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Category: Biodun Jeyifo

  • The mode of surplus extraction changed and corruption became the glue that holds things together: notes for young compatriots (2)

    The mode of surplus extraction changed and corruption became the glue that holds things together: notes for young compatriots (2)

    It the end of last week’s first essay in this series, I made the claim that when crude oil replaced export or cash crop production (together with industrial production of light consumer goods) as the medium of surplus accumulation by our political and economic elites, corruption became not only gargantuan and rampant but in fact became the means of massive distortion of income and wealth redistribution throughout all layers of the society in every part of the country. To this claim it is necessary to add a caveat, a qualification. It is not crude oil production itself that caused this epochal shift in how the social surplus is appropriated in our country, in how people became rich or poor. Crude oil production for export in and of itself has nothing inherently corrupting in it. Unlike Nigeria, many oil-producing countries of the world did not automatically and massively become corrupted by oil wealth. Examples are Norway, Venezuela and even some of the Middle East oil producing countries like the United Arab Emirates. As a matter of fact, historically speaking, in some countries of the world, oil wealth has greatly reduced the gap between the rich and the poor, between the powerful elites and the teeming majority of the given country’s urban and rural poor. Corruption has not vanished in such countries; indeed, it has not vanished in any country in the world and will probably never disappear from the face of the planet. But corruption has not in Venezuela or Norway or the UAE Gulf States become the glue that holds the society together in lieu of fair and just redistribution of wealth when oil wealth came to those countries. Why and how did this come to pass in Nigeria? That is the fundamental question.

    In responding to that question as the primary topic of this continuation of the series that began last week, I must again stress that my reflections in the series are primarily addressed to the younger generations of Nigerians, especially those born after 1980. Any Nigerian who had come of age by that date knew a vastly different country. Corruption did exist, and sometimes in quite spectacular forms and expressions. But it did not remotely have the chance, the now seemingly inevitable reality of being the means of the redistribution of wealth and hence the glue that keeps everything together in economy and society in the oil-rich but poverty stricken country the country we now know and perforce have to transform.

    The root cause of the epochal shift of corruption in the political economy of Nigeria can be simply put: with oil wealth, surplus accumulation by our elites that was not based directly on the exploitation of farmers and workers became possible. Yakubu Gowon’s infamous statement in the period is particularly relevant here: money is no longer our problem, he said; our problem is how to spend it. Concerning that infamous statement, I have often thought that Gowon would have been right if he had only added the word, “wisely”. That is to say if he would have said something that posterity would never forget if he had said our problem is how to spend our new-found oil wealth wisely. But he did not say that and the reason he did not was because he was bragging petulantly about Nigeria’s emergence as one of the most important oil producing countries in the world; he was saying that with our new-found oil wealth, the powerful nations and forces in the world and in particular the West, could no longer condescend or dictate to us. Alas, that portentous statement of Gowon reveals a lot of what he personally and virtually all of our political and economic elites do not know about the production and maintenance of true wealth, as distinct from illusory wealth in all the nations and among the peoples of our planet. This is the fact that, all expressions and forms of waste, squandermania and conspicuous consumption duly acknowledged, true wealth in our world is always tied to the production of real, life-enhancing and humanizing value. Let me explain.

    To create true wealth, you must work, you must create value. It helps in particular if your work either enhances existing value-creating work or indeed creates new ways of making work better and more productive. And it so happens that currently in our world, we are living in an epoch in which unprecedented innovations in technologies of knowledge production and the micro-processing of tools, appliances and operations of production in all areas of the circulation and exchange of goods and services between the planet’s regions and nations are the primary engines of wealth production. In the great universities, research institutions and frontline innovative “research and development” corporations of the world, new techniques of producing knowledge and making work more prodigious are being discovered and introduced into the marketplaces of the planet. The results, the ramifications are not always unambiguously positive and people all over the world still have to fight for equality of opportunities, justice and dignity. But it does help a lot if one’s nation and region of the world is abreast of these developments, these innovations in how real and sustainable wealth is produced. It is almost banal to say that our country, Nigeria, lags far behind in these developments. The cause, unambiguously, lies in the fact that oil wealth in Nigeria brought with it a massive devaluation of work as the creator of true wealth and value, especially when corruption became the means of an atrociously unfair and unproductive redistribution of wealth.

    I now come to the specific issue of corruption as the means of wealth redistribution in oil-rich Nigeria. In this regard, I find the statement made by the late Chief Obafemi Awolowo as the Federal Commissioner of Finance at the end of the Nigerian-Biafran civil war portentous. What was the statement? Awolowo said, with his characteristic dry sarcasm, that as far as he was concerned as the Finance Commissioner, no soldier died in the civil war because from start to finish, every kobo of every soldier’s salary was paid. The statement goes to the heart of the fact that in oil rich Nigeria, you not only don’t have to work to earn legitimate money, sometimes you don’ t even have to be alive! Beyond this, you don’t have to work; you don’t have to create value to become immensely rich and well-off. I think most adult, thinking Nigerians know this fundamental reality of their oil-rich but poverty stricken country. Everyone knows that it is not what you know, it is not what you can truly contribute that matters; rather, it is a question of who you know, what connections you can make with the rich and the powerful in whose hands lies the control of the oil wealth. And everyone knows that everybody wants to join the winners, those who are making it even in the midst and the thickness of widening circles of poverty. There is even an evangelical, Pentecostal denomination known, precisely, as “Winners”. But if this is all a well-known and widely discussed reality of wealth and poverty in our country in the last three and half decades, what is not fully appreciated is the fact that when things have gone this far in a country, it signifies that corruption has become the means of wealth redistribution and therefore the glue that holds everything together, a glue that we must dissolve completely the sooner the better.

    One of the reasons why corruption in oil-rich Nigeria is not generally and widely recognized for the atrocious means of wealth redistribution that it is can be traced to the fact that it is often confused with or explained away by link with genuine aspirations for growth and development throughout Nigeria, especially in the vast hinterlands of the land. Let me give two particularly crucial examples: state creation and the often resultant or accompanying creation of state universities.

    At the onset of oil wealth in Nigeria, there were four regions and about twelve universities in the country. As the oil wealth began to flow abundantly placing us in the position of the sixth or seventh largest oil-producing country in the world, we very rapidly moved from the four regions to twelve states, then nineteen states and then finally the current thirty-six states. Concurrently, the twelve federal and regional universities grew at an astronomical rate to dozens of universities as each new state created one, two or three more universities in each state, all within the space of slightly more than two decades. In the modern world, no other country in the world has seen the same rate, number and rapidity in the creation of states and state universities. The ostensible justification was the legitimate aspirations of our peoples everywhere in the country for bringing political administration and education closer to our localities and communities across the length and breadth of the country. But the actual results do not in the least indicate that those legitimate aspirations have come anywhere close to fulfillment. Indeed, in precisely the same period, poverty, economic marginalization and political alienation of the masses of our peoples have increased tenfold in nearly all parts of the country. Meanwhile, what has really happened is that the national cake has been further shared, further redistributed among the elites throughout the country. Every single state administrative bureaucracy in the country has grown beyond rhyme and reason and redundancies and sinecures abound aplenty. Indeed, in most states, recurrent expenditure which consists primarily of the payment of salaries and emoluments, run as much as three times the size of capital expenditure for real growth and development. And in the universities, a vast professoriate has been rapidly created with the result that quantity now far outweighs quality, as every single professor reading this article knows deep down in his or her consciousness and conscience.

    The profile that I have given of state and state universities creation as means of corrupt wealth redistribution is a profoundly saddening thing for me to state. But it needs to be said, especially as this profile constitutes the tip of a vast iceberg. In next week’s concluding essay in the series, I shall indicate other instances, other ramifications of what I have shown with the profile of state and universities creation. And I shall also give an indication of what we might do or should begin to do about the problem, the crises.

    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 (1)

    The mode of surplus extraction changed and corruption became the glue that holds things together: notes for young compatriots (1)

    f course, I was not yet born in 1929, the year of the famous Aba Women’s Revolt against the warrant chiefs that were the agents of colonial rule in eastern Nigeria. Nonetheless, I have read as much as I can on the fateful events of that signal rebellion against unjust taxation in pre-independence Nigeria. But I was already born and was a young man during the General Strike of 1964 that almost brought down the government of Abubakar Tafawa Balewa; beyond that, the strike also nearly ended the whole bourgeois political order constituted by all the ruling class parties in the country. Indeed, 1964 was my last year in secondary school and at that stage of my very early adulthood, I had come to an awareness of progressive class politics; I had come, so to speak, to a consciousness of the fact that if you want to understand the underlying causes of injustices and distortions in the wealth and poverty of nations, you must pay special attention to the mode of surplus extraction by the political and economic elites of a society.

    It was the Agbekoya Revolts of 1968-69 that finally seared this fundamental fact that the mode of extraction of social surplus by governing elites is the foundation of all politics into my consciousness. In the very midst of the Nigeria-Biafra civil war when a state of emergency banning all strikes and protests was in force throughout the country, the farmers and peasants of the southeastern part of western Nigeria rose up in armed rebellion against the state and its agencies. Emergency or no emergency, civil war or no civil war, these farmers and peasants had had enough. The whole economy of the country at that point in time, national and regional, was based primarily on the so-called cash or export crops the production of which overwhelmingly rested on the labour of farmers and peasants. Which is why the literal translation of the term “Agbekoya” means “farmers reject exploitation and suffering”. In one of the most spectacular acts of armed operations by the Agbekoya militants against the state, they marched on the city of Ibadan, stormed the central prisons at Agodi and released most of the prisoners.

    Protests, demonstrations, rallies and strikes – and in some cases armed uprisings organized either by the working or the non-working poor – are more or less permanent features of all modern societies. These features of social and political earthquakes are more common and more pervasive in modern nations and societies in which the poor are made to endure severe and degrading forms of exploitation by their elites. For most of its existence as a nation, Nigeria has been such a nation of great exploitation of the poor.

    From my primary school days in late colonial Nigeria to my early adulthood in the late 1960s when I was an undergraduate at Ibadan, virtually all the protests, demonstrations, strikes and armed uprisings in our country were connected to the direct appropriation of surplus produced by farmers and workers. However, by the mid-1970s when I returned from graduate studies abroad to take up a lectureship at my alma mater to the mid-1980s when I was one of the leaders of ASUU, things had changed drastically. But the change was due neither to the mere passage of time nor to the indisputable factor of new and younger generations coming into the historical scene. Rather, what had changed was the fact that the mode of surplus extraction had undergone a sea change bringing in its wake new logics and forms of protests, strikes, demonstrations and insurrections. Let me explain.

    If I am not misreading the historical facts, the massacre of peasants in Bakolori, Sokoto State, in 1980, was about the last major brutal crushing of a peasant revolt based on rejection by the peasants of dispossession of their land, their primary means of production, of livelihood. Long before the Bakolori massacre, we had gone through horrendous social upheavals leading to and culminating in the civil war itself in which blood flowed freely through both state and non-state violence – pogroms, ethnic cleansing and alleged genocide. Unlike, the General Strike of 1964, the Agbekoya Revolts and the Bakolori uprising, none of these pre- and post-civil war upheavals had anything to do with the direct appropriation of surplus produced by the labour of farmers and workers; rather, in one form or another, they all had their roots, directly or indirectly, in the politics of the appropriation of wealth from offshore crude oil production as the primary source of social surplus extraction by our political elites.

    For Nigerians born after 1980, the year of the Bakolori massacre, the benchmark expressions of social upheavals are – in no particular order of priority – Niger Delta militants; ASUU strikes; and the jihadist terror campaign of Boko Haram. To this list, we should perhaps add the periodic cycles of massacres between “indigenes” and “settlers” in some states of the North, principally Plateau State. There is of course a vast incommensurability between these expressions of social discontent in oil-rich but poverty stricken Nigeria. Indeed, given my own personal political and ideological history and experience, I would be the first to shudder at bringing ASUU strikes into the same orbit as Boko Haram and the settler-indigene massacres of Plateau State. [Parenthetically, I might note here that it was the fact of recently encountering the prominence that Chimamanda Adichie gives ASUU strikes in her latest novel, Americanah, that once again brought to my attention just how big ASUU strikes have become in the national imagination] The line that connects ASUU strikes to these other bizarre and horrendous expressions of social discontent is the simple but profound fact that the mode of surplus extraction by our endlessly corrupt elites has changed fundamentally from the means of exploitation that precipitated the General Strike of 1964 and the Agbekoya Revolt. In other words, this line takes us from direct exploitation of the products of the labor of farmers and workers to vastly expanded surplus extraction from the labor of a few thousands of oil rig workers, the great majority of them working offshore.

    I do not wish to overstate this change in the mode of surplus extraction in Nigeria in the last thirty to forty years. Farmers and farming communities are still producing the bulk of food consumed in the country, even if supplementation through food imports is constantly rising. And in spite of continuing drastic declines in the utilization of installed industrial capacities leading to shrinkage of industrialization for light consumer goods production for the whole West Africa region, Nigeria is not Gabon, it is not the Central African Republic; we still have magnates who make their wealth from industrial and commercial activities. But in the course of my lifetime, things have changed profoundly with regard to how most of the rich make their wealth and correspondingly how the poor and the dispossessed are made penurious and alienated. And it so happens that since the median age of Nigerians is 19, the vast majority of my compatriots happen to be those who were born after 1980, the year of the Bakolori massacre. As I earlier observed in this piece, Bakolori was the last great revolt waged – and crushed – on the basis of direct exploitation of farmers’ and worker’s labour or means of production.

    The most obvious and deleterious consequence of the change from extraction of surplus from direct exploitation of labour to derivation of vastly expanded surplus from offshore oil production is that both wealthy Nigerians and the state made in their image no longer feel any great pressure to respect workers’ and famers’ labour in particular and all labour in general. In my youth and within the radical circles in which I moved, we took seriously the slogan, “labour creates wealth”, almost like an article of faith. Perhaps to a lesser degree, so did the rest of the society, the governments of the regions and the government at the centre inclusive. Labour creates wealth. You have to treat labour with respect, fairness and dignity, even if sometimes you were forced to do so through demonstrations, rallies, strikes and armed uprisings. And if labour is the source of wealth, labour is also the source of value. And as the source of value, labour is what holds everything together; it is the cement that keeps the building blocks of social cohesion securely in their places within the united whole. Again with the proviso that I do not wish to idealize or romanticize the past, I would nonetheless argue that with all its imperfections and terrible crises that ultimately led to a harrowing civil war, the Nigeria of the first half of my lifetime so far was based on this principle.

    As noted in the title of this piece, I am addressing this essay primarily to younger compatriots, those of the generations that came after the great sea change from the direct exploitation of the products of labour as the source of surplus extraction by our elites to oil wealth based mostly on offshore production as a source of accumulation that seems to have little or no need for the labour of the vast majority of the populace. In plain terms, the Nigeria into which our younger compatriots were born and are being born is a Nigeria in which the elites, by an overwhelming consensus, feel and act as if labour and value do not matter, at least as long as the oil keeps flowing. It is a Nigeria in which social discontents and upheavals not only keep rising but are also taking ever more bizarre and terrifying forms.

    There are many reasons for this, but one big factor we must bear in mind is the fact that with the disappearance of labour and value as the linchpins of social cohesion and national unity, corruption has become the glue that keeps the society together. In lieu of equitable distribution of the social surplus through respect for and fairness to labour, corruption has become the primary means of redistribution without which everything would finally cave in. But corruption can never be a socially beneficial means of redistribution of wealth. And neither can it serve as a strong, durable glue for social cohesion. This observation, this claim will be the starting point for next week’s continuation of the series.

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Falling and getting up, again and again, through snow, ice and sleet: a morality tale

    Falling and getting up, again and again, through snow, ice and sleet: a morality tale

    Oluwa yo pa alo ati abo re mo [May the Lord keep your going and your coming sanctified and safe]
    A benediction of biblical derivation

    THE first fall happened around the third minute of a 20-minute walk. It was Thursday and I had just ended my last class for the week. I think it was the anticipation of a restful weekend that made me walk rather briskly, even thought I was well aware that I was walking on heavily snow-covered pavements. Because of the briskness of my walk, that first fall was a very bad one. As I slipped and lost my balance, the velocity of my walk turned my whole body into a human projectile, hurtling me into a long slide on the pavement that was eventually broken when my feet rammed into the pillars of a coffee house on the street. Badly shaken, I realized that if the path of my long but swift slide had been head-first and not feet-first, it would have been my head that would have rammed into the pillars and I might in all likelihood have suffered a concussion. By the time a few bystanders had rushed to my help, I had picked myself up, greatly relieved that I was alright, no bones broken, no hips displaced and, yes, no concussion. Since at the time I did not know, indeed could not have known that this would be the first of more falls that would total six or seven before I finally got home that afternoon, what is this essay about and why am I extrapolating from my many falls that afternoon what I call a morality tale?

    As the well known adage goes, to be forewarned is to be forearmed. For more than forty-eight hours before my misadventures on the snow-covered, icy pavements of Putnam Avenue in Cambridge, Massachusetts on Thursday this week, an “advisory” had been persistently put out on radio and TV by meteorological experts and the civil authorities asking the populace of the Greater Boston area to expect another blizzard that was projected to last from dawn Thursday to mid-afternoon on Friday. Stay home if you don’t have any important or urgent business to do outside, we had been warned. Don’t drive; walk or take public transportation if you have to go out. Many schools were closed, especially the kindergartens and crèches of young children, the so-called pre-schoolers. In the institution in which I teach, the authorities adopted a “wait-and-see” approach: the morning and early afternoon classes were kept open while the evening classes were cancelled with the proviso that if things got really very bad, all classes would be cancelled at very short notice.

    My class that day was an early afternoon class. To be forewarned is to be forearmed. Since I had to go and teach my class that day, I was very conscious of the warnings, the “advisory” that had been widely publicized concerning what to expect and how to prepare oneself for it. But I am a man from the tropics, from the warm, snowless, blizzard-less regions of the planet, even though I have lived and worked now in the temperate zones for a little more than two decades. As I left my apartment intending to go, teach and promptly return home, I looked like the proverbial snowman in my dressing, accoutered like the locals from the tip of my head to the soles of my shoes. Well, eventually, I was to realize that the soles of my shoes did not exactly fit what the denizens, the locals would normally arm themselves with in a blizzard. For in place of rugged boots with rough-hewn, serrated soles designed to yield a firm grip on snow-covered, icy pavements, I had shoes that were fur-lined for warmth inside but had soles that were as smooth as the face of a mirror.

    In wearing this kind of shoes, I wasn’t being foolhardy; rather, what I thought was that the fresh snow that began to fall that morning would cover the ice that had formed from the frozen snow of the blizzard of the previous week. In general and with a little bit of caution, people don’t slip and fall on fresh, heavy snow; it is when the snow turns to ice that the streets, the pavements become treacherous for walkers. And indeed, as I walked to go and teach my class mid-morning that eventful day, the snow was falling very heavily but there wasn’t the slightest indication that the pavement was slippery and treacherous. But then, between the time of my “going” mid-morning and the time of my “coming” mid-afternoon, wet snow, sleet and freezing rain had mixed with the snow and the result was that the icy undertow of the pavement that had been covered in the morning had become exposed by late afternoon. May the Lord keep our going and coming sanctified and safe!

    After that bad, nasty fall, I became more careful, more “tactical” in my walk. I thought that all I had to do was to rein in the briskness of my walk and keep an eye for the spots to avoid on the pavement. But then about two minutes later, I slipped and fell again. Even though this second fall was not as bad and fearful as the first, I was shaken and became nonplussed. Apparently, I did not know what was in store for me. But by the time that I fell the third time with still a long way to go before I got to my apartment, I came to the sudden and very sobering realization that on this day among days, even with the greatest caution I could muster, there was no assurance, no guarantee that I would not fall again and again. This realization came simultaneously with my awareness that, like a boatman who suddenly realizes in the middle of a sea far from the shores that his vessel had sprung a big leak, the shoes I had on would be the very instrument of my falling again and again on the ice-strewn pavement.

    That moment of awareness that I was, so to speak, trapped by and in my shoes was also a moment of a resolution with my fate, with the providential order in the universe that come what may, I would get to my house in one whole unbroken piece! Yes, I am almost certainly going to keep falling, I said to myself, but I am not going to break my neck or my limbs; I am not going to have a fall as bad and nasty as the first one; and I am not going to black out from a concussion! If and when I fall again, it would not be a bad fall and it would not catch my by complete surprise. Indeed, I became metaphysical and said to myself, he that falls but is not crushed by his fall will rise again; let him fall times without number, he will rise again! And isn’t falling and rising, and falling and rising yet again part of the human condition? The Lord will keep our going and coming sanctified and safe!

    For those of my readers who know only too well my solid secular “iwalesin” worldview and may therefore wonder about my invocation of the grace and will of the Lord several times in this piece, I give assurance that my extraordinary experience this past Thursday has not reconverted me back to a religious, metaphysical worldview. In the tradition of the secular humanism and the materialist, life-enhancing spirituality to which I have devoted the entirety of my adult life, we have our own expressive idiom for the epigraph to this essay that I have repeated several times in this piece and it is captured in the saying that heaven helps only those who help themselves. Altogether, I fell about six or seven times, absolutely without regard to all attempts that I made to stay on my feet, to walk the pavement and not become a human sled on it.

    There is no dignity in falling, brothers and sisters, especially in falling again and again within the same period of time. With each fall, a little bit of my self-composure, if not my self-respect, disappeared. While this lasted, I became an unwilling and unwitting embodiment of awkwardness and ungainliness. Indeed, I became a little paranoid, looking back and around me every time that I fell to see if anyone was laughing or was secretly jeering at me. I am happy to report that the thought was in my mind, not in the real world. With my falls, the few people in the street at the time looked away in embarrassment and perhaps also in sympathy. I would like to think that some of them might have realized that something unusual was going on. Some might even have recognized the cause of the mishap: the encounter of plain and non-serrated shoe soles with a treacherously icy pavement.

    I understand that in the United States, every year thousands of people either die outright or suffer great and crippling disabilities from falling on icy pavements during the winter season. So I consider myself lucky for having emerged from the mishaps of this last Thursday without any broken bones and any temporary or permanent physical disabilities. I suppose this is what led me to the morality tale that I have in this piece tried to extract from the experience. The will of humankind is insuperable; it will rise again and again from failures, defeats and catastrophes. This is what oppressors don’t know. It is what those who fight for the poor, the weak and the dispossessed must base their hope and faith that even the most depressingly oppressive conditions can be changed.

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Talakawa in the richest country in the world: reflections on Obama’s State of the Union Speech 2014 (2)

    Talakawa in the richest country in the world: reflections on Obama’s State of the Union Speech 2014 (2)

    I readily admit the unexpected irony in the real life event and experience that gave rise to the subject of my reflections in this series. In a time and a climate that made me feel so far away from home, Obama’s State of the Union Speech for 2014 surprisingly made me feel that, with regard to the fundamental moral and economic questions concerning the wealth and the poverty of the nations of the planet, I was actually so close to home that it actually began to feel as if I was still at home. In concrete terms, Obama’s speech made me realize that, as in Nigeria, there are legions of talakawa and almajaris in America. Moreover and again as in Nigeria, their ranks, their numbers are growing.

    I do not of course wish to ignore or even downplay the vast differences between Nigeria and the United States, especially with regard to the all-important question of the structure of the relationship between wealth and poverty in the two countries. My point is precisely that because, as in weather and climate, there are vast and seemingly incommensurable differences between the two countries, we should not allow ourselves to miss or ignore the remarkable similarities between the two societies. By this, I do not mean the rather abstract and hackneyed saying that human beings and human communities are the same everywhere. In very precise terms, Obama’s speech made me see so clearly as I had never done before that even though America is the heartland of global capitalism and Nigeria, with all its oil wealth, is one of the most perilous peripheral capitalist countries in the world, the things that drive poverty and inequality in the two countries are remarkably similar.

    Well, to convince the skeptical reader that my central argument in this series does not ignore the vast differences between the United States and our country, Nigeria, let me detail some of the most important and definitive differences of economy and society in the two countries. In gross domestic product – GDP in its shortened acronym form – the difference between Nigeria and the United States is like comparing the summit of the Himalayas to the lowlands of the world that are barely above sea level. Think of it: 15. 68 trillion dollars (US) to 405 billion dollars (Nigeria). Put in terms of population sizes, this means that while the population of the United States is roughly two times greater than that of Nigeria, the total value of goods and services produced in the United States is about thirty-two times greater than the total value of goods and services produced in our country annually. Which is perhaps why the per capita income – average personal income per year – of the United States is, at 42,953 dollars (2012) so vastly bigger than Nigeria’s per capita income of only 1052 dollars (also for 2012).

    There are even more startling indices of great difference between Nigeria and the U.S. in economy and technology that ought to caution us not to simply lump the two countries together when we are talking of wealth and poverty and the quality of life. For me, one of the most crucial differences is the fact that while the United States is the foremost country in the world in terms of research and development (R & D), in the last two decades, Nigeria’s infrastructures and performance at all levels of education have declined exponentially and our country’s status as a scientific and technological society in the modern world has hit rock bottom. Certificates from Nigeria’s universities are now regarded with dubiousness of their quality almost throughout the world. Indeed, quite recently, institutions and organizations based in the United States that are responsible for organizing examinations like the GRE (Graduate Record Examination) and the SAT (Standard Aptitude Test) have cancelled all Nigerian centers for conducting their examinations and as a result, Nigerian candidates for the examinations necessarily have to travel to Ghana to take the tests!

    The consequences of differences between the two countries in these particular areas are nothing short of truly sobering for in the modern world in all the regions and nations of the planet, poverty and inequality find fruitful environments to grow and fester in educationally, scientifically and technologically backward countries. We are becoming one of the most educationally backward countries not just in the world, but on the African continent itself. Only a Nigerian whose patriotism is as obdurate as it is ignorant will fail to recognize and worry about the fact that gradually and seemingly inexorably, education, science and technology are being driven out of the organization of life in our society, to be replaced by an otiose, idolatrous and infantilizing religiosity that pervades all aspects of life in our society.

    In the face of such vast and consequential differences between the United States and Nigeria, it would seem that it is mere dogmatic anti-capitalism to insist in seeing in Obama’s State of the Union Speech intimations of similarities and even common causes and connections between the talakawa and almajaris of the two countries. But this is not the case. The most persuasive reason for saying this is that there are many capitalist countries in the contemporary world that are radically different from the United States and Nigeria with regard to how they deal with poverty and inequality, countries like those in Scandinavia and South America where everything possible under the framework of capitalism is being done to lessen the gap between the haves and have-nots. And there is a country like China- which I have visited several times and in which I have done extensive internal travels – in which a form of state capitalism, with all its problems and crises, is doing a lot to substantially eradicate poverty if not wipe it out. Thus, the real motivating factor in this series is not a spurious and dogmatic anti-capitalism; rather, it is the need for us to recognize and engage the things that are remarkably similar between Nigeria and the United States in spite of the many differences that I have identified and discussed. In bringing the series to its conclusion, let me now briefly identify the major expressions of these similarities, common causes and connections between our two countries and economies.

    In the present historical phase of capitalism as a global phenomenon, the central ideological, political and ethical divide is between, on the one hand, progressive and democratic forces that want to regulate capital so as to hold it accountable to the needs of the public good and economic justice and, on the other hand, those forces that would go to the limits of institutional legality and the ends of the earth itself to keep capital unregulated. The powers that be and the hegemonic political systems in Nigeria and the United States are, at least for the moment, dominated by the forces of both relative and absolute deregulation. In both countries and their economies, privatization has achieved something of the status of an orthodoxy, a fanaticism that is secular in its uses but religious in its discourses and mystifications. And in both countries, privatization is nothing but another name for the massive transfer of wealth to a few hands at the expense of the overwhelming majority of the population.

    In Nigeria and present-day United States, the dominance of capital over regulation and the public good receives its greatest cover or protection from monumental levels of corruption that have legality and institutional authority and prestige behind them. In the United States, this is best seen in the widely discussed fact that big financial services enterprises like hedge funds and investment banks cheat their clients of hundreds of billions of dollars and get away with it. How does the same process operate in Nigeria? Well, from chairmen of local councils to executive state governors all the way to the presidency, hundreds, trillions of naira are stolen and looted in plain sight and nobody is punished, nobody goes to jail. Transparency International consistently ranks Nigeria as one of the most corrupt nations in the world; it is time for that organization to recognize the United States, in the legal and institutional cover that it gives to corporate greed and cheating, the most corrupt country in the world.

    One of the things that I personally find endlessly intriguing in contemporary discussions of poverty and inequality in the United States is the claim, hardly disputed by anyone on the Left or the Right, that 1% of the population corners the lion’s share of the wealth that is produced in the country. Isn’t this rather like Nigeria where 7 out of ten live below the absolute poverty line and if you extend the poverty to relative then the figure approaches 9 out of ten? To this question can be added the observation that in both Nigeria and the United States, these horrendous income gaps are stoutly, cynically defended by the rich and the powerful. In the United States, the over-affluent 1% proportionately pays less tax than most of the income groups in the country and in Nigeria it has been as long and futile to know exactly how much our legislators are paid as it has been to stop them from cornering the lion’s share of our national wealth.

    Since I wrote the first essay in this series last week, a monster snowstorm has hit large parts of the United States including the part in which I live and work, the Northeast. Climactically, it is a long, long way from home. But when I reflect on the things that I have discussed in this series, I find that the moral and ideological realties of the place I call home and the country of my sojourn indicate that I am really in the same climate, the same season of despair for so many in the face of obscene wealth for the few. The hope, the aspiration is that the other climates and seasons in the world wherein poverty and inequality are being greatly reduced may spread to the length and breadth of the planet. This will require more than a pious hope; it will require looking beyond the superficial differences that mask so much that unites us in this world.

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Talakawa in the richest country in the world: reflections on Obama’s State of the Union Speech 2014 (1)

    Talakawa in the richest country in the world: reflections on Obama’s State of the Union Speech 2014 (1)

    Irinajo lawa yi o, ori gbe wa dele/Irinajo lawa yi o, ori gbe wa dele
    [We are journeying far from home, fate, lead us safely home/We are in a foreign land, fate, see us safely home]

    A traditional Yoruba song of travellers

    Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.A, in the grip of a winter that is one of the most severe in recent memory. It is bitterly cold. The cold is made even more bracing by the fact that I have just come back from home where I spent most of December 2013 and the first twenty-four days of January 2014. Moreover, January at home had been unseasonably warm for where one had expected the chastening but bearable cold of the harmattan, it had been day after day of too much heat, too much warmth. From that to this: from unseasonable warmth to excessive cold. As I walk to my first class of the new semester, I can feel the steely chill of the cold in my bones. But for the fact that I have to earn my keep and go and teach my class, I would have stayed indoors in my apartment ensconced within the comfort of its centrally heated warmth.

    My first class of the new term goes very well. I am lucky to have students who are bright, eager and endlessly curious. The class is the first meeting of a course on the literary and cultural production of Africa’s diasporas in Europe, the Americas and the Caribbean. I tell the students that we will read the works of old and young, dead and living master novelists like Alejo Carpentier, Toni Morrison and Chimamanda Adichie and watch the films of classic filmmakers like Tomas Gutierrez Alea, Julie Dash and Euzhan Palcy. I tell them that the African presence in the world encountered through the artists and writers of the African diaspora is a field of imagination and accomplishment in the face of tragedy and trauma. I tell them through the works of these diasporic writers, artists and intellectuals, Africa is in the world and the world is in Africa. I tell them that the homeland that is Africa has extended itself into homes away from home in every continent, every region in the world. As I tell my students these things, one part of my mind is aware of the fact that the words are meant as much for me as for my young audience. You are away from home, I am telling myself, but home is not too far away.

    For the two hours of the duration of the class, I completely forget the bitterness of the cold and my unquenchable longing for the home that I have just left in Nigeria with its climactic and human warmth. But as soon as the class is over and I am in my office dealing with my accumulated unanswered emails, the yearning for home comes back with the force of hurricane winds. It is only a little after 5 o’clock and it is already dark. Soon, I shall have to walk through the bitter cold to get to my apartment. And when I get there, I shall be alone. I have friends in Cambridge and my children and my partner are easily reachable by phone, so I am not exactly bereft of human company. But I have just left Oke-Bola, Ibadan and the Ogunbiyis in Victoria Island; Cambridge is and feels like a world apart from these homely places I have just left. With these thoughts, the words of the song that serves as the epigraph for this essay begin to buzz and resound in my head as if my head is an echo chamber. “Irinajo lawa yi o, ori gbe wa dele”.

    After an early supper, I turn on the TV to watch the live broadcast of Obama’s State of the Union Speech for 2014. It is a masterful speech. Recent polls show that public opinion of Obama as president is at its lowest since 2008 when he assumed office as the most powerful politician in the world. It is perhaps on account of this dour fact that Obama put everything he could muster in the arts of oratory and rhetoric into this speech. Time after time in the slightly more than one hour that it took to deliver the speech, his audience rose to give him loud, cheering and prolonged ovation. And quite remarkably, in some instances, the ovation was joined by Obama’s arch-enemies, Tea Party Republicans.

    Two of the three loudest and most prolonged ovations came when Obama asked for equal pay for women and men and when he declared that in the face of inaction from Congress, he was raising the minimum wage for contractors for federal patronage to 10 dollars and ten cents per hour by executive order. These two declarations were based on the central theme of the speech, this being inequality as marked by the growing chasm between the rich and the poor in the richest nation on the planet. Indeed, as I listened to Obama’s speech with its unrelenting emphasis on the tragedy and shame of great and widening circles of poverty in America, it was as if I was back at home in Nigeria. With a rude awakening near the end of Obama’s speech, I realised that the talakawa and the almajaris are also here in their tens of millions in the very heartland of global capitalism. I am far away from home; but I am not that far away because beneath the impressive, indeed stunning physical, infrastructural and material development of America, the fundamental social and existential crises and dilemmas are like the ones I am all too familiar with in my homeland.

    Without going into details of comparative statistical data in which there are indeed great differences between America as the richest nation on the planet and Nigeria as one of the poorest countries in the world, I would nonetheless argue that there are indeed striking similarities in the incidence and experience of poverty in the two countries. First of all, there is the general, indeed almost universal feeling in both countries that not only is there a great gap between the haves and the have-nots but also that this gap is widening. Secondly, there is also the fact that in spite of the widening circles of poverty, wealth exists in great quantities in both countries: Nigeria is awash with petrodollars and petronaira; and of course, America is home to the almighty dollar, the currency of choice for exchange between the currencies of all the other countries and economies of the world. Thirdly, there is the fact that the burden of rising and deepening poverty in both countries is falling too much on the young, including the highly educated young. Fourthly, there is the widespread phenomenon of the working poor as a social and economic category distinct and separable from the jobless, non-working poor. Indeed, in Nigerian parlance, I would call the former the talakawa of America and the latter the almajaris of the U.S.A. Finally, there is the fact of the great and depressing complacency of the political class, of the ruling elites in the face of the deepening chasm between the few who are very rich and the teeming multitudes of the poor.

    The Honourable Abike Dabiri-Erewa was present on the high table when I gave a public lecture at the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs in Lagos on July 13, 2013. On any index of ideological progressivism, Abike Dabiri-Erewa must be one of the most progressive and enlightened members of the Nigerian National Assembly. As one of the respondents to my lecture, she gave a short commentary in which she strongly identified with most of my observations and the observations of others at the lecture calling for social justice and equality of opportunities for Nigerians of all groups and classes. Then because in my lecture I had identified the jumbo salaries and allowances that members of our National Assembly are being paid from our national coffers as one of the leading structural causes of inequality and poverty in Nigeria, a large segment of the audience began to loudly demand that Honourable Dabiri-Erewa tell the audience exactly how much each “honourable” in Nigeria is paid. When she didn’t seem to be forthcoming, the loud demand became a chant, a din, a clamor for the truth. But to the end, she stood her ground and refused to divulge that closely guarded secret of our parliamentarians.

    This whole essay is based on Obama’s 2014 State of the Union speech in which he not only spoke forcefully and eloquently on poverty and inequality in America but also identified their causes and probable remedies. This indicates a marked contrast with the scenario I have just described of the response of one of the most progressive and enlightened members of our National Assembly to the demand that she break ranks with the cult of secrecy that surrounds the legalised looting of our national coffers by our parliamentarians. In other words, Obama stands before a combined meeting of both houses of American lawmakers and speaks frankly and forcefully urging the lawmakers to join him in attacking the scourges of inequality and poverty thereby showing a stark difference with our own lawmakers in Nigeria. Given this fact, is it valid to talk of a complacency of political elites in both countries, the U.S.A. and Nigeria? Are the social and ethical landscapes surrounding the talakawa and the almajaris of America and Nigeria the same? My response to these questions is an unequivocal yes, in spite of the apparent differences. In next week’s concluding essay in the series, I shall start from this premise hoping to show that the inevitable great climactic differences should not obscure the common sources, the linkages between inequality and poverty in our world.

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • ‘BJ, what is it that you and Mama Sagamu see in Nollywood films?’ (2)

    ‘BJ, what is it that you and Mama Sagamu see in Nollywood films?’ (2)

    [For Akinwunmi Isola, raconteur, master storyteller and cineaste]

    It seems so obvious now that it surprises me a lot that I did not readily or easily realize as I watched Nollywood films with Mama Sagamu that the producers and marketers of Nollywood do not make their films for people like me who do not talk back to or with the characters in their films. More pointedly, it surprises me now why, for a long time, I did not or could not answer Sade’s question with the simple but irrefutable answer that Nollywood filmmakers do not care one jot about people like Sade who ask what people see in their films. I mean, let’s face the fact here squarely: if hundreds of millions of people in Nigeria, Africa and around the world are watching your films and talking to characters in those films, what does it matter if cultural and social elites who do not talk back at films raise questions about the value of your films? As I see all too clearly now thanks to the humility that Mama Sagamu rather unknowingly taught me, this matter is like asking the makers of Hollywood blockbusters what the millions of filmgoers who flock to see their films see in their products. Terminator 1, 2 and 3 – what do the hundreds of millions of viewers worldwide who have seen and continue to watch them see in these films? Ask such a question if you wish, but both the makers and fans of these films are completely indifferent to the question.

    I make this allusion to Hollywood blockbusters deliberately. There is a vast commercial, cultural and cinematic chasm separating the world of the big mega-studios that produce Hollywood blockbusters and the universe of the producers and marketers of Nollywood video films. For one thing, Hollywood studios spend vast sums of money to advertize, promote and “hype” their films. Moreover, they do have a more or less captive audience that was created over several decades. By contrast, Nollywood producers and marketers are still in the historic process of creating and consolidating their audience base. And if the truth must be told, they are as surprised as everybody else that people like Mama Sagamu love to watch their films. But having admitted these huge differences between Hollywood and Nollywood with regard to the creation and consolidation of audiences counted in the hundreds of millions, there are certain common features that both traditions share that throw considerable light on that question from Sade: “what is it that you and Mama Sagamu see in Nollywood films?” Let me explain.

    It is a fundamental aspect of cultural modernity in every part of the world that capitalism seeks to create audiences for the arts, for music, for sports and almost all other forms of entertainment and recreation in their millions, indeed in their hundreds of millions. The key thing in this is to find the winning and repeatable formula that will keep the audiences coming and watching in their millions or in some cases even billions. It is thanks largely to Mama Sagamu that I came to realize that before our very eyes and without anyone knowing exactly how it all happened, Nollywood filmmakers have found the winning and repeatable formula that puts them far ahead and above any other national film tradition in Africa in terms of attracting audiences across the whole continent and the African diasporas in Europe, the Americas and the Caribbean. This is why in last week’s opening piece in this column I made the assertion that the single greatest historic and cultural significance of Nollywood is the fact that, for good or ill, it has completely replaced Hollywood and Bollywood films as the preferred traditions of films that Africans love to watch.

    There is a theoretical or philosophical principle behind this achievement, but I have no room in this piece to explore it beyond merely identifying and stating it. This is the principle of the fundamental cultural, human and existential right and need of all the peoples of our common earth to self-representation. In plain language, this philosophical principle implies that as much as people everywhere in the world like to see and watch images of peoples from other lands and cultures, people everywhere prefer images and stories of themselves written and told by and for themselves. This is what Nollywood has achieved by massively displacing Hollywood and Bollywood as the cultural and commercial forces that for a very long time dominated the cinematic images that people in our continent could see. The interesting thing is why it was/is Nollywood which effected this “decolonization” and not any of the other national cinemas and video industries in Africa. Again, let me say that it was Mama Sagamu that made this perception very apparent, very clear to me.

    Let me put these observations and claims in some very concrete terms. On the MNET-Africa Magic channels that are broadcast twenty-four hours round the clock, Nollywood films overwhelmingly dominate the films that are watched throughout the African continent. I do not have the exact figures, but it would not surprise me to learn that the dominance is as great as a factor of five to one in favour of Nollywood films compared with films from other African countries. More tellingly, Nollywood film stars are the best known and the most talked about in Africa, many of them being household names, names that show up in reports and even in comedy routines in many African countries. Speaking for myself, apart from a few Ghanaian actors, I do not know the names of any stars from South Africa or Tanzania or indeed any other country that command the attention, the allure of Nollywood actors. Thus, we arrive at the very intriguing fact that just as millions of audiences of Nollywood films talk back to the characters, so do millions also talk a lot about and are obsessed with the actors themselves. Above all else and more subliminally, it is becoming more and more apparent that a Nollywood content and style, a Nollywood formula of video filmmaking is beginning to creep into the filmmaking contents, styles and techniques of films from many of the other African countries.

    This last point is about the most challenging task that we face in coming to some kind of critical and productive determination of Sade’s question that served as the catalyst for this series. If there is a composite Nollywood content, style or formula that has Mama Sagamu talking with and to the characters of Nollywood films in the intimacy of her own home or at the Ogunbiyis in Victoria Island, what is it? In the present context and as preliminary interpretive act, I can only provide a very broad outline of this Nollywood formula of filmmaking that has been so widely successful as to effect that “decolonization” of cinema in Africa from the dominance of Hollywood and Bollywood. Thus, first, a gripping melodrama of good versus evil is a constant factor in the scripts and storylines of Nollywood films. This is important if we bear in mind that melodrama is the most successful and popularizing genre of the modern era, especially in cinema. Secondly, there is the fact that Nollywood melodramas are acted with great, perhaps even exaggerated emotion, far more than films from other African countries. Thirdly, the same actors show up again and again in variations of the same melodramatic struggles of good against evil in Nollywood films. Moreover, these actors have so perfected their roles and routines that upon their very first appearance in a film, they elicit instant approving or enthralled responses from their adoring audiences. But then, there arises the question as to how this combination of content, formula and routines emerged and crystallize as the winning hallmarks of the Nollywood brand. I raise this point not as something to be explored in this series but as a topic for further reflection in a future series in this column.

    Melodrama, in every genre and culture in the world, provides a charged but extremely over-simplifying presentation and “resolution” of the problems and crises of society and life itself. Nollywood video films have taken this tendency of melodrama to new, unprecedented levels of moral, spiritual and cultural darkness and depravity. The “solutions” provided in Nollywood films are often stunningly naïve and obfuscatory. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the overwhelming pervasiveness in Nollywood films of witchcraft and the occult as active determinants of human motivation, behaviour and fate. Indeed, it is doubtful if any other national tradition of filmmaking in modern times has been as deeply immersed in witchcraft and the occult as Nollywood films. This prompts the tantalizing question: Are Nollywood films so popular in the African continent because of, or in spite of their immersion in the occult?

    A lot is happening to and within Nollywood. It is almost safe to project now that from its present continent-wide popularity as the “decolonizing” nemesis of the dominance of Hollywood and Bollywood in Africa that is however very contradictory in its contents and styles, scriptwriters and cineastes are at work in Nollywood who are using the popularity and the impact of the tradition to provide equally entertaining but more enlightened, subtle and progressive films. To one such person, one such visionary this concluding piece in the series is dedicated. He is Akinwunmi Isola. I do not know if Mama Sagamu has seen any of his films. But I shall be sure to make available to her a copy of Isola’s most recent film, Ofinga, a powerful, moving and also highly entertaining drama on how moral and legal squabbles within an extended family threaten the sense of right and wrong, of the just and the unjust and indeed the very humanity of all the characters in the film. If and when Mama watches Ofinga, I promise for once to join her in her accustomed running commentary on films!

  • “BJ, what is it that you and Mama Sagamu see in Nollywood films?” (1)

    “BJ, what is it that you and Mama Sagamu see in Nollywood films?” (1)

    [For Madam Juliana Mogbonjubade Osiberu]

    This piece owes its origin to the daughter of the person to whom it is dedicated. She is Mrs. Sade Ogunbiyi. She never tires of asking me the question that serves as the title of this essay: “BJ, what it is that you and Mama Sagamu see in Nollywood films?” Sade’s mother is of course the august person to whom this piece is dedicated, Mrs. Juliana Mogbonjubade Osiberu, affectionately called “Mama Sagamu” by all her children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and family friends. She has lived a long and for the most part fortunate and blessed life, a life not without its own share of pain and tragedies, but a life all the same deeply cherished by all who know her. At 93 years of age, she looks and generally feels about twenty years younger than her real age. Last year, I teased her that the woman that I saw in a picture of her that was circulated to Sade’s circle of friends to mark her 93rd birthday was an “a-young-e beauty”. She replied that suitors were still bothering her day in day out with marriage proposals! Well, Nollywood producers and marketers, know that in this “young” 93 year-old heartthrob you have one of your most avid and dedicated fans!

    Her daughter’s question – “BJ, what is it that you and Mama Sagamu see in Nollywood” – goes completely ignored by Mama. Unlike me, she has never felt that she owes anyone any explanations regarding her passion for Nollywood films. Knowing this and because Sade’s question is almost always posed to me in Mama’s presence, I too have never really responded to the question. At best, I make a nearly inaudible and generally incoherent response to the question, thereby more or less implying that an interest, perhaps even a passion for Nollywood films is its own “explanation”, its own justification. This essay is a reflection on that non-response. But before coming to the issue, a word or two is necessary concerning the social and psychological circumstances of Mama Sagamu’s great and avid interest in Nollywood films.

    For at least a couple of decades now, the home of the Ogunbiyis on Victoria Island in Lagos has of course been a sort of home away from home to me and innumerable other friends of the family. In the long evolutionary movement of human sociality away from fear of any space or community beyond the primal horde of the hunter-gatherer clan or the family, the notion and reality of “home away from home” is one of the great humanizing inventions of our species. Hotels, motels, inns and other edifices of the modern hospitality industry are latter-day, commercialized versions of this tradition of “home away from home”. But even the best of them cannot remotely match the sustaining warmth and assurance of the home of a close family friend that serves one as a deeply cherished “home away from home”. This is the general context for my reflections on Mama Sagamu and her Nollywood interest: for different but also related reasons, she and I watch Nollywood films at the Ogunbiyis at Victoria Island just as if we are at our own homes, that is to say with completely free and unselfconscious abandon. Let me give a brief account of the actualities of this sort of spectatorship.

    Just as I do in my own house at Oke-Bola in Ibadan, I hardly ever go out when I am at the Ogunbiyis in V.I. For the most part and as I do in my own home, at the Ogunbiyis I read and write for much of the day and night in my room and then come downstairs to watch the DSTV channels for recreation. “Recreation” in this case involves watching channels for news, soccer – and of course Nollywood films, especially as broadcast twenty-four hours round the clock on the MNET-Africa Magic channels. Invariably, when Mama Sagamu and I are visiting in the same period, we end up being the only two watchers left when everyone else has either gone out or gone to bed. As we watch, Mama Sagamu runs a lively commentary on the film in question. Well, “commentary” is not the right word; more properly speaking, it is a dialogue, an interactive though one-sided conversation that she conducts with the characters and the action and on the screen. “Ha, eleyi o tile mo baye seri”. Ha, awon omo araye ma buru o! Olorun ma je kari ogun ota o! Kini arakunrin yi tile n ro, to n fi ara e we Olorun? [Ha, this one has no clue about the nature of life and existence. Ha, the world is full of wicked, evil people! May God protect us from the malevolent machinations of wicked people! What exactly is this young man thinking acting as if he is God?]

    Dear reader, these are only the shorter varieties of Mama Sagamu’s dialogue with Nollywood films. She is convinced that the films in general raise vital and timely issues of morality, conscience and public good. It is of course true that I have heard similar running commentary made on Nollywood films in restaurants, bars and the waiting rooms of local hospitals and clinics. What is different between these other contexts and spaces is the fact that they lack the intimacy and the complete ease and relaxation of either the home itself or, as in the present case, the home away from home. In other words, the full impact of Nollywood films on millions of viewers in our country and across the African continent is to be properly gauged in the responses, the passions that they elicit at the home, especially with their commanding dominance of available leisure or recreation time at home.

    I should at this point perhaps inform the reader that I have written several times before on Nollywood in the popular press. I have also given lectures in universities and colleges and participated in academic conferences on the Nigerian video film industry. Indeed, sometime in the second quarter of last year, I gave a very well received public lecture at Redeemer’s University titled, “What Is Right and What Is Wrong About Nollywood”. I now confess that as much as that question from Sade – “BJ, what is it that you and Mama Sagamu see in Nollywood films?” – has stayed at the back of my mind in all my writings and lectures on Nollywood, I have never actually addressed it. It is only now in the very act of writing out these reflections that I can understand why I have never addressed Sade’s question. Simply stated, I realize now that while I have been very intrigued by my experience of watching Nollywood films with Mama Sagamu, I have never really thought much of the full significance of the nature and form of Mama’s interest in Nollywood. This maybe because I have been unconsciously reluctant to speak for her, but I suspect that deep down, the real reason is that I do not yet know what to make of it in terms of both my set and evolving ideas on the great social and cultural currents of the country and the world in which we live.

    I confess that with regard to spectators’ attitudes, I am the extreme opposite or antithesis of Mama’s robust and lively exchange with the characters and melodramas of good and evil of Nollywood films. I absolutely never utter a word, either to the actors on the screen or to fellow watchers. As a matter of fact, this total taciturnity extends to nearly everything I watch, whether live performances on stage or scripted and filmed dramas transmitted by television and other electronic media. Indeed, let me now make a last confession here: I am silent, I am taciturn because the films and the stage dramas themselves, as well as the audiences’ responses to them, constitute a composite enactment to which I pay attention. In other words, as much at my own home or home away from home at the Ogunbiyis, also at restaurants, bars and the waiting rooms of local hospital clinics, I watch the screen and simultaneously watch people watching and reacting to the films. If this seems a little creepy, in mitigation I enter the plea of a scholar’s and cultural critic’s curiosity as well as the not insignificant fact that I make sure that nobody is ever made aware of the fact that I include them in what I am watching!

    Inevitably, I come back to that question posed by Sade. And now I respond to the question by saying that Mama Sagamu, without really knowing it, has taught me to approach Nollywood films with humility but also with a critical attentiveness to its impact on millions of people in our country and our continent, especially in the most intimate of our private spaces, this being the home. For behind Sade’s question is the presupposition that Nollywood is, for the most part, artistic trash and cultural garbage. This view of our cultural elites concerning the value of the Nigerian video film industry is not without considerable merit and I have said as much in many of my writings and lectures on Nollywood. But we must not ignore the import of perhaps the single greatest historical and cultural fact about Nollywood. This is the fact that for good or ill, it has not only completely displaced both Hollywood and Bollywood as the dominant forces in the films that our peoples watch in their hundreds of millions, but it has done so by carrying the “struggle” far beyond public spaces into the intimacies of our homes.

    Barely more than twenty years ago, if I and Mama Sagamu were watching any films at all at the Ogunbiyi’s home in Victoria Island, we would in all likelihood have been watching Bollywood films. I cannot imagine that Mama would have had much to say to the characters and dramas of Indian films! What portents can we discern in this vastly consequential transformation? This will be the starting point in next week’s concluding essay in the series in which I intend to let Mama’s dialogue with Nollywood films be my critical guide.

     

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Waiting at the departure lounge of life before our time in our 21st century world

    Waiting at the departure lounge of life before our time in our 21st century world

    Ask not for whom the bell tolls/It tolls for thee
    John Donne, “Meditation 17”

    [For James Tunde Sawyer, alias “Sir Soul”, R.I.P.]

    It was Yemi Ogunbiyi that called me late last week to tell me of the sad, sad news of the death of James Tunde Sawyer. And after that, the phone calls and SMS messages started going out and coming in: from me to some of my classmates and members of my generational cohort of undergraduates at the University of Ibadan; and from them to me. As typically happens in such cases, we exchanged memories of the departed in these calls and text messages. Sawyer was quite easily one of the most witty, engaging and colorful personalities in our set at U.I. He was also the General Secretary of the Students’ Union Executive in which I was the Public Relations Officer. His sense of humour and capacity to make others laugh was without equal. Rotund, stocky and heavyset, he had a nimbleness of intelligence and a lightness of spirit that seemed at variance with his physique. He turned the lectures of our lecturers and professors on their head, transforming the lectures into parodic versions of the original in his inimitable and scintillatingly delightful extemporizations. He gave catchy nicknames to classmates that appeared too enraptured, too stricken by the great figures and texts of British literature. Personally, I found the nickname that he gave Jacob Tunde Somoye, also gone from us for more than a decade now and one of the members of the English class of 1967, the most inspired and inspiring. The nickname was – “Inspira!” [Pronounced In-spi-rah]

    Somoye was incurably intoxicated by the English Romantic poets, especially Keats and Shelley. He was also drunk on 20th Neo-Romantic writings in all the genres. He carried a copy of James Joyce’s The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man with him everywhere he went. But the poetry of 19th century British Romanticism was his real love. He could and loved to recite dozens, scores of lines from Keats and Shelley. And as he did so, Somoye seemed to have been transported into another world quite separate from this world. Sawyer found this very theatrical and wildly funny and not without some admiration, he called Somoye’s recitations nothing less than the mark of unselfconscious and besotted “Inspiration”! And from this came the nickname “Inspira!”

    For some time before his transition in early December 2013, Sawyer had dropped out of sight. Nobody saw or heard of him. It appears now that he had been gravely ill and may in fact have been dying. I have not yet gotten details of either his final illness or the precise nature of his demise. Only, I know that it was quite unlike him to keep to himself, to fail to answer calls or even initiate contacts. And side by side with his death, this is what troubles me the most, this thought that the illness that took him literally away from this life had before his demise substantially taken him away from his circle of friends.

    There is a philosophical tradition that holds that dying is a profoundly lonely experience, even if and when one dies in a war or a disaster that takes away hundreds or thousands of lives. Just as we are born, we die alone, each person with his birth or death – so goes this grimly realistic eschatology on life’s final moments. The existentialists in particular believe that death is probably the most unique and sovereign act or experience available to each member of our human species. But I contend that death also has its profoundly social and even generational coordinates. And this aspect of death and dying is what came to my mind when the news of Sawyer’s death came to me.

    I had thought of giving this essay the title, “A plague or epidemic of deaths before 70”. For this is a prevalent thought, indeed a gnawing premonition of members of my generation, almost without exception. As an illustration of this observation, please consider the fact that with news of Sawyer’s death and exchange of memories about him and his life, we all, members of his generational cohort, expressed fears and worries that too many of us had gone and are going, year by year and inexorably. Moreover, a significant number of those of this generation who are living seem gravely ill. As a matter of fact, the title that I finally settled on for this piece comes from one of our classmates at U.I., Dr. Olugbemi Akinkoye, alias “Sir Koye”. As far back as nearly a decade ago when singly and collectively we were either in our late 50s or early 60s, “Sir Koye” had made that pronouncement that we were all in the departure lounge of life. To this pronouncement I had replied that if that was the case, then I should perhaps revert to a very bad habit of my early adulthood, the habit of arriving late at airports and thereby missing scheduled flights!

    It is necessary to recall here the grim wisdom of the existentialists that whether one dies old or young, at twenty or at eighty, one dies alone, each woman or man with his or her fate. But then, there arises the fact that the trope of the departure lounge of life applies differentially across the diverse regions and nations of our world. We have the statistics and figures of national rates of life expectancy at birth as corroboration for this claim. At the figure of 83, countries like Japan and Switzerland stand as nations with the highest life expectancy rates in the world. Other countries of Western Europe and North America also have very high life expectancy rates; even some Latin American countries have figures in the mid to upper 70s. But at 52 for the year 2013, Nigeria has the 17th lowest life expectancy statistic in the world. With 64, Ghana has a figure that is 12 points better than our 52. Overall, the average life expectancy rate for the whole world is 68, putting us in Nigeria clear 16 points below this historic figure. The conclusion is inescapable: thanks largely to the miracles of modern medical science and a worldwide revolutionary spread in public and private sanitation, human beings are living significantly longer than our distant and recent ancestors did; but Nigeria is still way behind this modern achievement of expectation of long and relatively healthy life for most members of humankind.

    Because I live both in Nigeria and the United States, I have a rich basis for comparison of the effects and ramifications of this highly differentiated generational arrival at the “departure lounge of life” in which the figure for one country is 79 and that for the other country is 52. The key question, as I see it, is the phenomenon of habituated expectancy itself. In the last one decade, every time that I see a doctor in Nigeria, the body language, quite apart from explicit statements on diagnosis and prognosis, makes it clear to me that since I have entered into the seventh decade of my life, I must not ignore the relevance of “old age”. Conversely, no doctor in the United States has ever even remotely hinted that he or she considered me an “old man”; rather than this, the clear message to me is that if I do what is right, if I cultivate a healthy lifestyle, I can expect to live well into my 80s. Without revealing too much of very personal information concerning my medical profile in the last 20 years, I can say that I have had a renal dysfunction that I am absolutely certain would have caused the doctors in Nigeria to more or less have given up on me a long, long time ago. In other words, I am strongly convinced that had I been at the “mercy” of Nigerian doctors, I would long ago have either had to depend on dialysis or even a kidney transplant to either keep me alive or in a state worthy of a tolerably dignified existence. But not the physicians and nephrologists in the United States. They have been sanguine – and very successful! – in trying to convince me that in all likelihood, when I take my exit from this life in my allotted time, it will be something other than my renal dysfunction that will take me away.

    It would be too easy, too predictable to say that with greatly improved quality in health care delivery and public sanitation in Nigeria, the life expectancy at birth figure for the country will rise, perhaps even exponentially. Of course, this is indisputable. If African countries like Ghana and Algeria can have much better figures for their respective populations’ life expectancy, so can Nigeria, a country far richer than either Ghana or Algeria. But the issues go far deeper than improved infrastructures and practices of health care delivery and the medical sciences and arts of healing. As a member of a generation that has outlived the nation’s life expectancy figure of 52 and is therefore considered voyagers to the great beyond in the departure lounge of life, I bear bitter and desperate testimony to the fact that in our country, life itself has become too onerous, too deadly for the great majority of Nigerians, old and young, rich and poor. Form this perspective, I bear witness to the crying need to make life itself worthy of dignified, fulfilling existence for all Nigerians.

    I think Jimmy Sawyer would have found the notion of our generation sitting out a long or short, desperate or resigned vigil at that departure lounge of life immensely hilarious. In fond and grateful memory of my friend and classmate and his vast appetite for life, I hope that to the end, his good cheer and his lightness of spirit did not desert him. Sun re o, Sir Soul!

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Are Jonathan and PDP now liabilities for tolerable impunities of elite misrule? (2)

    Are Jonathan and PDP now liabilities for tolerable impunities of elite misrule? (2)

    n this concluding piece in a series that began in this column last week, perhaps I should start by admitting that the idea of tolerable impunities of elite misrule is a pessimistic, despairingly ironic notion. For ordinarily, there should never be talk of a “tolerable” or benign form of impunity in the misgovernment of any nation, any region of our world. This is because impunity of bad or mediocre elite governance is “tolerable” only to the rulers and even then only to that segment of the ruling class that occupies the seat of power, incumbency and patronage. For the overwhelming majority of the population, impunity of misrule is extremely intolerable. This is because it exerts a terrible toll on the lives of millions of the citizenry of any country whose unhappy fate it is to be subjected to such form of misrule.

    In our country, we are only too familiar with the lineaments of impunities of misgovernment. The underlying structural feature is the fact that a very tiny fraction of the populace lives in untold, squandered and unproductive wealth while the great majority live below the absolute poverty line. Consequently and more alarmingly, millions of our peoples have greatly inadequate access to the amenities and benefits of modern, civilized and dignified existence. The list of such basic aspects of life in modern societies of the world that we sorely lack in our country is well known: potable and drinkable water for the vast majority of the populace; regular generation and distribution of electricity, as much in the cities and towns as in the rural communities; hospitals and health clinics that are clean, serviceable and actually do save lives; roads and highways in a nation-wide or territorial transportation grid in which travel is relatively safe, comfortable and free of imaginable and unimaginable hazards; security of life, properties and personal possessions; ever-widening expansion of communities of enlightened, progressive and civic-minded people adequately attuned to both the challenges and the opportunities of life in the 21st century of the Common Era.

    As if the profile above is not bad enough, impunity of elite misgovernment also traps any people unlucky to be so misruled into becoming either willing or unwitting accomplices in their own subjection as the values, the practices and the norms of the rulers become those of the ruled as well. The corruption, the rot, the dog-eat-dog heartlessness of the political class is reproduced prodigiously in the populace. And it may come to be, heaven help us, that for the younger generations, this is all that they know of their country as knowledge of times when things were different becomes increasingly erased until it dies out with the last set of those old enough to have known relatively better and more humane times. No compatriots, “tolerable” impunities of elite misrule is a barbarous notion, a contradiction in terms, a sardonic yielding of discursive and ethical ground to a form of misrule that should never be accorded even the slightest space of legitimacy, talk less of sovereignty.

    These opening observations and thoughts are further clarified by the fact that even the perpetrators of impunities of elite misrule never admit to being rulers of this kind. With the possible exception of the Nazis and the openly fascist, right-wing dictators of South America in intermittent periods throughout the 20th century, no governments, no ruling class parties in modern political history have ever admitted to being perpetrators of “tolerable” or benign forms of impunity of misrule. This is partly because it is extremely dangerous to the perpetuation of this kind of misrule to admit openly and cynically to its peculiar form of governance. For any government, any regime of military or civilian governance to do so would be to admit that it is undemocratic and therefore itself liable to being undemocratically removed from office or power. Moreover, to admit that a political order or a governmental administration is a “tolerable” form of misrule is to raise the risky, dangerous question of “tolerable” for or to whom? For surely, unless one has a very low opinion of human beings and their capacity for good, just and humane governance, one must necessarily accept the fact that impunity of elite misrule cannot be “tolerable” for the vast majority of those condemned to suffer or put up with it. As a matter of fact, for our purposes in this series, this is the bottom line, the discursive or investigative fundament: for whom, for which groups and classes of Nigerians, have impunities of elite misgovernment since the return to “democracy” in 1999 been “tolerable”?

    Compatriots, in responding to this all-important question, I now intend to leave all abstract and speculative issues aside and address the question very concretely, very pointedly. This I wish to do by returning to the questions with which I concluded the discussion in last week’s piece. Let me remind the reader of the questions. From the time when Jonathan became Acting President in 2010, unprecedented sums have disappeared from the national treasury and the nation’s savings account, the Excess Crude Account: where did all this money go? Why, in spite of this – or precisely because of it – is the PDP fast breaking up and disappearing as the ruling party that was destined, as the boast went, to rule Nigeria for the foreseeable future in this 21st century? And what connection does all this have to the probability of the end of “tolerable” forms of elite misgovernment as the APC positions itself to become the new, post-PDP ruling party?

    The roiling fragmentation of the ruling party into two factions, the PDP and the New-PDP, together with mass defections into the APC are not taking place because corruption, waste and squandermania have become too big, too unprecedented in its scale and therefore too unsustainable – which of course is the case. The basic cause of the unfolding implosion of the ruling party and the defections into the APC is the question of whether the Presidency will remain after the 2015 elections with Jonathan, the first “Minority” civilian Head of State in the country’s political history or go to a candidate from the North, most likely from the so-called “core” North. The oil subsidy mega-scam of 2011 in which 2.58 trillion naira – which is two and half times the annual budget for the whole country – was blatantly misappropriated was used primarily to fund Jonathan’s election in 2011. It has neither drawn sustained criticism nor has it afforded much ideological and moral firepower to the other political parties. Ditto with the 21 billion dollars that was the balance in the nation’s savings account, the ECA, when Jonathan became Acting President in 2010; in less than four years, it has dwindled massively to well below 2 billion dollars without any accounting provided to explain the disappearance of such a vast sum from our national coffers. But it too has neither been the target of principled and unrelenting criticism by the other parties nor the cause of the mass defections from the PDP to the APC.

    I do not mean to suggest that the extraordinary levels of corruption, aimlessness and mediocrity in the Jonathan presidency is of no consequence in what is happening to and within the PDP now. For by even the abysmally low levels of performance in office of all the PDP federal administrations since the return to civilian “democracy” in 1999, the Jonathan presidency is extraordinarily mediocre and lackluster. However, even though this fact is being used vigorously and opportunistically by the other ruling class parties and especially the APC in their aspirations and efforts to dethrone the PDP as the ruling party in 2015, this is not the main reason why the PDP is imploding and is on the verge of ceding ground to the APC. The main reason is that Jonathan’s presidency and the PDP under his leadership have far exceeded the “tolerable” limits of elite misrule and all the ruling class parties and politicians are fearful that if the PDP is not stopped, they will all lose as the other ruling party – the army – steps in to “save” the country and the ruling class.

    It remains for the other ruling class parties – and the APC especially – to demonstrate in theory and in practice, in ideology and policies, that their accession to power will be more than a mere reconfiguration of the PDP into new power blocs and alliances that will restore governance in our country to “tolerable” forms of impunities of elite misgovernment. If this does not happen, it will be business as usual, with only a few cosmetic changes to legitimize the new status quo. In such a reconstitution of the political order after 2015 in which we might say the king is dead but long live the king, nothing significant will change. The Southwest and the “core” North will still be the dominant power blocs in the country. The Presidency will still have the largest concentration of power, authority and patronage in any Head of State in the world. The Southeast will still feel permanently excluded from entitlement to producing an incumbent for our unreconstructed presidency. The Executive Governorships will still function basically as mini heads of state whose maintenance costs are financially crippling and morally deleterious for the country and the citizenry. And the people, the multitudes in every part of the country will still continue to endure the ravages of “tolerable” impunities of elite misrule.

    This is not a forgone conclusion, an inevitable happenstance looming on the horizon of the present. But we need another series to explore this non-concluding conclusion on a note of hope, faith and optimism based on a firm and unshakeable belief in the capabilities of the masses of our peoples to take their destinies into their own hands.

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Are Jonathan and PDP now liabilities for tolerable impunities of elite misrule? (1)

    Are Jonathan and PDP now liabilities for tolerable impunities of elite misrule? (1)

    At the end of this column last week, I suggested the possibility that Obasanjo’s much discussed letter to Goodluck Jonathan was, in its unspoken undercurrents, driven by OBJ’s worry that what increasingly appears to be a terminal crisis in the ruling party, the PDP, might also be a terminal crisis for the country itself. In other words, OBJ, I pondered, was concerned that Jonathan and the PDP was approaching or had indeed crossed the line that separates – or should separate – the survival of the ruling party from the survival of Nigeria. This is the idea that I wish to explore more closely and expansively in a two-part series that begins with this piece.

    In perhaps the single most astonishing of the many charges against GEJ in OBJ’s letter, he compared Jonathan to the late Sani Abacha. And in order not to make this comparison seem merely speculative, Obasanjo stated categorically that Jonathan had already put into plan the training of snipers who would, at the appropriate time and one by one, eliminate persons on a watch list of 1000 Nigerians. Even more pointedly, Obasanjo asserted that El Mustafa, Abacha’s notorious Chief Security Officer who supervised the late dictator’s torture, intimidation and assassination machine, has more or less become Jonathan’s point man in the project or plan to eliminate those on the alleged watch list. If we may reasonably assume that Obasanjo did not make these particular assertions comparing Jonathan to Abacha in a fit of absent-minded and mischievous gratuitousness, the question arises as to what exactly is the point of the comparison. This, I suggest, is where the question of tolerable and intolerable impunities of military or civilian elite misrule in Nigeria comes into the equation. Let me explain.

    As the whole world now knows, the most dreaded political trademark of Sani Abacha was the intimidation, imprisonment, torture and, ultimately, killing of elite or ruling class opponents who could not be bought off. The obvious intention behind this was to signal to all opponents that there was no line at all that he, Sani Abacha, could not cross. In one of the most egregious expressions of this particular propensity to completely blur the lines between what is permissible and impermissible, decent and indecent, and judicious and injudicious, Abacha was particularly indifferent to, or perhaps even contemptuous of what world opinion, with special reference to the Western press, thought of anything he did. After he hanged Ken Saro-Wiwa in 1995 in total defiance of world opinion, Abacha boasted to his close associates that his ambition was to become the first Head of State in history to hang a Nobel Laureate, meaning by this none other than WS. And he set in motion an international manhunt squad designed to achieve this ambition. [Parenthetically, we might note here that his Foreign Minister, Tom Ikimi, one of the chieftains of the APC, played out this script of Abacha’s disregard for world opinion with great aplomb and reckless bravado. For Ikimi it was who, when Mandela bitterly and scathingly condemned the killing of Saro-Wiwa, insulted Mandela by saying that he was the black president of a white country whose prison experience under apartheid had turned into a doddering old fool!]

    It is very important to emphasize here both the distinction between, on the one hand, tolerable and intolerable impunities of elite political misrule and, on the other hand, how in the Nigerian context Abacha marked the first and so far the ultimate expression of the deliberate and systemic crossing of the line that separates tolerable from intolerable impunities of misrule. On this account, since the end of the Nigerian-Biafran civil war and the consequent institutionalization of a rentier state based on oil wealth, impunity of elite misrule has been the norm in our country: one scandal, one outrage in the looting of state funds and the squandering of our oil wealth comes on the heels of another and nothing, absolutely nothing, can ever embarrass or shame our rulers into reducing the impunity, talk less of actually becoming responsible and accountable. Of course, as in all things, there are the few exceptions that both establish and depart from this norm of impunity and blatancy. But the norm is the all-pervasive reality.

    However, tolerable impunity necessarily enters the profile because even impunity and brazenness must, like everything in nature and life, ultimately confront their limits. Item: You must not loot the national treasury completely empty. Item: In order to keep intra-class and inter-elite antagonisms, particularly those based on ethnicity and religion, to a minimum, you must widely distribute the loot; you must not and cannot keep too much of it to yourself and your cronies. Item: Periodically, you must throw crumbs from the loot, from the national treasury to the masses, even if this occupies the space of a distant second place to distributing patronage to allies and competitors among the elite. The essence of Obasanjo’s comparison of Jonathan with Abacha is that both men considerably exceeded the limits of tolerable impunities of elite misrule. Let us explore this suggestion carefully.

    Both in the manner in which he came to office as military Head of State and in the ways in which he sought to consolidate his hold on power, Abacha departed deliberately from “tolerable” impunity. In this, there was a marked difference between him and Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida. Babangida believed that every “normal” Nigerian had a price; what he had to do as a ruler was to find the right price for each difficult or recalcitrant opponent. And if in the end he found a Nigerian who could not be bought, a Nigerian who did not have a “price”, he concluded that the man or woman was not a “normal” Nigerian and therefore had to be closely watched. By contrast, even though he set out from the same premise as IBB that every Nigerian had a price, however unlike IBB, Abacha regarded any Nigerian without a price as not a true Nigerian at all and therefore worthy of being either imprisoned, or killed, or both. He spent humongous sums in buying off those who could be bought off; and conversely, those who could not be bought off and therefore constituted a threat to his rule he imprisoned, killed or pursued to the ends of the earth. In the vast majority of cases, these were all members of the political, economic and intellectual elite. And indeed, this is the fundamental flaw or hubris of any administration that crosses over from the tolerable to the intolerable in impunity of elite misrule: it becomes a liability as much to the ruling class itself as to the whole country.

    Jonathan is of course not Abacha; and the ruling party, the PDP, is unlike the army that in the crisis of June 1993 brought Abacha to power and through whose instrumentality he sought to perpetuate himself in office indefinitely. But this should not blind us to a few things that are remarkably similar in the institutional and political circumstances of that army and the current ruling party, the PDP. In the first place, the army under Abacha became, just as the ruling party under Jonathan has become, dubious or even entirely useless as an institutional instrument for keeping elite misrule within those limits beyond which ethnic antagonisms and political and ideological differences among the country’s elite would spin out of control. By the time he mysteriously died, no military officer of any rank, serving or retired, was immune from Abacha’s megalomaniacal suspicion and probable humiliation. Consequently, he could no longer count on the loyalty of any but a few in the innermost circles of his regime. Similarly, Jonathan’s PDP has become a dysfunctional political machine that has increasingly and self-destructively turned toxins of political paranoia and psychological insecurity inwards on its own members; as a result of this, scores of the heavyweights and scions of the party are jumping ship as from a sinking ship and defecting to other parties, especially the APC. Secondly, just as Abacha had to reach deeper and deeper into the national treasury to buy off real and potential threats to his rule without however being ever sure of the loyalty of those so “bought”, Jonathan has beaten all previous records in post-independence Nigerian federal administrations in the totally unrestrained manner in which he has emptied the national treasury presumably and partly in order to buy loyalty and support for his present and aspiring future stay in office. Two particular instances of this pattern stand out. One: the sum of 2.58 trillion naira that was paid out in the oil subsidy mega-scam of 2011 is the single greatest act of official looting of our national treasury in the entire postcolonial period. Two: in the same vein, nothing is comparable in scale of squandermania to the fact that the 21 billion dollars in the nation’s savings account, the Excess Crude Account (ECA), which was the balance in the account when Jonathan became Acting President in 2010, has been drawn down to less that 2 billion dollars now, close to the end of 2013.

    Where did all this money go? And why, in spite of it – or precisely because of it – is the PDP fast breaking up and disappearing as the ruling party that was destined, as the boast went, to rule Nigeria for the foreseeable future in this 21st century? And what connection does all this have with the erosion of tolerable forms of impunities of elite political misrule as the APC positions itself to become the new post-PDP ruling political party? These and other questions will start us off in next week’s closing piece in the series.

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu