By Biodun Jeyifo

Who is Jonathan Isaac? He is a professional basketball player who plays the Forward position for Orlando Magic, one of the leading basketball teams in the United States. On July 31, 2020, Isaac startled the crowd when, at a game between his team and the Brooklyn Nets, he broke with all the players who were kneeling when, alone, he stood when the Star Spangled Banner, the American National Anthem, was being played. But then, two days later, at a game between his team and the Sacramento Kings, Isaac suffered a terrible injury in, of all the body parts possible, the knee! Twitter and other social media platforms exploded with posts which, for the most part, celebrated Isaac’s miserable luck. Some posts from Africans living in the US declared that the gods of Africa were not asleep. From African Americans came posts declaring that “Uncle Toms” always pay for their betrayal of the race. It must be reported that the overwhelming majority of professional basketball players were more generous and merciful – for that moment, they set aside their bitter disappointment in Isaac’s break with the taking the knee act, wished him well and prayed for his full recovery.

And Wilfried Zaha, who is he? He is a gifted Ivorian striker who plays for the English Premier League club, Crystal Palace. Four weeks ago on Saturday, March 13, 2021, in a game between his team and West Bromwich Albion, Zaha surprised everybody when, like Jonathan Isaac, he stood while all other players and officials on the field knelt in compliance with the pregame anti-racist ritual. Before the game, he had announced his intention not to kneel while others did so. But still, Zaha’s act of protest against a ritual that was itself a protest surprised everybody. There is one little point of difference between Isaac and Zaha in their respective acts that needs to be pointed out and it is this: in the US, Black players constitute an overwhelming majority over White players while in the Premier League, although Black players are a sizeable group, White and other Non-White players are more numerous than Black players. In effect, Zaha did not seem to be as starkly separated from other Black players as Isaac did when, last year, he emerged as the first Black athlete to show by his refusal that he was done with taking the knee.

I am assuming that everyone reading this article is familiar with how and why “taking the knee” is so well-known all over the world that I do not need to give a long introductory explanation about what it is before getting into what I have to say in this piece. Nevertheless, here’s a quick recap to ease us into the discussion. 2016: Colin Kaepernick, a Quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, kneels in protest against police brutality and racial inequality; he kneels alone in a preseason game with another team while all others on the field, players, officials and the huge crowd, stand for the playing of the national anthem. Kaepernick kneels alone for a long time until, gradually, other Black players begin to kneel with him. The act begins to be widely known as “taking the knee” when many, many other players join Kaepernick, especially when former president Donald Trump begins to violently attack Kaepernick and all knee takers as unpatriotic Americans. Finally, in May 2020, taking the knee becomes more than a symbol when Gorge Floyd was killed in Minneapolis by a policeman who placed his right knee on Floyd’s neck and choked him to death while standers bye pleaded for Floyd’s life. At that point, taking the knee becomes a major part, indeed the physical, bodily insignia of the Black Lives Matter movement. And it is at that conjunctural moment that the English Premier League, and many other national soccer leagues in the world, begin to “take the knee” before matches. Thus, as a perhaps the supreme expression of radical, progressive links between professional sports and politics, taking the knee has become perhaps the most iconic cultural phenomenon of our time. It is against this background that Jonathan Isaac and Wilfried Zaha should be judged in their decision to stop taking the knee.

Before going into the wider political and social ramifications of the decision of Isaac and Zaha about taking or not taking the knee, I want, first, to briefly discuss what the two players are saying in defense of their decision. Isaac has been more simple and uncomplicated in his self-justification, even though in the end, his explanation leaves more questions unanswered than Zaha’s. Briefly, here’s what Isaac has said: All lives matter. And since apart from being a professional basketball player he is also a preacher, Isaac adds that in the eyes of God, all lives matter. Because he does not wear a Black Lives Matter T-shirt or display any graphics or inscriptions connected with the BLM on his jersey as most Black players do, Isaac has been asked whether or not he believes that Back lives matter. To this question his answer is, yes of course, Black lives do matter. And then he repeats: All lives matter.

Read Also: At last, Buhari is all in for privatization and full deregulation – why Atiku is jubilating

Zaha is more complicated, more defensive, more truculent in his self-justification. In essence this is what his rambling and barely coherent explanation amounts to: I alone, Wilfried Zaha, will decide for myself how to fight racism; in spite of taking the knee, some of us are still experiencing racism; I told my club of my decision before I acted on it, I did not want it to be a surprise to them; I alone, Wilfried Zaha, will decide for myself how best I will fight racism. Since, so far he has given no indication of how he is going to fight racism by himself, many posts on Twitter handles have praised Zaha for refusing to continue with what many of the posts have called “group think”. Although Zaha himself has not used that term, I don’t think it is unfair to ascribe this to him since his explanation places so much weight on thinking and deciding by and for himself what he will be doing to continue the fight against racism.

Zaha and Isaac are of course multimillionaires and historically, this social context has been a crucial factor, positively and negatively, in how sports has been used to fight racism. In the positive cases, radical and progressive anti-racist professional athletes have had to make enormous sacrifices in order to achieve the greatest impact possible. I am thinking here of Mohammed Ali in his refusal to be drafted into the US Army to go and fight in Vietnam. And there is the case of the Black Power salute of Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the Mexico City Olympics of 1968. In these two cases, all the athletes were well aware that their acts would cost them dearly and yet they were willing to make the sacrifices. In the same vein, star athletes have used the specter of huge financial losses to the owners and proprietors of football (American) and soccer clubs to win support from them for their action against racism. The negative possibilities come when the humungous financial world of professional sports makes star athletes with enormous wealth work, at best ambiguously and at worst deliberately and opportunistically, to give comfort to racist and supremacist forces in society. I suggest that in the two cases of Isaac and Zaha, we see, respectively, the opportunistic and the ambiguous cases. Let’s examine each of these two cases with regards to explanations that Isaac and Zaha have given us, but on the condition that we must respect their right to make whatever decision about taking the knee they like.

All lives matter, Isaac’s explanation for his action, was already widely in use by conservative White groups pushing back against the Black Lives Matter Movement’s slogan of “Black lives matter”. Was Isaac unaware of this fact? Absolutely impossible. He would have had to have been away from America since the year 2013 when Black Lives Matter was founded. Not only did the counter-slogan, “All lives matter” appear almost immediately after the appearance of the “Black lives matter” slogan, it was also very widely circulated. The only reason it did not achieve the vastness of the circulation of the “Black lives matter” slogan is that it’s circulation was restricted mainly to White conservative and supremacist groups and their supporters, whereas “Black lives matter” had a circulation that was global. This is why it is extremely dubious that Isaac is completely unaware of this connection. He is a preacher apart from being a star athlete, a multimillionaire. He claims that it is from his religious faith that he is asserting that to God, all lives matter. But this is exactly what the conservative White evangelicals who first coined the slogan, “All lives matter” also claimed! Indeed within a week of Isaac’s refusal to take the knee, his numbered Orlando Magic shirt was selling widely among White conservative groups. Look for Isaac to run for office or the Senate in the years ahead as a Republican!

On Zaha’s more ambiguous case, while one could concede that he is probably motivated by a feeling that taking the knee is fast becoming a fad, an empty ritual which is beginning to lose its mobilizational potency against racism and White supremacy, Zaha expresses absolutely no appreciation, no praise for what taking the knee has achieved. Therefore he sounds as if, from the beginning, he was always reticent about taking the knee. This is compounded by the fact that he is also against wearing Black Lives Matter T-shirts or paraphernalia. Why did he have to announce that, making it a notable aspect of his refusal? On this score, I suggest that Zaha’s case should remind us of the fact in all cases of resistance to oppression or injustice on a large scale, not everybody in the oppressed community is a “resister”. In other words, anybody who thinks that all Black people are natural supporters of Black Lives Matter or taking the knees is very naïve. It is the same type of naivete of those who expected, during the colonial phase of our modern political history, that everyone was against colonialism – which was not the case at all. In my youth in colonial Nigeria, I knew many people who wanted the British to stay for as long as they wanted, if not forever!

In conclusion, here’s what I think will happen, in the long run. In the NBA in the United States, Black professional players are so numerically dominant, their financial muscle and power of negotiation so robust that taking the knee will not just fade away. If and when it does, it will not be without replacing it with something to augment and sustain its powerful antiracist impact on American society and culture – unless of course basketball ceases to be one of the most powerful economic and social forces in America. The situation is very different in the Premier League and the other European national professional soccer leagues. Black players, though a considerably important presence, are not even remotely comparable to African Americans as a group in basketball. For this reason, there is a strong possibility that, in slow degrees, the leagues will take a cue from Zaha and other Black players who will almost certainly follow in his footsteps. Let us hope that before that happens, other strategies and tactics would have been found and mobilized to continue whatever achievements of antiracism we can ascribe to taking the knee.

Biodun Jeyifo, bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

By Biodun Jeyifo

For decades, I have championed the privatisation of our economy and full deregulation of our oil and gas sector, amongst other sectors, for greater service delivery and efficiency… It is always better late than never. And I commend the Federal Government for coming on board. I urge that the privatisation process be as transparent as possible, as that is the only way to ensure that Nigeria reaps the greatest economic benefits from this policy…It was never about me. My interest has always been the peace, prosperity, and progress of Nigeria, and I am happy to share these ideas, and others, with the government of the day, for the betterment of our nation and its people. – Atiku Abubakar

In any country in the world that moves from state or public control and ownership of national resources and assets to privatization and full deregulation, the people who benefit the most from the process are the wealthiest of the wealthy who are typically less than 2% of the population. When you buy businesses and enterprises that constitute the commanding heights of the national economy, it is far bigger than building or buying a string of five-star hotels or a residential estate of quality houses spread over a thousand acres of choice landed property. For that reason, in the quote above, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar is completely – and deliberately – wrong in saying that his exultation in the Buhari administration’s announcement of the last or ultimate act of privatization and full deregulation is not about himself. He is wrong because he is among the small circle of very, very rich Nigerians who will benefit immensely from the announced change of policy by the government. In other words, a small circle of very rich Nigerians are about to get even wealthier on a grandiose scale and Atiku is one of them.

In this piece, although I will focus on Atiku, I will do so strictly with regard to the fact that the Alhaji stands not merely for himself but for the class of our country’s wealthiest men and women who, since the end of the Nigeria-Biafra war, have derived the bulk of their wealth, not from successful industrial, manufacturing or commercial enterprises – like Dangote – but from their control of the political and administrative institutions of the federal or state governments. In other words, to focus exclusively or even mainly on Atiku would be a mistake because Atiku Abubakar is only one among an entire class of Nigerians who achieved their social, political and personal prominence through the primitive accumulation of transferring national resources and assets to private ownership. But before getting to this matter of Atiku as a prism through which we can study the experience of a whole class, I deem it necessary to clarify some confusion about privatization and deregulation as historical and economic phenomena.

For instance, it is not true, as most academic, political and ideological advocates of privatization and deregulation in our country will tell you, that ownership and control of important areas of a national economy is a bad thing promoted only by communists and socialists. This is false. It is false because while the dream of all capitalist societies and economies is to minimize as much as possible state or public control and ownership of all sectors of the economy, there is widespread recognition that regulation and even ownership of essential sectors of the economy are necessary in the overall interest of the whole society. For instance, in the United States, the heartland of global capitalism, it is unthinkable that the federal government in Washington, DC or any of the 50 state governments would ever dare to privatize the collection of taxes – as many states in our country are currently doing. This is even more pronounced in full deregulation: without exception, in all the full-fledged capitalist nations of the world, there is general agreement that the kind of full deregulation that Atiku has for decades been calling for is absurd, especially with regard to the most essential services and utilities. This is due to the recognition that any society that deregulates completely, that does not retain a measure of regulation places itself and its population at great risk.  As a matter of fact, the recent near total devastation of the infrastructures of power and water supply in the state of Texas caused by a monster storm has been universally blamed on the full deregulation of those two utilities. This is because with regulation completely held at bay, the calls of Texans for decades for “winterization” of the state’s electricity grid fell on deaf ears so that when the recent storm hammered the state, disaster hit Texans with a ferocity that had not been seen in decades.

Thus, I suggest that the apostles of privatization in Nigeria can learn a lot from one area of public life in the United States that has been vigorously protected from complete privatization and full deregulation, this being education, especially tertiary education. We can see this in the fact that while the private “Ivy league” institutions are top of the pecking order of higher learning in the country, some of the best state-run institutions like the California, New York and Texas state systems are right there on the highest tiers of programs of teaching, research and outreach. How have these excellent state universities been maintained, given the fact that residents of the given state pay highly subsidized fees that constitute only a fraction of the cost of running these state universities? The answer is very instructive for our ideologues of privatization: for a staunchly capitalist country, the US has kept private universities from dominating higher education by making enormous investments in publicly controlled and funded education of high quality.

At this point in the discussion, let us get back to Atiku as a representative of his class, let us confront him as a frontrunner in primitive accumulation, let us ask him if he really understands what is at stake in his call for full deregulation. Does he know, does he understand that even without formal deregulation, the Nigerian economy already operates like a fully unregulated and unregulatable economy? Does he recollect the herculean work of the late Dora Akunyili at NAFDAC when she arrived at that regulatory agency and found that it was doing anything but regulate the pharmaceutical industry in our country?  Atiku began his personal primitive accumulation when he was the boss of the Nigerian Ports Authority. How much “regulation” did he perform there as he was supposed to do? And don’t we remember his bitter war of words, insults, and accusation and counter-accusation with Obasanjo when both men engaged in an open, mutual revelation of the astronomical sums of money each man had allegedly looted from our national coffers? Didn’t Atiku (in)famously fall into trouble when the United States government accused him of complicity with a US Congressman, William Jefferson, in a corruption scandal for which Atiku’s alleged American accomplice was jailed for thirteen years?

Read Also: Biodun Jeyifo at 70: His person, prowess, push for freedom

 

Again, permit me to say with the greatest emphasis possible that this piece is not about Atiku in his personal identity; it is about Atiku as a representative figure, one of the most representative in the formation of a class of Nigerians formed by primitive accumulation of an exceptionally predatory and unregenerate kind. Remember what Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the new Director General of the WTO, said about the scale of corruption among the political class in our country at the beginning of her first tenure as Minister of Finance? She said that corruption in government and public service in Nigeria was so monumental that she would be satisfied if all she could accomplish in office was reduce the corruption by only 4%. Remember also the estimate given in 2012 by former President of the World Bank, Paul Wolfowitz, of the amount of money that had been stolen in our country between independence in 1960 and 2012? 400 billion dollars! And remember that since the arrival of the oil boom in our country, we have been near the bottom of Transparency International’s annual list of the world’s most corrupt nations. Can a nation whose political class has been so predatory, so freewheeling, so unregulatable in its   corruption credibly call for full deregulation?

Please compatriot, understand what’s at stake in Buhari’s and the APC’s final capitulation to the forces of privatization and deregulation. In the abstract, advocates of free market, neoliberal capitalism fight on the claim that privatization and deregulation will do away with all the “ills” associated with state or public ownership and control of the economy like bureaucratic rigidity, lack of flexibility in dealing with the dynamism of market forces, discouragement of initiative and absence of satisfactory provision of services and goods for the consumer, the ordinary citizen. This view can be contested with the sound argument that both regulation and deregulation, public ownership and privatization are only as valuable as they are effectively operationalized, whether in a capitalist system, a state-capitalist order or a socialist political economy. Beyond this, the important thing is to move away from abstract arguments about the merits and demerits of privatization and deregulation and locate ourselves in the concrete context of the Nigerian economy in which the “regulated” economy is already unregulated and unregulatable, and in which the consumer or citizen has no rights, no protections that any enterprises respect. In other words, it is completely academic to argue whether or not deregulation in our economy will do the work it is supposed to perform in a normal, functioning capitalist system because it won’t.

The thing that irks me the most in Atiku as a representative of his class is his claim of fighting for privatization and deregulation with the best interest of the country at heart. Listen to him in his own words: It was never about me. My interest has always been the peace, prosperity, and progress of Nigeria, and I am happy to share these ideas, and others, with the government of the day, for the betterment of our nation and its people”. Where is the peace, the prosperity and the progress that he has been fighting for? Are peace, progress and prosperity possible in the predators’ republic that he and his class have imposed on our country? Has he, like the proverbial ostrich, buried his head in sand and therefore cannot see the terrible conditions of life and living for most Nigerians at the present time, together with the insecurity that is ravaging the land everywhere we look? And who is he addressing, a country of fools and dupes who will buy the fiction that selling off our most valued collectively owned resources and assets will wipe away the blood and the tears drowning our peoples relentlessly?

In conclusion, I wish to suggest that regardless of what Atiku and the members of the ruling and owning class say in justification of privatization and full deregulation, we should bear three points in mind. First, privatization in our country has been very mediocre, very unregenerate. Secondly, what is at stake now is privatization of the most valuable resources and assets that we have and for this reason, this is the most consequential privatization that we have ever experienced in Nigeria. Thirdly and finally, what is about to happen will be the greatest act of dispossession of the Nigerian people. This all looks very gloomy, compatriots. But keep this in mind, as a source of hope: in all capitalist and non-capitalist societies of the world and our era, the competition between privatization and collective public control and regulation of resources is unending. What explains this phenomenon? It is distribution and redistribution, the fact that they are processes that will never end.

• Biodun Jeyifo, bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

    

By Biodun Jeyifo

By near unanimous agreement among pundits, here are the truly failed African states at the present time: Central African Republic (CAR); Chad; Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC); Somalia; South Sudan. In the opinion of the pundits, technically, two conditions are deemed necessary in order for a state to be declared and universally regarded as a failed state: the state in question can no longer enforce or project authority over the entirety of its territory; and it can no longer protect its boundaries with other states. We should spell what this means in social and human terms: as rulers of a failed state continue to plunder the nation’s resources and assets, bands of militias, bandits and marauders plague all parts of the country, both in the urban and rural areas; declared and undeclared warfare breaks out, between the central authority and various insurrectionary militias, and/or between belligerent groups and communities; acute insecurity of life, property and movement worsens relentlessly and uncontrollably. We could add more to this broad sketch of the failed state in the modern world system, but let this profile suffice for our purposes in this piece.

In the light of these manifestations of the failed state, how close are we in this country to the profile? Deliberately, I leave it to you, the reader, to judge for yourself. In this piece, I lay out the outlines of three scenarios, all of which took place this month of February 2021. If you were looking for indications, or more subliminally, intimations, of how close we are to a failed state, you couldn’t have found anything more telling than the first two of the following three scenarios. Indeed, precisely because the scenarios were totally unplanned and unexpected, Nigerians at home and abroad are still trying to catch their breath from the shock that they caused. Of the third and final scenario, because it came to light in the same month as the other scenarios, I ask the reader to take it a sort of Godsent revelation of how, even as the country is teetering on the brink of a failed state, our wealthiest politicians are still brazenly and unconscionably milking the national cow dry]

 

Outgoing Service Chiefs’ Voluntary Confessions

The first “confession” was made early in the month by Major General Bashir Salihi Magashi (Rtd), the incumbent Defence Minister. Since the incident and the outrage that it caused are still very fresh in the minds of Nigerians, we can quickly deal with it. In essence, the Minster said it is only Nigerians themselves who can and should defend themselves from the scourge of armed robbers, kidnappers and bandits. I quote one of his most offensive sentences: “We shouldn’t be cowards. Sometimes bandits come with about three rounds of ammunition and when they fire shots everybody will run. In our younger days, we stand to fight any form of aggression. Why should people run away from minor, minor aggressions?” At first, most people were simply outraged by Magashi’s suggestion that unarmed people could repel the menace of bandits armed with AK 47s. But when the Minister very awkwardly and unsuccessfully tried to take back his statement, people came to realize that what Magashi was really and rather inadvertently saying was this: in the final analysis, it is you, Nigerians, not the government, not the police, not the army, who can protect yourself from the menace of armed bandits, kidnappers and extortionists.

Barely one week after the Magashi blunder, an even more bewildering spate of completely voluntary “confessions” that our armed forces cannot rid Nigeria of crippling insecurity came from the topmost echelons of our military establishment. The occasion was the so-called “screening” exercise by the Senate of the recently retired Defence and Army Chiefs of Staff for appointment to non-career ambassadorial posts.  Beyond the fact that it surprised and irked many Nigerians that these army chiefs were about to be given ambassadorial posts within only a few months after their retirement, people also felt that it seemed that they were being rewarded for failure, given the appalling failure of the military to end the Boko Haram insurgency as well as other rampaging armed bandit operations across many states of the country. The two service chiefs involved were Lieutenant Generals Abayomi Olonisakin and Tukur Buratai respectively.

It is difficult to decide whose “confession” was more devastating, Olonisakin’s or Buratai’s. Buratai’s “confession” was more blunt, more chilly. It will take Nigeria at least 20 years to defeat the Boko Haram insurgency, he said, almost as if he wished to drive fear and terror into the hearts of his Senate audience and, beyond them, the Nigerian nation as a whole. Listen to him in his own words: “Unless certain things are done, this insecurity will continue because the truth must be told (that) it may take another 20 years for the country to surmount the problem of insurgency and that is the truth.”

Olonisakin, the retired Chief of Defence Staff, chose the more absurd style of redundancy and inanity in making his own “confession”. The problem, he said, was “forests” – we have too many forests, he declared, and the insurgents and bandits are using them to evade capture and defeat. Indeed, Olonisakin’s “confession” is best savored in his own words: “Three years ago, I conducted research on the forests in the country. I realized we have over 1,000 forest reserves. I sent the team to Kenya and brought out a paper and I said then, three years ago, that our next crisis will be in the forest.” And to clinch the impeccable “scientistic” pedigree of his “forest” thesis, Olonisakin added the following bizarre jargon-riddled conclusion to his “confession”: “I want to say that the solution to insecurity is multi-pronged. We talk about conventional warfare and asymmetric warfare. We are talking about hybrid warfare where everyone is involved. It is not about kinetics. Kinetics gives only a 35% success rate in any war we are fighting. It is a national approach that must be properly galvanized for us to actually surmount the insecurity”.

 

The incoming army chief’s order to destroy Boko Haram in 48 hours!

In their testimonies, their inadvertent “confessions” that the federal government cannot or will not win the war against the many insurgencies and security challenges that we face, Olonisakin and Buratai left their Senate audience, in the idiom of the popular saying, gasping for breath. Particularly galling was General Buratai’s brutal assertion that it will take no less than 20 years for Nigeria to be rid of its security crises. As far as I am aware, this is the first instance in which a highly placed defence and security functionary of the Nigerian state has openly admitted that our country has more or less met the first of the two essential conditions for being a failed state, this being the inability of a state to enforce or project its authority throughout its territory. But before we come to any conclusions here, there is another person who we should discursively summon to our conversation in this piece and that is no less an august personage than Buratai’s successor as Chief of Army Staff (COAS) the newly appointed Major General Ibrahim Atahiru. Barely one week after Buratai addressed the Senate, Atahiru gave an order which more or less amounted to calling for resolute and overwhelming military action to destroy Boko Haram in Bornu State within 48 hours! Here is the new COAS in his own words:

“You must not let this nation down. Go back and do the needful and I will be right behind you. You should be rest assured of all support you require in this very onerous task. You are aware of the recent attack on Dikwa and Marte; you should not allow this to happen again, go after them and clear these bastards. Areas around Marte, Chikingudo, Wulgo, Kirenowa and Kirta must be cleared in the next 48 hours.”

We do not know if the new COAS had the 20 years doomsday prophecy of the old COAS in mind when he gave this order. All the same, we must not resist the temptation to juxtapose Buratai’s 20 years to Atahiru’s 48 hours. On the basis of this juxtaposition, we are forced to wonder, to ask why our military and defence chiefs think in such starkly incredulous numbers, either on the upstream end of an imaginary pendulum or the downstream edge. This being the case, neither the old COAS’ “20 years” nor the young COAS’s “48 hours” offers Nigerians the hope, not to talk of the certainty that Buhari’s administration is up to the challenge of pulling our country away from the brink of a state that is almost forever close to joining the ranks of Africa’s failed states.

 

Meanwhile, the last bastions of state-owned resources and assets are about to fall

Whether in a fully failed state or one that is teetering on the brink of becoming one, life is extremely onerous, insecure and fragile for most of its citizens. But not for all or even most of the citizens. If you go to any of the African countries that have been formally declared to be failed states – CAR, Chad, Somalia or South Sudan – you will be surprised to see that there are hundreds of extremely wealthy people who continue to get very rich, very comfortable in the midst of the terrible misery that defines the human essence of what it entails to be a failed state.  For the records, I wish to quote in full here the overjoyous words of Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, the former Vice President, as he contemplates the immensity of wealth that will come to members of his class of the wealthiest politician-tycoons as Buhari’s administration finally yields to decades-old demands for total privatization and deregulation of our country’s public assets and resources:

“For decades, I have championed the privatisation of our economy and full deregulation of our oil and gas sector, amongst other sectors, for greater service delivery and efficiency.

“As chairman of the National Council on Privatisation, I advanced these policies which saw our economy achieve 6% GDP growth and created jobs for the masses of our people and amass the national wealth that enabled us to exit the debt trap and secure our financial independence.

“Even though my ideas were scorned by the All Progressives Congress-led Federal Government over the years, I am nevertheless most fulfilled that an administration that once failed to see the wisdom in these sound economic policies, is now facing reality and has now embraced reason, by announcing the privatisation of our refineries and other assets, which have not always prospered under public management.

“It is always better late than never. And I commend the Federal Government for coming on board. I urge that the privatisation process be as transparent as possible, as that is the only way to ensure that Nigeria reaps the greatest economic benefits from this policy.

“It was never about me. My interest has always been the peace, prosperity, and progress of Nigeria, and I am happy to share these ideas, and others, with the government of the day, for the betterment of our nation and its people”.

In next week’s column, I shall delve much deeper into the implications and ramifications of this final, historic embrace of full-fledged neoliberalism by Buhari after his long holdout against the privatizing hawks in his administration and party. For now, all I wish to point out for notice is the fact that it is precisely at the moment of his administration’s closest nearness to a failed state that Buhari finally caves in to those poised to wrench ownership and control of our most prized natural assets and resources from us, the Nigerian peoples. In other words, it is more than merely fortuitous that it is in the same month that Buratai testifies to the Senate that it will take more than 20 years for Nigeria to crush Boko Haram and all the other security crises plaguing the country and that getting information that Buhari will finally sell off NNPC and our other prize assets, Atiku Abubakar breaks out in a song of praise of privatization and deregulation.

 

• Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

 

By Biodun Jeyifo

In the year 2008, Amnesty International’s world renowned Corruption Perception Index (CPI) ranked the US as No 18 among the total number of 180 countries compared. Now, 2008 was the year of the economic crash caused by perhaps the greatest swindle in global capitalism in the 20th century. The swindle, known as subprime mortgage through credit default, caused tens of millions of Americans to lose their homes and their jobs, together with dozens of suicides committed by distraught, heartbroken victims, most of them working class Americans. Altogether, the mega-swindle caused the global economy a loss of about 2 trillion dollars in economic growth.

The people who caused this mammoth economic disaster were hedge fund financiers, investment bankers and brazen speculators of the mortgage industry. One of them, John Paulson of Paulson & Co, made about $20 billion dollars. Perhaps the most scandalous thing in the whole saga of greed and pillage on an unprecedented scale was the fact that not a single person went to jail for their crimes, even though the means through which they had defrauded tens of millions of people were as clear as the light of day. But wait a minute: there was a bigger scandal and that was the fact that for that year, 2008, Amnesty International (AI) gave the US one of the topmost rankings in the world in its CPI rankings for that year, this being No 18 out of 180 countries.

But that is not the end of the story because for last year, 2020, the last year of Donald Trump in office, Amnesty International placed the US as No 25 out of also 180 countries. By all accounts, Donald Trump in office was one of the most corrupt American presidents of all time. He was quite easily one of the most representative of Amnesty International’s unique definition of corruption, this being the use of public power for private and personal self-enrichment. Against the laws and norms of the country, Trump quite easily and brazenly effaced the distinction between his personal and family business and the official busines of the US. He inflated the costs of services rendered by his businesses to the American government and military. He looked away from and condoned members of his cabinet who were milking the American government for services and purchases made for themselves and their families while they were either at home or abroad. And it was widely known that his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, was using his position as the highest Senior Adviser to the President, to establish lucrative business contacts around the world, especially in the Middle East. In spite of all this, Amnesty International placed Trump’s America among the top 12% of the world’s relatively corruption-free countries.

To get to my purpose in this piece, we must make a differentiation between the basis for Amnesty International’s ranking of the US in 2008 and its ranking of the country last year, 2020. For the year 2008, the cause of the gross misplacement can be attributed to the fact that AI bases its annual review of corruption perception of countries on only the public sector, completely excluding the private sector, or more precisely, the big enterprises and corporations of America and the world. The critics of AI, especially from the international Left, have for long argued that this is completely nonsensical as all of us know that there is as much corruption in businesses and corporations as there is in governments and no one has ever done a study of where corruption is bigger and more endemic between governments and businesses. On this count, Amnesty International can claim that while it is true that it excludes corporations in its yearly reviews of countries, its exclusive focus on governments has undeniable beneficial effects. I give my endorsement to this claim – just look, compatriots, at how enraged, how apoplectic Buhari’s spokesmen have been by AI’s location of Nigeria at No 149 in the just released rankings for the year 2020!

When we come to the basis of AI’s ranking of the US for last year, 2020, we come to a completely different circumstance. We must state what is involved here as clearly and as unambiguously as possible: corruption in the public sectors, by the governments of the very wealthy, high income countries is greatly underreported by AI. I confess that I do not know the reasons for this, but I know that it is there, just as AI also has a much greater tendency to sniff out corruption in the poorer, low income countries of the world than in the wealthy nations and regions. To its credit, AI does pay a lot of attention to poor countries that do much to keep the lure of corruption at bay. But it is undeniable that all things considered, between New York and Lagos, between London and Mexico City and between Frankfurt and Cairo, AI is far more likely to smell corruption in the centers of business and politics in the developing world than in the centers of fully developed capitalism like New York, London and Frankfurt in the Western countries.

I have stated that I do know the reasons for AI’s underreporting of public sector corruption in the rich countries of the world. All the same, I can make some educated guesses. One reason is speculative and it is this: primitive accumulation ended more than a hundred years ago in the rich countries of the world while it is still raging like wildfires in the developing countries of the world. What is primitive accumulation and how does it enter into the framework of this discussion? Briefly stated, primitive accumulation is the historic process by which the wealthy, upper bourgeois classes separated themselves from both the rural and urban poor and from the wage workers and underemployed lumpenproletariat who flocked to the cities in waves and upon waves of several generations. All historians of primitive accumulations testify that in every region of the planet, primitive accumulation was as much a pitiless and brutal phenomenon as it was also endlessly corrupt. Since it ended a long time ago in the rich countries and is still raging in the developing world, I suspect that this is why AI is far more prone to see perceptions of corruption in the developing world than in the wealthy countries and regions of the world.

At this point in the discussion, I come to the linking of Nigeria and the US in the title of this piece. Whose administration, whose public sector was more corrupt last year, Buhari’s Nigeria or Trump’s America? Since AI placed the US at No 25 and Nigeria at No 149, this question would be quite nonsensical to the Berlin-based international anti-corruption organization. But to me and any other careful observer of Buhari’s Nigeria and Trump’s America last year, AI’s placement of the two countries far apart at upper and lower levels of the ranking order makes no sense, no sense at all. As a matter of fact, with regard to what is known in the public careers of Buhari and Trump, Buhari seems like a saint compared with Donald Trump.

Please do not get me wrong, compatriots, this is not an apologia for Buhari. There is not the slightest doubt that his anti-corruption crusade has turned out to be fake, an imposture through and through. Those among his supporters and defenders who claim that much or even all of the corruption going on in his administration and the country are perpetrated in spite of his noble intentions and not because of his connivance. I disagree completely with this view. Buhari knows a lot about what is going on. His ineffectiveness, his unmitigated failure in his anti-corruption crusade is caused by a combination of lack of moral acuity and intellectual acumen in the face of the enormity of the challenge that corruption poses to Nigeria and many of the countries of our continent and the developing world.

On a concluding note, I wish to emphasize that I have not in this piece attempted a “Nigerian” counter-response to AI’s rubbishing of Nigeria in its 2020 Report. In all probability, Nigeria under Buhari deserves that low, low 2020 ranking. Corruption under Buhari’s reign and under most or all of his predecessors is killing many of our peoples, is wasting the lives and capacities of countless numbers of our young people. A curse on all who rise to defend Buhari against the charge that his anti-corruption crusade has failed utterly! But this also I say: pay attention to the critics of Amnesty International. Do not take everything the organization says in its annual reports as irreproachable truth. Look at the Reports of 2008 and 2020 on corruption in the US! Until the organization cleans up the many shortcomings in its methodology and performance, always ask question that the organization refuses to pose. And if it will give any Nigerian reader of this piece some consolation, tell anyone in Nigeria who will listen to you if you are one of the apologists for Buhari that BJ says that, yes, Donald Trump is infinitely more corrupt and more corruptible than Muhammadu Buhari!

Donald Trump between the “perception” and the actuality of corruption

As a sort of postscript to the main body of the discussion in this piece, consider, compatriots, the difference between Amnesty International’s emphasis on the “perception” of corruption and the fact, the actuality of corruption. For a long time, indeed as a matter of fact since its formation in July 1961 in London, Amnesty International has faced sharp criticism of confusing perception of corruption from the actuality of corruption. Nigeria seems to be the perfect case history for this confusion because it is the most likely country in the world for effacing the difference between being accused of humungous corruption and being punished for corruption and/or being made to cough up stolen loot.

Just think of this fact, compatriots: a radical, even revolutionary Act of Parliament – the Administration of Criminal Justice Act (ACJA) – was passed by the Nigerian legislature in the year 2015 and till today, circa 2021, it has been all but impossible to make our law courts comply with its stipulations. Indeed, it could be argued that the Nigerian Bar and Bench at the present time derives the lion share of its earnings from non-implementation of ACJA and all the Acts and Edicts before it that sought to curb or eradicate corruption in the land. This is the reason why in Nigeria more than any country in the world, the perception of corruption is indissociable from the actuality of corruption.

But then, think of Donald Trump who, as president, made the perception of corruption the twin brother – a Siamese twin brother – of the actuality of corruption! How did he do this? He perpetrated every act of corruption completely in the open, right before everyone’s eyes. In other words, for Trump, the perception was the actuality and the actuality made the perception so sharp, so ineffably defined that you did not need any other proof of what was going on. It might help to think here of many Heads of States of countries in the developing world who infamously more or less kept the coffers of their nation’s treasury in their palatial homes in order to make the perception and reality of looting convergent. As one Nigerian State Governor, the late Sabo Barkin Zuwo of Kano State, once put the matter: where else would you expect to find government money if not in the Government House?

Well, metaphorically speaking, that was what Donald Trump did in, of all places in the world, America, the heartland of global capitalism, the country in which, more than any other country in the world, primitive accumulation is said to have ended a very long time ago. At his inauguration in January 2017, Trump claimed that he was going to the nation’s capital to “drain the swamp”. But instead of draining the swamp, the swamp claimed him and he drowned in it. How strange then that an organization like Amnesty International was completely ignorant of this Trumpian elaborate reenactment of primitive accumulation, rank, excessive primitive accumulation in the second decade of the 21st century!

• Biodun Jeyifo bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

 

By Biodun Jeyifo

 

It would have been very funny if it had also not been strangely pathetic. January 20, 2021, the day of the inauguration of Joe Biden as the 46th American president. As widely reported, as hundreds of thousands of Trump’s QAnon supporters watched television broadcasts of the ceremony, they traded derisive comments among themselves in the social media to the effect that the inauguration wasn’t happening, that what Americans and the world were watching in real time was a fakery that had been elaborately staged and filmed and was now being presented as a real life event. And in their chatter on the internet, the QAnon conspiracy theorists added this item to their wild fabulations on Biden’s inauguration: sections of the American government and the military were about to move in and arrest Biden and all those who aided and abetted him in faking the inauguration and foisting it on the country and the world. But as day became night and was followed by another day and nothing happened, these Trumpian QAnon supporters went into great despair. And, to use a biblical trope of great despair and consternation, there was a lot of renting of hair and gnashing of teeth.

If, dear reader, you are utterly “flabberwhelmed” by this account, think of the incredible falsehood on which it was based, the lie, the absurdity of the claim that Trump won the election, that victory was stolen from him. In all but one of the six states claimed to have been won by Trump and “stolen” by Biden, the elections and the counting of votes were supervised by Republican officials who, as they declared to the whole country, had actually wanted Trump to win. Moreover, Trump and his lawyers lost every one of their more than sixty court battles to have the election results overturned and awarded to Trump. In the majority of these cases, the judges who ruled against Trump and his lawyers were appointed to the Bench by Republican state administrations. As a matter of fact, three of the Supreme Court justices who joined their five colleagues to find against Trump were Trump-appointed. Thus, it is hard, very hard, to find a more bogus claim of electoral victory in the history of modern elections than this lie, this mendacious fabrication of Trump and his supporters. This point leads us to the subject of discussion in this piece.

A lie, a falsehood, will do as well as facts and truth, if not more: this is a fundamental aspect of all the fascist movements of the modern era. This is because since all fascist movements are based on fear, hatred and dehumanization of racial, national or ethnic others, they must depend as much on lies, myths and fabrications as on provable facts and truths. Since fascism is always first and foremost a movement, facts and truths are far more inconvenient than lies and falsehood for starting a movement and keeping it growing and going. The Nazi fascist movement had a reputation for ultrarational and technocratic efficiency, quite unlike Trumpian fascism which has a well-deserved reputation for being one of the most inefficient and dysfunctional fascist administrations in the Western world. All the same, German Nazism, true to its fascist nature, was redolent with irrationalism. This is why Nazism has been such a vast treasure trove for films, plays, novels, art and music based on its irrational, fantastical elements. But on this point on the constitutive irrationalism of all fascist movements, I contend, provisionally, that Trumpism stands alone in a class by itself.

I have mentioned the QAnon conspiracy theorists about three times in this discussion. Permit me to now give an elaboration of this movement, this phenomenon that takes irrationalism, phantasmic absurdity to a level it had never reached in the history of modern fascist movements. Although it is a White supremacist phenomenon, in its most bizarre “othering” of feared and hated opponents, QAnon does not refer to Black people, Native Americans or immigrants. No, for the QAnon cultists in their hundreds of thousands, the ultimate dehumanized Other are Democrats and the cultural elites of Hollywood, together with the national literary intelligentsia. About these groups of mostly White Americans, mindboggling stories of evil and depravity are told as literal truth, as palpable realities. Pedophiles who molest children and then eat them. Satanists whose control of most of the governments and corporations of America and the world God has sent Donald Trump to destroy. The day of that destruction is NOW, circa AD 2020/2021. And Trump is – or will be – the instrument of that divinely ordained destruction.

It should of course be admitted that the QAnon conspiracy theory phenomenon is not the most characteristic of Trumpian fascist irrationalism. More characteristic is the claim that Trump and his administration were more than equal to the challenge of Covid-19 to America when in reality Trump has the blood of hundreds of thousands of the dead of the pandemic on his hands. Or the claim that Trump’s relationships with Putin’s Russia and Kim Jong-un’s North Korea were models of gifted and productive breakthroughs for a divided and fractious world. In actuality these relationships served to spread and unite authoritarian regimes in our world. But even if it is only an outlier, the QAnon conspiracy theory is nevertheless solidly coextensive with all the other aspects of the Trumpian fascist project of total destruction of American liberal democracy. What is so different between QAnon’s fantastic canard and the utter brazenness of the lie that Trump won the election, that victory was stolen from him? One presupposes the other; and they are both aspects of an insurrectionary departure from norms and practices of liberal democracy.

At this point in the discussion, I must state with as much emphasis as possible that I am not trying to claim an exceptionalism for Trumpian American fascism in this piece. Yes, I see an incredible uniqueness in both the vastness of irrationalism in it and the forms that the irrational take in it. But this uniqueness does not amount to an exceptionalism of any kind. For instance, even though I have drawn attention to demonization and dehumanization of sections of the White American community in Trumpian fascism, the main flank of mass support for Trumpism is overwhelmingly among Whites. And of this fact we must never lose sight: like all fascisms before it, Trumpian fascism is totalitarian rule of one man and one man only, the Leader for whose glory and edification the party, the movement and all the institutions all converge. For the moment He is out of power and out of the White House and these are considerable setbacks for him and his movement. Thus the time is NOW to make sure that he never comes back, and that his fascist movement will be confronted with lessons from history on how fascist movements of the past, especially under capitalism, were successfully challenged and defeated.

It is of course quite impossible in one discussion to give a substantial account of lessons from the history of struggles against fascism. In lieu of such an approach, what I wish to do here is give a brief reflection on struggles against fascism within a liberal democratic order in which parliamentary democracy is (still) the main political and institutional context. In other words, here is what I have in mind: the last election that installs the fascist movement in power for a long time has not (yet) taken place; the institutions and norms of liberal democracy have not (yet) vanished; and war, foreign and/or civil, has not (yet) emerged as the solution. Alongside of these factors, we must of course add, or superimpose the scourge of the Covid-19 pandemic and the contradictions of neoliberal globalization of which America is the heartland. What lessons from history can be brought to bear on this unique conjuncture? In this discussion I can only draw attention to the things that I consider the most salient factors.

One of the most important things that I wish to emphasize is the fact that though the working class in particular and poor people in general are split between Trumpian fanatical supporters and Democratic and Independent anti-fascists, there is a slight numerical and electoral advantage of the latter over the former. Everything possible and progressive – and even tactically reformist – must be done to widen this advantage. If this is not done, if Trumpian Republicanism ever regains control of all the three institutions of governance – the presidency, the Senate and the House – the very first thing they will do is, if not abolish democracy altogether, then considerably weaken the chances of Democrats to ever regain control of the levers of governance.

Another thing to bear in mind pertains to both the title and the contents of this piece, this being the vastness of the surreal absurdities of Trumpian fascism. Americans in particular and, more generally, the whole world is in disbelief, great disbelief, of the lies, the fantastical alternative realities that power the imagination and will of Trump’s supporters, from the barely educated to elites trained in the best schools and colleges of a steep educational system. While it is not the best thing to reduce the complexities of economic production to false consciousness, it is nevertheless necessary to trace the absurdities that power contemporary rightwing American electoral politics and agitational struggles to the contradictions of neoliberal global capitalism. In the real economy, millions of workers lose their jobs and are impoverished almost beyond anything known in previous stages of the development of capitalism; but at the same time in the phantom economy of “casino capitalism”, the stocks have been performing at a historic high. How can a few be doing so well while the vast majority are doing so poorly, so hellishly? This seems perplexing and from such seeming perplexities are born the pedophiliac and cannibalistic cabals of QAnon conspiracy theories!

In conclusion and to push the resonance of this analogy further, let us take Donald Trump himself as a source and a representation of neoliberal capitalism’s tendency to generate phantasms that are then transformed into aspects of the real. Trump is, by all accounts, a serial failure as a businessman who squandered the vast wealth that he inherited, who openly, before our very eyes, turned the presidency into a source of self-enrichment for himself and his family, even as his administration recorded levels of incompetence never before seen in all previous American presidencies. And yet, because the very rich grew much, much richer in his time, thanks to the illusory nature of wealth for most Americans, Trump would have won the 2020 elections if the pandemic and its economic ravages had not intervened. He would have won because his supporters clung to the illusory compensations of the personal and national “wealth” about which Trump endlessly boasted.

There is every reason to think that Trump is a fake “billionaire” and that he is so indebted that his total assets are less than one billion. His world is thus nothing but an elaborate make-believe. At the other side of that world of fantasy and illusion is the real world of great dispossession and suffering. No two “worlds” could be more dissimilar. The economic impact of the pandemic brought their dissimilarity to the light of day and the BLM summer and autumn 2020 demonstrations and protests consummated the rest of the work of demystification. What will happen to Trumpian fascism in the months and years ahead will be decided largely by how racial and economic justice powers American antifascism in the immediate future before us.

 

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

By Biodun Jeyifo

January 6, 2021: in Washington, DC, an insurrection inside the Capitol, the magnificent edifice that physically houses the two parliamentary arms of the US Congress and symbolically denotes the highest ideals of the American democratic order? Yes, but please note that actually, there were two distinct insurrections, not a single uprising. The insurrection that most Americans and the rest of the world talk about is that in which about two thousands of Donald Trump’s extreme rightwing supporters stormed the Capitol, easily overcame the Capitol Police, and gained entrance to the chambers forcing all legislators to be rushed into safe sanctuaries deep inside the labyrinthian recesses of the massive building. In what could be regarded as the climax of the action of this particular insurrection, the flag of the United States was removed and replaced with two other flags, one of Donald Trump and the other of the Southern Confederacy.

Now to the other insurrection, this being the unprecedented attempt of a sizeable number of Republican legislators to challenge, disrupt and overturn the “electoral college” joint meeting of the Senate and the House of Representatives to confirm Joe Biden as the 46th President of the United States. To use a Nigerian Pidgin English expression, this was an “ogboju” insurrection of the highest order. This is because there is absolutely no basis in the US Constitution to challenge the result of an American presidential election by the time it gets to the Electoral College. Far more telling, Trump and the Republicans had challenged Biden’s victory at nearly every level of the American judicial system, from the lowest courts to the Supreme Court itself; they had lost every case in more than sixty delivered judgements. Thus, beyond the significant fact that the attempt was based on a bewildering falsehood, the attempt was insurrectionary precisely because it was completely outside every level, every norm of American legality.

Did Trump and his enablers intend a link, a combination between these two insurrections? It is too early to tell definitively. The fact that the Republican legislators who were executing the “ogboju” insurrection were also severely terrorized by the hordes who stormed, looted and vandalized the Capitol would seem to suggest that things went awry between the two insurrections. Except for one Senator, Josh Hawley of Missouri, no Republican congressman or woman seems to have been in sync with the action of the hellish rioters. But this is not the crucial issue here. What we should pay great attention to is the fact that Trump apparently felt that he needed the two insurrections. He clearly saw that the “ogboju” insurrection had limits whereas the potential of the insurrectionary invasion of parliament by lawless, marauding hordes was limitless: outbreak of rightwing uprisings in other theatre of operations around the country; civil war; martial law; perhaps even a “race war”. Any of these, thought Trump, would be much better than Biden succeeding him as president!

Against this background, the victory of the Democrats in the Georgia senatorial runoffs on the same day, January 6, 2021, added a remarkable contrast to insurrections at the Capitol. The two elected senators, Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, are ideologically located in the progressive, center-left wing of the Democratic party. In the campaign leading to the election, these gentlemen’s Republican opponents focused relentlessly on charges of “communism” and “socialism” against them in an attempt to render them unelectable to a Southern electorate, to no avail. The decisive factor in the victories of Warnock and Ossoff was the promise of far-ranging racial social justice policies and projects in a Biden administration that had control of not only the presidency but also the House and the Senate. Indeed, Warnock is the senior pastor of the famous Ebenezer Baptist Church of Atlanta, Martin Luther King’s church and Ossoff comes from a background of Jewish anti-racist and civil rights activism and was a disciple of the legendary civil rights icon, John Lewis. Thus, the fact that on the very day, Wednesday, January 6, 2021, that extreme rightwing, supremacist hordes stormed the Capitol, this victory of Warnock and Ossoff took place in a southern state should give us hints of the complexity of political forces at work in America at the present time: in the capital, an insurrection whose rumbling shook the whole world; in Atlanta, Georgia, a victory of the most progressive forces in American politics.

Permit me to push this train of thought farther by suggesting that the insurrections in Washington, DC, this past Wednesday constituted a counterrevolution of sorts. Since for there to be a counterrevolution there must be preceding revolution, the question arises as to which revolution or revolutionary conjecture Trump fomented his failed coup against. This is the core issue that we must absolutely not lose sight of in the overwhelming shock of the events of Wednesday, June 6, 2020. I wish to be both precise and concrete on the matter: under the leadership of the Black Lives Matter movement, the protests and demonstrations of summer 2020 raised struggles to end police violence against black people to the level of a revolutionary conjuncture in which not only black people but people of all races and ethnic communities have an important stake. Let me express this in an even more concrete form: the BLM this past summer brought into being the most consequential alliance of progressive forces and individuals, principally among Blacks and Whites, but also among virtually all racial and ethnic communities in the country – Native Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, Arab and Middle Eastern Americans.

I would like to frame this train of thought in another formulation: in the wake of the BLM direction of the protests and demonstrations of summer 2020, elections and voting came to assume a revolutionary salience that it had rarely had in American politics since 1960s. I say this without having forgotten the elections that brought Bill Clinton and Barrack Obama into office, both of which were reformist, not revolutionary. Now, Biden himself is no revolutionary; indeed he is somewhat to the right of Obama and would easily match Clinton in nervousness about the radical and progressive forces in the Democratic Party. But he will come to the presidency in a conjunctural moment in which attentiveness to the endemic racial injustices of the American society is a precondition for dealing with all the problems and challenges of economic and social justice for all other excluded groups and communities.

In order to begin to move towards the conclusion of this piece, I suggest that through the power of elections and the vote, race and racial justice have become the bearers of a revolutionary conjuncture in Trump’s America. As a consequence of this development, the Republican party has apparently come to the conclusion that it can no longer play by the rules of the electoral system. Indeed, for a long time now, Republican presidential candidates have won only through the electoral college; they have found it more and more difficult to win both the popular vote and the electoral college. For this reason, until and unless the party fundamentally reforms its extremely backward racial politics, it will more and more find even minority rule through victory in the electoral college beyond its grasp. We all know that Trump and a Republican Party made over in his image is completely incapable of this kind of internal reform. This is the crisis that produced the insurrections of this past week. Nothing demonstrates this crisis more than the fact that the Democrats won the runoff Senate seats in Georgia on the same day that the insurrections were perpetrated in Washington, DC.

Dear reader, did you see how very swiftly nearly everyone noticed that the mostly white insurrectionary stormtroopers who seized control of the Capitol were treated as if they were at a festive celebration by the Capitol Police? Indeed, they were treated so nicely that it seemed that they had come to clean up and renovate the Capitol, not loot, deface and damage it. As this unraveled before our eyes, everyone thought of how BLM protesters and demonstrators had been savagely treated last summer. This difference has been described as a “double standard”, one standard for whites and another for blacks. I disagree; it is far worse than that. You can only talk of “standards” where you not only take the humanity of both groups for granted but also recognize their inviolable citizenship rights as Americans. But that is not the case for as we know, Trump’s MAGA – Make America Great Again – really means MAWA, “Make America White Again”. We have great cause to worry about what will happen to American democracy as long as Trumpism remains a huge, huge factor in American life and politics. But please don’t lose sight of what happened in Georgia on the same day!

In praise of Stacey Abrams

I confess, with not a little embarrassment, that among civil rights activists, voting rights activists – unless, like Martin Luther King, Jr, and John Lewis, they are also social and political activists –  are not high on my list of the most admirable public intellectuals. But Stacey Abrams is in a class all by herself. She is like a force of nature and is probably the greatest voting rights activist in the world. Definitely, she is quite easily the politician and activist that the Republican Party fears the most, both at the State level in Georgia and nationally, with regard to the countrywide ramifications of her work.

Although the victory of the two Democratic senatorial candidates in Georgia this week was achieved through the work of dozens of activists, to Ms. Abrams belongs the primary agency for the victory. Thus, this I also confess: until I began to pay close attention to the work of Ms. Abrams, I had not really placed great value on voting rights activism. I was not disrespectful of voting rights activism as a calling or a passion for broader social, economic and political rights, but because elections per se did not occupy a high place in my view of the most important mechanisms for achieving deep and lasting revolutionary changes, I tended to extend this to all voting rights activists. But that ended when Stacy Abrams caught my attention. Incidentally, this came about through the prism of the negative obsession of Donald Trump and the bigwigs of the Republican Party with Ms. Abrams. Let me explain.

Until I became aware of the work of Ms. Abrams, I simply did not know enough how much Trump in particular and the Republican Party in general are endlessly invested in suppressing the votes of African Americans and other communities of color in America. This, at first sight, is undoubtedly perplexing since all the liberal democracies of the world, especially of the West, place great value on an active, civic-minded electorate that regularly votes in high percentile figures. But with Trump and the Republican Party, this is completely hypocritical because over the course of several decades in the 20th century and as voting rights were extended to racial and immigrant communities, Republicans found that their racial, economic and social views and policies made the extension of African Americans’ voting rights damaging to their electoral fortunes and their political survival as representatives of a dominant racial majority. Thus, though I had read of the terrible violence with which, at different  times, both the Republican and the Democratic Parties had used voter suppression of black people in America as a weapon of racial segregation and domination, it was not until I encountered the work of Stacy Abrams that I became critically aware of an unending titanic struggle against voter suppression as the fundamental fulcrum of racial and social justice in America. Nobody in the political history of America has understood and embodied this struggle more than Ms. Abrams. Thus, compatriots, if in the next few years under the administration of Biden you see big and meaningful changes in the American order of race, class and gender, think above all else of the work of this brilliant and gifted African American woman!

• Biodun Jeyifo bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu