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Category: Biodun Jeyifo

  • Obasanjo as Jonathan’s nemesis: moral ambiguity and cynicism in lieu of genuine reform

    Obasanjo as Jonathan’s nemesis: moral ambiguity and cynicism in lieu of genuine reform

    Farewell Remorse! All Good to me is lost; Evil be thou my Good!
    Satan, in Milton’s Paradise Lost, Book 4

    First a confession: it was not Milton’s Satan in Book 4 of Paradise Lost that first came to my mind after I had read, word by word, sentence by sentence, the entirety of Obasanjo’s recent explosive letter to Goodluck Jonathan; it was Tartuffe, the eponymous protagonist of Moliere’s classic play of that title, Tartuffe. Long before this latest salvo of raging moral fireworks from Obasanjo to Jonathan, I had always thought of OBJ as the ultimate embodiment of “Tartuffian” super-hypocritical moral unctuousness in contemporary Nigerian, African and world politics. For those who have not read Moliere’s play, Tartuffe is a holy, pious man who secretly craves all the things that he preaches relentlessly against – until he is finally tricked into exposing his true self and the fires of passion and desire that he masks under his unctuous moral sternness. But even after he is completely exposed, to the end Tartuffe clings to his holy mien, his mask of unwavering piety. The moral of this parable of gargantuan Tartuffian hypocrisy? Nothing, absolutely nothing that you do – or can do – will ever shame the Tartuffes of this life, this world into owning up to their moral weaknesses and venal foibles. This is Obasanjo, ineluctably and quintessentially the Grand Tartuffe of this day and age.

    As many commentators have remarked, with the exception of one or two important things that I will briefly engage later in this piece, Obasanjo is guilty, ten times guilty, of many of the extreme moral lapses and dire political failures that he pointed out and berated in Jonathan. Corruption around the presidency stinking to the high heavens? Didn’t Atiku Abubakar, in his very bitter quarrel with Obasanjo that was waged on the pages of the nation’s daily newspapers in 2006 reveal how wide, deep and unconscionable the corruption in Obasanjo’s presidency was? Being a man of honour and trustworthiness in not staying in office beyond your allotted and foresworn time? Didn’t Obasanjo nearly empty out the national treasury in bribes to members of the National Assembly and other ‘politicos’ in the so-called “Third Term” bid to unconstitutionally and immorally perpetuate himself in office? Turning the ruling party, the PDP, into an immoral and cynical instrument of the President and his selfish and self-centered wishes and desires at the risk of wrecking the ship of state and the polity? Isn’t this what Obasanjo did and perfected after he had removed Audu Ogbeh as the Party Chairman of the PDP? And in spite of all these things, hasn’t Obasanjo, in and out of office, regularly taken it upon himself to lecture the nation and the African continent on political morality and legal and constitutional probity? Hasn’t he gone round many African nations as an election monitor after he and Maurice Iwu had conducted the two worst election rigging debacles in Nigerian political history? Let us not mince words here, compatriots: Obasanjo is Tartuffe in an ersatz, modern-day Nigerian political incarnation!

    All the same, compatriots, it was not Moliere’s Tartuffe but Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost that first came to my mind when I read Obasanjo’s letter to Jonathan and confronted the sheer enormity of his charges against the sitting President. I must explain here that Milton’s Satan is of course not the Satan of contemporary Nigerian Pentecostal demonology, an endlessly evil avatar without a shred of awareness of the good that he had once experienced and lived as God’s beloved lieutenant in Heaven. This Satan of the brotherhood and sisterhood of Nigerian Pentecostal prayer warriors is without any moral ambiguity, any contradictions of spirit and Being; therefore, he is absolutely outside the realm of the human, the ordinary, the familiar. By contrast, Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost has known goodness; and he has never lost sight of the fact that he had been on the right hand side of God, right beside that incandescent and omniscient rectitude. Indeed, he retains a keen knowledge of that earlier state. This is why, in that ironic inversion that is perhaps the most widely quoted passage from Milton’s Paradise Lost – Evil, be thou my Good – Satan is still measuring himself and his projects in a discourse of the good. This makes him very human and incidentally, as virtually all Milton scholars have said again and again, the most engaging of all the characters in Milton’s classic epic poem on good and evil.

    This is the kind of very human, very ordinary “Satan” that has occupied Aso Rock Villa since 1999. The stench of superabundant evil in every known form coming from the Villa has been overwhelming and correspondingly, life has been a veritable hell on earth for the vast majority of our peoples in every part of the land. But it is not a demon but a very ordinary person who has been in charge of the miasmic rot and decay. That is what first came to my mind after I had finished reading Obasanjo’s epic letter to Jonathan: Evil, be thou my Good! All the three occupants of that highest of the high in the throne of political power and prestige in our country have been very religious-minded men, and with great ostentation too! First Obasanjo, then Yar’ Adua and now Jonathan, they never ceased talking about God, goodness, prayerfulness, even as the impunity of their moral cynicism grew into a bottomless bog threatening to drown the whole nation. On the evidence provided in Obasanjo’s letter to Jonathan, we are now at the very brink of that bottomless moral sinkhole. In other words, Jonathan has carried the project of “evil, be thou my good” to its ultimate limit beyond which lies the specter of national catastrophe.

    Earlier in this discussion, I drew attention to some charges that Obasanjo makes against Jonathan that separates the present incumbent of Aso Rock Villa from the other two previous occupants of the highest office in the land since 1999. Two of these are worthy of our special attention. First is an extreme and indeed extremist clannishness and divisiveness that no Nigerian ruler has ever either openly promoted or condoned in his supporters and henchmen. I think no one but the hardiest of Jonathan’s supporters will dispute the veracity of this charge. Secondly and far more concretely and specifically, Obasanjo has charged Jonathan with a project, a plan allegedly already being executed, to train about a thousand hit men or killers to go after those whose names have already been compiled in a watch list, this in preparation for or the run-up to the 2015 elections. Is this a frivolous and baseless charge? That is the question, compatriots.

    In the unspoken and perhaps unspeakable undercurrents of Obasanjo’s letter to Jonathan, I find the traumatizing anxieties of a very frightened man. His supporters will think and assert that the fear is for Nigeria, for what may happen to our country after Jonathan might have carried his policies and plans to their logical and practical conclusion. There seems to be a small iota of truth in this view of OBJ’s letter. But the real fear, the bracingly traumatizing anxiety that I see in the undercurrents of the letter is located elsewhere and this is in Obasanjo’s complete conflation of the historic fate of PDP, whatever that might be, with the fate of Nigeria, as if what may or will happen to the ruling party will also happen to the country.

    Before our very eyes, the PDP is imploding and doing so relentlessly. Now, Obasanjo has every reason to be fearful of the breakup, the end of the PDP which, as he sees it, Jonathan is haplessly and foolishly doing everything that he can to bring to its grand, ruinous finale. But as to whether the implosion, the breakup of the PDP will also spell unmitigated disaster for Nigeria, this is a moot point, not an inevitable conclusion. For me, it is remarkable that in a long, rambling letter that cried out against terribly evil things that are wrong in the Presidency and the ruling party, there is not a single suggestion, or a train of thought on how to deep, meaningful reform in our country’s elite politics. For instance, Obasanjo never even remotely addresses the all-important question of why the ruling party is so prone to complete subordination to the will, the whims and caprices of whoever it is that occupies the seat of power at Aso Rock, so much so that even as the President’s actions and policies are destroying the Party, nothing in the institutional, collective life of the Party can save it from the madness and folly of the President. And to be completely frank, I winced in enjoyment, not in pain, as I read again and again in Obasanjo’s letter to Jonathan his whinnying, helpless plea to Jonathan, as the ONLY person who has the power, to save the PDP from a looming, self-destructive implosion. Who among us had ever imagined that we could see Obasanjo as a whinny, whimpering supplicant to a political operator that he himself helped to create!

    I was treated, once again, to the self-righteous ranting of a Tartuffe in OBJ’s letter to Jonathan. But we have cause to be deeply worried. As the payer warriors like to remind us tirelessly, Satan is alive and doing his best to wreck millions of lives in our land. But it not the Satan that they conjure up to strike fear and terror in the gullible that we must worry about. It is Milton’s Satan with his chilling mantra that we have every cause to be deeply worried about: Evil, be thou my Good! For this “Satan” may be far more numerous in the PDP than in any other party, but his incarnation exists aplenty in the other political parties too. We must not be complacent about what it will take to bring about genuine moral and institutional reform in elite politics in our country.

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Writing, as if life itself depended on it (3)

    Writing, as if life itself depended on it (3)

    [For Festus Iyayi: radical humanist; writer; neorealist artificer]

    Jacobinism: 1. The principles and practices of the Jacobins. 2. The egalitarianism and terrorism of the Jacobins of the French Revolution of 1789. 3. Any violent or revolutionary political extremism
    Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language (Unabridged), 1993

    An Awaiting Court Martial there is a great, romping delight in telling stories and telling them well, much greater than what we get in the earlier novels. This is the most distinctive literary mark of this book of short stories. Of course the fictional imagination is not without considerable merit in the three novels, but simply in terms of stories as stories, of tales told for their gripping or spellbinding effect, we are almost in a new imaginative territory in this particular work of Iyayi. Much of this effect depends on the stories themselves, on their haunting, spectral quality. Let me give a few examples.

    In “Jegede’s Madness” which, at about 42 pages is not only the longest story in the collection but is also formalistically a novella, the tale climaxes with the maniacal search of the protagonist, Jonathan Alawa, for a cure for his sexual impotence. He consults experts in scientific medicine, to no avail. Then he turns to the “witchdoctors” and every single one he consults tells him that he must sleep with a particular madwoman, a prescription which at first he rejects until desperation pushes him to try to sleep with every madwoman in surrounding cities and villages, still without any success. Meanwhile he does not know that the madwoman he must sleep with is his own wife, Elisa, a great beauty of surpassing aloofness who had gone mad after a White Colonial District Officer had tried forcibly but unsuccessfully to seduce her, the seduction being something Alawa himself had arranged in order to become a fabulously wealthy middleman with the colonial and commercial lords of the land. At the end of the tale, Alawa himself goes mad as his entire palatial mansion is overrun by the miasmic stench from the gargantuan mass of his unflushed defecations.

    In both the title story, “Awaiting Court Martial” and the sixth story in the collection, “When They Came for Akika Lamidi”, we find harrowing tales of characters who are completely crushed by a military dictatorship whose assumption of power over life and death is however compromised and undercut by the paranoia of the rulers. In the title story, the victims of this paranoiac, sadistic power are two siblings who, from within the ranks of the autocratic military machine itself, break ranks with the arbitrariness of militarism and confront the madness of the rulers with – laughter, a laughter that rings out powerfully at the very moment when the victims should have been shaking with terror. Akika Lamidi, the eponymous protagonist of the story in whose title his name features prominently, is a newspaper cartoonist. On the fateful night on which “they” came for him, he and members of his family at first think the “visitors” are armed robbers. But from the terror of what to expect from lawless bandits, Akika soon moves to the more paralyzing terror of what is coming from the “lawful” squad from the SSS that has come for him on account of his subversive cartoons against the regime. He is very brutally killed, but before the termination of his life he has a short but riveting conversation with the murderous visitors during which Akika experiences the satisfaction of discovering that the supposedly omnipotent military rulers have an irrational, obsessive fear of him and his corrosively subversive newspaper cartoons.

    I do not wish to give the impression that in all the stories in Awaiting Court Martial, it is a recurring case of terrifying or harrowing endgame for the protagonists. Definitely, except for “Sunflowers”, the shortest and the last story in the collection which ends on a hopeful, optimistic note, no story in the collection affords the reader an unambiguous relief from the parade of life-changing encounters with the darkest impulses of the human psyche. But there are stories – like “Na Only One Pikin”, “Our Father Is Coming Home”, “She Will Be Buried Here”, and “Three Times Unlucky” – in which, metaphorically speaking, after the purgatory comes the redemption as profoundly chastened characters learn more about themselves and the world than they had ever remotely thought possible or anticipated. What I can affirm as true to all the stories in the collection is the fact that Iyayi goes to the roots of characters as individuals driven either by their passions and appetites – for sex, for love, for life, for fulfillment – or by their fears, their weaknesses, their manias and eccentricities.

    In such a wide and capacious canvas, workers and the poor do not occupy the centre of narrative or thematic attention as in the three previous novels. All classes and fractions of classes are present in the totality of the stories. What is even more subtly and sensitively hinted at but deliberately never made explicit in the stories is the fact that class is refracted through desires and manias that fuel the narrative energy of the stories as Iyayi constantly weaves into narratives of existential crises brief but unforgettable snippets of description or dialogue detailing the nightmare that reigns everywhere in a country under the heel of a draconian, corrupt and dehumanizing military rule. The nightmare reality is there, omnipresent and suffusing, but it is so ineluctably rendered by Iyayi that the casual reader might miss it, almost in the manner in which blood runs through the arteries and the veins, invisible to the naked eye but incontrovertibly there as the source of an organism’s life or, conversely, ill-health. This is what makes Awaiting Court Martial perhaps the most subtle, the most powerful literary work that we have on militarist misrule in Nigeria in particular and the African continent in general. Thus, radical class consciousness is very present, very clamant in these stories, only it is no longer consciousness of class as seen primarily or exclusively through the prism of oppressors versus the oppressed, of exploiters ranged against the exploited as we encounter it in the three novels, Violence, The Contract and Heroes. This is the mark of the decisive move in Iyayi’s works from social realism to what, for want of a better term, I am calling neorealism in this tribute.

    Famously of infamously, depending on where one stands ideologically, Soyinka once called leftists and radicals in Nigerian literature and criticism of the late 70s and 80s “Leftocrats”, going further to call that stage of our modern literary and intellectual culture a “Jacobin moment”. Soyinka used these terms neither in neutrality nor approval, but with scathing disparagement of what he considered the revolutionary, doctrinaire extremism of the Osofisans, the Iyayis, the Omotosos, the Jeyifos, the Darahs and the Osundares. Well, Soyinka should know, for he also had his own individual Jacobin literary moments in such works as The Man Died, Season of Anomie and Madmen and Specialists!

    If there is indeed a Jacobin moment in modern Nigerian literature that produced plays, poems, fiction and essays that were accomplished on literary as well as political-ideological grounds, Iyayi’s first three works of fiction that I have placed within the social realist mode in this tribute loomed large in that formation of revolutionary writings of exceptional force. In this respect, Iyayi is in the company of contemporaries and fellow travelers like Odia Ofeimun, Niyi Osundare, Kole Omotoso and Femi Osofisan, all of whom, without exception, had their own inevitable appointment with Jacobinism and then moved beyond and away from it when, gradually and subtly, we discovered that the revolution was going to come only through a long and complex historical process.

    There are two things to note here in passing. In the first place, this was a literary and cultural Jacobinism that was, unlike Soyinka’s ferocious incarnation of it in the works I identified above, a collective movement, a very conscious and in some cases programmatic one. Secondly, it is worthy of note that Iyayi’s “Jacobinism” was more grounded and more systematically thought through than that of any others among his contemporaries, especially in his first and third novels, Violence and Heroes. And for good measure, if we can now talk of a Post-Jacobin phase in our national literature that began in the 90s and persists in many currents to the present moment, Iyayi’s book of short stories, Awaiting Court Martial, is perhaps more paradigmatic of this phase than any other single work of which I can personally think. What meaning, what portents do I attach to this observation, this claim?

    By way of indirectly engaging this question, I wish to write specifically now of my rather very astonishing personal relations with Iyayi as a writer. Among the radical, committed writers of my generation, I have had the closest ideological affinities and activist engagements with Iyayi. It strikes me now as very odd that it is precisely with Iyayi that I have never had any conversations on writing. Both within the specific context of ASUU and in the broader framework of the social movement for progressive change in our country, we had long conversations on radical politics and activism on nearly every subject. But we never once talked about writing! With Osofisan, Ofeimun, Osundare, Omotoso, Darah and the late Omafume Onoge I had innumerable discussions about art, writing and politics. But never with Iyayi! It is extremely embarrassing for me to say it now, but it was always as if we had far more important things to discuss and act upon than – mere writing!

    Writing – good, significant and radical writing – should never be considered a mere subsidiary activity by a truly mature progressive or revolutionary movement. This deeply problematic attitude has indeed had one deleterious effect on the institutional aspects of the publication of Iyayi’s works, virtually all of them, but especially the most accomplished one, Awaiting Court Martial. Let me state this as simply and directly as possible: the publishers of Iyayi’s works, Longman and Malthouse, did very little of the pre-publication editorial work that all works in general require and significant works positively demand. Indeed, it is no secret that Longman thought of the series within which Iyayi’s novels were published as just a cut above the Onitsha Market chapbook tradition! There is not the slightest doubt in my mind that had Iyayi’s first three novels been published within the imprimatur of the much more professional Heinemann African Writers Series, his reputation and the standing of those three novels would be much greater and wider than it is now. With Malthouse and Awaiting Court Martial, the level of professionalism was even more compromised, both editorially and typographically. It is thus a telling mark of the quality and strength of Iyayi’s writing in these works that they rose above the institutional constraints of the circumstances of their production. But this should not blind us to one urgent task: Awaiting Court Martial needs to be re-issued, this time with the kind of gifted and conscientious editorial work that it deserves.

    If this tribute does nothing else, I certainly hope that it has now laid to rest the ghost of that unwitting philistine attitude to art and writing of the Nigerian Left in the 70s and 80s, the attitude that regarded writing as something you did on the side while you were engaged in the “real” tasks of the revolution. This is only one among a host of revaluations that we need to do and I can think of few as rich with possibilities for this task as Iyayi, the writer, the artificer, the consummate storyteller.

    Concluded.

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Writing, as if life itself depended on it (2)

    Writing, as if life itself depended on it (2)

    [For Festus Iyayi: radical humanist; writer; neorealist artificer]

    What is the decisive shift that occurred in Iyayi’s writings in the 1990s? Can one even talk of a “shift” in a corpus that is comparatively “slim”, comprising, as it does, only four published works of fiction? My response to these two questions is, of course, affirmative: yes, there is a very discernible shift in Iyayi’s writings; and yes, one can validly talk of shifts even within two, not to say four, works of an author – as long as such shifts are so apparent, so decisive as not to even remotely seem to be the factitious projection of the critic’s own fantasies or delusions.

    The most apparent, the most undeniable shift in Iyayi’s writings is the one between, on the one hand, the first three published works of the late 70s and 80s, Violence (1979), The Contract (1982) and Heroes (1986) and, on the other hand, Awaiting Court Martial (1996). The most discernible change is formal or generic: the first three titles are works of full-blown novelistic fiction while Awaiting Court Martial is a collection of fifteen short stories only one of which, “Jegede’s Madness”, has the length and the narrative scope to qualify as a novella. It is of course possible that the ten years between the publication of Heroes and Awaiting Court Martial might not really amount to a genuine temporal hiatus since some of the stories collected in the latter could very well have been written either before the publication of the former or contemporaneously with it. But there are clear indications that with the move from the novel to the short story something very decisive, very fundamental has taken place in Iyayi’s writings. Indeed, it is on account of this very fact that I gave this essay its title: writing, as if life itself depended on it. For this title is far more appropriate, far more germane to the kind of writing that we confront in Awaiting Court Martial than what we see of literary art in the preceding three works of fiction, even though there are intimations of this kind of writing here and there in the previous works.

    This observation has a rather intriguing aspect that we ought to highlight here: if Iyayi is unquestionably so much at his very best as a writer in the collection of short stories, what is even more enigmatic is the fact that in Awaiting Court Martial we encounter a form of radical writing that is not easy to categorize, a mode of storytelling that inscribes literary radicalism far more complexly than anything we find in the three novels. Let me expatiate on this crucial claim by starting, first, with some incontrovertible differences in themes, style and narrative technique between these two phases of Iyayi’s writings before moving to more substantive points of theoretical and ideological import that I shall subsume under the rubrics of social realism and neorealism.

    The plots, the characters and the themes of the first three novels characteristically revolve around the struggles of protagonists against an oppressive, neocolonial social order that is unspeakable in its barbarity, ferocity and mediocrity. In Violence, this takes the form of an unrelenting struggle of Idemudia, the protagonist, to get a better sense of the corrosive effects of this barbaric social order on both his dire social circumstances and on his inner life, especially as this is excruciatingly played out in tortured and uneasy relations with his wife, Adisa, and with his co-workers. In The Contract, this oppressive social order seems infinitely more entrenched, more impregnable, so much so that the protagonist, Ogie Obala, decides that the best thing to do is to find out how best to compromise with it on his own terms so as not to be eaten up and destroyed by it. And in Heroes, with graphic, terrifying accounts of atrocities on both sides of the Nigerian civil war as its searing backdrop, the protagonist, Osime Iyere, is in a world even more horrific in its dehumanizing and brutalizing acts and effects than what we had encountered in the two previous novels. For this reason, Osime Iyere finds that he must do something that neither of the protagonists of the two previous novels have had to do and that is completely and existentially unlearn virtually everything he had always thought and taken for granted – about his country, his neighbors, the combatant forces in the civil war and their conflicting claims and, above all else, himself.

    In all three novels, Iyayi writes so powerfully and so truthfully about the Nigerian neocolonial version of what Hannah Arendt has famously called the banality of evil that it is no exaggeration to state that the sheer vigor and eloquence of the testamentary quality of his writing in these three novels is almost without equal in postcolonial Nigerian literature. In all, I have read these three novels several times and each single act of reading finds me in the profoundly disquieting stance of being compelled to actually like the novelistic depiction of an order of existence in our country about which there are almost no redeeming things to write about. In such moments when I have been either reading or rereading Violence, The Contract and Heroes, I have had to remind myself that I also liked Dante’s literary depiction of purgatory in Inferno; the difference of course is that the “inferno” so memorably rendered in Iyayi’s three novels is one that we are living in, the one that continues to haunt us at the present moment when this essay is being written.

    The strength, the quality of the writing in these three novels thus rests a lot on evocations of place, context and environment that are external to the inner lives, the inner struggles of the protagonists. But not exclusively so, for at the same time that he invests so much narrative space and skill to the depiction of external forces impacting on his protagonists, Iyayi manages to get deep under the emotional and psychic skin of these characters. In graphic terms, the characters literally and figuratively have their backs against the wall of material and psychological survival, whether in the jungle of the commoditized public sphere of endlessly crooked business deals or the emotional wildernesses of marital or erotic private spaces in which spouses and lovers find that the “enemy” is as much within as it is outside in corrupt public officials and their repressive political misrule. Indeed, with the possible exception of Soyinka, no radical Nigerian writer has explored so powerfully this interior psychic and moral space of the “enemy within” in his protagonists.

    I must of course not fail to note here that occasionally this exploration by Iyayi of psychic and moral self-division within his characters is handled rather awkwardly in a formulaic manner in which “voices” representing either “good” or “evil”, rectitude or cynicism battle for the soul of the protagonists. But side by side with these instances of predictable and “convenient” narrative crutches, there are innumerable instances in which, through either dialogue or extended ruminative authorial description, Iyayi stands tall and ramrod straight as a writer as he confidently and masterfully deploys fresh, probing and often mesmerizing prose to do the work of laying bare the inner moral and psychological torments or, as the case may be, victories of his characters. And to his great credit, Iyayi confers this particular narrative “privilege” as much on the “heroes” as on the “villains”, as much on the workers and the oppressed as on the exploiters and their cronies and hirelings, especially in the first two of the three novels, Violence and The Contract.

    So much then for what we encounter by way of characters, plot and narrative style in Iyayi’s three novels of the Seventies and Eighties, all pointing to a radical, committed writer who very deliberately if also often memorably bends the art and craft of fiction to openly avowed ideological and political purposes. The term “social realism” has been applied to these three novels; some critics have even been more specific and have mentioned the more ideologically loaded label of “socialist realism”. There is no denying the appropriateness of these terms to Iyayi’s writing in these novels. But then, there are socialist realists and there are socialist realists. The label, the badge does not automatically confer significance on the writer; significance has to be earned and Iyayi consistently gives proof in his novels that he has earned it. He is definitely one of the most successful socialist realists in contemporary Nigerian writing and one of the important exemplars of the “school” in postcolonial African writing. But more on this point later in this tribute.

    With regard to the book of short fiction, Awaiting Court Martial, we are in an entirely different literary, artistic universe than the worlds of the three novels. Perhaps the most compelling proof of this is that no critic or scholar can “accuse” Iyayi of either “social realism” or “socialist realism” in this collection of short stories. There are some very obvious, very easily perceived indications of this shift, but so are there much more subtle factors that require critical vigilance and “readerly” sensitivity to nuances of language and style to discern them. Let us take the more obvious factors first, on the condition that we will then subject their “obviousness” to radical, deconstructive critique.

    In Awaiting Court Martial, there are absolutely no characters like Idemudia and Adisa (Violence), Ogie Obala, Rose Idebale and Eunice Agbon (The Contract) and Osime Iyere (Heroes), characters who struggle mightily to come to grips with the crushing weight of the oppression, exploitation and corruption in the land and in their lives. Of the fifteen stories in the collection, only four – the title story, “Awaiting Court Martial”, “Saira”, “Extracts from the Testimony”, and “When They Came for Akika Lamidi” – have characters or themes that entail the depiction of struggles against oppression in its myriad forms and expressions. But in none of these stories are we close to what we encounter in the three novels and the clearest sign of this is the telling fact that in each of these four stories in Awaiting Court Martial, the struggle is utterly defeated. Moreover – and this point is crucial – in the eleven other stories in the collection, the struggles, the conflicts have far less to do with socio-economic or socio-political issues than with confrontations that could more appropriately be described as existential, woven as they are around the dilemma or the anguish of how to live or die well in a world in which deceit, bad faith, cynicism and rampant indifference to human suffering are the reigning values that determine and shape all relationships. Indeed, in comparison with Iyayi’s three novels, it is nothing short of astonishing that the working class in particular and, more generally, subaltern groups and those who struggle on their behalf are, so to speak, greatly “underrepresented’ in Awaiting Court Martial. Conversely, characters with a middle class professional background clearly predominate in the stories in the volume.

    These are the more apparent, the more obvious shifts in character, “plot” and themes that we find in the movement from the earlier three novels to the collection of shorter stories in the book that I, along with a few other critics, deem the best work to date of Iyayi as a writer. But what are the not so apparent, more subtle shifts in Awaiting Court Martial the perception of which should lead us, as I wish to suggest, to an interpretation of this work that might lead us to a fruitful, radical and progressive analysis of a collection of stories in which, for the most part, we encounter only catastrophes and defeats? This will be our starting point in next week’s concluding essay in the series.

    To be continued.

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Writing, as if life itself depended on it (1)

    Writing, as if life itself depended on it (1)

    Talakawa Liberation Herald 41

    [For Festus Iyayi: radical humanist; writer; neorealist artificer]

    Note: 

    This tribute to Festus Iyayi as writer is excerpted from a much longer essay that I wrote for a collection celebrating his 60th birthday six years ago. In the essay, I paid exclusive attention to Festus Iyayi the writer. In this excerpt, I have stuck to that decision. I do not know whether the collection for which the essay was written was ever published as I was never sent a copy by the Editor, Professor Wumi Raji. Raji did tell me that Festus saw and read the essay. As I mourn his transition with his family and other comrades, it gives me some consolation that he got to read some of the things I say in the tribute concerning how belated the essay was. The title of this tribute is the same one that I gave the longer essay for the collection. There was not the slightest intimation that he would be gone so soon! Thus, I have left intact the present tense of the active verbs that I used throughout the tribute. Festus is not completely gone from us; may his writings be a lasting, imperishable legacy to us and those that shall come after us!

    It is a challenge for me to give a precise, easily comprehensible sense of what I have in mind in the title of this tribute: writing, as if life itself depended on it. Writing is of course one of the greatest cultural inventions of all time. At different times and places human life, especially when conceived in terms of human progress, has received a tremendous boost from powerful or momentous written documents. But unlike verbal speech which is both a primary cultural activity and a social act that almost always entails trans-individual and intersubjective negotiation between two or more persons, writing is a secondary cultural activity; in all its most significant expressions, it is a profoundly lonely activity. For this reason it is not easy to think of any act of writing of which it could be said that life itself depended on it – except perhaps in a figurative sense. Of course more prosaically, life could be said to depend on writing if a particular writer’s psychological or even physical survival in a period of an exceptionally brutal incarceration literally depended on his or her writing. But in neither of these two instances, one figurative and the other literal, am I using this loaded, pregnant phrase – writing as if life itself depended on it – in this tribute to Festus Iyayi. Rather, what I have in mind here is a combination of both the subject matter and the effect of that extraordinary kind of writing in the presence of which the reader is taken (back) to the very roots of being. This is what one confronts most powerfully and unforgettably in perhaps the best among Iyayi’s works, the book of short stories titled Awaiting Court Martial. But this effect of a kind of writing that subliminally expresses what the Italian philosopher, Giorgio Agamben, has famously described as bare life is already present, already an insistent intimation in Iyayi’s works from the very first title, the celebrated novel, Violence. In other words, I am suggesting that Iyayi is a writer in whose best stories one confronts a kind of imaginative, belletristic writing that subliminally takes us back to the roots of Being, close to the edge of what it means to live without the illusions of religious or ideological mantras, or the blinkers people often desperately snatch from the pieties of conventional morality in order to shield themselves from the savage truths of an often cruel and unforgiving existence.

    Sometime in June 2006 at one of the many events organised to celebrate Femi Osofisan’s 60th birthday on the campus of the University of Ibadan, a fierce verbal controversy over the writings of Festus Iyayi took place between me and Pius Omole, then a Senior Lecturer at the University. Now, I should perhaps state that I am quite deliberately identifying Omole by name and institutional affiliation here when tact or simple courteousness demand that I keep his identity unrevealed. I am departing from that protocol of civility because the view of Iyayi’s writings that Omole expressed at that gathering, while very common among the mainstream of conservative or liberal literary critics and scholars in Nigeria, nonetheless enjoys the “protection” of anonymity. In other words, while most conservative and liberal critics privately express this view of Iyayi as a writer and some even express it in their classes, no one has publicly owned up to it.

    Now, it is precisely because I do not wish to perpetuate this anonymity of a view that I consider both lacking in any demonstrable basis in the corpus of Iyayi’s fiction and over-simplifying about the nature of engaged, committed writing in our country that I have put a particular name, a specific, individuated identity to it – that of Pius Omole as publicly stated in a verbal exchange between us. Thus, it is useful to give a profile of this view of Iyayi’s writings from the Right and the Centre of Nigerian literary-critical discourse that led to that vigorous controversy in June 2006, right in the midst of the celebration of Osofisan’s works.

    On one level, this view can be simply and unambiguously stated: Iyayi is a writer of the radical Left with an overriding, urgent social cause; for that reason, the value of his writings rests primarily on the Cause (deliberately capitalised) for and about which he so passionately writes. At face value, this view is factual and perhaps even unexceptionable: Iyayi, as the whole world knows, is indeed an engaged, committed writer and the causes for and about which he writes matter greatly to him. And if his writings have, in one way or another, served to advance greater critical awareness and discussion of those causes, so much the better for Iyayi himself and those on behalf of whom he writes.

    But this is all rather facile and this becomes clear the moment you bring into the discussion those who are either critical of the causes about which Iyayi writes or are indeed dubious about, or even downright hostile to those causes. For as soon as you bring into the discussion this perspective of fragmented or multiple readerships of Iyayi’s writings, then the matter gets very complicated. And this was precisely Pius Omole’s tactic in June 2006: he vigorously insisted that Iyayi’s value as a writer is determined solely by his value for those among the Nigerian reading public that share his social and ideological views. In other words, this implies that while Iyayi’s writings are obviously very important for radical-leftist critics and activists, they don’t hold up well outside the fraternity of the Left. Expressed in other words, this implies that with Iyayi, the imaginative works are little more than an extension into the realm of fictional writing of Iyayi the activist, the passionate and uncompromising Leftist who stands tall and implacable among the country’s radical intelligentsia.

    Of course, I immediately took Omole up on these assertions. I vigorously insisted that similar to what obtains in the works of other progressive, leftist writers like Femi Osofisan, Niyi Osundare and Odia Ofeimun, Iyayi is one radical writer about whose works no scholar or critic could be condescending. I stated that I was making this point emphatically because there are indeed radical Nigerian poets and playwrights the quality of whose writings invite and have indeed received a surfeit of patronising critical commentary, the kind of critical condescension that any self-respecting, sophisticated author would reject. But Iyayi, I insisted, is not a progressive, leftist writer of that kind. Resting my “case” on an exposé on the underlying, though unspoken assumptions of Omole’s assertions, I argued that Iyayi is one of the great radical humanists of postcolonial African literature, a writer whose passionate and eloquent advocacy of the revolutionary transformation of our society did not in any way compromise the quality of his writing, especially with regard to the dominance of realism in its diverse forms and expressions in our literature across the entire ideological spectrum occupied by our major authors.

    Of the underlying assumptions of Omole’s assertions during that verbal joust between us in June 2006, the most crucial is the idea that a work of literature or art cannot simultaneously serve a social cause and be a significant or even outstanding work. But this view, I countered, is refuted by innumerable works of literature and art from diverse cultural traditions of the world, from antiquity to modern times, and from classically realist to bracingly or joyously modernist and postmodernist styles and forms. In different times and places, I argued, works that were produced to protest war, slavery, the oppression of women and the poor, and the tyranny of specific social orders and institutions have been very successful in pursuit of those causes at the same time that they have moved even readers who were not particularly open to the causes advanced by the works.

    The refutation of this fallacious claim about Iyayi as a radical writer is what drives this tribute. This I intend to do through a particularly focused attentiveness to a major shift in fictional form, style and themes that occurred in Iyayi’s writings in the 1990s. This radical shift in his writings has very rarely been noted; for that reason, it has not been subjected to critical inquiry. I am using it as a point of departure for this tribute because, as I hope to demonstrate, it says a lot, heuristically, not only about Iyayi’s own writings but also about committed, radical literature in Nigeria in the postindependence period. I must emphasise here that it is a deliberately symptomatic cognitive mapping of this decisive shift in Iyayi’s writings that I carry out in this tribute because, as I shall be arguing, what at first sight appears to be so particular, so striking in Iyayi as an engaged writer, is indeed highly revealing of broader currents in Nigerian writings of a distinctively radical, leftist orientation. This is the interpretive burden of my central arguments in this essay, this claim that the shift that appears so marked, so distinctive in Iyayi’s writings is in fact symptomatic of a whole shift in radical, engaged writing in Nigeria in the last three decades. Before coming to it, a few words about the belatedness of this essay are perhaps useful.

    Writing now for the first time ever on Iyayi as a writer, I am struck by how odd, how strange it is to me that he who should have been the very first about whom I ought to have written is the last, using that word “last” in its specific connotation of something that comes as the latest in an ongoing series. This is because, simply stated in its most essential aspect, no other Nigerian writer of imaginative works, either of my generation or within the ranks of self-identified progressive authors in our country, has been closer, in theory and praxis, to my own ideological and political views and to my work as an activist than Iyayi. I shall have more to say on this point later in this tribute. For now, let me simply say that I am so amazed at this belated realisation of this silence of mine on Iyayi’s works – which I have admired for a long time and which I so vigorously defended in that verbal exchange with Pius Omole in June 2006 – that I am moved, probably as an act of symbolic reprieve for the oversight, to raise here the shades of that biblical saying in Matthew 20, verse 16: The last shall be the first and the first shall be the last!

    To be continued

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Abysmal statistics, facts and realities that define and yet do not define us (3)

    Abysmal statistics, facts and realities that define and yet do not define us (3)

    In bringing this series to a conclusion, the opening section of the famous first sentence of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities comes to mind:”It was the best of times and it was the worst of times”. The “two cities” of Dickens’ novel are London and Paris in the months and years of the French Revolution, one of the most earthshaking events of modern history. Perhaps when a novel of comparable power and popularity comes to be written about the pre-revolutionary times we are living through in our country at the present time, its opening sentence will be, “it was the worst of times and it was, yet again, the very worst of times”. That opening section of Dickens’ novel applies to everybody who was alive in the period, rich and poor, the powerful and the downtrodden. If, heaven forbid, that novel comes to be written about Obasanjo’s, Yar’ Adua’s and Jonathan’s Nigeria and it opens with “it was the worst of times and it was, yet again, the very worst of times” this will also apply to all Nigerians alive now and living in the country.

    Yes, a few thousands of the 170 millions of Nigerians are immensely wealthy. And yes, our political and public officeholders, especially our parliamentarians, are the best paid, the most handsomely remunerated in the world. But don’t we all live in a society in which the conditions of life, in its bare, irreducible essentials, are dire for everybody? Heaven help any Nigerian, rich or poor, who gets very sick and needs the most reliable and efficient facilities that modern medicine can provide, for they are either completely absent in our hospitals and clinics or, in the few hospitals where such amenities can be found, they are so expensive that even the very wealthy among us find it better to go to India if they wish to survive. The education that our schools provide is generally so poor in quality that even moderately well-off Nigerians who really cannot afford it nonetheless invest their life savings in sending their children abroad if they want their offspring to have the kind of education they had in this very country in their youth.

    As I have been arguing in this series, perhaps the most confounding manifestation of these evil and unhappy times that have befallen our country lies, I strongly believe, in the collapse of every mark of meritocratic values and practices in all aspects of our collective existence as a nation, a society. Ability, talent and merit now have little or nothing to do with how the majority of our wealthy got rich and with how most of our professionals got the certificates they wield as passports to good, superannuated jobs. For the most part, the majority of those who rise to immense political power and authority in our country have little ability, imagination and vision to show for their success – as everyone can see from the quality of the present occupant of Aso Rock. There are examination malpractices galore in private and public examinations conducted to test the ability and training of the pupils of our primary and secondary schools; and sometimes, when a diligent invigilator spots the miscreants and tries to “book” them, violence is visited on that would-be conscientious examination official. Even in the religious institutions, in churches and mosques where an inordinate amount of moralizing and sermonizing goes on, pastors and imams, church wardens and imams’ assistants are known to lend their seal of approval or, indeed, sanctification on very wealthy members of their congregations that are known to be openly and brazenly corrupt.

    At the end of last week’s piece in this series, I promised to conclude the series with a reflection on the few hopeful signs and portents that indicate that things could be far better in Nigeria than they are now. I intend to keep that promise, even though I also said that there are no easy solutions to the immensity of the crises traceable to the collapse of meritocracy – in those of its forms that are compatible with popular democracy and social justice – in our society. In three discursive steps, I now wish to enter this concluding and cautiously optimistic section of this series. In the first step, I give some comparative statistics and figures to show the roots of the problem. In step two, I argue that Nigeria was very, very different about four decades ago than what the statistics and figures in step one reveal. And in step three, I argue that logically, if things were actually quite different in the past, they could be also very different in the future, given an honest, courageous and, let us admit it, probably very painful encounter with the past and the present.

    Step One

    With a population of roughly 1.3 billion people, a land area of 1.26 million square miles, India has only 28 states (plus 7 so-called “Union Territories” that do no have the political and administrative status of states). Moreover, the political heads or chief executives of India’s states are not called Governors; their designation is “Chief Minister”. Now let us consider the figures for Nigeria: land area, 356.7 thousand square miles (less than a third of India’s land mass); population, 160 million (less than one-eighth of India’s population). How many states do we have? 36, with agitation still going on for yet more states to be created! Moreover, the political and administrative head of our states are called “Governors” (In Ghana, they are called “Regional Ministers”)

    In case there are readers of this piece who wonder what’s in a name, what’s in a designation, the answer is that a “Governor” (Nigeria), unlike a Chief Minster (India) or a Regional Minister (Ghana) combines the post of head of government with that of head of state. Thus, while the Chief Ministers of India’s 28 states are no doubt powerful politicians, singly and collectively, they do not remotely come near the influence, authority and powers of patronage concentrated in our Governors, all of whom are no less than mini heads of states. This is why in relative administrative cost of governance, Nigeria is second to no other country in the world, with the probable exception of only the United States of America, the richest country on the planet, the center of gravity, at least so far, of global capitalism. The colossal waste and squandermania that is constitutionally woven into political governance in Nigeria at the present time is not only the worst in the world, it is the structural and material base of all the corruption, all the rot that pervades all aspects of our collective existence. It must be terminated and soon, because for as long as it remains, the corruption, the rot in our country will not only persist, it will grow ever bigger and bigger. Why is this so? For an answer to this question, let’s move now to step two

    Step Two

    At one time in Nigeria when the country was administratively divided into three regions and the economy was based on a combination of export crops and a nascent light consumer goods industry whose market was the entire West African region, we did have Governors in this country. But they had no political or administrative power; their posts were mostly honorific and symbolic, corresponding to that of a head of state that is not also head of government. I recollect here that for the most part, the occupants of these positions were highly respected and/or beloved officials: Sir Kashim Ibrahim in the North; Sir Francis Ibiam in the East; Sir Adesoji Aderemi, the then ruling Ooni of Ife in the West. It so happens that all this took place before Nigeria became awash with oil wealth, with a near mono-culture economy based on a mainly offshore extractive industry that requires little or no value-added production in the hinterlands of the country for the oil wealth to continue to flow to the benefit, mostly, of the oil conglomerates and a just few thousands of Nigerians.

    I recall these facts here not for nostalgic or sentimental reasons but simply to make the following crucial point: with the change of the national economy to an offshore extractive industry that is not primarily based on developing the infrastructures and human capacities necessary for value-added production deep in the hinterlands of the country, we began to have Governors who are both heads of government and heads of their states. With one or two exceptions, none of the thirty-six governors (including the President himself) has a fraction, an iota of the enormous respect that Governors had back then in the First Republic. Indeed, for the most part, and again with only a few exceptions, most of the Governors now care not one jot for the respect or love of their people. As a matter of fact, many of them do everything, it seems, to attract anger, shame and disrespect from their peoples!

    Step Three

    We cannot go back to that past when Governors were only 3 (later 4), not 36; that past in which the Governors were highly respected public appointees. For one thing, the economic and structural basis of that past is gone, seemingly forever. The benefit that we may derive from reviewing that past is this lesson: we must design our mode of political governance with a keen eye to the economic foundations of the society. Waste and squandermania were not unknown in the First Republic; but they were nowhere close to being the worst in the African continent, not to talk of the whole world. To put this in the language of political economy, waste and squandermania were not (yet) a significant part of capitalism as it was then known and practiced by the ruling class parties of the country. And if waste and squandermania have become so colossal now, it is because the capitalism now practiced, now regnant in Nigeria is one of the most backward and unproductive forms of capitalism in the world: an economy dominated by an offshore extractive industry that seems to have no compelling need for development of infrastructures and human capacities in the country’s hinterland. There is nothing inherently Nigerian in this extremely backward form of peripheral capitalism; it simply the case that none of our ruling class parties, I repeat none at all, has shown a real interest to do away with the present economic order in which, with very little infrastructure and human capacities developed in the country’s hinterlands, the oil wealth continues to flow and their Excellencies continue to live and act as the lords of universe.

    No developing country in the world can afford the level of waste and squandermania in the Nigerian socio-economic and political order of the present historical moment, especially because this (dis)order serves as the foundation of all the corruption and rot in the country. Seen in the light of what the totally needless and voidable suffering that this (dis)order imposes on lives of the majority of our peoples now and potentially in the future, it is arguably one of the most stupid forms of governance on the planet. This is not an act of gratuitous abuse on my part; it is simply an assertion, a proud one at that, that we are not a stupid people! We are only, for the present moment, governed by political elites most of whom are completely unembarrassed by stupidity. The darkness and suffering caused by this stupidity will not last forever; only we must hope that they don’t last for too long. The more enlightened, patriotic and egalitarian among our political and business elites will – must – eventually separate themselves from the presently dominant crowd of greedy, barawo cretins who, for want of a better term, I call “Obasanjo’s political brood”. Capitalism will then enter a new phase in our country. I say this with full knowledge of the fact that constitutively stupid political rulers never give up their misrule voluntarily or easily. Let us just hope that it will not be too violent, too self-maiming, the process that will lead us out of the present darkness and stupidity.

  • Abysmal statistics, facts and realities that define and yet do not define us (2)

    Abysmal statistics, facts and realities that define and yet do not define us (2)

    Meritocracy: noun, 1. an elite group of people whose progress is based on ability and talent rather than on birth, class privilege or wealth. 2. the persons constituting such a group. 3. a social system formed on such a basis.

    On many occasions in this column, I have reported how shocked and bewildered I was the very first time I came across the 98.2% failure rate in the NECO November-December 2009 examinations. Let me now report that soon after I had absorbed the bewilderment of that discovery, I felt some relief! As a matter of fact, on July 13 this year when I delivered a lecture at the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA) and mentioned this fact of a great relief that followed my initial shock, the Deputy British High Commissioner, Mr. Peter Carter, who was on the high table, rather spontaneously abandoned all diplomatic niceties and composure and blurted out rather loudly, “You were relieved! Why?” Yes, I had felt relieved, I replied; I had felt relieved because after I had thought deeply about the matter, I recognised that no group of children on the planet could be so dumb, so congenitally retarded as to score that abysmal failure rate of 98.2%. Obviously, I added, the essential problem was not with our children, it was with our system of education. That system of education is failing our children, robbing them of their right to relevant and quality education.

    The same logic could be applied to employers of labour in our country who, as I have reported on many occasions in this column, have for a long time now been complaining that the graduates produced by our universities and other tertiary educational institutions are in general so poor in quality that they are “unemployable”. Well, let me now add to that observation an assertion that as far as anyone can tell, employers of labour in our country, those among the demographically small circle of the very wealthy in Nigeria who pride themselves on having worked for their wealth, have never done much to improve the quality of education in our secondary schools and universities. They have, it seems, just assumed that somehow, quality education, quality graduates just emerge from tertiary institutions the way fruits naturally grow from trees. In all the struggles that teachers in our secondary schools and lecturers and professors in our universities have been waging to have funding that is adequate to the task of educating millions of our youths, these employers of labour have generally watched as bystanders, as neutral observers with no stakes in the outcomes of the struggles.

    This observation can, and indeed should, be couched in terms of macro-institutional policies and the ruling political order itself. As ASUU has been informing the country and the world for decades now, the Nigerian state consistently scores very low on UNESCO guidelines for capital investment in educational infrastructure for the developing countries of the world. There are many things terribly wrong with education in Nigeria; perhaps the single most important factor is consistent under-investment in education over the decades. And this period happens to be the very period in which the country’s political and economic elites grew immensely rich while the vast majority of our peoples became more and more impoverished. With very few exceptions, the employers of labour that endlessly complain about the quality of graduates produced by our universities have been at the heart of this process of obscene self-enrichment at the expense of the vast majority of Nigerians, at the expense of the development of educational and other infrastructures in our country, at the expense indeed of the quality of life and prospects of the future for our youths. We must not lose sight of this factor and its significance in the calamitous decline of meritocratic values and practices in virtually all aspects of life in Nigeria in the last three to four decades. Indeed, we must place this factor at the heart of all our conversations concerning the abysmal statistics and data that indicate that corruption, mediocrity and rot have eaten deep into the fabric of the social order in our country.

    I should perhaps state very clearly here that I am not a warrior, not an ideologue for pure and unadulterated meritocracy in Nigeria or indeed in any part of the world in which we live. For no pure meritocracy has ever existed and will ever exist in human society. Indeed, relatively speaking, meritocratic values and practices first came into prominence in the modern era largely on the heels of the bourgeois world revolution. As status based on noble birth, inherited wealth and social pedigree was powerfully challenged by ability and talent as the commanding criteria for the creation of the industrial and financial capitalism that changed the world forever, meritocracy achieved a prominence that was unknown in any previous stage of human development. However, in nearly all the countries of the world, “old money” based on meritocratic values and practices constantly gives way to “new money” that largely derives from the subversion of meritocracy as an important organising principle in the social order, especially by large-scale and endemic corruption.

    For Nigerians over the age of fifty, these observations will perhaps induce some sentimental nostalgia for late colonial and newly independent Nigeria when merit, talent and ability, mostly obtained through education but also expressed through a dogged spirit of industriousness, mattered a lot, when “old money” derived from trade and commerce reigned as the benchmark for the creation of wealth in our country. School children used to make educational trips to the industrial and commercial enterprises of magnates; I think here of the Odutola Tyre Manufacturing Factory in Ijebu-Ode. Transport magnates like Sir Odumegwu Ojukwu, the father of Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu, were fabled embodiments of “old money” in that period of our country’s economic and social history. And when the so-called “industrial estates or corridors”, as the first mark of state capitalism in Nigeria, were created in the three regions of the country, they were for the most part run efficiently, at least for some time and especially in the Western Region.

    I personally feel no nostalgia, no sentimental wistfulness for the particular order of meritocratic values and practices of that period in the economic affairs of our country. In the present discussion, I cannot get into a full discussion of the reasons for feeling this way. Perhaps at some future date in the column, I shall do so. For now, it suffices for me to state that what I feel, what I urge is this: meritocracy has its place in all modern societies, not as the reigning or supervening element, but as a sort of salve that gives assurance that democratic governance and peace, progress and justice will not be subverted, will not be wiped out by corruption run amuck. Pure meritocracy always inevitably leads to alienated rule by technocrats and bureaucrats; on the other hand, a significant absence of meritocracy leads to the sort of rampaging and destructive rule of kleptocrats and unregenerate oligarchs that has Nigeria and Nigerians under its heels at the present time. Ability and talent are not morally neutral qualities; in the hands of opportunists and cynics, they can be the weapons of thieving, unjust rulers; conversely, when allied to the forces of justice, equality and dignity for all women and men, they can be used to break down the walls of oppression and misrule.

    As a people we are not unchangingly defined and constituted by those abysmal statistics, data and figures that are regularly trotted out by both concerned patriots and bemused, unbelieving traducers of the Nigeria in which mediocrity, corruption and rot have become like second nature to the rulers and the ruled, the powerful and the disenfranchised. Any number of refutations can be given to illustrate this contention. Here’s one of them: the children of Nigerian immigrants in the U.S. regularly outperform the children of many of the other national immigrant communities of that country. So, there is nothing naturally “wrong” with our children here in the country; it is the system, the prevailing order that is failing our children at home. Here’s another point to keep in mind: even with the disastrous fall in standards in education in general and writing in particular, the intellectual life of the Nigerian nation is generally far more vibrant than what obtains in many other countries in Africa and other parts of the developing world. And here’s another point that is hardly known, even in Nigeria itself: even with the poor ranking of our universities in the African continent and in the world, against all the odds, many home-based Nigerian academics are producing works of world class standard and are very, very dedicated to their students; moreover, when given the chance in the international arena of global academia, they give very good accounts of themselves.

    How can these positive or hopeful portents be used as transformative tools? How can we make Nigerians of all social groups and ethnic communities begin to believe that our children can perform as well at home as they do abroad, that our rulers will not always be unconscionable looters and wastrels, that honesty, compassion and decency might one day actually form the composite ethos of our society? There are no easy answers to these questions, but neither are they beyond the pale of what is possible, given the right kind of environment. This will be the starting point in next week’s concluding piece in the series.

  • Abysmal statistics, facts and realities that define and yet do not define us (1)

    Abysmal statistics, facts and realities that define and yet do not define us (1)

    Statistics should be used the way a drunk uses a lamppost, not for illumination but for support.

    Anonymous, credited to British humorists

    When a dead fish starts to rot, the process begins at the head from which it spreads to the rest of the body.

    A Greek adage

    With some embarrassment, perhaps with even a little bit of shame, let me admit it: a few days ago when I went to check where our country’s stand in the Human Development Report (HDR) of 2013, I was greatly relieved, indeed almost joyous, to discover that at 153 out of 187 countries, Nigeria was not at rock bottom level among the countries of the world. The HDR is an annual report issued by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) that gives details of each country’s Human Development Index (HDI) for the preceding year. The HDI itself is a term that was devised to give a far more expansive and accurate measurement than the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the total well-being of the populations of the countries of the world. Being ranked at HDI 153 out of 187 is of course a pretty bad, perhaps even scandalously poor ranking for an oil-rich country, but when your country is nearly always at the bottom of the global totem pole of meritocracy, you may be excused for feeling gratified when your country shows up 34 places above the lowest of the low.

    For those who read the piece on the Nigerian Premier League and professional soccer in our country that was published in this column last week, it will come as no surprise why this week I went searching for Nigeria’s location in the HDR of 2013. For in the light of that piece, our NPL has the great but dubious distinction of being the world’s worst national soccer league, not in terms of the quality of the players but with regard to the absurdity of data and statistics displayed in the league table for the 2012-2013 season. Individually and collectively, we have some of the best players on the African continent; and we export players to virtually all the other regions of the world where they generally tend to give good accounts of themselves as gifted, talented players. By contrast, the league table reflects a completely different profile; it reflects matches regularly won and lost due to factors that have barely anything to do with merit, talent, skill and effort; it reflects a moral universe in which referees, fans and players themselves seem totally resigned to winning and losing through corruption, violence, intimidation and fear.

    This gap between, on the one hand, what might well be the real quality of players in the Nigerian soccer league and, on the other hand, the data and figures displayed in the league table for the whole world to see and mock provides the point of departure for the series that begins in this column with this essay. Can we generalise from this case of the NPL and its absurd league table? As a people are we defined, are we constituted by the myriad of other statistics and realities that indicate that for the great majority of its citizens Nigeria is one of the worst countries in the world in which to live? Or as with the players of the NPL, are Nigerians not really defined or constituted by these super-negative statistics and figures? As we shall see, these are not easy questions or issues to resolve; all the same, they are urgent and pressing matters that require our undivided and unceasing attention.

    Now, besides the organisation of professional soccer, there are of course other major areas of our collective national existence like politics, economy, society and education in which Nigeria is a low achiever, a two-bit player in the theatre of the most meritocratic societies of the planet. As a matter of fact, some of the statistics and figures in these particular aspects of Nigeria’s identity at home and abroad are nothing short of the continent’s or the world’s very worst. At one time or another, some of these have been discussed in this column. In the interest of a cogent and focused discourse, I will cite only a few that I consider the most salient and portentous.

    In one year (2009), only 1.8% of students taking the NECO high school leaving examination passed; in the last decade, the passing rate in this particular examination has never risen above 35%. Similarly, our universities and other tertiary institutions are very poorly ranked in Africa; in the world, the ranking dips so far below the ground level that it is enveloped by invisibility. This pattern also applies to what I personally regard as unquestionably the most unconscionable of these relentless statistics and data of gloom and doom: an absolute poverty rate which stands at seven out of 10 or 70%, again one of the worst in Africa and the world. Closely related to this are the staggering figures, data and anecdotes on corruption in Nigeria that are bandied around the world. Almost a decade ago, Paul Wolfowitz, former President of the World Bank, estimated that since crude oil began to be exported from Nigeria, about $300 billion dollars had been looted by the country’s military and civilian rulers and their cronies. This brazen official brigandage continues to this day, just as it continues to be one of the worst and the most talked about in the world. For instance, as I have observed again and again in this column, in the oil subsidy mega-scam of the year 2011, the sum of N2.58 trillion naira that is the equivalent of $16 billion U.S. dollars was looted from our nation’s savings account, the Excess Crude Account (ECA), more or less in broad daylight.

    Most of these data, figures and realities are well known and much talked about, in Nigeria itself and in many other parts of the world. I think it is safe, if also extremely disturbing, to say that most Nigerians think that we are defined by these data and figures, that we are what the figures and data say we are. On the surface, most Nigerians feel or think that the politicians, the rulers bear full responsibility for this troubled and troubling convergence between what these statistics say and what we are as a people. But I think that deep down; most Nigerians also think that the people themselves, in their scores of millions and in virtually every part of the country, bear some responsibility for the corruption, the rot, the abysmal state of things. Now, this is bad enough when we are thinking of things like corruption and dishonesty, but what of the abysmally low figures for education? What of the infinitely low ranking of our universities and other tertiary institutions? Are Nigerians some of the world’s dumbest people as the statistics seem to imply?

    In case any reader of this piece is inclined to think that these are mere abstract or speculative questions, please think of the following realities. For close to two decades now, employers of labour in our country have been complaining that the majority of students graduating from our universities, often with excellent results, are so bad, so inferior in quality that they are “unemployable”. Think also of the fact that our newspapers are often filled with badly written, sometimes blatantly ungrammatical writing, the likes of which you could never have seen two or three decades ago. Think also of the fact that whether it is corruption or the failure rates of students at the public school leaving examination, Nigerians seem remarkably resigned, seem unperturbed and carry on as if, well, that is how things are and what can one do about? Indeed, this particular factor of resignation, complacency or perhaps even widespread opportunistic collusion in the rot that seems to define us as a people requires careful consideration.

    When I first came across the 1.8% passing rate in the NECO exams of November-December 2009, as shocked as I was about that statistic, I was even more shocked that the Minister of Education showed little or no outrage. In any country in the world that is not benighted with rot and mediocrity in high places, that Minister of Education would have lost his or her job on the basis of that distressing result alone. It was therefore doubly astounding that our Minister of Education did not on that occasion get fired and did not even get queried when he showed no outrage, no concern at all. And in the course of the last one decade when the passing rate has not exceeded 35%, if any Federal Minister of Education has shown any alarm at this calamitous state of things, I have not seen it as I have been on a year after year lookout for it. What this means, what this can only mean, is that as far as the powers that be are concerned, Nigeria is a low achiever in education, period. If this seems a thoughtless or gratuitous remark to make, please think of the notorious “4% annunciation” of the Minster of Finance, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, when she infamously declared that because the scope of corruption, waste and squandermania in Nigeria was so vast and so endemic, she could only hope to have reduced the scale by not more than 4% by the time she leaves office in 2015.

    But what of teachers, parents, guardians, and local communities themselves? What outrage have they shown about 35% as the highest passing rate that their children and wards can reach, as revealed in published NECO results year after year? Again, in many countries in the world, with 35% as the upper passing rate, parents and guardians would be up in arms against teachers, against educators, against the government. But this has not happened in our country. Indeed, if widespread anecdotes are to be believed, instead of outrage, something that is almost exactly its opposite has been observed in many communities across the length and breadth of the country. In one anecdote that was narrated recently by a former member of the National Assembly at a public lecture at Harvard University, his offer in his home constituency to pay for extra hours of lessons and more dedicated teaching for secondary school students so that their NECO results could be improved was rebuffed by the chosen leaders of the community. No, they told the shocked Ex-Honourable Member, our children do not need extra hours of teaching, they do not need better paid and more dedicated teachers, what they need is failsafe access to examination papers since, as they have been told by neighbouring communities that that is the only real passport to good NECO results!

    This, of course, is not the end of the story. As a people, we are not defined, we are not constituted only by these sorts of anecdotes, together with the range of statistics and data of negation that I have discussed in this essay. We must use statistics and data carefully, astutely. And when everything is said and done, it all boils down to how the lives of the people are organised by the political leadership. As the second epigraph to this essay puts it, “when a dead fish starts to rot, the process begins from the head”. This will be our starting point in next week’s continuation of the series.

  • Worldwide, the jokes on our Glo NPL Table are mounting to the high heavens!

    Worldwide, the jokes on our Glo NPL Table are mounting to the high heavens!

    It was about three years ago that I wrote my one and only comment to date on the Glo Nigerian Premier League (NPL). At that time, this column, under a slightly different name, made its regular appearance in The Sunday Guardian. On that occasion, I was prompted to write by a news item that I heard on Lagos State Radio Service 89.7 FM that reported a bizarre incident that happened on the last day of the of matches played in the Nigerian premier league that year. As a sort of background to what I wish to write about in this piece, let me briefly state what was reported in that radio broadcast that was actually a news commentary that explored and decried widespread corruption in the NPL.

    It was a match on the last day of the season. One particular club needed to win – and win by at least 10 goals in order to secure both the total points and the goals average needed to avoid relegation from the premier league. To everyone, this seemed an impossible feat, especially in light of the fact that the opposing club was known to have a much stronger team that was indeed much higher in the league table than the desperate club hovering on the edge of relegation. Besides, who has ever heard of a club in a professional national football league being trounced by a margin of 10 goals? But lo and behold, relegation was averted because the desperate club won and it won by a margin of 13 goals!

    Now, I confess that for at least forty years, I have not watched any soccer match in the Nigerian premier league, either on the football pitch or on television. Moreover, Eyimba and Shooting Stars are the only teams about which I have any ideas at all that connect the NPL of today with the time in the past of nearly a half century ago when I had an active interest in professional soccer in our country. All the other teams and virtually all the names of top players and officials in the NPL of today mean nothing to me. Now this is regrettable, at least as far as bits of knowledge and information of this kind are necessary or even vital to making an informed and useful commentary on the current state of the NPL. For this reason, I must make a disclaimer here: this piece has a purpose different from giving an expert, knowledgeable opinion on the NPL and its weaknesses at the present time. What I wish to write about can be best be indicated by comparing it to something you write, or say, or do when you are trying to recover from a profoundly saddening and maddening experience before which you seem powerless, stultified, dazed. Monstrously corrupt and extremely backward things that can be found in no other country in the world are happening in professional soccer in our country and on a scale that was simply unimaginable some four decades ago when I was a keen fan of the sport. These things have just come to my knowledge. I write to take them in, to reflect on them in the hope that I may be able to shed some light on their connection to the huge matter of what it is to be a Nigerian in the world today.

    If he does not mind my drawing this attention to him, I must say that it was Akin Adesokan, a former graduate student of mine and now an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Indiana-Bloomington, that started the chain of action and reaction that ultimately led to the writing of this piece. Having read that column a few years back when I wrote on that affair of the 13-goal, relegation-averting margin of victory in an NPL match, Akin forwarded to me an article published earlier this week in The Guardian (U.K.) with a comment that what I wrote then was child’s play compared with the corruption and rot going on in the NPL now. I duly read the article forwarded by Akin to me and was left speechless. But as I soon found out, this particular Guardian (U.K.) article was just a starting point because from it, I was directed to other publications, in print and in the electronic medium, on the same topic of NPL and its League Table for the season just ended, 2012-2013. Virtually every piece to which I was directed got bigger and bigger in the scale of corruption and scandal said to be rampant in the Nigerian league. And so did the scale of disbelief and condescension with which the allegations were reported and documented. In the worst cases, one saw contempt bordering on reproduction of racist stereotypes of Nigeria and Africa, the Dark Continent and its allegedly most corrupt and rotten country. [Parenthetically, I might add here that it was a great relief for me as I perused these articles, that by far the best written and the most insightful was written by a Nigerian, Colin Udoh, Editor of the online journal www.kickoffnigeria.com in an article titled “Defying statistics, the NPL way”. For readers who wish to read Udoh’s article, it was posted on October 28, 2013] Now, what are the things that make the NPL League Table of the 2012-2013 season completely unlike any other league table of a national professional football league in the whole world?

    For readers who may be well aware of this mega-crisis of corruption in the NPL as reflected in its league table, it is important to bear in mind that what every single writer on the subject keeps repeating is that this is unique to Nigeria, that it happens in no other country in the world. And with regard to this unwanted “uniqueness” of the NPL League Table, two things stand out. First: a vast majority of clubs win at home and lose in away marches. Secondly: the points differential between the winning club at the head of the table and the relegated club at the bottom of the table is relatively insignificant. For an illustration of the first point: Kano Pillars, the NPL champion for 2012/2013 won all home games but won only 2 away games; with 3 away wins, only Kwara United did better in away wins, even though they were still relegated for being among the three clubs at the bottom of the league. And for an illustration of the second point, Kano Pillars, the champions, had a total of 63 points while Shooting Stars at the very bottom of the table had 46 points. As Colin Udoh remarks in his article, unlike other national soccer leagues in the world, teams in the Nigerian league hardly ever win away games: 3 was the highest number of away wins and the champions of the league won only 2 away games.

    Of the many causes given for this dubious uniqueness of the Nigerian football league table, two closely related factors are particularly disturbing in the way in which they remind one of how corruption is often closely linked with violence in the public sphere in our country. The matter here pertains to referees and refereeing: home teams openly bribe our referees and in an addition, home team fans regularly visit lynch-mob violence on referees who dare to rule against the home team. In one account, I read of a referee who dared to rule against the home team at a crucial moment in the game; instantly, without waiting for the game to end, the fans descended on the field with an obvious intent to do grievous bodily harm to the ref. Unknown to them, the man was a colonel in the Nigerian army who, wisely, had his service pistol on him. He drew out his pistol and with one mind, the crowd thereupon decided that cowardice was the better side of courage in numbers and gave up their chase. Indeed, all accounts that I read on this matter stated that Nigerian referees are beholden to home teams for their accommodation, hospitality and even remuneration. Thus, corruption is inherent in the system of refereeing itself; the thuggish mob violence of home teams is an icing on the cake, a jara that acts as enforcer just in case a referee decides to be fair and objective regardless of how much he has received from the home team.

    From regarding refereeing as the essential bane of Nigerian professional soccer, it is important to add that the clubs, the teams, the players themselves play an assigned or compulsory role in the rot. For one thing, it is said that for fear of home team mobs, visiting teams often decide to lose rather than win and face the ire of the mob. In one instance, because the foul was so blatant that nobody failed to see it, a referee awarded a penalty to a visiting team close to the end of a match. Right in front of the whole world, so to speak, all the other members of the visiting team begged their goalkeeper to dive in the other direction of the expected penalty shot so as not save the spot kick. The goalkeeper willingly obliged and nobody was hurt. The home team was not defeated.

    This profile of the rottenness of the NPL would be incomplete without dealing with the conditions under which most visiting teams in the Nigerian league have to play their away matches, conditions that reinforce the norm that ensures that clubs hardly ever win away matches. For the most part, visiting teams travel by bus by road, often in long journeys over extremely bad roads that leave the teams physically tired and hardly in a spirit to tackle a well rested home team. Sometimes, visiting teams find it impossible to arrive in time or even on the day of the match so that when they finally arrive, the game has already been lost to their conditions of travel. Meanwhile, their management typically does not house the players in decent or comfortable hotels en route. This is partly because there are no such hotels along the highways of Nigeria and partly because the players themselves would rather share the money for lodging amongst themselves than be housed in third rate hotels. In this particular respect, the conditions of work and remuneration in the NPL accurately mirror the conditions that all working and non-working poor Nigerians have to live or contend with.

    For most commentators on professional soccer in the world, these peculiar conditions under which soccer in Nigeria is (dis)organised at the present time are invisible. All they can see, all they hear and read about is that unlike any other national league in the world, home teams nearly always win and visiting teams nearly always lose in the Nigerian league, no matter how good a club is. Indeed, merit, skill, practice, effort, none of these has anything to do with the results displayed on the NPL table. The referees see to that; the fans see to that; the players themselves see to that. Above all else, the present state of things, of disorder masking as order and of misrule masking as legitimate rule provides very fertile breeding ground for the kind of professional soccer league that we have that is fast becoming the butt of jokes all over the world.

    It is not difficult to see that very soon the jokes about NPL will be about as widespread and regular as jokes about 419 internet scams which, in all parts of the world, are now regarded as primarily or perhaps even essentially Nigerian. As a Nigerian, I have always been indifferent to the jokes purporting that 419 internet scams are essentially Nigerian. Yes, most of those who perpetrate the 419 scams are Nigerians, but the scams and scammers themselves are not as deeply rooted in the organisation of life and work, of work and play, and of play and reward as professional soccer is in our country. We are a passionate people about football. And the world, generally speaking, regards us as one of the leading soccer nations in Africa and the world. If this is the case, why is professional soccer so corruptly run in our country, in conditions that are some of the most backward and unregenerate in Africa and the world? But isn’t this how politics itself is run in our country?

  • Progressivism, between revolution and evolution: For Baba Omojola, 1938-2013

    Progressivism, between revolution and evolution: For Baba Omojola, 1938-2013

    The philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in several ways; the point however, is to change it.
    Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach” [11th thesis]

    The news of his death came to me from Eddie Madunagu through a terse text message that got to me at about 4 a.m. in the morning: “BJ, Baba Omojola is dead.” Incidentally, I had just gone to bed having been at work most of the night. I was tired, I was sleepy, but the news made me sit bolt upright. I had a mind to call Eddie right away, but the thoughts, the images of encounters with Baba over the decades and years flooded my mind, my psyche and I willingly submitted myself to them. For this reason, instead of calling Eddie I sent him a brief text message saying “A terrible loss. He never looked his age. He seemed deathless, he seemed indestructible!” Having sent this message to Eddie, I resumed my sad, brooding and introspective thoughts about Baba and what his life, thoughts and deeds had meant to the revolutionary struggles against injustice and inequality in our country, our continent and our world. After about an hour, I drifted to sleep and for this reason, it wasn’t until about five hours later that I was finally able to call Eddie and share with him the deep sense of loss and mourning that I think each of us felt both personally and as members of a generation of which Baba Omojola was both a beacon, a pathfinder and an organizer-extraordinaire.

    Before ideology, doctrine, principle and organisation all of which mattered a great deal to him, Baba was a person who it was a privilege and a delight to meet and to know. For one thing, nature and/or genetics were very kind to him in that for almost all of his adult years, he looked considerably younger than his real age. I used to tease him and joke with him to reveal to me the secret of the “ajidewe” (magical potion or elixir of eternal youthfulness) that made him always look so much younger than his age. At a deeper level, the perpetual youthfulness that he exuded in body and spirit never left him. Indeed, it took some time for me and members of my generation who entered the movement of leftist, socialist activist politics in our country in the late 1960s to appreciate the fact that Baba was older than us, both in age and in the movement!

    While we were yet to figuratively cut our milk teeth in Marxism and the workers’ and farmers’ struggles, Baba had been there with legendary figures like Pa Imoudou, Tunji Otegbeye, Eskor Toyo, Mokwugo Okoye and Raj Abdalla. He had personally and directly participated in international currents of the worldwide anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist revolutions that we had only read about in books. And yet in spite of this rich background of experience and education, Baba was a profoundly humble, unassuming and approachable man. He was hospitableness and generosity personified. He hosted, often at his own expense, innumerable public and private, open and secret, legal and extra-legal meetings of the Left. He was one of a few, if indeed not the only one, who could call a meeting of all the factions and tendencies of the Nigerian Left in the 70s and 80s and every group would respond positively to the call.

    And yet, Baba was ardent and passionate in ideology, doctrine and organisation. Anyone who knows anything at all about Marxism and socialism in their incarnations as revolutionary movements and organizations knows that this means factionalism and divisiveness often on an extraordinarily bitter and self-defeating scale. Perhaps unknown to the Nigerian state and unknown also to the generality of Nigerians, Marxists and socialists in the country in the 60s, 70s and 80s were divided and spilt along the fault lines of this constant and perpetual factionalism of the Left in nearly all countries of the world. Baba taught all of us in the Left in Nigeria an invaluable lesson in the necessity of overcoming this historic and normative organizational disease of the Left. What do I mean by this?

    Baba Omojola was a member of the Third International, the controlling formation of all Trotskyite-Marxist movements and comrades in the world. He was the Editor of a publication known as “Mass Line”, the most prominent Marxist journal in the country at the time. In the journal, Baba and his comrades stuck to the Trotskyite line and everyone on the Left knew this. But beyond mandatorily holding on to the official doctrinal line, Baba opened the pages of the journal to debates with other factions, other tendencies of the Left in the country, something to which Trotskyites in other parts of the world are not usually predisposed. The upshot of this was the fact that while ideology and doctrine definitely meant a great deal to Baba, it meant a great deal more to him to bring living, breathing, suffering and struggling human beings together whatever ideas they profess as long as they were willing to contribute to the great struggles for the betterment of society in general and the lot of the most oppressed in particular. The three major All Socialist Meetings of the 70s at which virtually all the groups and individuals on the Left in the country were represented were convened by him. [It was while I was driving back from Kano at the second of these meetings that I had an accident at Kontangora that nearly took my life in 1976] Nobody, absolutely nobody was more dedicated than Baba to creating a viable and strong political party of the Left that would contain all factions and tendencies. Look into every single attempt to found such a party in our country and you will find that Baba was there as a moving spirit. He never tired, he never relented, he never gave up on the attempt. And when that effort failed, he went into parties and organizations that were bourgeois in social location but liberal and egalitarian in ideology and orientation. If revolution did not seem to be coming as passionately as he wanted it to, he looked to evolution, to gradual, incremental steps by which the same goals could be achieved. He was a radical and progressive humanist for all seasons.

    It is against this background that we must assess the popular view on the Left that in his last decades and years and especially after the nullification of the June 12, 1993 electoral victory of M.K.O. Abiola and the Social Democratic Party, Baba subordinated the class struggle to the national question. What this means is, simply, that he became an “ethno-nationalist” for whom the fate of the Yoruba “nation” within Nigeria was of more importance than the common fate of the oppressed of all the ethnic, regional and religious communities in the country. The fact that he was such a prominent figure in PRONACO definitely added much fuel to this view for among all the major progressive groups in the country, PRONACO it is which is totally and unapologetically committed to the “national question”, to the cause of parity and true federalism among all the federating ethnic nationalities in Nigeria. Beyond PRONACO, even Leftists and socialists of his generation like the late Ola Oni and Bala Usman, among so many others, are also said to have taken this route of the primacy of the national question over class struggle.

    In my humble opinion, I think that the matter is a little more complicated in the case of Baba Omojola. I think to the very end, he kept all possible avenues to progress, justice and equality in our country and our continent open. We know, for instance, that in recent years PRONACO was not the only organization and forum in which he was active. He was a member of the Socialist Party of Nigeria (SPN) and contributed to debates that informed its periodic bulletins on the state of the country and its working peoples across the length and breadth of the land.

    Baba Omojola was born into and came of age in the colonial age of imperialism. He saw with great clarity that not everyone, not every group in colonial Nigeria and Africa suffered under foreign rule; he saw in fact that some of the colonized benefited from it. He saw that colonialism drew much of its force and hegemonic authority from capitalism, just as slavery had also been closely aligned to capitalism in its mercantilist phase. That’s what led him to Marxism and socialism. In the postcolonial and neocolonial Nigeria and Africa of his middle-aged years, he saw that capitalism in his homeland had evolved worldwide to a different stage and had regressed in his country and continent into a new form of cannibalistic predatoriness. Correspondingly, his Trotskyite Marxism and socialism became more heterodox, more flexible. In his last years and decades under neoliberal global capitalism in its rise and fall, he saw his country and continent taking one step forward and two or three steps backward. On the very last day of his time with us here, he was still struggling, still trying to work out how best to proceed with head unbowed and spirit undaunted. We will miss him dearly but we take great comfort in the knowledge that he was here.

  • Jonathan’s SNC: a gathering of the elites, by the elites and for the elites? (2)

    Jonathan’s SNC: a gathering of the elites, by the elites and for the elites? (2)

    readily admit it: it is no easy task to link the urgent need to redefine relations between the centre and the geopolitical zones and states of the Nigerian federation toward equitable administrative and fiscal federalism with the equally urgent need to redistribute the wealth and resources of the country equitably between the few haves with the vast multitudes of the have-nots across the length and breadth of the country. Part of the difficulty lies in precisely the fact that, with few exceptions, the majority of the proponents of the SNC in Nigeria in the past few decades have not given much thought to the need to link the two.

    But there is another reason for this difficulty and it is this: everywhere in the world, it is always a daunting task to simultaneously fight for just and equitable distribution of wealth and resources between, on the one hand, the various parts of a nation and, on the other hand, between the few rich and the teeming masses of the poor and the dispossessed. And on this point, one of the great ironies – or perhaps tragedies – of the politics of just and equitable distribution of wealth and resources in the nation-states of the world is the fact that far too often, the poor and the disenfranchised themselves are successfully co-opted into service as foot soldiers of the struggles of political elites for equality and parity between the constituent or federating parts of nations. The post-independence history of Africa and other parts of the developing world is rife with the terrible consequences of this great misplacement of priorities and allegiances in which the poor and the dispossessed wage wars against one another at the behest of political elites whose one and only goal is to carve out ethnic or geopolitical fiefdoms for themselves. How does this general pattern apply to Nigeria and, more concretely, what is its relevance to the SNC?

    Even with its vast oil wealth, Nigeria is still a poor country and the struggle for sharing the nation’s resources equally between the geopolitical zones and ethnic groups of the country occupies a commanding space in the political imagination of our elites and their supporters, leaving little or no space for attention to the struggles of the poor and socially and politically marginalised across the length and breadth of the land. We know only too well the slogans, catchphrases and demands through which this fixation on sharing the nation’s wealth only among our elites are manipulatively framed by reference to the nation’s constituent parts. But just for the records, here are some of them: Whose turn is it to produce the next president? Why are appointments to key posts in the federal cabinet and directorships of major, lucrative parastatals so skewed in favour of particular zones and ethnic groups? Which zones of the country get the lion’s share of federal contracts? Ambassadors, heads of the different units of the armed services, the large entourage of favored elites that typically accompany the President on his countless foreign trips, cronies who get generous grants to make government-sponsored pilgrimages to Mecca and Jerusalem, Pro-Chancellors and Heads of Council of our universities – how well do they reflect the federal character of the nation? Why must responsibility for many public services and amenities like policing, education, health, licensing of companies, registering of patents, youth development, and sports and recreation be located at Abuja when they could be much better organized and dispensed at the state or local level? And again, let us state the most weighty and portentous of then all: Whose geopolitical and ethno-national turn is it to produce the next president? And when he is elected – so far, it has always been a “he” – will he use the vast concentration of power and authority in his office to the benefit of all parts of the country rather than just his own “people”, his own region?

    If the reader of this piece has noticed or suspected a note of sarcasm in my profile of these elements of the politics of ethnic and geopolitical manipulation among our elites, I readily admit that, yes, I am being somewhat sarcastic here. This is because I look around me and I observe that the only people who have really benefitted from the struggles for fair sharing of resources among all the parts of the country have been our elites, pure and simple. But having made this admission, I will be the first to also admit that no matter how much sarcasm one may make about how elites from different parts of the country manipulate struggles over the sharing of the nation’s wealth and resources between the constituent parts of the nation to their own benefit, this kind of politics will always be with us. I repeat: just as no nation in the world has transcended the politics of revenue sharing among all the demographic and geopolitical units of any given nation, so will we in our country always have to contend with this politics of equitable balance of forces between the parts within the whole.

    But then there arises the absolutely crucial question of the other side of the equation in the sharing of the wealth and resources of nations between the rulers and the ruled, the wealthy and the poor, the powerful and the powerless. The happy nations and societies of the world combine these two levels and forms of political struggles over the sharing of resources; the unhappy nations and societies keep them apart simply by substituting one for the other. In other words, in the more progressive and egalitarian nations of the world, simultaneously as every effort is made to cement equitable distribution of resources between different parts of a nation, strenuous efforts are also made to prevent wide gaps between the rich and the poor of all parts of the nation. Our own country is such a tragically unhappy and unstable land at the present time precisely because with regard to this principle that operates among all the nations of the world, we have for the most part kept rigidly apart the distribution of resources between the different parts of the country and the distribution of resources between the tiny minority that have too much and the vast majority that have far too little.

    If Jonathan’s SNC does in fact take place look, compatriot, for the conference to be dominated in composition and agenda by political elites whose primary, if not exclusive interest will be to redefine or redraw the lines of power and sovereignty between the centre and the states of the federation and between the different geopolitical zones and ethno-national communities of the country. Look for great attentiveness of the confreres to fiscal and administrative federalism. Look for talk of resource control and the principle of derivation. Look even for much talk around the idea of a rotational or collegiate presidency. There is nothing inherently wrong in having these themes or ideas robustly engaged at the coming SNC. Only let us not fool ourselves into believing that Jonathan’s SNC can have any iota of credibility or legitimacy if the terrible social and economic conditions of the great majority of Nigerians at the present time are excluded from the deliberations or are deferred to another day, another SNC of the future. There is no shortage of very knowledgeable, wise, just and patriotic individuals and civil society groups in our country that can ably represent these interests at the SNC. And also: workers, tradesmen and women, professional associations, youth organizations, pensioners representatives, all have able leaders and spokespersons aplenty that can present the experience and aspirations of the masses of ordinary Nigerians at the SNC. Their inclusion in the SNC of Jonathan would be about the only indicator, the only guarantee we have that the President is not thinking of convening a gathering of political elites, by the elites and for the elites.

    Like many others who have commented on this subject, I too wonder why Jonathan, who has steadfastly refused to consider, let alone talk of the necessity of the SNC for many years now, all of a sudden decided to spring this surprise on us all at precisely the moment of great weakness and total loss of sense of direction in his presidency. But I suggest that this is no reason to boycott the SNC, given a readiness to get out of the proceedings at the very first signs that Jonathan has his own agenda, his own secret reasons for convening the conference. Almost without exception, the Jonathan presidency has botched just about every opportunity that has come its way to rid the land of insecurity, mounting levels of poverty and immiseration, disunity, statist and non-statist violence and anxiety and fear around the coming elections of 2015. Perhaps, but only perhaps, this coming SNC may be his and our last chance to arrest the nation’s drift toward chaos, anarchy or worse.

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu