and ideological grounds that are worth returning to, that are indeed the basis of my going back to the matter nearly three decades later. So to start with, what was the historic significance of the ASUU-NLC merger and what is its enduring legacy decades after Babangida took ASUU out of the NLC?

    At the present time when the ties and contacts between ASUU and NLC are so intimate and regular and a good umber of Nigerian university lecturers have a keen and supportive in interest in the NLC and the lot of workers, it is perhaps difficult to imagine the vast distance that existed between Nigerian workers and Nigerian academics in the 60s and 70s before ASUU joined the NLC. The distance was so great the only a few radical academics whose number could be counted in single digits had anything to do with the trade unions. Which is why academics like Ola Oni of Ibadan, Eskor Toyo of Calabar and Ikenna Nzimiro of Nsukka stood out among their colleagues as the friends of labour in our universities at the time. Indeed, they not only stood out, they were regarded on the campuses as oddities, “communists” who were deluded in their association with workers and the trade unions. I can add my own personal experience to this observation because when, as a young lecturer, I began to associate closely and regularly with trade unionists, many of my closest friends and associates in the community of radical writers and critics looked at my trade union comrades with suspicion if not indeed with disdain!

    On a much larger historical and global terrain, this was in fact something endemic to virtually all the capitalist societies of the world, this separation of workers from academics, a separation in effect of manual labour from intellectual labour. This fear had and still has a justifiable reality in the fact that an alliance of workers and intellectuals, of workers in the factories and workers in the elite institutions of education in any country in the world often shakes conservative and oppressive capitalist societies to their foundations. This was the larger historical, ideological and political background to the ASUU-NLC merger.

    Against the background of this larger historical and global context, the claim that any one person has sole responsibility for, or was the single moving force in the ASUU-NLC alliance is a fatuous and misleading claim. For my generation of so-called ‘campus radicals” we drew inspiration from and followed the examples of people like Ola Oni, Eskor Toyo and Nzimiro. Speaking for myself, long before I became ASUU President, I had been attending meetings of the NLC as an unofficial observer at the then headquarters of the organization at Ojuelegba in Lagos. And I was reporting my observations and experiences at these meetings to the radical groups to which I belonged at the time principally the Socialist Collective at Ife and the Anti-Poverty Movement of Nigeria (APMON) which had branches all over the country. And when I became ASUU President, with the permission and authority of the National Executive Council of the Union, I applied for and got official observer status at the meetings of the NLC and became quite familiar and intimate with leaders of the trade union movement in our country like “Labour Leader No 1” Pa Imoudou, Hassan Sumonu, S.O.Z. Ejiofor, M.J. Sule and Adams Oshiomhole, the current governor of Edo State who was then a middle-level leader in the trade union movement.

    Again, I must emphasize the fact that only with temporal hindsight can we see now as logical and inevitable what at the time was a very steep and arduous mountain to climb. As ASUU President, it had been relatively easy for me to get official observer status at NLC meetings because we did not have to take the matter to the entire Union and its branches for approval; all I had to do was get the approval of the National Executive Council and this wasn’t difficult. All along, the ultimate objective was that we had to take the whole Union, ASUU, into the NLC. By “we” here I am referring to radicals and progressives at many of the branches of ASUU across the country. “We” were influential but small in numbers; moreover, the majority of the membership of ASUU always watched our moves and tactics with keen, vigilant interest if not with suspicion.

    When Mahmud succeeded me as ASUU President “we” decided that the time had come to make the move. This was because Mahmud was not as strongly “suspected” as a “friend of labour” by the generality of ASUU members as I was. Moreover, it was well known that he was not particularly close to the trade union movement. For this reason, as the Immediate Past President (IPP) with a lot of clout in the Union, I was delegated by the radical left in all the ASUU branches to “work” on Mahmud to make him go along with the objective of taking the whole Union, ASUU into the NLC.

    At this point, I must now take up my earlier observation in this piece that Mahmud had important theoretical and ideological reservations about taking our Union into the NLC. The contents of his reservations and objections can be briefly summarized. First, Mahmud thought that both in practice and ideology, the leadership of the labour movement in Nigeria was radical and progressive in name only; he thought their bark was much bigger than their bite. Secondly, he thought that at key moments in the history of the labour movement in Nigeria, this leadership of the trade union movement had sold out to employers and the government. Finally and most important of all, Mahmud thought that while in his opinion, farmers and rural communities were the most potentially revolutionary force in Nigeria because they were far more extensively and cynically exploited than workers, labor leaders in Nigeria had never sought and pursued an alliance with farmers and rural communities.

    As indicated in the title of this piece, this essay is merely a footnote to an unwritten history. The whole history will be written some day, hopefully sooner than later in the near future. What remains for me to say in concluding this piece is to report that in my theoretical discussions on the matter with Mahmud, I succeeded in making him pay attention to things that were going on in underground currents among workers, farmers and intellectuals in the country, things indicating that the distances between these groups were narrowing and were being transcended. It was on the strength of this that he agreed to go along with the objective of taking ASUU into the NLC. But even then, he refused to personally represent ASUU in the Central Working Committee (CWC) of the NLC as he should have as the incumbent president of our Union. Rather than take his place in the CWC of the NLC, he delegated that task to me as ASUU’s IPP and for close to three years I attended every meeting of that highest organ of the NLC as ASUU representative.

    ASUU was eventually kicked out of the NLC by Babangida but the links had been irrevocably forged such that the formal, autocratic attempt of the dictator to effectively sunder the links failed woefully. Without being a formal affiliate of the NLC, ASUU remains closely connected with the national labour body. The most important expression of the legacy of that historic alliance is the fact that today and well into the future that lies ahead of us, workers and academics in our country no longer see their destinies as separate and unrelated as they once did in the long years and decades before ASUU went into the NLC. A Luta Continua!

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • The national conference: things it will talk about and things it will not talk about (3)

    The national conference: things it will talk about and things it will not talk about (3)

    May Allah provide for you so that you can provide for us!
    The ultimate supplication of the almajaris and talakawa of the North to the rich and the powerful. Its origins date back to the precolonial, precapitalist, feudal epoch.

    In this concluding piece in the series that began in this column two weeks ago, perhaps it is best to start the discussion by quoting directly from the concluding sentence of last week’s essay: “At the end of JNC, whether we will have a looser or stronger federation is only one part of the epic drama of the times we are living through now. The more important thing is the fact that our peoples will always have to live together. If we are to live together in peace, justice and equality, what unites our peoples beyond their imagined and real differences must take precedence over what the political elites broker as appeasements to their greed, their megalomania and their bankruptcy.”

    Please make no mistake about it, compatriots, what will emerge from the JNC will, in one form another, be appeasements to the demands of each formation of the power blocs of the ruling elites of the country. Whether what emerges is a stronger or a looser federation, the fundamental thing is that some factions of our elites will feel more satisfied and others will feel considerably dissatisfied and aggrieved. If a reasonably high proportion of our elites feel satisfied, then the status quo of looting and squandermania would have bought some more time for itself. I personally think that this is highly unlikely, but I may be wrong. What is more likely is that a much larger proportion of our political and economic elites will walk away from JNC highly dissatisfied and disgruntled. Why is this the more likely scenario that we will get at the conclusion of the deliberations at JNC? The reason for this is simple in outline but considerably complicated in its substance: we have reached the limit of how much social peace and cohesion can be “bought” by the sharing of power and wealth exclusively amongst the elites, with the concomitant massive exclusion of the vast majority of Nigerians from all parts of the country. That’s it: we have reached the limit; we in fact reached the limit a long time ago of the quotient of tolerable cohesion and social peace that can be bought and prolonged on the basis of the economic and political marginalization of the overwhelming majority of Nigerians through the exclusive sharing of power and wealth among our elites. If that is the profile in its simple outlines, what is the nature of the more complicated substantive dimensions of this conjunctural crisis in which looting, squandermania and patronage peddling can no longer either secure cohesion among our elites or “Pax Nigeriana” in the country as a whole? Allow me to carefully elaborate what this entails.

    As I remarked in last week’s column, long before the peoples and cultures of our country were “amalgamated” by colonial administrative diktat into one country, our peoples had made deep and wide cultural, linguistic and economic exchanges amongst themselves. Incidentally, they had also made wars of conquest and domination against one another. But even through those wars, the exchanges sustaining life and civilized existence continued. From this, I repeat one of the central observations that I made last week: whether at the end of the JNC confab we have a stronger or looser federation, whether or not the crisis of power and wealth sharing among our elites is resolved, our peoples, our societies will always live together in this national and regional patch of the planet as they have done for more than millennium. However, local, regional and global capitalism has massively impacted upon the age-old patterns of economic and cultural exchanges between our peoples. In particular patronage peddling by the elites to the poor and the marginalized as a means of maintaining social cohesion and inter-group peace can no longer work in the epoch of modern regional and global capitalism.

    I do not wish to mince my words on this particular point. Those who among our progressive and radical comrades who denounce the present looting frenzy and wanton squandermania of our political elites as a form of capitalism are not exactly accurate in their denunciation. The kind of looting with utter shamelessness and impunity that characterizes the political economy of our country at the present time is “capitalist” in name only. Capitalism is justly famous and even celebrated by its defenders for creating wealth in vast proportions. Its fundamental flaw is the vastly unequal and exploitative nature of the distribution of wealth generated. Capitalism that squanders wealth and that is fundamentally based not on the generation of more wealth from oil revenues but the sharing and dissipation of the oil revenues as loot is no capitalism. To give a particularly apt illustration of the crucial point I am making here, permit me to briefly explore the profoundly non-capitalistic nature of the use of patronage peddling as the primary means of “sharing” their non-productive, looted wealth with the masses of ordinary Nigerians by our elites. In doing this, I wish to invoke the system and practice of the so-called “trickle down economics” that is the hallmark of the bastions of capitalism at its most conservative and recalcitrant in the sharing of wealth with the majority of workers and the poor in even the richest capitalist countries in the world.

    Trickle down economics is fairly easy to understand, even if admittedly it is extremely difficult to combat. Basically it means through extremely low rates of taxation, through loopholes that favour the rich in the regulation of how wealth is produced and shared, an extremely small minority of the very rich keep the lion’s share of the total wealth produced in a nation’s economy, but making sure that they do not consume the whole of the social surplus, that some fraction does “trickle down” to the majority of the populace. In some cases, 5 to 10% of the population keeps 80 to 85% of the social surplus, of the total wealth produced. At the height of the “Occupy Wall Street” movement, the activists and spokespersons of the movement symbolically chose 99% of the population of the United States as the fraction to which 1% of the social surplus “trickles down to”.

    On the surface, the manner in which our economic and political elites keep the lion’s share of our oil wealth while doling out mere pittance to the majority of Nigerians everywhere in the country seems to be another example, another form of “trickle down economics”. The President, the Executive Governors, the Ministers and Commissioners, the Senators and Honourables, the Chairmen and Chairwomen of the local government authorities, they all take their respective jumbo shares of our oil wealth, but pass some of it, a little portion of it, to their constituents, their “people”. The wealth has trickled down, hasn’t it? We are practicing our own brand of trickle down economics, aren’t we?

    No, we are not! For the simple but crushing truth is that in our context, all the wealth, all the oil revenues, are consumed, the small, infinitesimal proportion that goes to the masses of ordinary Nigerians as well as the lion’s share that our elites keep for themselves. Looted, squandered wealth is not real, productive wealth, whether in its bloated incarnation among our elites or in its ridiculously and insultingly small handouts to the masses. In truly capitalist economies and nations where real trickle down economics is practiced, factories don’t close down in their hundreds of thousands because the wealth has been consumed; millions of young school leavers and graduates don’t face mass unemployment and a bleak future because oil wealth is mostly looted and squandered and not put to the production of more wealth, more productive economic activities. No, we are not practicing trickle down economics; what we are practicing is “evaporation economics”: the crude oil turns to oil wealth; and the oil wealth evaporates and vanishes.

    “May Allah provide for you so that you can provide for us”. So goes the epigraph to this piece. We must not judge this supplication that degrades both the giver and the receiver in the light the values and processes of modern capitalism. In pre-capitalist and feudal societies, obligations of the rich to the poor did not generate new wealth but neither did they evaporate the wealth that was produced. But in the age of global capitalism, to continue to distribute the wealth of the country along the lines of this feudal supplication of the poor to the rich is to condemn our country to a long, endless form of “capitalism” that will never generate wealth but only “evaporate” it.

    For those who might think that I am ending this series on a note of an apologia for capitalism, let me reply strongly by saying that that is not the case. Capitalism is not the end of the story in the unfolding of history in our country and our world. And there are various forms of capitalism. The ones that I find the most admirable and the most humane are the social democratic societies and economies of the truly capitalist world. There does not seem to be the ghost of a chance that deliberations at JNC will free us from “evaporation economics” and deliver us to a capitalism that we can begin to work on. So this seems like crying in the wilderness. Sometimes, in a single human life or in the lives of entire communities out of wilderness come new possibilities. More importantly, the true wilderness in our country at the present tine is in JNC and what it represents. If much of what I have written in this series is correct, JNC will fade quickly into the oblivion of history. And we shall continue the search for a country in which all our peoples, all those that constitute the vast majority of the excluded and marginalized will find restitution under a different order of organization of life and its possibilities that does not rest on “evaporation economics.”

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • The national conference: things it will talk about and things it will not talk about (2)

    The national conference: things it will talk about and things it will not talk about (2)

    I concluded last week’s originating piece in this series with the claim that the topic of power and wealth sharing amongst our political elites and between our elites and the masses of Nigerians throughout the country will be the biggest thing that the Jonathan National Conference (JNC) will not talk about. I said, I asserted that JNC will be entirely, perhaps even exclusively dominated by deliberations on power and income sharing among our elites. Of course, I should have added that at the JNC confab, they will not call it power and money sharing amongst the wealthy and the powerful of all ethnic groups and geopolitical zones in the country. No, they will give it other names, other designations. They will call it “fiscal, political and administrative federalism”. They will call it power sharing between the North and the South, between major ethnic groups and minorities. They will call it “rotational presidency”. They will even call it replacement of the 1999 Constitution with a new, more truly “federal” Constitution. But compatriots, don’t be fooled by these fine-sounding appellations: the bottom line, the overriding subject of deliberations at JNC will be how to share power and wealth amongst our elites, to the unanimous and almost complete exclusion of the sharing of power and wealth between our elites and the vast majority of Nigerians from every part of the country.

    My suggestion, my claim in this series is that since they will not talk about this all-important subject at JNC, all truly democratic, patriotic, progressive and fair-minded Nigerians must talk about nothing else during the duration of JNC and even after it has ended. This is not only because it is too important a subject to exclude from conferences and deliberations on the future of our country, but also because in virtually all forms of representative democracy throughout the world, equitable and “civilized” power sharing and wealth and income distribution between elites and the rest of society is the cornerstone, the foundation of good governance, social and economic justice, peace and sustainable development. This means that we cannot talk of one and exclude the other; we must talk simultaneously and substantially about both, power and wealth sharing amongst the elites and between the elites and the rest of society that actually constitutes the demographic and human majority of the country’s citizenry.

    In making this observation or claim so assertively, I have in mind the fact that many progressives, democrats and radical activists are of the view that all fair-minded and patriotic individuals and organizations in our country should completely ignore JNC and have nothing to do with it. I am not unsympathetic to the reasoning behind this stance, this being the largely indisputable fact that Nigerian elites and Nigerian ruling class parties and politicians are, with few exceptions, completely indifferent to the economic and social conditions of deprivation, immiseration and suffering of the majority of Nigerians in every part of the country. But while I readily acknowledge this fact, nonetheless I think it would be a mistake to completely ignore or be indifferent to the deliberations at/of JNC. We must take issue with any and all deliberations on power and wealth sharing among the elites, the purpose being, unambiguously, to show its lack of connection with power and wealth sharing with the vast majority of Nigerians. Let me explain what I mean by this carefully.

    Power sharing and wealth and income distribution among our elites is a subject that massively dominates political discourses in our country, even and especially among the masses of Nigerians who are themselves substantially excluded from the sharing of wealth and power. Which person reading this piece is unaware of the fact that Nigerians of all walks of life, elite and non-elite alike, are obsessed with the sharing of power and high political offices between the North and the South, between “Christians” and “Moslems” and between major ethnic groups and minorities? Who is not aware of the largely unwritten but nonetheless ironclad, nation-wrecking post-civil war “agreement” between politicians of almost all the other ethnic groups that the time is not yet ripe to have an Igbo as the President of Nigeria? Which person reading this piece is not aware of and perhaps not disturbed by the fact that across the length and breadth of the country, hundreds of thousands of ordinary Nigerians, perhaps even millions, are ready to respond to the calls, the mobilization of professional politicians of their ethnic group and religious affiliation to come out and protect the interests of their ethnic group or religious community in the sharing of the country’s wealth and political power? Aren’t we all fearful, perhaps even terrified of what looms ahead of us in the forthcoming elections of 2015 precisely because many politicians have been threatening Armageddon if power does not come to their part of the country? And who is not aware of the fact that outside Nigeria in the wider world, most commentators and analysts see the sharing of political power in our country precisely along these same lines of deep cleavages based on ethnicity, regionalism and religious fanaticism? Indeed, don’t we all know that when the American government, through its State Department or the CIA, makes its periodic prediction on the looming breakup of Nigeria, it bases itself on “tribe”, “region” and “religion” as the ineffable political fault lines?

    But as the late Chinua Achebe, basing himself on an Igbo proverb, used to say, “where one thing stands, another thing will stand beside it”. For side by side with the tendency of the masses of Nigerians to let themselves be mobilized and manipulated along the lines of “tribe”, region and religion, Nigerians also know, they know in their millions that apart from ethnicity, region and religion, they are divided by power and wealth. They know, in every part of the country, that while a few hundreds or thousands have power and wealth, the populace in its millions lack power and wealth, lack the basic necessities of a dignified existence. Nigerians know also in their tens of millions that they are united by the operations of market forces; they know that if the paths of trade and commerce between the different parts of the country are impeded or blocked, people will suffer all over the country. For this numberless masses of Nigerians, it is not the 1914 amalgamation of the North and the South that united Nigeria since most of them have never heard of Lord Lugard; rather, what effectively unites Nigerians is the concrete fact that we trade and do business across the different parts of the country and moreover, have a dominance in economic and commercial relations over the whole of the West Africa region. Finally, the Nigerian masses in all parts of the country have a deep distrust, a deep hatred of the looting frenzy and incurable squandermania of our political rulers and public officeholders.

    Like the CIA and the State Department of the American government, the Jonathan National Conference is only driven by considerations of the things that cause quarrels and disunity among our political elites. In this, they are bolstered by the fact that, as I have remarked earlier in this discussion, they are often able to mobilize and manipulate the passions of the Nigerian masses around ethnicity, region and religion. But if the CIA and the State Department cannot see that Nigerians in their millions are also acutely aware of the things that unite them, things like the forces of the market and their deep anger and resentment of the looting frenzy and squandermania of the political elites, why cannot the JNC see these things? Why are the handpicked delegates to JNC so sure that this time around, as in previous cases, they can exclude from their deliberations these things that unite the masses of ordinary Nigerians in their powerlessness and their faith in the forces of the marketplace? These issues will be the composite starting point in next week’s concluding piece in the series. In concluding this particular essay, let me give a short preview of what I shall be discussing more substantively in next week’s piece.

    Nigerians in all their ethnic, linguistic and cultural diversity lived together, traded together and made cultural exchanges together long before British imperial and colonial amalgamation of the North and South administratively “united” the country. [We must not forget that they also made war against one another]. Moreover, Nigerians have been active along trade routes across the whole of West Africa for at least a millennium before modern relations of regional and global capitalism became the dominant framework of national, regional and continental affairs. At the end of JNC, whether we will have a looser or stronger federation is only one part of the epic drama of the times we are living through now. The more important thing is the fact that our peoples will always have to live together. If we are to live together in peace, justice and equality, what unites our peoples beyond their imagined and real differences must take precedence over what the political elites broker as appeasements to their greed, their megalomania and their bankruptcy.

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • The national conference: things it will talk about and things it will not talk about (1)

    The national conference: things it will talk about and things it will not talk about (1)

    Over the last two decades, the calls had been for a Sovereign National Conference (SNC). What has finally emerged is the Jonathan National Conference (JNC). Praise be! Since the JNC is not and can never be the SNC, please don’t bring the expectations of one to the other, the expectations of the SNC to those of the JNC. To clarify what this means, I have outline below the things that the JNC will talk about and the things that it will not talk about.

    Money sharing (or “fiscal federalism” and the principles of resource control and derivation): JNC will talk a lot about how oil wealth should be shared between the three tiers of government – the federal government; the state governments; and the local councils. There will be a lot of quarrelling, a lot of squabbling concerning what proportion of oil revenues should go to each of these three tiers. The oil producing states will argue passionately for an increase above the current 13%; the so-called “core” North will vigorously oppose that demand and will insist that population should be the main criterion of the share that goes to each state and each geopolitical zone of the country; the Southwest and the Southeast will in principle support the criteria of derivation and resource control, but it will be a weak, dithering support. Altogether, there will a significant pressure by most states and geopolitical zones for reduction in the share kept by the center, by the federal government.

    Money sharing as an issue of great importance at JNC will be completely silent on the paltry and insignificant share of our oil wealth that goes to workers, farmers, the poor, the unemployed, old age pensioners and the millions of jobless youths. This is the fundamental cause of economic insecurity and backwardness in our country, but JNC will not talk about it. It will not talk about it for several reasons. First, the great majority of the handpicked delegates to JNC have never shown the slightest awareness of the fact that the poverty and economic insecurity of the overwhelming majority of Nigerians is a problem, a problem of crisis proportions. Secondly, JNC will not talk about it because the delegates are perfectly satisfied with how our oil wealth is currently being shared, that is primarily among the elites with a trickling down of a mere pittance to the masses through patronage. Thirdly and finally, the majority of the handpicked delegates to JNC are so fixated on ethnic nationality and geopolitical zones as the basis of money and power sharing in our country that where they should see concrete, living and suffering human individuals and groups, they see the “tribe”, the geopolitical zone and the religious community as the only valid criteria and agents of negotiation.

    Power sharing (or “political and administrative federalism”): This will almost certainly be the most dominant issue of deliberations at JNC. The effective line of division will be between those who want the present order of a centre that is much stronger than the federating states and zones to continue and those who want considerable devolution of power and responsibilities to the federating units. At the core of this division between what we might designate the “unitarists” and the “federalists” is the presidency itself and the presidential system as compared with the parliamentary system. Jonathan has picked delegates to his JNC with an incontrovertible numerical advantage to the “unitarists” but at the end of the deliberations, concessions will be made to the “federalists”. At any rate, compatriots, expect to hear and read much about a “rotational presidency” at JNC.

    But don’t expect that deliberations on power sharing as a subject at JNC will extend to true and genuine empowerment of the masses of Nigerians. Don’t expect to hear passionate and genuine respect for the rights of free association, of assembly, of rallies and demonstrations to be expressed at JNC. Don’t expect calls for building an active, mobilized and civic-minded populace as an inestimable expression of true democracy at JNC. Least of all should you expect that popular sovereignty, as contrasted with the “sovereign” power and authority of the President and the Executive State Governors, will be articulated at JNC. In the last four decades in our country, both the idea and the practices of popular sovereignty have been massively eroded, first by the run of military autocrats and then by their civilian legatees since 1999. Without exception, all the incumbents of Aso Rock Villa since 1999 have greatly feared any mass gatherings of Nigerians in their hundreds of thousands if and when such gatherings are not for religious revivals or in support of the government or a ruling class party. Without exception, when politicians and ruling class political parties in our country think of and talk about power sharing, they mean, quite unequivocally, power sharing only amongst themselves!

    Will the terribly backward and ever regressing state of education, science and technology in our country be an important topic of deliberations at JNC? Don’t expect it, compatriots! On a per capita basis, Nigeria is one of the most irresponsible, even most delinquent countries in the world when it comes to public spending, public investment in education. If one makes an exception for a few state governors, spending and investment on physical and institutional infrastructures for education, science and technology in our country are abysmally inadequate. In a modern state – any modern state – this is like deliberately committing cultural and economic suicide. There ought to be an inviolable constitutional provision for this, that per capita spending and investment in education, science and technology that is consistent with UNESCO guidelines for developing countries should be enshrined in our Constitution.

    But don’t expect that this will be an important topic of deliberations at JNC. Why not? Well, have any of our rulers, any of our governing elites, shown the slightest concern, not to talk of panic, about the terribly inferior performance rates of secondary school leavers at NECO exams? Have they shown the slightest concern over the fact that Nigerian universities don’t rank high either in Africa itself or in the world at large? Do they have any inkling as to why our university lecturers and professors have not given up but continue to mount protests against this indifference, this neglect – against all the calculated attempts to demonize them and delegitimize their rights of protest and strikes?

    Let there be no doubt about JNC and what it portends. About slightly less than a year ago, Nigeria officially overtook South Africa as the country with the largest economy in Africa. Many economist and technocrats, either of the establishment itself or with an establishmentarian mind, rejoiced mightily over this “achievement”. But deep down and below the surfaces of growth without development, this “achievement” means little or nothing, either for the masses of ordinary Nigerians or for the Nigerian economy itself. For in the main, Nigeria continues to lag far behind South Africa and indeed most countries in Africa in per capita income. Nigerians living below the absolute poverty line still constitute the overwhelming majority of the populace, both in the urban centers and in the rural communities. The percentage of installed capacity for industrial production that is working is still very low as the aggregate cost of production, the aggregate cost of doing business in our country continue to be very high. Against the background of this array indices of growth without development, of the largest economy in the African continent that is also the most skewed and lopsided in its operations, our rulers and ruling class parties are extraordinary in their complacency, their mediocrity, their indifference to the plight of the great majority of Nigerians. JNC, in terms of the relationship between the things it will talk about and the things it will not and cannot talk about, JNC is the expression of this defining complacency of our political elites.

    I do not in the least with to imply that the things JNC will talk about and those things it will not and cannot talk about are unconnected. For instance, power and/or wealth sharing among the elites and between the elites and the generality of Nigerians should be the concern of all true democrats and progressives. Indeed, I contend that we cannot or should not talk of one without talking simultaneously of the other. This observation has concrete, practical implications. Let me briefly spell out some of these implications in a provisional non-concluding end to this essay that will be more fully elaborated in next week’s continuation of the series. In the first place, democrats, progressives and radicals picked by Jonathan for his “national conference” should go there only or precisely to raise issues that JNC will not talk about. It is also okay for some of such progressive and democratic citizens who do not wish to join the JNC confab to decline the invitation, but to do so not in order to retreat into either silence or a jeremiad against the things that JNC will talk about. The great task before us is to show how power and money sharing among the elites connects to power and money sharing between the elites and the vast majority of our peoples. This will be the starting point in next week’s continuation of the series.

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • The mode of surplus extraction changed and corruption became the glue that holds things together: notes for young compatriots (3)

    The mode of surplus extraction changed and corruption became the glue that holds things together: notes for young compatriots (3)

    So distribution should undo excess/And each man have enough. William Shakespeare, King Lear

    In bringing this series to a conclusion, let me openly and readily acknowledge that so far, I have hardly written about the better known and more widely discussed acts and expressions of corruption in Nigeria of which there are uncountable and spectacular cases. In place of such cases, I have focused on actions and policies most of which are perfectly legal; indeed, most of them possess tremendous institutional authority. The two examples with which I ended last week’s piece in the series come to mind here. These are state creation and the rapid creation of federal and state universities by the dozens within the space of slightly over two decades. I do not doubt that to some of my readers, my using these as examples of corruption as atrocious means of wealth redistribution among our elites might very well constitute a great provocation. To such readers, I have a simple observation or proposition to make: the day that any state government in our country drastically cuts down the number and size of the cabinet and the state bureaucracy, I will eat my words; the day that any of our political parties makes it a fundamental part of its electoral platform and administrative policies that capital expenditure will be three to five times the size of recurrent expenditure, I will swallow my words. Don’t let us kid ourselves: ilabe and miliki constitute the composite ethos through which state creation and the creation of public funded universities in the last three decades were made commanding phenomena of institutionally legal but endlessly corrupt income redistribution of oil wealth among our elites.

    For the umpteenth time in this series, let me repeat that I address myself primarily to young compatriots, those who do not know that at one stage of our political and administrative maladjusted development in this country, with both the federal government and the regional incumbencies, capital expenditure did in fact far outstrip recurrent expenditure. Up to the time of the outbreak of the Nigeria-Biafra civil war, every single government in the country spent far more on capital expenditure for growth and development than on recurrent expenditures for payment of salaries and bonuses for public officeholders and the upkeep and maintenance of elaborate bureaucracies. As I have said repeatedly in this series, I am not advocating a nostalgic return to that past, even if that were possible – which it is not. Nigerian politicians and rulers were not angels or saints then; there simply was a limit to how much they could loot and waste because the social surplus came primarily from taxes and the appropriation of the labour of farmers and workers. My main point in referencing that past is to let those of our compatriots to whom the future belongs know that things have not always been the way they are now and that things are the way they are now largely because our elites do not have to directly oppress workers and farmers for oil wealth and this has erroneously wiped their consciousness clean of the need for responsible and sustainable governance. Thus, the central challenge that we face is how to compel our elites to realize, perhaps through a baptism of fire, that even if the social surplus they are looting and wasting do not come primarily or predominantly from the labour of farmers and workers, that wealth belongs to all of us and must be used to the benefit of all Nigerians of the present, living generations and those that will come long after we are gone.

    If the reason why I have in this series not focused on those other better known and more widely discussed practices of corruption in Nigeria is not yet clear or apparent to the reader, let me now make it more explicit. In the first place, corruption among our political and economic elites is so pervaded by impunity that you do not have to look far to find it in brazen and spectacular forms. Where else in the world but in Nigeria would the two leading political officeholders in the land – the President and the Vice President – engage in a bitter feud before the entire nation in which they exposed their wanton and gargantuan acts of looting of public funds, as Obasanjo and Atiku did in 2006? Where else but in our dear country would the staggering sum of 2.58 trillion naira be stolen by people who do not go into hiding but are actually seen in the inner circles of the favoured of the President of the Republic himself, as happened in the so-called oil subsidy mega-scam of 2011? And among the populace, the masses of the dispossessed themselves, where else in the world but in our country do we regularly see mirror reflections of elite corruption, looting and brigandage of public funds as we find almost as a universal phenomenon in the buying and selling of goods and services that are severely adulterated, often with dire consequences for the safety and health of the people themselves? What of the very widespread incidence of exam malpractices and fraud in our schools, and of the organized trafficking in certificates that are not worth their weight in paper? What of community leaders and prominent burghers throughout the length and breadth of the land who, on behalf of their communities, demand their share of the whopping jumbo salaries and allowances that are lawmakers pay themselves? Is that not in fact what our parliamentarians use to justify the unconscionably vast sums of money they are corruptly paid?

    I do not by any means wish to suggest that we should take these many practices and expressions of corruption among the elites and the masses for granted. Definitely, I wish to join my voice to the voices of our anti-corruption crusaders, those who argue, compellingly, that corruption should never go unpunished in our country, that indeed, the more it goes unpunished, the more brazen and uncontrollable it gets. The main point, the central idea of this series is the proposition that corruption has become the means of redistribution of oil wealth in Nigeria in the last three decades. That is the root of the problem of corruption in our country: a poisonous, life-destroying root whose toxins have spread through the main trunks of the tree of our national collective existence to the branches and the flowering shoots in all the nooks and crannies of the land. Pushing the deployment of these botanical metaphors further, I would argue that what we need is a transplantation that cures that root of its toxins and transplants the tree of national collective existence on new soil.

    We must completely destroy the underlying idea behind this noxious, toxic root of corruption as the means of redistribution of wealth in our country. This idea has it that because oil wealth does not come primarily from the extraction of surplus value from the labour of farmers and workers, our elites are free to do anything they like with the oil wealth as long as some of it percolates to the rest of the society outside the circles of the elite. Wealth, oil wealth included, becomes true wealth only when it is put to work to produce more wealth, more value. This proposition can be put in very concrete terms. For instance, it can and perhaps should become the law of the land that every Nigerian is entitled to earned income from bankable shares floated by investing fixed percentages of savings from our oil revenues in high-yield local and foreign ventures. This would give that hackneyed phrase, “stakeholder” real meaning: every Nigerian actually gets dividends from stock options bought from our oil revenues. This is the classical capitalist solution to wealth that comes to nations in the form of jackpots or lotteries that seem to come from providential grace: unsuspected and unlimited deposits of mineral resources precipitately discovered; extractive industries springing up in the heart of barren deserts; offshore oilfields with reserves to last several generations. This is in fact the “solution” of some of the Gulf oil producing states: make every single citizen a beneficiary of national stocks held in trust for the whole country both in its present incarnation and its posterity.

    But Nigeria has a population far larger than all the Gulf oil producing states combined and that solution may be impracticable in our own case. And so my own preferred solution is that at the earliest possible date, we must do three separate, distinct but nevertheless closely connected things, if possible in a coordinated fashion. First, we must completely dismantle the huge, monstrously bloated federal and state bureaucracies; they are not only filled with redundancies, they also greatly contribute to the prevailing ethos in which work has been devalued and value itself has been massively distorted. Secondly, by law and by constitutional provisions, we must reverse the ratio of capital expenditure to recurrent expenditure; capital expenditure must be at least ten times bigger than recurrent expenditure. This seems unthinkable now only because no ruling class politician and no political party in the country has the slightest inclination to carry out this sort of radical restructuring of our priorities. But if the Nigerian peoples can be educated and mobilized in support of it, within half a decade, we would have gotten our priorities right. Thirdly and finally, we must make the looting and squandering of our national coffers above 10 million naira a capital offence. For petty larcenies and frauds involving theft of public funds less than 10 million, long prison terms are appropriate forms of punishment; any sums above 10 million naira should fetch capital punishment.

    As I am philosophically against capital punishment, I find myself in the strange and terribly discomfiting situation of being an advocate for it. I confess that this is a great dilemma for me. In mitigation of my discomfiture, I state that this particular application of capital punishment would be temporary and provisional; and hopefully, within the space of one decade, it would become a rare thing. This is because if and when it is put into practice in our judicial process, it will very rapidly wipe out this terrible and unending plunder of our national coffers that is like a nightmare from which we will never wake. When I think of corruption as the glue that holds everything together in contemporary Nigeria and as the savage and atrocious means of redistribution of our oil revenues, two grotesque images come to my mind. One: an unflushed toilet bowl already filled to overflowing on top of which defecations and excrements continue to be piled unceasingly. Two: a massive traffic crawl in downtown Lagos that has come to a complete stop while a torrential rainfall of epic proportions becomes a deluge carrying the thousands of cars caught in the traffic jam and their occupants into God knows where. Let the nightmare end, especially for the sake of those that will come after us.

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu