Category: Biodun Jeyifo

It is difficult to decide which is more absurd, more laughable, President Jonathan’s denial this past week that the national treasury is broke or his assertion that the financial illiquidity of the federal government is limited to July 2013 and is caused exclusively by so-called “pipeline vandals”. As can be seen in the epigraph to this piece, this was what Jonathan told the nation and the world last week: that the country is not broke; that our national economy only experienced a hiccup in July from the nefarious activities of pipeline vandals; and that those who are saying that the country is broke are doing so out of ignorance and political mischief.

The president is of course completely wrong on both counts. As at the end of this past week, the monthly allocations from our national coffers to the 36 states of the federation have reportedly not been paid for the months of July, August and September. Fearing punitive reprisals from the presidency, the governors have not made their frustration and desperation public. But privately and off the record, they have been grumbling bitterly as they have been trying to meet their recurrent expenditures without the allocations from Abuja. Thus, if you want to know whether or not Nigeria under Jonathan is broke, ask the governors, whether they are in the ruling party, the PDP or in any of the opposition parties.

The truth is that thanks to corruption, waste and squandermania on a colossal scale, Nigeria is at the moment broke, very broke. Indeed, most pundits and commentators on our national economy have been saying this for at least the last four to five months. And if this is the case, for Jonathan to say that the drop in oil revenues in June allegedly caused by the activities of gangs stealing and selling our crude oil is all we have to worry about is to be both naïve and disingenuous.

I am not indulging in mere or gratuitous name calling here when I assert that the President is being both naïve and disingenuous in making these two assertions. He is being naïve because he obviously does not know or is untroubled by the fact that every well informed person in Nigeria knows that the country is broke – and not only from the work of “vandals”. And he is being disingenuous because he obviously and quite deliberately wants to avoid responsibility, indeed glaring culpability for the sorry state of our national economy. This piece is motivated solely by this consideration: we must not allow the President to duck his responsibility for both the state of the national economy at the present time and the untold suffering that the generality of our peoples are experiencing on account of the terribly inept and mediocre stewardship that Jonathan has exhibited as the occupant of Aso Rock starting from the time when he was Acting President to the present moment of the third year of his own incumbency. My central argument is that the President comes from a line of political rulers since the inception of the current Fourth Republic in 1999 who have badly, even criminally, mismanaged our national economy; however, Jonathan has far surpassed every previous ruler in incompetence, wastefulness and squandermania in the management of the national economy. Let me now write directly in illustration of this claim.

The national “savings account” of Nigeria is the so-called “Excess Crude Account” (ECA). Established in 2004, it was created so as to conserve our oil revenues in order to make its accumulation serve as a buffer against the often wide fluctuations of the world oil market and as a sort of “rainy day” fund for the future or long term needs of the country and its peoples. In other words, the ECA is a strategic federation account that calls for the greatest act of prudence, patriotism and responsibility in its management by our rulers, especially the President. As at 2005, the balance in the account stood at $5 billion dollars. Between 2005 and 2010, this balance grew rather exponentially such that by the time Jonathan became Acting President in 2010, the balance stood at around the whopping figure of $20 billion dollars! But ever since then, the account has been relentlessly drawn down and wastefully depleted. For instance, at the beginning of this year, the balance in the account was $11.5 billion dollars; now it is under $4 billion. At this rate, it will be close to zero at the end of the year.

It is worthy of note that Jonathan has never given any explanations for why in less than three years, he has drawn down and more or less completely depleted the savings in the Excess Crude Account (ECA) from a beginning balance of more than $20 billion dollars to less than $4 billion dollars. It is no mitigation of his culpability that, with regard to where all the monies he has withdrawn for the national savings account went, Jonathan has faced no determined questioning from the Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC), the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) or any of the other leading and usually vocal advocates of good, accountable governance in our country. That being said, and with a certainty that is informed both by present dire circumstances and even more bleak future prospects for the majority of our peoples, I am arguing here that it is neither too late nor too soon to start asking Jonathan and his administration what they have done with the vast sums of money that have been withdrawn from the ECA. To this I would add that as much as the President himself, the Coordinating Minister for the Economy, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, has much explaining to do. If, as seems likely, they will not give any explanations at the present time, we must keep our options open so that sometime in the future, changed circumstances will compel them to render an account of their stewardship of our national treasury.

For now, it is fortuitous for us that Jonathan has left many clues for intrepid souls willing to get to the bottom of this scandal as to what he has done with all the monies that have disappeared from the national savings account under his watch. One of the most astonishing of such “clues” is the N2.58 trillion naira that was paid to both real and fake, actual and phantom oil marketers under the humungous oil subsidy scandal of 2011 in which staggering sums of money were paid for refined petroleum products that were never imported into the country and distributed to Nigerian consumers. In essence this was a “subsidy” to a cabal that comprised many of Jonathan’s cronies and backers during the presidential elections of 2011. To get a sense of the scale of theft and waste entailed in this scam, the sum of N2.58 trillion naira paid out was nine times (900 %) of the budget for oil subsidy for that year, 2011; and it was nearly two and half times (250%) of the total national budget for the whole country for the year. As I have explained several times in this column this is quite easily the greatest single theft from our national coffers in the entire 53 years of our collective existence as an independent nation. Moreover, although all the persons and companies to whom the looted sums were paid are known, together with how much each person or enterprise was paid, not a single naira, not a single kobo has been recovered and paid back to the national treasury from the monumental sums looted in that mother of all scams in our country.

President Jonathan has never said a word, never given any explanation for how it came to pass that the N2.58 trillion naira that was in excess of both the particular oil subsidy budget and the more general national budget for 2011 disappeared from the national treasury. We must never forget this fact whether or not Jonathan remains in office beyond 2015. But then we must ask ourselves: Why have the Nigerian peoples, especially as represented in their professional, civic and activist organizations and movements, not confronted Jonathan at every point with the sordid, lurid details of this mega-scam? For it is precisely due to the fact that he has never been seriously confronted on this scam – and many others – that Jonathan was emboldened this past week to assert, against the facts and the realities, that Nigeria is not broke and pipeline vandals are the only culprits we should worry about and go after.

As a matter of fact, Jonathan at the press briefing last week in which he made these absurd claims went so far as to argue that contrary to what anybody may think or say, corruption is not as bad in Nigeria as people make it out to be. Indeed, it is useful to quote Jonathan himself on this point: “If everybody continues to say the problem of Nigeria is corruption, then the feeling is that corruption is our major problem”. In other words, it is only because people say so that corruption appears to be our most important problem; if people stop saying so, corruption will cease being our most important problem! Who has any doubt that behind this facetious and distorted nominalism of Jonathan is the false bravado of a ruler who has never been seriously confronted or challenged on the billions of dollars and trillions of naira that have disappeared from our national coffers since he took office as Acting President?

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

Becloud: verb (used with objects) – 1.to darken or obscure with clouds.
2. to confuse or muddle: to becloud the issues.
Dictionary.com (Online)

I think it was about two years ago that my mind began to focus on the appearance of the words “the cloud” and “cloud computing” on the screen of my laptop computer. I use the term focus deliberately for as soon as I began to pay attention to these words, I realised that for quite some time, my mind had been slowly registering their appearance on my laptop screen and pondering what they meant. At any rate, eventually my slight, semi-conscious curiosity became a very active need to know and that was when I began to focus on those words, “the cloud” and “cloud computing”.

I should perhaps add at this point that the first thing that came to my mind with this focus was a vague intimation that I felt between these words and one of my favourite plays from Greek antiquity, The Clouds of Aristophanes. The play is a powerful and rambunctiously funny satire on the school of classical Athenian philosophy known as the Sophists. As we all know, it is from this school of philosophers that the word “sophistry” has come down to us. Famously or notoriously, sophistry beclouds issues by a show of brilliance that initially promises to be illuminating but actually turns out to be muddled and confounding.

Astonishingly, when I searched for the meaning of “the cloud” and “cloud computing” on the internet and even asked people who knew what the words meant, my vague intimations of Aristophanes’ play were confirmed. “The cloud”, it turns out, refers to a range of services on the worldwide web that seem to be provided by real internet servers or providers when in fact they are served up by virtual or simulated software applications (apps) running on one or more real machines. Since these virtual servers of “the cloud” do not physically exist, they can be moved around and scaled up and down endlessly in the manner in which a cloud – an insubstantial cloud that appears to the naked eye like a weighty mass – can be blown about in the wind. Another thing that I found out about “cloud computing” is that it involves a large number of computers and users that are connected in a seemingly real time communication when in actual fact they may be located at opposite ends of the planet.

To date, I have not tried “the cloud”, even though it intrigues me a lot. And it is this very fact that links it with all those other services and inducements of the internet and the digital age that I also have not tried or tried rather half-heartedly. These include but are not limited to twitter, facebook and text messaging. Obviously, my hesitation, my reservation about text messaging needs an explanation and, dear reader, I am happy to give one. I come from an age in which the only form of “texting” that we knew was the telegram. To send a message by the telegram you of course had to go to a post office. You filled out a form with your message on it and took great care to be economical with the number of words in your message because each word cost quite a bit. I forget now how long it took for your message to be delivered to whom you wanted it sent, but it certainly was not the same day, talk less of the same instant. From this brief account it can be seen that the telegram is to text messaging on a cell phone as travelling in the horse drawn carriages of the past is to traveling in the futuristic “bullet trains” of China.

Does my reservation about text messaging on the cell phone have anything to do with my having once been a user of the telegram? Yes and no. Let me take the no first: I have no nostalgia, none whatsoever, for the telegram. This is because even back then, long before the arrival of computers, smart phones and text messaging, using the telegram was a cumbersome and rather joyless affair! You not only stood in line for a long time at the post office but when you got to the service counter you often found out that you had to go and prune down the number of words in your message because you did not have enough money on you to pay for the number of words in your message. And that sent you right back to the end of the long line in which you had stood for perhaps more than thirty minutes!

Now for the yes part. Coming from the age of the slow and laborious rituals connected with sending telegrams predisposes one to being economical, being prudent with one’s time and one’s dispositions. Here I must make a confession: the longest, the absolute longest, that I can go on a text messaging spree is, at the very most, ten messages each way. Imagine this admittedly spartan regimen to the unlimited temporal freedom of the enthusiasts, the champions of marathon text messaging sessions that can spend a whole day sending messages back and forth, most of them quite inane! I do not make this comment self-righteously, sitting in judgment over the aficionados of cell phone text messaging. But if it seems that I am being judgmental, being haughtily dismissive of what other people find joyful and fulfilling, do accept my apologies. To each person his or her own inclinations and disinclinations. Only, please, please do not force your own inclinations on me as a denizen of the new brave and buoyant 21st century age of a digitality that promises so many inducements!

In all seriousness, though I affect a light, playful tone in these ruminations, these are very serious matters. In this new age of a virtual digital paradise in a real world that has not successfully tackled some of the oldest and most enduring problems of survival for us as individuals, nations and the species, we are all, in our diverse and often conflicting ways, consumers of an endless range of services that confound the distinction between our wants and our needs and between products and services that can sustain us and those that are meant only to entertain us or even distract us from the hard, difficult choices we have to make. Let me elaborate a little on this observation.

I spend an inordinately large part of my daily life on the internet. For the most part, these are hours well spent, hours in which I am working on things I must do in order either to enhance my professional competencies or get a better and fuller sense of the world we live in. There is also the odd hour or two in which I am hunting down or chasing after humorous or entertaining posts and blogs on the internet. In all, it means that I have to be extremely mindful, first, that I am not distracted from important things by the surfeit of mirages on the internet and second, that the recreational inducements of the internet do not overwhelm my real or potential capacity to intervene, to make a difference for the better in the conditions of my life and the lives of others close to me. This, I confess, is the source of my hesitation, my reservation concerning things like twitter, facebook, LinkedIn and, yes, the newfound intriguing inducement of “the cloud”. The deluge is upon us and growing. Unless of course you among the hundreds of millions of the poor and the marginalised of the world who have no access to the internet.

If you are not among these multitudes and if you are not an incurious person, you cannot go surfing on the internet without discovering new things that catch your fancy, that send powerful impulses of wonder, delight and discovery. It can be both exhilarating and very tiring and confounding.

How do you react wisely and productively to this cornucopia of elixir and poison, uplift and confusion? What are the signposts for separating the wheat from the chaff, the wine froth from the dregs? Drawing a lesson from the time in my childhood when I taught myself how to swim at Alalubosa Lake in Ibadan and discovered that when you were tiring and the shore was still a long distance away, you could regain your strength and your composure by treading water on the same spot, I take a pause, a long pause, before taking the bait of each new product, each new inducement thrown up by the profligate supermarkets of digitality on the internet and elsewhere. Let me state a few of these “treading water” pauses of mine with regard to one particularly ubiquitous product or service of digitality, phone calls.

Phone calls. I am very wary, perhaps even very resentful of just how massively and crazily phone calls have become intrusive into our daily lives. Without a doubt, this comes from the instant connectedness that the cell phone has established between friends, families, acquaintances and even total strangers in our world. Moreover, some of us remember the time not too long ago when you had to be rich and well connected to own landline phones. At any rate, who among us can now leave home without his or her cell phone? Well, consciously and deliberately, most times I do! And I cannot believe that there are not a few others like me who also feel completely unperturbed to leave their phones at home when they step out into the outside world. If you sometimes feel inclined to do so but feel unsure that it is a wise thing to do, try it a few times and you will discover that your daily life has not become impoverished on account of that simple act. Yes, I miss many calls but I return the missed calls when I can. Yes, I am haunted by the thought that one day a call might come that might have to do with a life and death emergency, but that is a contingency that is there all the time anyway, cell phone or no cell phone.

I readily admit the fact that many of my friends were initially quite upset by the constancy of the missed calls they got from me. However, in time they have become used to the discrete distance I have established between my cell phone and my daily life. What are friends but those who are willing to take you for who you are as long as they know that your idiosyncrasies do not negate your love, your respect for them? There are long stretches of daily life that I try to keep free of any and all intrusion; and there is a corresponding pool of inner concentration that I try to preserve from the incessant, endless barrage of phone calls. And on a far more mundane level, I never take phone calls when I am walking in the streets, never!

To conclude, perhaps rather inconclusively. Facebook, twitter, LinkedIn, they all interest me but so far, I have stayed away from them. This has not stemmed the flow of invitations to wade in, to join them, to tune in on the waves of their allegedly very ebullient social networking. Concerning “the cloud”, something tells me that sooner or later, I will try it, I will get in on the act. But if and when I do so, I hope that I shall not be be-clouded.

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

If, as I argued in last week’s column, the unregulated and perhaps even unregulatable exercise of greed within capitalism was the evil, the rot that led to the global economic meltdown of 2008, perhaps the greatest lesson that came from the crash is the fact that the greed that capitalism had perpetrated ‘abroad’ in the developing nations of the world came to wreak terrible, unmitigated havoc at ‘home’ in the rich nations of the global north. Fortunately, the outlines of this tragic reversal can be stated succinctly, without any equivocations, any ambiguities.

The central global division within capitalism for much of the second half of the 20th century was the division between capitalism at the center and capitalism at the periphery. The colonial stage of imperialism had ended and there were no colonies left, but the old division continued in a new and extremely invidious distinction between ‘capitalism at home’ and ‘capitalism abroad’. For the five decades of the post-Second World War period before we get to 21st century capitalism, the working and non-working poor of the neo-capitalist nations and societies in the periphery bore the full brunt of the exploitative ravages of the capitalism of the rich countries. With very few exceptions, as the affluence and consumerism of these rich countries of the global north were extended to ever-widening circles of their workers and the general populace, the workers and non-working poor of the developing countries saw ever declining levels of quality of life, even though a greater proportion of the planet’s deposits of natural resources are located in the global south. This chokehold on the lives of the masses of the developing countries came to a climax in the so-called Structural Adjustment Programs (SAP) of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) that were imposed on the third world countries starting from the mid-1980s. As nearly everyone in the world knows, SAP left a trail of devastating impoverishment in the developing countries that is still unfolding, that will indeed take generations to reverse.

Well, with the crash of 2008, the chickens came home to roost: when the economies of the rich countries crashed, when the national or sovereign debts of these countries spiraled out of control, SAP took a detour from the global south and came visiting the shores of the global north, like the grim reaper with his unforgiving harvesting scythe. In the words of the Yoruba cautionary adage that serves as the epigraph for this essay, beware when you throw ashes to the winds for quite often the ensuing trajectory is not windward, it is leeward and you end up being the hapless receiver of the ashes you threw into the winds.

I hasten to say that I do not make these observations in a spirit of gloating. Exploitation, impoverishment and suffering, whether in the developing countries or in the rich countries, are to be carefully studied and resolutely resisted. One of the great lessons to be learnt from the worldwide crash of 2008 is how closely linked are the fates of the poor and the marginalized of the world. This is not a pious, moralizing observation; it is a claim I make on the basis of an acute awareness of the fact that under capitalism, the rich of all the countries and regions of the world extract surplus value from their working and non-working poor by basically the same means, the same mechanisms. As a matter of fact, this claim should draw our attention to perhaps the single most unexpected development from the crash of 2008, this being the fact that the rich countries have now joined the rest of the world in the widening of the gap between the few extremely rich and the rest of the population. Since this is an absolutely crucial, it needs to be restated carefully.

For most of the second half of the 20th century, the ultimate claim of triumph over socialism that apologists and ideologues of capitalism made vigorously was based on the assertion that, without bloody revolutions, the rich countries of the world were narrowing the gap between the rich and the poor and doing so in leaps and bounds. Well, the crash of 2008 has exposed this claim as a premature declaration of victory over socialism and as a completely bogus and misleading claim. Indeed, in the long historic view of the impact of the meltdown of 2008, it may well be that this exposure of the claim of a continuous narrowing of the gap between the rich and the poor as nothing but a myth will turn out to be its greatest intellectual legacy. The ramifications of this demystification are worthy of note.

The rise in the number and the ranks of the working and non-working poor in the rich countries of the world since 2008 has been nothing short of dramatic, at the same time that wealth continues to be concentrated in the hands of a very tiny minority. As everyone knows, the figures are more bracing in countries like Greece, Spain, Ireland and Italy, but even in the United States, the centre of gravity of global capitalism, the figures are so striking that they led to the so-called “Occupy” movements that started, inevitably, with “Occupy Wall Street”. What is worthy of especial note in all these countries is the fact that it is the market, it is market forces that threw hundreds of millions of people into poverty. Conversely, it has been the state in its diverse incarnations that has been called upon to effect redress, to put a human face to capitalism. But all things considered, the market is fiercely holding its own against the constraints of the state and public institutions and considerations. What does this portend?

We know from history that there is nothing new in this role of the market in mass exploitation, this tendency of market forces to enslave and degrade human beings on a colossal scale. At different periods but with fairly regular consistency, the market has aligned itself with capitalism to perpetrate historic horrors like slavery, colonialism, workers’ exploitation in factories, patriarchal exploitation of women in what is known as the feminization of poverty and the kind of jingoistic-nationalistic militarism that the world experienced in the First and Second World Wars. I will be the first to admit that market forces have also historically led to progress and to the discovery of new knowledges and the construction of new and better ways of organizing production. But it has never been the case that the market all by itself achieved these laudable goals without the intervention of human solidarity with those caught in the traps of the darker and more destructive aspects of market forces. In the very early days of capitalism when its classical theorists were still casting about to provide justificatory explanations for the significant role of the market, they theorized that a so-called “invisible hand” was at work in the world of trade and commerce coordinating the infinite number of competing operators and interests at work in the market. That theory has been discredited many times over but that has not stopped the ideologues of free market capitalism from resuscitating the theory again and again in one version or another in the last two hundred years or so. The end of this perpetual revisionism is nowhere in sight.

Since 2008 in the rich countries of the world, unregulated or minimally regulated capitalism has been on the defensive and currently, it has its back to the wall of credibility and viability. Memories are still keen, still sharp on what a casino-style unregulated capitalism can do to the life savings, the jobs, and the futures of hundreds of millions of ordinary men and women. But the apostles and warriors of free market capitalism are not conceding defeat. Far from this, they have in fact of recent gone on the offensive and are doing all they can to reverse all the legislations put in place after 2008 to regulate the market more diligently and efficiently. Let us not be mistaken in appraising why the struggle is so fierce between the forces of regulation and deregulation: the bottom line is whether the wealth that is created by and in society will be equitably distributed or cornered by a powerful and oligarchic few.

In Nigeria and many other African countries, it is as if these battles between the forces of regulation and deregulation are not taking place in the heartlands of global capitalism. In our country in particular, the ideologues of the deregulated market are extremely sanguine in their promotion of the total surrender of the state to the market. True, they sometimes talk of the trinity of the P-P-P, this being the so-called public-private partnership. But don’t be deceived by this subterfuge, compatriots! The “public” in this triad really means a state, a government that is completely beholden to a tiny kleptocratic elite because it has been massively privatized. Let me spell out this claim very clearly, compatriots.

Every time that you hear the likes of Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Nasir El-Rufai and Charles Soludo talk of the public-private-partnership, run for cover because behind their notion of the “public” is a massively privatized state, a looted state, a comatose state. I mention these three names deliberately because they have been the most articulate and the most authoritative and militant defenders of free market capitalism in Nigeria since the inception of the current Fourth Republic in 1999. Of recent, Soludo has been making a tentative or hesitant review of his positions on free market capitalism but perhaps because he is currently in the grip of APIP – Any Party In Power – and is desperately looking for a party in which his unrelenting ambition to become Governor of Anambra State can be realized, he is distracted from a full-scale revision of what the promotion of free market capitalism, in theory and in practice, really means in Nigeria at the present time.

In my view, the so-called informal or parallel market is the only truly unregulated market in Nigeria today. On this view, the official, regular market is no more or less than an extension of the state, the massively privatized state. This is obviously because most of the capital with which privatized public enterprises were bought was looted from our national coffers. But in addition to this, the privatized state is too compromised, too weakened to carry out any regulatory functions on the market – even if the political will was there to do so. Effectively shut out of both the formal, official market and the privatized state, the overwhelming majority of Nigerians subsist in the informal, parallel market where you can buy and sell any commodity in the world, where no taxes are paid, and where cheap, meretricious goods rub shoulders with genuine articles of trade. Some economists put the size of this informal or underground market at twice the size of the formal market; that is how big it is.

To some analysts, the size of the Nigerian informal market indicates that Nigerians are, deep down, natural or inveterate capitalists in the sense in which over the ages, capitalism has always resisted all attempts to regulate it, to subject it to other values beyond those in the service of cutthroat competition and unlimited accumulation. I beg to disagree with this view. The informal, underground market thrives everywhere in the world where the state has been taken over by mediocre, thieving political elites unwilling or incapable of running a well organized modern capitalist or social democratic state. Nigeria is thus only an exacerbated example of this universal pattern. We must take back the privatized state from the looters, the kleptocrats. The starting point for this is the demystification and rejection of privatization and deregulation as the only panaceas for the discontents of capitalism. The global crash of 2008 provides ample evidence that this is on the agenda of the political and economic affairs of every nation, every region of the world.

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

Greed is good.

Gordon Gekko, the protagonist of the 1987 film, Wall Street.

This week five years ago, the world was stunned by an economic meltdown that was worse than any previous worldwide downturn since the crash of 1929 that led to the so-called Great Depression of the 1930s. And indeed, comparisons with that crash of 1929 were made in September 2008, though these did not come immediately; they came gradually and fitfully as analysts and pundits slowly realized the scope of the crash. This slow pace in coming to a full comprehension of the humungous scale of the collapse was not unusual since capitalism routinely goes through the so-called “boom and bust” cycles. Rather like the biblical “seven fat years and seven lean years” of the dream of Moses, this cycle implies periods of relative growth and wealth that are typically followed by periods of hardship and scarcity. Because of this cycle, it takes a while to perceive whether a particular meltdown is a mere cyclical recession or a full-blown depression.

By December 2008, it was clear to most analysts that the unfolding economic crisis was far worse than a mere recession. Not just individual banks and financial institutions like hedge funds but the whole financial services sector, the driving engine of 21st century capitalism, came crashing down. Within the space of a few weeks, millions of workers and pensioners lost their entire life savings. As if that was not bad enough, workers began to be sacked in their millions as massive retrenchments in both the public and private sectors descended on the workforces of the rich countries of the world. The housing industries of European and North American countries, together with their central location in the available or disposable loans and credit in the global capital pool, came unstuck. Hundreds of thousands of homeowners not only lost their homes, but they were also sucked into loan portfolios whose value sometimes quadrupled the amount they had initially borrowed as principal.

As a consequence of these and many other extremely frightening crises, a specter descended on capitalism in all its formations, national, regional and global. But that specter was not socialism or communism. Rather, it was the fear of something not outside it but within capitalism itself, something like a cancerous growth, a corrosive toxicity, a suppurating rottenness. This spectral, profoundly destabilizing element within capitalism itself is the subject of this “commemorative” essay on the fifth anniversary of that meltdown of 2008. However, before I come to it, permit me to make a few remarks on the personal and social location from which I observed that meltdown five years ago. These initial remarks hinge on the supposition that the privilege – or, conversely, lack of privilege – with which one surveys the globality of economic and other relations in our world ought not to be taken for granted but should be woven into the fabric of our analyses and reflections.

The first direct personal encounter that I had with that global economic collapse of 2008 came from the shock waves that it sent throughout the ranks of administrators and faculty of Harvard University, the richest university in the world, my employer and the community of teaching and research in which my professional life is based. As if in one fell swoop, Harvard lost about a third of its endowment. As a result, a regime of very stringent austerity measures were put in place drastically downsizing the budgets of departments, schools, colleges and institutes of the university. Development projects that were designed to place Harvard at the forefront of 21st century transformations in academia were put on hold indefinitely. In all this, the great fear was that no one knew where it was going to end, together with the great worry that the university’s endowment could shrink further and may even disappear completely and with it all that Harvard thinks of itself and all that the world thinks of Harvard with regard to the upper stratospheres of meritocracy.

But in spite of the seismic scale of this worry, Harvard actually continued to be a place of great privilege and opportunity for its faculty and students. As a matter of fact, the third of its endowment that the university lost through the meltdown still left it with financial resources far in excess of what most of the other universities and even nation states of the world could count on in the lean months and years ahead. In this respect, the “view from Harvard”, if one can call it that, is only one view among many others from which one can take stock of the globality of affairs in our world. Another way of expressing this idea is to say “globality” does not imply and can never yield a single, overarching vantage point from which everything can be seen in totality. There is no neutral or God-like viewpoint available to any of us. The 2008 economic crash proved that beyond any shadow of doubt.

Ironically, it was actually within the portals of Harvard itself that I first directly and without any mediation encountered this dimension of the specter unleashed by the crash of 2008. In my classes, and from my advisees, I began to hear expressions of deep anxieties and uncertainties about the future. The jobs were vanishing quickly while student debts were mounting. Where they had been eagerly looking forward to leaving their parents’ homes as soon as they finished their college education and striking out on their own as did most of the members of nearly all previous generations of college-educated youths, my students could only look forward to living with their parents as grownup dependants well into their late twenties or early thirties. Caught between, on the one hand, the shrinking ranks of the very rich and, on the other hand, the expanding masses of the working poor and the permanently unemployed and “unemployable” underclass of the inner cities, many of my students at Harvard felt powerfully drawn to the “occupy movements” even in cases where they did not actually join them. It is no small matter for a whole generation to suddenly come to the realization that everything it had been told, every promise that the society had made to it either had no solid foundations or was based on deceit, cheating and greed. Let me make an elaboration on this observation carefully.

It took little or no time after September 2008 for it to com to full public knowledge all over the world that the crisis had largely been caused by legal but extremely cynical corrupt practices in the financial services industry. The technical term, the special jargon for this was something known as the “securitization of debts”. In layman’s terms, this means bunching together millions of individual and group debts and using these as not only an article of trade but the prime article of trade in the whole economy. For once you have “securitized” and thereafter own a bundle of debts, you can speculate endlessly with it: buy out your competitors; buy or sell ailing factories at a profit without having really rescued them; declare huge profits without having ever produced anything of value; buy or sell insurance to the tune of billions of dollars (credit default swaps) without having the means to redeem the premiums should the need to do so arise; and resist or even defy the efforts of regulators to rein in your activities. It is no accident, no misnomer that these “securitized” debts became known as “toxic assets” when the bubble bust. But true revelation came only when the managers and chief executive officers of the banks and financial services enterprises that caused the meltdown continued to pay themselves huge salaries and bonuses even after they had been rescued by bailouts from the governments of the rich countries of North America and Western Europe; even after hundreds of millions of people whose lifetime savings they had wiped out were reeling from the shock. As Gordon Gekko, the unscrupulous protagonist of Oliver Stone’s 1987 Hollywood film, Wall Street, declares at the climax of the film, “Greed is good”!

To or for whom is greed good? To or for whom are the toxic assets of securitized, over-leveraged debts good? The economic crash of 2008 provided an unambiguous answer to that question. Greed is “good” when it is either completely unregulated or only minimally regulated. But this unregulated or minimally regulated greed is good for only a tiny fraction of humanity in every nation, every part of the world; it is calamitous for the vast majority of the denizens of the planet, seen as the homo economicus of a greatly interdependent but vastly unequal world order. Unregulated, rampaging greed, this is the Achilles heel of contemporary global capitalism as revealed to us in the weeks and months following September 2008. If meaningful change for most of humankind is to come on the heels of the current economic downturn in the world, this is one of the catalysts that will cause such change.

Historically speaking, it is a great departure from the received wisdom of progressive politics and revolutionary anti-capitalist consciousness to assert that the specter that haunts contemporary, 21st century capitalism is neither socialism nor communism but a malaise, a rot within itself. The only remaining officially “communist” states in the world are the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Cuba and the People’s Republic of China. Not a singe one of them poses any real challenge or threat to capitalism. As a matter of fact, China and Cuba have both made significant compromises with capitalism; in the case of China, the compromises are very big and very far-reaching. The DPRK is a caricature, a grotesque deformation of the communist states of the first half of the 20th century. Socialism remains on the horizon of historic possibilities but it is presently locked into seemingly inevitable or compulsory compromises with capitalism. We must think carefully through the complex, tangled webs of these negotiations between socialism and capitalism in their diverse expressions and incarnations, paying special attention to the concrete effects on actual human lives beyond the abstract, reified formulations that we give to either capitalism or socialism.

Five years after the crash of 2008, the struggle over who or what structures shall regulate the operations of capitalism and to what extent continues to dominate the political and economic affairs of almost every nation in the world. The market or the state? If one or the other, to what degree? Remarkably, after an initial retreat, the apostles and warriors of an unregulated market have risen up again and are indeed on the offensive in many countries of the rich nations of the global north, especially in North America and Western Europe. In Nigeria, free and completely unregulated capitalism is enjoying its most successful ideological and political successes at the present time, especially since the institution of the Fourth Republic in 1999. Is this because the market has proved superior to the state? Or because the state has generally been so lackluster, so comatose that the market has made the most of the opportunities open to it by default? What of the tremendous strength and resilience of the almost completely unregulated parallel market in which millions of Nigerians make their living? These and other issues will be our point of departure in next week’s concluding essay in the series.

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

Redux: (adj) brought back; resurgent. The Victorian era redux.
Dictionary.com (online)

I was totally unprepared for it, the deluge of comments that I received by email on the article that was published in this column last week on Nasir Ahmad El-Rufai. By a very long shot, this was the largest body of comments that I had ever received on any single or particular week’s column since I began writing the series nearly seven years ago, first in The Guardian (under a slightly different title) and then in The Nation since March this year. As much as the sheer volume of the comments that people sent to me, I was also surprised by the fact from their names, one could see that the writers of the comments come from all parts of the country. And as if that was not enough, there was the additional fact that almost without any exception, all the comments expressed very negative sentiments and opinions about El-Rufai, many of them with scathing and unforgiving anger. Indeed, it is instructive to go over the contents of some of these comments.

The most common themes in the comments concerned what their authors deemed El-Rufai’s penchant for hypocrisy and opportunism. As an illustration of this allegation, those who leveled the accusation against El-Rufai stated that now that having decamped from the PDP and is in the APC, he has started to praise or even hero-worship General Muhammadu Buhari, whereas when El-Rufai was still in office and in the PDP, he had said of the retired general that on the basis of his performance when he was in office as military head of state, Buhari was “permanently unelectable”. Others talked of venality and self-seeking. One comment that came from a prominent civil rights advocate was sanguine in reminding me that as of this very moment, El-Rufai is in the courts of the land being prosecuted for corruption, having earlier been indicted by both chambers of the National Assembly for corruptly enriching himself while in office. Others talked of thoughtless and wasteful highhandedness while he was in office, especially as the FCT Minster. They talked of how the monetisation policy of the Obasanjo administration was used by El-Rufai to sell housing units constructed specifically as permanent residences for members of the National Assembly while they were members of parliament, with the result that subsequent members of the National Assembly had to be accommodated at exorbitant costs at government expense. And so it went on and on, the mountain of outrage and anger at El-Rufai in and out of office.

As I pored over these comments, it was not difficult for me to come to the conclusion that El-Rufai is most definitely one person that many people love to hate, in the words of that well-known and overused phrase. Moreover, from what I have read, both from and about him on the internet, it appears that El-Rufai himself not only seems to invite violent negative feelings toward himself but he actually delights in doing so! In this respect, El-Rufai seems to me to be the obverse of the Honourable Patrick Obahiagbon who greatly delights in drawing condescending, mocking laughter toward himself while one may say that El-Rufai likes to attract vituperative and condemnatory anger toward his person.

Like Obahiagbon, it seems that hardly any attention is paid to the actual contents of El-Rufai’s articles, speeches and blogs. Definitely, not a single one among the dozens of comments on last week’s article in this column on El-Rufai that came to me via email said anything at all on the actual contents and the claims made in “Stunted Potentials Hobble Our Nation”, the article that I extensively discussed last week. In other words, it seems that the “messenger” being so objectionable to so many people, there is little or no regard for the “message”. As I happen to believe that there is much to ponder carefully in El-Rufai’s recent articles and lectures, I think this is unfortunate. In other words, it is my contention that the question of the gap, the disjuncture between the “message” and the “messenger” in El-Rufai’s writings should lead us not to the conclusion that what we confront in him is an embodiment of the all too common phenomenon of the public figure that everybody loves to hate but, rather, the reality of a monumental credibility problem. This is a credibility gap, a trustworthiness problem that in this particular instance attaches to the public persona of El-Rufai but that, on another level, he shares with most members of our political class. This is what I wish to discuss briefly in what follows.

On any account, the public lecture that El-Rufai gave in May this year to the Ikeja Branch of the Nigerian Bar Association is masterful in its detailed identification and concise analysis of many of the problems and crises that we face as a nation and a continent at the present time. Given as this year’s contribution to the annual Alao Aka-Bashorun Memorial Lecture and titled, “Impunity, Injustice and Insecurity: What Is the Role of the Law?” the lecture graphically explored the scope and depth of such issues as unprecedented levels of poverty in Nigeria at the present time; the chasm of social inequality that separates the few rich from the rest of the society; youth unemployment, its grandiose scale and equally grandiose frightening ramifications; and the deep divisions that are deliberately and opportunistically manufactured by our political elites. What was even more moving about the lecture was that it traced these issues beyond their abstraction as “problems” and “crises” to their effects on our individual and collective humanity as a people. And quite remarkably, the anger of El-Rufai in this lecture toward members of the political class is so stark, so overwhelming that, but for the fact that one knows that all this is coming from El-Rufai, one would have thought that these were the words of a radical activist, a revolutionary who had completely broken, not just with the PDP but the entirety of the Nigerian political class. As a matter of fact, several times during the lecture, El-Rufai invoked the names of both Alao Aka-Bashorun and Gani Fawehinmi as the departed avatars from whom he had obtained a mandate to speak truth to power in our country.

In a similar vein, though on a more limited scope, this is the same order of discourse, the same universe of deeply humanistic and egalitarian values that we confront in such other recent articles of El-Rufai as the one discussed in this column last week, “Stunted Potentials Hobble Our Nation” and “Fiscal Responsibility Commission – The Sleeping Watchdog”. In both of these articles, El-Rufai takes on the voice, the persona of the Nemesis of all that is monstrously corrupt, wasteful and comatose in governance in our country, especially as this negatively impacts the lives of the majority of our peoples. And as I remarked in last week’s column, it is particularly noteworthy that El-Rufai in these articles is magnificently impatient with our leaders; he is insistent on the fact that we are in a race with time and with all the better organized and more humane nations and societies of the world. Several times as I read these articles I asked myself the following questions: Where is all this coming from? Why did El-Rufai not say these things and act upon them when he was in government? What does he expect all those who are very familiar with all the things he did and did not do in office, in government, what does he expect them to think of the born-again moral reformer and social revolutionary that we confront in these recent articles? Famously and with an extraordinary emblematic power, on the road to Damascus, Saul of Tarsus, who had vigorously persecuted the Christians, experienced an epiphany that was to transform him into Paul, the Apostle on whom the future of Christianity, that then much despised religion of the poor, ultimately depended. On the road to 2015, will El-Rufai act according to the classic schema of this Pauline script? Will he truly, truly cast his lot with the poor and the marginalised, the millions of unemployed youths of our country and our continent? Or is he merely appropriating the critiques and the vision of all those in our country who, over the decades, have consistently and unwaveringly stood by the side of the majority of our peoples?

Perhaps these questions redundant, precisely because sadly, tragically, our peoples are not famous for holding their politicians to their word, their promises. And I must admit that I am the very first to concede that the questions may indeed be completely redundant in the Nigeria that we all know only too well and are living through. I confess also that at a certain level, I am as infected as any compatriot reading this piece with the virus of the deep, unbelieving skepticism of the mass of ordinary Nigerians toward nearly everything coming from their social and intellectual elites, most especially the election-cycle promises and visions of our politicians.

This means that in the end, these questions do not constitute the last word on this issue of El-Rufai’s credibility problem. If there is a last word, look for it in both the run-up to and the aftermath of 2015. El-Rufai is at the moment out of office and is rather beleaguered. Let us wait to see if the rhetoric, the born-again visions will outlast this current phase in his career. More importantly, let us wait to see how many in the ranks of the APC he can and will carry with him in the rough roads ahead if, against all the odds, he decides to stick to the Pauline script of genuine and profoundly life-changing epiphany. I confess that I am not holding my breath.

1.8% Bested by 0%

A few weeks ago, I remarked playfully in this column that if in the future I ever came across any results in national secondary school certificate examinations around the world that were worse than the 1.8% passing rate in the NECO exams of 2009, I would bring such finding to the notice of the readers of this column. I was sure that everyone recognised that I made that remark playfully because I thought that it was impossible to get anything “better”, as I ironically put it, than a passing rate of 1.8%. In other words, I was sure that I would never need to fulfill that promise.

Well, I regret, deeply regret, to inform the reader that we now have something that has surpassed that record. And it is not 1.2% or even 0.8%; it is 0%. This took place in Liberia three weeks ago in the national entrance exams taken by secondary school students for entrance into the University of Liberia. Reportedly, of the nearly twenty-five thousand students that took the exam, not a single one passed. Passing in this case was measured in exactly the same terms as in NECO: at least five subjects including English and Mathematics.

If it offers the reader any consolation, let me also report that, unlike the near total indifference with which the NECO debacle of 2009 was met in Nigeria, a national outcry of anguish greeted the Liberian catastrophe three weeks ago. This, I hope, shows that if we send Patrick Obahiagbon to commiserate with the Liberians on the terrible failure rate of their students in English, he will not find a welcoming party at the airport.

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

If we are not careful, another struggle is going to come. This is because the contradictions will blow up the country again, maybe before 2015 or by 2015. We have not addressed the fundamentals of our politics. As I said earlier, breaking of Nigeria is not going to pay anybody. As a Yoruba man who loves his people, I am clear in my mind that a good Nigeria will be good for the Yoruba.

Ropo Sekoni, Premium Times (Online), August 7, 2013

There is no place on earth that I would have loved to be earlier this week on Wednesday, August 7, than in Lagos when the family, relatives, friends and colleagues of RS gathered to mark his 70th birthday with a festivity that I am told, was as intellectually stimulating as it was also a rousing social function. RS, as he is universally known, is of course none other than Ropo Sekoni. Unfortunately, I could not be present as I am far away in China. To make things worse, because right now I am traveling in that vast country, I could not even carry out a promise I had made to some co-conspirators that I would record and send an audiovisual message that was to have been played at the gathering. Given this background, in writing this tribute in my column this week, I am turning an opportunity missed to a rare chance to say in this forum some things that need to be said about one of our country’s most prominent and progressive public intellectuals.

In Yoruba culture and language, there is probably no higher form of social approbation that could be paid to an adult person than to say that he or she is an omoluabi. I personally cannot think of a single word in the English language that could serve as a satisfactory translation of this Yoruba term. In essence, it encapsulates the social identity of a person that is both self-respecting and highly respected in the community, a person in whom one can repose the complete confidence that she or he can be expected to always do that which is considerate, just and honourable.

Now the really wonderful thing about this omoluabi appellation is that, as far as class and social status are concerned, it is completely neutral. Though it does not preclude women and men of wealth and power, one does not have to be rich, highly educated or famous to be deemed an omoluabi. This is because it is manifested in your character, in how people not only perceive but also experience you. Thus, an omoluabis are neither more nor less in number among our university teachers than you will find in any other occupational group in our society, including farmers, tradesmen, market women and artisans like mechanics and welders. In other words, it is a great boon to find an omoluabi in any social or occupational group; for me, it is even more gratifying to find one among professors and progressive activists. Among friends and colleagues with whom I have ever worked professionally as an academic and politically as an intellectual activist, RS is among the few who is not only generally regarded as a first rate omoluabi but is also eminently deserving of the honorific connotations of the term.

At this point, I would like to ask the reader to please note that I have not said that an omoluabi cannot also be a person with an irreverent sense of humor or a very keen sense of the absurdities and inanities of social existence. Indeed, among progressive academics, RS is almost in a class by himself in the ways in which he never takes either himself or others so seriously that he moves beyond the pale of reasonableness to the excesses of haughty self-righteousness. When we were together at OAU, Ife, the only person who had a more wicked but good-natured sense of humor and a more infectious, ringing laughter than RS was the late Professor Oyin Ogunba. And about the only person who could recount anecdotes and tell ribald jokes more exquisitely than RS was Professor Akin Isola, aka “Honestman”. Thus, the last thing I would want the reader to take away from my application of this term, omoluabi, to RS is the suggestion that he is a sentimentalist, a person whose natural inclination to do that which is just and decent prevents from him perceiving and responding with energy to the horrific social wrongs and evils that make life so miserable for the great majority of our peoples at the present point in time. In other words, RS is no sentimentalist, no stargazer hedging his bets on the probability of positive and progressive transformation in Nigeria on a naïve hope that an innate predilection for fairness and decency is all that is needed to bring more equitable and humane conditions to a multi-ethnic, multicultural society that is as deeply divided and misgoverned as our country is at the present time.

It is remarkable that I not only remember but cannot recall exactly how RS and I became close personal friends and intellectual and political comrades. With all my other close, intimate friends I can recall precisely when and how we became friends: Yemi Ogunbiyi, Femi Osofisan, Eddie Madunagu, John Ohiorhenuan, Niyi Osundare, Chima Anyadike, Yomi Durotoye, Olu Ademulegun, and Kole Omotoso. With RS, there is in my mind and recollection no signal moment of a beginning, almost as if we have always been friends. Of course, certain milestones of extraordinary intellectual and political collaboration do stand out in my mind, especially after he left the University of Ilorin in 1982 to join us at OAU, Ife. I will never forget the work we put in together, with some input by G.G. Darah, to draft the first advanced courses in postgraduate literary and cultural studies in any Nigerian and African university. Before this momentous step, no postgraduate courses were offered in Nigerian and African universities for M.A. and Ph D. candidates; following the Oxbridge British tradition, graduate students took any courses beyond the ones they had taken during their undergraduate years; all they did was read as much and as widely as they could under the guidance of one supervisor who completely controlled the fate of the student.

The collaboration and comradeship in political activism is too numerous, too eventful to enumerate: ASUU; the Socialist Forum at OAU; the work done with workers and their trade unions; the epic struggles against the Abacha dictatorship as part of the external opposition to that regime. In a deliberately very restrictive use of the term, much of this work of collaborative political activism is “classified” and cannot be told now, although inevitably, all will be told some day. But I can reveal here that as much as anyone in the movement, RS always tried to make his personal, professional and political lives and activities connected with one another and also consistent with his deepest political and ideological beliefs. I do not know if he will agree with this characterisation, but I would note here that he tended to stay a step away from the extreme left, without however blurring his philosophical beliefs and practical engagements with centrist positions as a sort of left-of-centre rather than centre-left. But I am sure that he will not mind my saying here that I can think of only one or two of all the comrades and collaborators I have ever worked closely with who are the equal of RS in the practice of gender equality in his relations with his wife, Banke. All of this composite profile is what I have tried to communicate in that part of the title of this piece containing the phrase “the omoluabi professor as a revolutionary democrat”. Let me attempt to clarify what this entails by a brief discussion of RS’s area of scholarly research and publication, semiotics.

It so happens that RS was the first major scholar of semiotics that Nigeria produced. [A case could be made for the late Sunday Anozie as the first, but his emphasis was more on a highly idiosyncratic form of structuralist aesthetics and poetics than on semiotics proper] Add to this the fact that in his active professional life before his retirement in 2009, RS made the intricacies and ambiguities of Yoruba and African oral traditions his main areas of sustained scholarly attention. In this, he focused on two particular arrears of semiotic study that tell us much about his brand of political and intellectual activism. These are, respectively, the gnostic-animist tradition of Ifa poetic chants and traditions of West African trickster tales with their emphasis on moral ambiguity and epistemological indeterminacy.

What semiotics entails can be both relatively easily described and incredibly tough to understand. On the “easy” side, semiotics is the study of the signs by or through which a culture can be “read” and understood, first by the owners or bearers of the culture themselves and secondly, by outsiders. On this account, anyone and everyone that speaks a language and achieves functional adulthood in the culture of the language is a “semiotician” since their fluency in the given language and culture implies that they are able to competently read the signs of the culture.

The “tough” side consists of the fact that you need rigorous and exacting study to grasp the tools or the “code” by which the signs of the constitutive elements of a culture can be read or “decoded”. To get at this code, you must stand outside the culture and critically study it; and you must be a comparatist and a universalist of sorts, with a deep interest in how signs and their codes work within and between the diversity of human languages and cultures. It is the possession or deep awareness of this code that separates the naïve or lay “semiotician” from the professional and rigorous expert in semiotics. On the basis of this distinction, we can get at the fundamental theoretical and methodological assumption of semiotics which is that it is one thing to live in and be immersed in a language and culture; it is another thing entirely to study it rigorously and unceasingly in order to have ever deeper understanding of it. The two are not mutually exclusive, but to cross from one to the other, or to move productively back and forth from one to the other, you must be aware of this distinction.

RS is one of a handful of Yoruba scholars of Yoruba culture and traditions who are not only aware of this distinction but actually embody and live it, knowing only too well that the survival of Yoruba language and culture, of indeed any Nigerian and African language and culture, depends on making and living this distinction. Like these other scholars and writers, RS is an unabashed defender of the Yoruba language and culture, especially with regard to threats posed from without by the zealotry of the Abrahamic religions and from within by those who, seeing no credible or usable cultural resources with which to successfully engage the powerful currents of modernity and its products and promises, blame their language and culture for lagging behind the richer and more technologically advanced nations and regions of the world. On this account, what is peculiar in RS is the fact that, perhaps more than any other scholar-activist, he has made this distinction between being totally immersed in your language and culture and standing athwart it in the wider context of other languages and cultures with whom your language and culture must not only coexist but also necessarily and inevitably commingle the basis of his political activism. It is now our common experience that any time that ethnicity or the so-called national question comes up in Nigerian political discourse, images and thoughts of reactionary irredentism and tribal chauvinism are conjured in our minds. This is not unjustified. But I would like to suggest that there are scholars and activists like RS in whom ethnicity or the national question is completely coextensive with revolutionary democracy. Listen to the man himself in the epigraph to this tribute: “If we are not careful, another struggle is going to come. This is because the contradictions will blow up the country again, maybe before 2015 or by 2015. We have not addressed the fundamentals of our politics. As I said earlier, breaking of Nigeria is not going to pay anybody. As a Yoruba man who loves his people, I am clear in my mind that a good Nigeria will be good for the Yoruba.”

Congrats on making it this far, RS. “Iwo ati Banke maa lo’ra yin dale ni o’!

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu