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Category: Biodun Jeyifo

  • Freedom of Information Act and Dictatorship of Corruption and Mediocrity (3)

    Freedom of Information Act and Dictatorship of Corruption and Mediocrity (3)

    It is time in this lecture to address the equation between corruption and mediocrity that is a central aspect of the undeclared ‘dictatorship’ that I am engaging in the lecture. Corruption and mediocrity in our country at the present time are symbiotic, they feed off each other. Extremely poor performance or even no performance at all is no barrier to becoming very wealthy and holding very high public office in our country – including the highest office in the land. According to the House of Representative Ad-Hoc Committee Report on the oil subsidy mega-scam we see “a gross lack of record keeping”, “decadence” “rot” and “entrenched inefficiency” in the work of the public officials that supervised the payment of those vast sums to the oil marketers.

    These epithets of abysmally low standards of performance and probity were addressed to the specific case of the oil subsidy scam but they might as well have been addressed to the generation and distribution of electricity; construction of physical infrastructures like roads, bridges, hospitals and schools; public sanitation and waste disposal; social services for children, youths, the elderly and the disabled. Federal and state governments don’t have to perform well or perform at all to generate the budgets on which they depend; it comes to them like manna from heaven even though we know that the source is the rents from the oilfields of the Niger Delta.

    At the centre of things in the government of the federation and the ruling party, the standards of performance in virtually all areas of governance are so low that almost any other party or phalanx of politicians can credibly claim that they can do better than the current incumbents, even though there is little to choose between all the ruling class parties in terms of their ideologies and their value orientations. Almost everywhere that you find corruption in our country, mediocrity is never too far behind.

    At this point and drawing from my professional academic interest in linguistic, literary and cultural studies, I would like to offer some thoughts on the separate and yet connected relations between the cognate terms corrupt, corruptive and corrupted. My intension in doing this is both to further clarify and broaden the ramifications of this link that I am urging between corruption and mediocrity in our country. Thus, when we say that a person, an act, or a process is corrupt we are alluding adjectivally to a quality, a disposition or an effect. The term corruptive adds a dimension that implies an active transformation that turns that which is not initially corrupt to that which becomes tainted with corruption. The term “corrupted” lends an even more dynamic, more perfected or completed dimension to the term “corruptive”. At this level, the term corruption that we so often use to describe our politicians and their habitual practices takes on the quality of a specter, a malaise, a generalized social pathology that reeks of rot, decay, putrefaction. On this basis, I would argue that in our Nigerian context, “corruption” is to politicians and political parties as “corrupted” is to virtually all our institutions, both religious and secular, both private and public, both local and nation-wide.

    Pushing further on this observation, I would argue that we tend to associate corruption primarily with our electoral process and our politicians and political parties, but who among us is unaware of the cheap, superstitious and facile religiosity that underlies the nairamania, the amassing of great wealth in our mega-churches and among our most prominent, jetsetter religious leaders? Who is unaware of the scale of examination malpractices in our primary and secondary schools? Yes, the corruption has its roots, its foundations in the political order and among our rulers, but almost every institution in our country has become corrupted.

    Since I am an academic, I am particularly interested in the decay, the unspeakable fall in standards that has befallen our educational institutions. Here, I will give only a few particularly shocking examples of this terribly corrupted state of things in our secondary and tertiary institutions. The failure rates in our secondary school leaving examinations are some of the worst in the world. In the last one decade, I don’t think we have recorded anything higher than 35% of passes in these exams. In one particular year, in the NECO exams, only 1.8% of those who sat for the exam passed, leaving a staggering failure rate of 98.2%. Our universities are poorly ranked in the world; not a single one of them is among the 2000 most highly rated institutions. Far more alarming is the fact that our universities are also poorly ranked among African universities. In the most recently released rankings, only eight of our universities were listed among the first 100 universities in Africa and only one Nigerian institution is among the first 20. Within the country itself in the business sector of the economy, potential employers of our university graduates are forever complaining that the instruction our university students receive are so appallingly poor that a lot of the graduates are simply “unemployable”. The list goes on and on with a depressing regularity that has a grim foreboding for the future of our country.

    I do not wish to empty out the contents of the special focus of this lecture – the Freedom of Information Act of 2011 in relation to the dictatorship of corruption – into an endless jeremiad about the things that are prematurely but utterly corrupted in virtually all the institutions of our society. The Greeks have a saying that is very pertinent here that I wish to invoke to underscore this point: When a fish begins to rot, the process starts from the head and it is from there that the decay pervades the entire body of the fish. From this, I wish to state with as much emphasis as I can muster that it is our rulers, our politicians and political parties that we must hold accountable if we wish to arrest the rot, the decay that acts like a dictatorship in our present political order.

    One aspect of a comparative, transnational view of corruption that we would do well to keep in mind in this respect is the fact that corruption is not always or even necessarily linked with mediocrity as we find it with our rulers. As a matter of fact, as big as corruption is in Nigeria, it is nothing in size compared with the corruption that has been documented and much discussed with regard to some of the biggest transnational business conglomerates of Western and East Asian countries. Without in the least bit offering an apologia for the scope of corruption among our rulers, I would insist that it ought to be pointed out that Transparency International is able to regularly rank corruption higher in African and other developing regions of the world than what obtains in the West only because its figures pertain to the countries and regions of the world, leaving out the big business empires of the planet who, between them, account for by far the greatest share of corruption in the world, together with the effects that corruption has on the lives of the poorest and most vulnerable peoples of the planet. I repeat: corruption is not always and necessarily linked with mediocrity, with abysmally low or poor standards. The high incidence of corruption in the ranks of some of the smartest and most innovative corporations in the world is clear proof of this assertion. The movements and forces around the world that have taken on the corruption of these corporations have counted on rationality, legal and ideological, as weapons with which to wage their struggles.

    This is where, in my opinion, we must locate the potential of the Freedom of Information Act to make a difference in the struggle against corruption and the indifference to due process and accountability that reigns supreme in the highest corridors of power in our country. Like all other national versions of the Freedom of Information Act, ours also presupposes legal and moral rationality, especially as enshrined in the presupposition that the state, the liberal-democratic state, is founded on the rule of law, on the assumption that a country’s rulers, a country’s public officeholders and a country’s business enterprises must comply with the laws of the land, otherwise what you have is not a true democracy but a dictatorship hiding behind the outer forms and shells of democracy. Invoking the theoretical jargon of radical political economy here, I would argue that our Freedom of Information Act of 2011 presupposes that our country is on the verge of transforming primitive accumulation of the most vicious kind into a modern, market-driven economy in which, in conjunction with cutthroat competition, you have the supremacy of the law.

    It is doubtful that our press, our media houses have thought much of these ramifications of the Freedom of Information Act. This is because as much as they fought long and hard for the passing of this Act, they have been remarkably reticent in using it to compel our rulers, our public institutions and private business companies to comply with the provisions of the Act. Let me move to the conclusion of this talk by briefly engaging one of the few instances when the provisions of the Act was invoked – and met stiff, unyielding resistance from the powers that be in our country.

    This much is known about the scale of remuneration of the members of our National Assembly: Both in relative and absolute terms, they are the highest paid legislators in the world. Each member of our National Assembly collects far more in salaries, allowances and bonuses than the President of the United States, the most powerful man in the world.

    In the face of the universal outcry in the country against the whopping scale of our legislators’ remuneration package, they have been extremely secretive about the precise figures. Indeed the lengths to which they are apparently willingly to go to keep the exact figures hidden from public awareness and scrutiny seems to have no bounds. Thus, when a former member of the House, Honourable Dino Melaye, began to go public with these figures, he was swiftly and severely dealt with by the leadership of the House. Indeed, the manner in which he was silenced was so effective that no other member of the National Assembly has since then ever dared to follow his example.

    Far more cynical and indifferent to its claims to democratic norms is how the National Assembly responded when a civil society organization, The Legal Assistance and Aid Project, LEPAD, invoked the Freedom of Information Act of 2011 to compel our legislators to reveal to the Nigerian people exactly how much they are paid. They refused absolutely. Consequent on this refusal, LEPAD dragged the National Assembly to the courts. In a suit argued by the frontline activist lawyer, Femi Falana, SAN, a high court ordered the National Assembly to act in accordance with a law that it had itself passed by promptly releasing full details of the salaries and emoluments paid to members of the Assembly. They still refused and then took the matter to a federal appeal court. The case is still pending in the courts.

    I should mention that without being a lone figure crying in the wilderness, Femi Falana has done much to put the usefulness, the value of the Freedom of Information Act to test again and again since 2011 when the Act was enacted. He has invoked the Act in relation to a range of issues of public good that pertain to a whole group of governmental functionaries, parastatals, private commercial interests including but not limited to Minister of Justice and the Attorney General of the Federation; the Universal Basic Education (UBE) Commission; the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA); and the GSM/Internet Providers. I do not think that Falana harbors any illusions at all that by itself, the Freedom of Information Act will radically and positively transform the present endlessly corrupt and mediocre Nigerian political order. But he is taking this prevailing deeply unjust, wasteful and corrupted order to the very limits of its claim to being a democracy founded on the rule of law, not a failing state perpetually on the brink of becoming a failed state. Let Falana’s example be a wakeup call to our media houses and our journalists that they must rediscover the reasons why they fought long and hard for this Act to be passed. Quite possibly, the Freedom of Information Act is the only remaining legal and moral instrument that we have for making the revolution that is coming a peaceful one. But this line of reasoning requires another lecture, another set of reflections.

    Concluded

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Freedom of Information Act and Dictatorship of Corruption and Mediocrity (2)

    Freedom of Information Act and Dictatorship of Corruption and Mediocrity (2)

    For our third and final case, we must go all the way back to 1984 when Nigeria was still in the grip of the irruption of military dictatorships into political governance, an irruption whose end seemed to be nowhere in sight. The case in point is the Buhari-Idiagbon Decree No 4 of 1984, unquestionably the most notorious of all military decrees ever promulgated in Nigeria. That Decree has a special bearing on all that I have said so far concerning the challenge of the dictatorship of corruption and mediocrity to the Freedom of Information Act. This is partly because in military rule, dictatorship manifests itself directly and autocratically; it has no need to deviously manifest itself through corruption. Also, you simply cannot talk of a Freedom of information Act in the African dictatorships of the 1970s through the 1990s when the very first thing that goes with the inception of any military dictatorship is the Constitution itself, together with all the rights that derive from it. Moreover, African military dictatorships are notoriously very paranoid, to the extent that many military dictators at the time actually went so far as to promulgate decrees banning rumors, as if any human society has ever existed in which there can be no rumour-mongering as an inevitable part of social existence. At any rate, the Buhari-Idiagbon Decree No 4 of 1984 took this axiomatic and quixotic paranoia of African military dictatorships to a new level when it explicitly stated that you must not and cannot publish anything to embarrass military leaders and their support corps of civil service officials even if what you publish is true.

    It is important to state here that like the two other cases I have already mentioned in this lecture, this infamous decree against truth also had its origins in the phenomenon of endemic corruption in our country. This is because the decree came on the heels of allegations of the disappearance of N2.8 billion naira from the coffers of a federal ministry that had been under the headship of Buhari in a previous military administration. Allegedly, Buhari had been deeply embarrassed by this report and when he himself carried out a successful coup, he promulgated Decree No 4 to deal with those sections of the press that had been most vocal about the alleged missing N.2.8 billion naira.

    From these three separate cases, we can see that there is a common of corruption. However, unlike the corruption that we saw in both the oil subsidy scam and the Obasanjo and Atiku feud that paraded itself in broad daylight, the alleged corruption in the case of Buhari’s military dictatorship was hidden, subterranean. Everyone knew it was there and abundantly so; but you could not talk openly about it; you could not even engage in rumours about it. In Buhari’s Decree No 4 of 1984, this veil of silence and secrecy on corruption was made sublime in its impunity and brazenness: the decree stated without the slightest equivocation that even if true, any allegation of corruption could not be published because it would embarrass the military government and its loyal civil servants. This observation leads us to the next stage of this lecture, the stage in which we now directly engage the crucial issue of a dictatorship that is not military, not exercised through the gun but through the complex mediations of corruption and mediocrity of the highest order.

    To enter into this segment of the lecture, please consider the following ironic reversal of normal expectations concerning dictatorships and democracy. On the one hand, we have a military dictatorship that is non-elective, that is indeed totally contemptuous of popular mandate but is nonetheless very paranoid about being embarrassed by any revelation that it is corrupt. But on the other hand, we have an elective, “democratic” government that putatively bases its legitimacy on popular mandates but is completely unembarrassed by any and all allegations of corrupt practices and dealings.

    I would like to suggest that the irony in both cases is more apparent than real. Military dictatorships are characteristically, even extremely paranoid about being shown to be corrupt only because nearly all military coup-makers come into power on the claim that they have come to clean up the mess made by civilian governments, or even by a preceding military autocracy. Of all the governments we have ever had in Nigeria, the Buhari-Idiagbon dictatorship was the most self-righteous, the most fanatical about imposing discipline on Nigeria and Nigerians; for this reason, it absolutely could not stand being embarrassed by the taint of corruption, especially if the allegation happened to be based on truth.

    The irony in an elective, “democratic” government that brazenly washes the dirty linens of its oceans of corruption in the national and global public sphere is likewise a factitious irony with no basis in reality. This is because the presumption of virtually all our ruling class parties since the return to formal democratic rule in 1999 has been, quite simply, that no party, no politician ever wins or, conversely, loses an election on the basis of public exposure of huge sums that the politician or the party has looted from our oil wealth. At a more general level, winning or losing elections has little or nothing to do with your performance in office. You may be as corrupt and as mediocre as the worst politician on the African continent or the world, but that is no disqualification for you to become a member of the National Assembly, the Executive Governor of a State, or the President of the Republic itself – unless, of course you have been caught, tried and jailed.

    I readily accept the fact that not all our politicians are corrupt and mediocre. Indeed, there are a few state governors and public officeholders that are deserving of respect and admiration. But I think that the great majority of our politicians are fundamentally predisposed to being corrupt and mediocre. This is not because they are necessarily or inherently corrupt or mediocre; it just so happens that this is the prevailing order that they know; it is the universe of expectations and values in which they operate. Corruption and mediocrity reign supreme in our country at the present time because that is the game in town; it is the undeclared dictatorship which has apparently found a perfect hiding place in the outward forms and protocols of a formally democratic political order. Permit me to expatiate a little on this observation.

    I think it is safe for me to assume that most of us in this gathering this morning would agree to a proposition which states that an endlessly corrupt electoral system in which massive, blatant and violent rigging plays a central role is the main reason why virtually all our political parties and politicians do not really depend on their performance in office to win elections. Another way of putting this concretely is to say that rather than actually perform well in office and win the respect and the mandate of the people, virtually all of our political parties spend most of their time amassing the war chest that will enable them either to successfully rig elections or, conversely to prevent successful rigging by opposing political parties and politicians. In other words, rigging does not stand alone; it is part of a vastly corrupt and corrupting political party system.

    Because this is a very crucial point in this lecture, I wish to be absolutely clear about what I am asserting or even claiming here. For this reason, I wish to give one very concrete illustration of my claim here that rigging does not stand alone but is part of a vast network of corruption in our political party system. This illustration, I would argue, is one that most adult and politically sophisticated Nigerians know only too well. Thus, I don’t think anyone would seriously contest the fact that as the ruling party with a so-far iron-clad control of the centre, the PDP spends most of its time between election cycles preparing to rig itself back into power with absolutely no relevance to how it has performed in office. By contrast, the other ruling class parties not in control at the centre but in the seats of power in some of the states of the federation spend all their time between electoral cycles amassing the financial means and the strategies with which to prevent the PDP from rigging itself back into power. Nowhere is this whole apparatus of a deeply corrupt and corrupting political order more apparent than in our election tribunals in which, as everyone knows, political parties and politicians who have much more credible claims to having won elections must still bribe very heavily to secure legal redress for having been robbed of their victories through rigging at the polls.

    It is well known that the 2011 oil subsidy mega-scam that ran into more than N2.58 trillion naira had everything to do with the re-election project of the President and the PDP. But even with that dubious help, we shall never get a full measure of the actual sums that go into both rigging and preventing rigging by our ruling class parties. All we can safely say is that rigging and its opposite, rigging-prevention, are but the tip of an iceberg; behind the whole unholy party-electoral edifice in our country is the widespread, defining feeling among the Nigerian political class that the money is there to be looted either to stay in office or to come into power because, for a long time yet, the oil will keep flowing. I will come back to this point at the end of the lecture.

    In case the point I am making here is not yet clear enough, let me spell it out: the rigging of elections, as heinous as it has generally been in our country since the return to civilian rule in 1999, is but one factor among others that make our electoral system and our present political order so spectacularly corrupt and corrupting. This is why, as much as I loathe and condemn the rigging of elections in our country, I do not ascribe what I have in this lecture been calling the dictatorship of corruption and mediocrity to the agency or primacy of rigging; rather, in my view, corruption itself is the agent, the precondition of a dictatorship that is both kleptocratic and plutocratic.

    I have observed that in the Obasanjo-Atiku feud of 2006, both camps made revelations of corruption about each other that should, at the very least, have led to the impeachment of the President and the Vice President. But nothing happened to them and not a single one of their cronies, henchmen and girlfriends that were the beneficiaries of the “loot” from the PTDF was made to pay back a single kobo. Also, nobody has paid back a single kobo out of the N2.58 trillion looted in the oil subsidy mega-scam, a colossal sum that could make the lives of millions of Nigerians better than the horrible conditions they currently have to endure, thanks to this dictatorship of corruption and mediocrity. As a matter of fact, with regard to this particular case of the oil subsidy scam, the whole nation was treated to a comedy of errors and absurdity when the Chairman of that same House of Rep Ad-Hoc Committee on the oil subsidy scam, Hon Farouk Lawan, was caught by a hidden videotape camera receiving hush-money bribe from one of the biggest names among the cabal of real and fake marketers. Hon Lawan has not faced any significant legislative censure for this egregiously corrupt act. All that has “happened” to him is that he is being tried in a court of law in which he is apparently successfully tying up the legal process in a seemingly endless impasse.

    To be continued

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Freedom of information Act and dictatorship of corruption and mediocrity

    Freedom of information Act and dictatorship of corruption and mediocrity

    It gives me great pleasure to at last be able to give this lecture. I say this because, first, I was to have given the lecture last year but could not do so for all sorts of reasons and, second, because this year once again, other pressing engagements and commitments almost made it impossible for me to give the lecture.

    There is another reason why I am very delighted to be giving the lecture and this is simply the fact that the sponsors of the lecture, the Wole Soyinka Centre for Investigative Journalism, is an organisation whose work and vision I both greatly admire and endorse. Journalism, specifically activist journalism, was crucial in the struggle for our country’s freedom from colonial rule, just as we are finding out more and more that in the long and unfolding struggles to consolidate that independence from continued foreign domination and internal misrule, anarchy and suffering for the vast majority of our peoples, that tradition of journalism will prove indispensable. The Wole Soyinka Centre for Investigative Journalism is a leading, perhaps pioneering organisation for the consummation and perpetuation of this vital tradition of the press at this particular conjunctural moment in our history. May its work live up to the great expectations that its mission bestows on its founding in the years and decades ahead!

    All modern democratic nations and societies need a free press at the centre of which stands the kind of activist, professionally mature investigative journalism that the WSCIJ seeks to nurture and expand in our country. Beyond this, the developing nations of Africa and other parts of the global South have an even much greater need for a free press, for an activist, independent-minded journalism than the affluent liberal democracies of the global North. The theme of my lecture this morning – the Freedom of Information Act of 2011 (FoI) as it confronts the immense challenge of what I call the dictatorship of corruption and mediocrity – is a small part of this larger global issue of the centrality of a free press and an independent-minded activist journalism for all modern democratic societies. But this should not blind us to the immensity of its ramifications for the survival of our country and the future prospects of the majority of our peoples. Since the term “dictatorship of corruption and mediocrity” in the title of my talk goes to the heart of this assertion, let me now dispel any puzzlement concerning the term by directly addressing the range of issues and significations I have in mind in my use of it.

    Before going directly to this theme, a word of clarification is perhaps necessary. As I move into discussion of the theme, I ask you, my audience, to bear in mind that the question that drives all my observations, analyses and projections is this: What need do we have for a Freedom of Information Act when what I am calling the dictatorship of corruption and mediocrity in our country is so open about all the corrupt misdeeds, all the inept illegalities and all the official inanities that attach to “democratic” governance in our country?

    Well, my answer to this question is that we still need that landmark legislation that is known as the Freedom of Information Act that was passed in the year 2011, even if corruption and the mediocrity which it creates on a gargantuan scale in our country are normatively not hidden, not shrouded in secrecy in Nigeria. As a matter of fact, I shall in the course of my lecture be arguing that there is a crisis of under-utilisation of the FoI by our press, by our media houses in spite of the fact that they were at the forefront of the struggle for the passing of the Act. Indeed, my central argument in the lecture will be that though the nature and scale of corruption in Nigeria poses a challenge to the FoI, this is a challenge that is not insurmountable. However, before I come to this argument, it is perhaps helpful to highlight three particular cases that are exemplary in their graphic illustration of the climate of corruption that the FoI must contend with in our country that is almost without comparison with the moral and political climates that the FoI in other countries of the world have to deal with. [Parenthetically, let me note here that the FoI exists in many countries of the world; it has indeed become an almost indispensable part of human and civil rights legislation in many parts of the world]

    The first case concerns perhaps the biggest and most brazen act of state or official corruption ever perpetrated in Nigeria. This sublime brigandage is known as the oil subsidy scam of 2011. It involved vast sums of monies paid out of our national coffers to a cabal of oil marketers that hold the lifeline to the distribution of petroleum products in our country. I am sure that every woman and man in this hall has heard or read of this case before but all the same, a critical look at the details is necessary in the context of this lecture.

    For the avoidance of doubt or confusion, let us remember that in the Nigerian context oil subsidy implies an annual budgetary allocation to defray the costs of refined oil imported into the country to augment the shortfall between what our oil refineries produce and the volume of petroleum products that the nation consumes annually. There is a longstanding controversy concerning the reality and the scale of this subsidy, but in the present context, we need not concern ourselves with that controversy. The important thing to note here is that in the year 2011, and depending on which set of posted and announced figures you use for your computation, what was actually paid out to marketers as oil subsidy was six to nine times bigger than what was budgeted, even though there was no rise at all in the volume of petroleum products sold and consumed in the country. Indeed, for 2011, the posted, budgeted sum was N245 billion for the whole year. But within the first eight months of the year, an alleged sum of N1.3 trillion had been paid out to the marketers. I say “alleged” here because N1.3 trillion was only one of the figures thrown around. On this particular crucial issue, let me quote from the Report of an Ad-Hoc Committee of the House of Representatives on that oil subsidy scam:

    Contrary to the earlier official figure of subsidy payment of N1.3 trillion, the Accountant General of the Federation put forward a figure of N1.6 trillion; the Central Bank N1.7 trillion, while our Committee established subsidy payment of N2.58 trillion as at December 2011, amounting to more than 900% over the appropriated sum of N245 billion.

    Please note that the sum of N2.58 trillion actually paid out was 900% greater than the N245 billion budgeted. Indeed, for the year 2011, the budget approved for the whole country was N4.97 trillion, which means that what was paid out to the cabal of oil marketers was more than half of the national budget itself for that year. And to place this within the framework of some of the convertible currencies of the world, N2.58 trillion is approximately $16 billion US dollars; 12.46 billion Euros; and 10.73 billion British pound sterling, all paid out to marketers most of whom were phantom dealers in petroleum products who supplied nothing.

    One more quotation from that same House of Rep Ad-Hoc Committee Report and we will move on to my second example of what I am calling the dictatorship of corruption and mediocrity. This is the quotation:

    Contrary to statutory requirements and other guidelines under the Petroleum Support Fund (PSF) scheme mandating agencies in the industry to keep reliable information data bases, there seemed to be a deliberate understanding among agencies not to do so. This lack of record keeping contributed in no small measure to the decadence and rot that the Committee found in the administration of the PSF… We found out that the subsidy regime, as operated in the period under review (2009 and 2011), was fraught with endemic corruption and entrenched inefficiency. Much of the amount claimed to have been paid as subsidy was actually not for consumed PMS (i.e. petroleum products). Government officials made nonsense of PSF Guidelines due mainly to sleaze and in some cases, incompetence. [The emphases are mine]

    “Decadence”; “rot”; “entrenched inefficiency”; “incompetence”: these are the Committee’s own terms, not mine. Mine is only to draw conclusions from these terms and from the combined effect of their concatenation in the Report’s searing indictment of the sublime kind of corruption that reigns in our country. This is my conclusion, my extrapolation: Corruption is not only dishonesty, fraud, or sleaze; it is also aided by, and in turn generates mediocrity, rottenness, putrefaction. We shall come back to this issue later in the lecture.

    For now, let us turn our attention to the second of the three exemplary cases that I wish to highlight in these observations and reflections on the challenges that the dictatorship of corruption and mediocrity poses to the FoI Act. This happened in the year 2006 and entailed a very public feud between no less august and authoritative political personages than the President and Vice President of the Republic at the time, Olusegun Obasanjo and Atiku Abubakar. The feuding in essence entailed accusations and counter-accusations by Obasanjo and Atiku of massive looting of the Petroleum Technology Development Fund (PTDF) of hundreds of millions of dollars. It was precipitated when the President sent a report to the National Assembly alleging that Atiku had conspired with some Americans to divert vast sums from the PTDF to the benefit of himself and his foreign co-conspirators. Please note that the word “loot” was in the report that Obasanjo sent to the National Assembly with a demand that impeachment proceedings be launched against the Vice President.

    Of course, as could be expected, Atiku promptly responded to Obasanjo’s charges. But what no one expected, what in fact nearly took everyone’s breath away in Atiku’s response was that he did not deny the charges at all; rather than a denial, he alleged that Obasanjo and some of his cronies and girlfriends had benefitted from the funds he had diverted from the PTDF. And to back up this claim, Atiku made photocopies of the cheques he had written in favour of these cronies and paramours of Obasanjo. He took out full-page advertorial spreads in major newspapers in which documents in support of this extraordinary counter-accusation were published.

    Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, it is tempting to say that this account, this story speaks for itself. But that is not exactly true. To the story itself and for our purposes in this lecture, we must ad that no action based on the FoI could ever have brought out the surfeit of information on the looting, the corruption that Obasanjo and Atiku, together with their supporters, voluntarily revealed about themselves. And let us also note that nothing happened to Obasanjo, Atiku and their cronies, girlfriends and sycophants that benefitted from that vast looting of the funds of the PTDF by way of well deserved punitive action. Ironically, the only person who did go to jail was the American congressman, William J. Jefferson who, at one time, was Atiku’s point man in the United States theatre of operations in financial wheeling and dealing before he and the Vice President quarreled and went their separate ways. But Jefferson served prison time in the United States, not in Nigeria.

    To be continued

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Wimbledon 2013: reflections on an ‘open era’ that is only conditionally ‘open’

    Wimbledon 2013: reflections on an ‘open era’ that is only conditionally ‘open’

    [For Yusuf Oyeniran, in remembrance of things past; and for Lawrence Awopegba]

    Thursday, July 4, 2013. It is only three days now to Sunday, July 7, the day on which the men’s finals will be played to mark the completion of Wimbledon 2013. That day also happens to be the day on which this article will appear in print.

    I confess it: my passion for watching tennis on television, especially the so-called “grand slams” (Wimbledon; the French Open; the US Open; and the Australian Open) is nearly all-consuming, so much so that my friend, Femi Osofisan, teases me all the time about it. A few years ago, a younger colleague, Professor Wumi Raji of the University of Benin, called me by phone while I was watching one of these “grand slams” and upon my telling him that we had to conclude our conversation quickly as I was watching a tennis “grand slam” on TV, he immediately sent me an email message after he hung up on the phone to tell me how greatly “relieved” he was to discover that I actually had something to do for relaxation other than reading and writing all the time! The next time that I spoke with him by phone I told him that apparently, there is a lot about me of which he knows little or nothing, the passion for watching tennis ‘slams” being only one of them.

    With regard to watching tennis, there are only three other things that I watch with equal interest or attention on TV: world news; football; and independent, experimental films from around the world. Since watching world news is fairly routine and is more or less an everyday affair of no more than two hours on any given day, it stands apart from the others on its own. Watching football needs little explanation, for where and who is the Nigerian, the African, the denizen of planet earth who is not hooked by this game that is, by a long shot, the preferred viewership sport for most of the nations and peoples of the world? Apart from this, a talent for soccer runs in my family and three of my siblings actually went on to become professional football players after the years of boyhood and teenage when talent either fades away or blossoms into a professional occupation. I did play football beyond my teens, but my interest in it as a potential occupational candidate for what I would do with my life ended with my membership of the winning soccer team of Kuti Hall, U.I. of 1968. As for watching independent, experimental films from around the world, I picked up the habit when, as a first-year doctoral candidate at New York University, I took courses in Cinema Studies and discovered that commercial Hollywood and Bollywood, “Indian” films did not have the last word in filmmaking. This account leaves the passion for watching tennis that is the subject of this piece as the one interest, the one consuming viewership-recreational habit of mine whose comprehension is anything but simple and uncomplicated. Let me explain.

    The life experience that serves as the origin of this passion is nothing if not filled with enigma. It can be stated succinctly before going into an attempt at interpreting what it means, what it portends. For in all my life so far, I played tennis actively for only three years, 1962, 1963 and 1964; that is all. I neither played it before those particular years nor I have I played it since then. But in those three years, I gloried endlessly in playing it. To be precise, 1963 and 1964 were the true vintage years, for it was only in those years when I moved from what was called a “day student” to a “boarder” that I found the time, the opportunity to play tennis to my heart’s content. And I became very good at it. Now, two things stand out in this experience that, to this day, still astonishes me. First, I was completely self-taught: from the moment when, at my school, Ibadan Boys High School, I watched senior boys playing the sport, I was hooked and it was only a matter of time before I picked up a tennis racket and more or less taught myself not only how to play the game but how to play it gracefully and masterfully. Secondly, there were no regular “lawn tennis” competitions in our secondary schools in Ibadan at the time. Athletics, yes; football, yes; hockey, yes; even cricket, yes, but only exclusively among the elite schools. But tennis, no; a big no.

    I have not made any systematic research into the matter and so I do admit that there might have been competitions in the sport in the schools in the past. But in my time in secondary school in the early 1960s, there certainly were no competitions in the schools of the Western Region in “lawn tennis”. And this lent an “anonymity”, a selectivity to those of us among the student population who played the game. Since there were no intra-school and inter-school competitions, we could never achieve fame playing the game and for that reason, not too many pupils gravitated to the sport. I apparently did not know it at the time, but I must have liked this “anonymity”, this self-selectivity about tennis as I knew it, played it and grew passionate about it then. One of the two men to whom this piece is dedicated, Yusuf Oyeniran, was among this select company of students at my school who, above all others, stands out in my memory as the person with whom I played some of my toughest and most exhilarating matches. [Yusuf Oyeniran, you and I live in this same Ibadan, but how strange that we have not set eyes on each other since 1964, how strange!]

    The thing that intrigues me the most is the fact that as I much as I loved the sport and was very good at it, I never played it again after 1964, my last year in secondary school. This is all the more intriguing since in all the universities in which I have taught over the decades – Ibadan, Ife, Cornell, Harvard – there were excellent courts and facilities for indulging myself to my heart’s desire if I wanted to play tennis. Sometimes I wonder if the circumstance of being expelled from school in my very last term just before I took my West African School Certificate Examination (WASCE) had something to do with this enigma. This expulsion occurred because, allegedly, I led a revolt of the students against the school authorities, a revolt that was unprecedented in the school’s history up to that time. One consequence of this expulsion was that I “grew up” rather precipitously and left all “childish” things behind, tennis being in my mind at the time one of these things.

    I confess that, ultimately, I do not know. All I know is that although I left tennis more or less for good in 1964, tennis never left me. And this is where my reflections in this piece connects that enigmatic past with what I have been thinking this week as I have been deeply absorbed by watching Wimbledon 2013. Perhaps it was the relatively early dispatch of Serena Williams from the competition, for this year in watching Wimbledon I have been forcefully struck by the fact that tennis is the only world sport that I like in which, with the exception of Africans of the Diaspora, Africans from the continent itself are inversely notable only by their total absence. Kevin Anderson and a few other white male and female players are there but that’s about it. The matter would have been of little or no consequence to me if, like Rugby, the sport is hardly played in the cities and towns of African countries. But tennis is played in Africa. It is played in universities and polytechnics. It is played by “officers and gentlemen” of the armed services in some barracks. There are even Tennis Clubs in major cities of the continent, even if we must admit that most, if not all the players are amateurs, not professionals. And let us not forget that this country has produced a Lawrence Awopegba, the other man to whom this piece is dedicated, who shone brightly at regional and international competitions, as did others like David Imonite, Nduka Odizor and Sadiq Abdulahi. But tennis in our country and our continent has never found an institutional home in which competitive professionalism could grow. And this is where the question of the so-called ‘open era’ of world tennis comes into these reflections.

    According to the historians of world tennis, the ‘open era’ that began in 1968 sets off the present decisively from the past, pre-open era when amateur players were the only ones allowed to participate in competitive tennis, the “grand slams” included. In other words, prior to 1968 when the ‘open era’ began, money was not a big factor in world tennis as only amateurs competed in the “slams”. With the coming of the ‘open era’ the organization of the sport entered into an entirely new epoch, though this happened not all at once but gradually. Many things stand out and cry for attention in this historic transformation from one era to another: a phenomenal increase in prize money; the industry responsible for manufacturing equipment and gear for the sport became more and more monopolistic, casting a long shadow over virtually every aspect of the sport; rights to radio and television broadcasts became more and more lucrative; advertizing brands penetrated the on-court and off-court identities of the most gifted players; the players themselves self-organized into rich and powerful associations. Roger Federer or Maria Sharapova are not simply Roger Federer and Maria Sharapova; they are franchises, brands whose off-court marketability are as important as the dazzling and powerful talent that these iconic players display on the courts.

    I hope that it would not have escaped the notice of the reader that 1964, the last year in which I actively and passionately played tennis, is not far from 1968, the year in which the ‘open era’ in world tennis began. I look around me in Nigeria and I find that the organization of tennis as a competitive sport has hardly changed from 1964. For the most part, there are still hardly any truly professional tennis players of note in our continent, always excepting the special case of South Africa. More pertinently, the organization of the sport in our continent has not yet acceded to the level of a cottage industry, let alone talk of a small or medium scale enterprise. The ‘open era’ does not mean that amateurs are excluded from world tennis, but they don’t stand even the ghost of a chance in the prevailing context of the dominance of combined finance, industrial and service capital in the organization of the sport, especially in the “grand slams”. Increasingly, East European and Asian professional players are holding their own against the previously dominant players of Western Europe and the United States. Of all the regions of the world, our continent is the only one that is yet to record a noticeable presence in world tennis. The fact that diasporic Africans like the Williams sisters, Jo-Wilfred Tsonga, Giles Monfils, James Blake, Sloane Stephens and so many others are there with the very best players means that there is nothing “racial” about our non-presence in world tennis.

    For me, this is one of the most compelling proofs that Nigeria is not yet a middle-income economy, for only in the true middle-income economies of the world do professional tennis players have all the material and organisational support systems they need to thrive. But let us keep hope alive. As the ubiquitous, streetwise saying puts it, no condition is permanent, compatriot.

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Analog is to a single mirror image as digital is to a hall of mirrors: reflections (2)

    Analog is to a single mirror image as digital is to a hall of mirrors: reflections (2)

    Since it was only a few weeks ago that I asked the NEPA/PHCN service vendor whether the replacement of my old analog meter with a new digital meter could be expected to lead to better power supply and fairer and more honest assessment of charges and fees, it is perhaps premature for me to give a precise answer to that question that is based on actual experience. But I have no doubt that like me, most of the readers of this series do not expect that the new digital meter will make much of a difference, especially with regard to power supply or delivery. I will come back to this point later in this piece, but for now, I think it is instructive to give an account of how, long before my encounter with the NEPA man, I came to a rather acute awareness of this whole subject of the widespread, indeed worldwide replacement of analog technology and appliances with their digital equivalents.

    As I live and work part of the year in the United States, this event took place in that country, specifically in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Regretfully, I did not record the year, the date, though I am fairly certain that it was sometime within the last eight years. [I moved from Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, to Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2006] The occurrence involved an aspect of some habits of mine that I am not particularly proud of, this being procrastination when it comes to keeping up with the routine demands of daily existence. Here is what I happened.

    For a very long time, COMCAST, my cable television provider, kept sending me regular notices and warnings to change the box-like decoder that made it possible for me to enjoy their services from the old analog version to a new digital replacement. But I procrastinated and did nothing about the notices and warnings. These notices had also advised me to replace my television set with one made specifically for digital technology, even though the notices also said that keeping my old TV set would not make reception completely impossible; only, it would be significantly inferior. This “reprieve” perhaps added fuel to the fire of my procrastination and long after the expiration of the recommended date of the changeover, I still kept using my analog decoder and TV set. I finally – and very promptly – made the transition when I visited the home of a colleague who had made the change. The difference between what he was seeing, what he was enjoying regularly as the owner of digital equipment and appliances and what I had become used to as a consumer of the services of COMCAST, our mutual services provider, was like the difference between day and night. Sound, visual clarity, color and tone, all were of infinitely superior quality in my colleague’s appliances. Dear readers and compatriots, may we never be left behind by the great, beneficial changes in life and history! [Also: may we never lack the means to make it possible for us not to be left behind!]

    To get back to my encounter with the NEPA vendor, one big issue is of course the fact that this comes almost a decade after my experience with COMCAST, the Cambridge, Massachusetts, service provider. In other words, the fruits of the digital revolution got to us in Ibadan/Nigeria almost one decade after digital it had entered the currency of common experience in the United States. Another difference is the unsurprising fact that consumers in the United States enjoy vastly superior services and rights than consumers in Nigeria. For in Nigeria, I never received any notification, any warnings that I should change from analog to digital. One day, Lukman, my neighborhood NEPA vendor, just showed up in my house and said, “Prof, I advise that you replace your analog meter with a digital one; it will cost you some money, but you will not regret the change”. Indeed, Lukman left it completely open to me whether to make the change or not as NEPA, it seemed, was perfectly content with whatever choice I made: stay with analog or change to digital. But for me, the most important difference lies well beyond the relative advantages and rights of consumerism in Nigeria and the United States and go to the fundamental issue of how technological advances in our world impact the rich and the poor nations of the planet to the detriment of the poor nations and, especially, the poor and the marginalized of those nations. Because this is a subject whose complexity demands far greater exploration than I can give in this piece, permit me to deal with only its most salient aspects.

    From my brief encounter with Lukman, I surmise that NEPA is not insisting that all its costumers make the transition from analog to digital. And I think we can take it for granted that even if it did, as long as electricity can still be delivered and its charges assessed to its millions of customers through the subsisting or old analog meters, the great majority of the customers will stay with analog meters for the simple reason that that is what they can afford. In other words, in Nigeria as in most parts of the developing world, one age, one epoch in the technological organization of services and facilities enjoyed by the populace hardly ever completely supersedes another; rather, for a long time (and perhaps even forever), different epochs coexist side by side. This observation requires a concrete illustration.

    To this day and in the homes of many of my friends from my childhood at my neighborhood in Oke-Bola, Ibadan, the TV sets you will find are not of the variety of sleek digital, flat-screen models; for the most part, they are bulky, weighty analog sets that have been around, it seems, almost forever. True enough, these analog sets do receive services from DSTV whose programming and delivery are entirely run on digital technology, but the services received are of an abysmally low quality. With a little ruefulness and without the least bit of smug self-satisfaction, I can report that these friends seem content with what they receive from DSTV through their outmoded analog TV sets. But I should also point out that when they wish to fully enjoy a crucial game involving their adopted English Premiership clubs, they come to my house and submit themselves to the delighted viewership of ultramodern, digital flat-screen television set!

    But this is not an idle chatter about relative middle class and upper middle class privileges and allurements in consumerism in our country. Beyond consumerism, beyond what I and some of my friends at Oke-Bola – most of whom, by the way, are retirees who have put in long years of meritorious and dedicated professional service to the country – enjoy or don’t enjoy through our analog or digital TV sets, the topic we have been exploring in this series goes to the heart of survival itself, either as a national community or as the human species as a whole. This is because the ongoing digital reorganization of the recoding, transmission and reception of sound and image affects virtually all areas of the production, maintenance and reinvention of human life as a sustainable and fulfilling project whose end is not and will never be in sight.

    At its most elemental level, the digital revolution involves listening to and looking at nature, at the universe and at ourselves and recording and transmitting what we find at infinitely more efficient and valuable levels than analog technology had ever been remotely capable of achieving and consummating. Medicine is definitely one of the greatest beneficiaries of the digital revolution where, among other things, imaging technologies that were unthinkable only a decade ago now enable us to look at, record and transmit the most intimate processes going on in the innermost recesses of the cells within our bodies. The whole field of R&D, of research and development, is another big beneficiary of digitality: research projects and hypotheses that could not have been conceived, let alone accomplished a decade ago are now routinely fashioned in virtually all the disciplines of the natural sciences. As I am not a professional scientist, I can only talk about what I have been told and what I have read concerning the work of some of my scientific colleagues. Some of their projects are so unprecedented that it sometimes appears to me, with my background in the arts and the humanities, that some of my colleagues in the sciences are peering at and listening to the very heart of existence itself. Other areas where the displacement of analog technological processes by digitality is causing epochal shifts include food production; the production of new drugs and medications; and the study of the heavens and the oceans in their depths and vastnesses.

    But how is this unprecedented digital revolution impacting the life chances, the present and future prospects of the masses of ordinary women and men, both in our part of the world and in the world at large? To go back to the opening question in this series, it is extremely doubtful that any truly beneficial changes in power supply and delivery will redound to our benefit with the coming of digital meters to Nigeria. And more generally, who really thinks that by itself alone, the digital revolution will significantly affect the endemic crises of security and community that we face as a nation?

    One can wax lyrical about the achievements and benefits of digital technology, instruments and appliances, but ultimately it all boils down to that question. For us in Nigeria in particular, it is difficult not to be worried that the digital revolution has come not to relieve, but to spread a mystifying, talismanic cloud over the challenges and dilemmas of existence in the new millennium. Far from moving closer to a semi-advanced scientific and technological power, it seems we are becoming more and transfixed by and mired in superstition, sterile religiosity and facile, self-serving irredentist attachments. This leads me to wonder whether or not digitality is a fertile breeding ground for these deeply disturbing psychic and spiritual states of many of our peoples at the present time. For to think of digitality in its essence in our present social and historical context is to think of the accumulated effect on the mass consciousness of cameras that don’t use film; recorders that don’t use magnetic tapes; and cell phones that are not only “wireless” but are also unlimited in the uses to which they can be put (camera; calculator; clock; radio; torchlight; and miniature television screen). Absent from this symptomatic list are microscopic imaging devices that weigh less than one ounce and travel with the blood stream over the whole terrain of our internal organs; measuring instruments that are calibrated in billionths of meters and seconds; and tracking instruments whose objects are not airplanes, ships, cars or persons but totally imperceptible motions of sonic, visual and virtual waves.

    As I am not a Luddite, I celebrate these instruments, devices and accomplishments of the digital revolution, but as I am Nigerian, I wait for the day when they will take their places side by side with cell phones, digital cameras and recorders as the fruits of the supersession of analog technology. Let that day come soon – on the waves of secular hope and faith.

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Analog is to a single mirror image as digital is to a hall of mirrors: reflections (1)

    Analog is to a single mirror image as digital is to a hall of mirrors: reflections (1)

    I finally knew that I had to write on this subject of the crushing blow that digital technology has dealt analog technology in our world when, a few weeks ago, the NEPA service vendor for my neighborhood in Oke-Bola, Ibadan, advised me to get a digital meter as a replacement for the old analog meter that I, like all other customers of NEPA, had been using up to the present time. The man more or less sang or chanted hymnal praises in celebration of the superiority of digital technology over the utterly disgraced analog instruments and appliances. But when I asked him to tell me precisely what this superiority and the advantages that came with it were, he did not exactly lose his métier, but beyond very broad generalities, he did become rather imprecise. This sent me into some rather cloudy thoughts concerning what I myself knew and did not know about this presumed universal and relentless epochal shift from analog to digital in virtually all parts of the globe. By the time the NEPA man left, I was convinced that I had to sort out things for myself on this very important subject, especially as the man seemed completely nonplussed when I asked whether with the replacement of my old analog meter with its digital equivalent I could assume either that power generation and supply by NEPA would improve or that I, like other costumers of NEPA, could expect more honesty and transparency in the determination of fees for electricity provided by our hapless national power provider. This piece is the first fruit of the project of self-clarification that began with that encounter with the NEPA vendor.

    We can, I assume, accept that everyone reading this piece has seen his or her own image, her own reflection in a mirror. But I think I am not far off the mark if I suggest that most people reading this piece have never seen reflections of themselves thrown back at them in a hall of mirrors. But what we lack in direct experience we can make up with the exercise of our imagination. Thus, I doubt that anyone reading this piece can have any difficulty at all in envisioning the great, incommensurable difference between seeing oneself as reflected in a single mirror image and seeing the endless duplications of the image of the self that one encounters when one wanders into or is plunged into a hall of mirrors. That difference, that incommensurability between the single mirror image and the vast and vanishing horizon of images and reflections of the self is the metaphor that I deem appropriate to the task of giving a concrete differentiating image between analog and digital technologies. I am not certain that this is the best or the most appropriate metaphor that I could have come up with, but I ask the reader to please bear with me as I tease out the implications of this metaphor for the subject of this piece.

    Now since I am a professor of English and Comparative Literature and not of Electronics or Engineering, the reader must take seriously my humble confession that I do not have expert or clear knowledge of the defining technical processes of analog and digital technologies. Although over the years and decades I have tried to make up for the unhappy fact that in high school I was not among the best students in mathematics and the sciences, I do not have the knowledge and the vocabulary to explain to myself and others what exactly is happening when the physical laws of nature and the universe are deployed or even manipulated in engineering in general or electronics in particular. For instance, I am greatly impressed in learning that in both analog and digital technologies, sound or visual waves are converted to electrical signals so that they can be transmitted and then reconverted at a point of reception into the original waves that had been converted into electrical signals. But please don’t ask me about the finer points of exactly how human or natural sounds and sights are either transmitted into electrical signals in the first place or how, at the point of reception, they metamorphose back into the sounds and sights that we hear and see with our human faculties.

    These highly technical processes require some contextualisation in real life experiences. I did enough of Physics in high school to know that all that we see and hear in this life come to us in invisible waves. From that basic knowledge that is backed by my own natural instincts comes my layman’s appreciation of the fact that the essential thing that distinguishes analog from digital technologies is the fact that the transmission and reception of electrical impulses in the former (analog) are much closer to real time and experience than in the latter (digital). This is because in digital technology sound and visual waves are not only changed to electrical signals that are then transmitted and received as recorded, but they are further electronically “refined” by being converted to codes that can be stored and used later in circumstances completely removed their production or occurrence in nature or human activities. Again, please don’t ask me exactly how electrical signals made from sound and visual waves are transformed into codes in digital technology. I have faith in the “explanation” available in the jargon of the experts in the fields of engineering and electronics that states that the analog signal is a continuous signal close to physical measurements while digital signals are discrete or discontinuous codes generated by digital manipulation. This “faith”, though made possible by the powers of abstract reasoning, is in fact rooted in actual experience. Permit me to explain this claim by reference to two key instruments or appliances of analog and digital technologies, these being tape recorders and computers.

    Both in my professional career and in my personal or social life, I have worked a lot with tape recorders. For this reason, I can affirm that it was a great moment for me when the “tape recorders” that I used stopped being tape recorders and became, quite simply, recorders. This, as we all know, was marked by the fact that the magnetic tapes on which recorded sounds were “captured” were simply discarded and that was the end of it: you no longer needed those highly brittle and eminently degradable tapes to record sound. That phenomenon has now been absorbed into my (and our) stock of common knowledge and experiences that we take for granted, but I can never forget the wonder and elation that I felt the very first time when I recorded sound without using tapes and without having to worry about how and where to store what I had recorded. I can now assert – with some regrets – that if digital recorders had been around when I did the research for my first published book that dealt with the traveling theatre movement of Hubert Ogunde, Duro Ladipo, Kola Ogunmola, Amos Olaiya and the others, I would have been spared hundreds of hours of work and worry having to carefully label and preserve every single magnetic tape that I used.

    Since I have written on the subject several times in this column, my remarks on computers in the context of the move from analog to digital technology and appliances will be brief. I never learned completed the task of learning to type on the old, sturdy and for the most part reliable typewriters, whether Remington or Olivetti. Perhaps it was this previous experience that made me at first resistant to learning and mastering typing on the computer keyboard. But once I discovered that digitalisation made the task of typing not really a “task” but a facility that, in comparison with the typewriter, was endlessly much easier and less cumbersome to operate, I quickly became avid in typing on the computer keyboard and producing my own essays, monographs and books. What used to be a chore that I somewhat resented and left to others to do at great cost to my financial solvency became something in which I found much pleasure and fulfilled aspirations.

    I have focused on these two electronic appliances largely because they are so central to my own personal encounter with the digital revolution, the epochal move from analog to digital technologies. For other people, the “totemic” instrument or appliance might be cell phones in comparison the old large and weighty landline phones. Who among us now leaves his or her house without the cell phone? Who in the past could carry their landline phones with them? Perhaps the clearest and the most ubiquitous sign of the “faith” we all now have in digitalisation as inscribed in the cell phone revolution is the fact that cell phones are now deemed indispensable in all the marketplaces of local, national and global communications. If you lose your cell phone, its replacement is swift and relatively uncomplicated. I do not recollect that anyone I knew had such “faith” in landline phones that were the epitome of analog technologies.

    No reflections on digitalisation and its impact on our country and our world can be complete without mentioning the replacement of analog television sets with their digital equivalents, their digital nemesis. At the most obvious level, the picture and sound values are infinitely better in the latter than in the former, apart from the fact that analog sets tend to be bulkier and weightier. I am not making a plug here for flat screen television sets, though I confess that I am susceptible to the aesthetic allure of their sleekness, their élan. I am alluding more properly to the programming and reception that digital sets make possible beyond anything one could have hoped for or received from analog sets. Here I must confess that it was only with the arrival of digital technology on the scene that television broadcasts in our country looked anything close to what you see in other parts of the world with advanced scientific and technological cultures. This particular observation needs some emphasis: television is one of the great cultural legacies of the last century; in the new millennium, it has become even more decisive in bringing national, continental and global communities closer with regard to programming and reception. Nigerian television programming and reception came of age, perhaps could only have come of age, with the advent of the digital revolution. South Africa is far ahead of Nigeria in continental programming and reception. This, I would argue, has a lot to do with which of the two countries had the infrastructures in place to make the most of the digital revolution.

    My own preferred way of understanding and coming to terms with the digital supersession of analog technology lies in critically unraveling the term “digit” that is the root word for “digital”. I think intensely of the digits and integers that are the codes into which digital technology transforms the electrical signals made from human and natural sounds and sights. Sounds and sights as digits and integers? Doesn’t this abstraction, this extreme technological reification of nature and experience carry with it some risks, some hints of alienation and anomy? Is the hall of mirrors a place of utopic fulfillment and/or a site of the loss of the self in empty, confounding amplitude? In plain language, does the digital revolution, in being so dazzling, so talismanic in its instruments, appliances and effects, not carry with it some risks for us all, individually and collectively? These will be the composite starting point in next week’s concluding essay in the series as we go back to my query to that NEPA services vendor: Will my new digital meter lead to improved services and more fairness and honesty in NEPA billing practices?

     

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Endgame 2015: they are frenemies alright, but are they benign and/or deadly?

    Endgame 2015: they are frenemies alright, but are they benign and/or deadly?

    Frenemy: Alternatively spelled “frienemy”, the term is a portmanteau of “friend” and “enemy” that can refer to either an enemy pretending to be your friend or someone who is your friend but is also a rival.
    Oxford English Dictionary (online)

    Share de gari/Share de gari/Share de gari
    Share gari/Share gari/Share gari
    Share am/Share am/Share am!
    Wole Soyinka, “Etiko Revo Wetin?”

    It is well, compatriots. Stay blessed, countrymen and women. The shortest book in the Bible, the holy book of Christians, is the Book of Nahum. It is also the one and only book in the Bible that, from the beginning to the end, is filled with curses, imprecations and maledictions, some of them so bitter and violent that you wonder whether this book is indeed part of a holy book. But the Book of Nahum is in the Bible exactly in the manner in which, if you go today to the houses of worship and nights of vigils in our country, you will feel as if you are in the world of the Book of Nahum. This is because a great part of both the prayers and the sermonising in these times and places of worship is devoted to calling the wrath of God and Jesus against “ota ile” and “ota ode” (enemies known and unknown; enemies within one’s own household and enemies lying in wait for one outside the home). In these devotional and prayerful contexts, there are only friends and enemies; there are no frenemies at all. This is why the topic for our lay, secular sermon this Sunday is precisely this enigmatic category of individuals, groups and political parties, frenemies, a category that defies and confounds an easy separation between friendship and enmity as we can see in the dictionary definition of the word in the first epigraph to this “sermon”.

    There are three questions at the centre of our “sermon”. This is the first one: Why are our religious practices and discourses filled with a clear separation between friends and enemies while, if you look beyond the claims and counterclaims, the dire warnings and predictions that our politicians hurl at one another all the time, what you see are so many frenemies amongst whom it is virtually impossible to separate friends from enemies, bitter foes from loyal allies? Secondly: if in our contemporary religious worldview there is a clear separation between friends and enemies while there are only frenemies and no true separation between friendship and enmity among our politicians, does this mean that there is a gap, a contradiction between the inner movements of religion and politics in our country? Thirdly: What do these questions have to do with the looming elections of 2015 about which even the most optimistic among us are already feeling great foreboding?

    For Nigerians under the age of 40, it may come as a surprise to learn that politicians of the First Republic for the most not only remained permanently in one party, they had considerable loyalty to their parties. And it was a common thing that they felt an allegiance, even a pride in the ideologies and policies of their parties. The phenomenon of carpet-crossing from one party to another was not unknown, but it was rare, so much so that it always caused a great stir anytime that it happened. Who amongst us does not know that defection from one party to another is so rife now, so banal in post-1999 Nigerian politics as to be the order of the day? Regardless of what reputation you have as a politician, regardless of either your expressed views or, conversely, your absolute lack of any views, all our political parties without exception will throw their doors open to you if you defect from another party, another coalition of parties. If, compatriot, you are still dubious about my claim that there are only frenemies and no real separation between ally and foe among our politicians and political parties, this is the clearest sign of the claim, the phenomenon.

    Compatriots, this is not a sermon from a religious pulpit that is steeped in sacred catechisms of faith and moral and philosophical absolutes. Nothing in our contemporary politics is foreordained, nothing happens in a transcendental time outside history and human practice in which, as diehard religionists among us put it, “God is in control” no matter how bad a mess our leaders have created and are continuing to create. I do not in the least expect that things will always stay as they are now. Moreover, I do readily admit that within the overwhelming blurring of ideological, moral and policy lines between our political parties, there are pockets of talented and visionary leadership that could, under a different political order, make a difference. But we must face the facts of the present, brutal as they are: other than where their ethnic and regional bases are, other than the invocation of the principle of performance as an ultimate value in political governance, there are no real or significant philosophical, ideological and policy differences between our political parties. This is why our present political ethos is overwhelmingly dotted with frenemies who are willing to forego any and all moral, ideological and policy differences as long as power at federal or state level is within reach.

    At this point in our “sermon” we must address the question posed in the title of the sermon: “they are frenemies alright, but are they benign or deadly?” This is because so far in the discussion we have engaged the issue of the non-distinction between friend and enemy, ally and foe only with regard to philosophical, ideological and policy differences between our politicians and political parties. The truth is that these are not the only or even main grounds around which individuals and groups within political parties draw lines of alliance and opposition, friendship and enmity. All over the world and throughout history, it is a well documented fact that politicians base their friendships and enmities not only around philosophical, ideological and policy differences but also around the prize at the end of their electoral and electioneering activities, these being the material and symbolic spoils of office. It is also a recorded fact of political history throughout the world that where the “prize” is so big, so monumental as to leave losers in dire circumstances, the stakes become so high as to make bitter enmity a prevalent, perhaps even defining aspect of politics. Definitely on the African continent, perhaps in the whole of the developing world, the “prizes” of electoral politics that are sedimented in the Nigerian presidency and the states’ executive governorships are without equal in their actual and symbolic concentration of power, authority and patronage, thanks largely to our oil wealth. To put this in very blunt terms, for as long as the oil wealth lasts, the scions of federal and state political power in our country seemingly have to do nothing other than simply collect and share amongst themselves the rents from crude oil production as the principal and in many cases the only source of their power, influence and authority. And this is why, even though there are no real or deep enmities on philosophical, ideological and policy grounds between our politicians and political parties, there is an ocean of bitter and nation-wrecking enmity around who gets the “prizes” and how to share them. In other words, here we are in the universe of the Book of Nahum in which there are enemies everywhere in the struggles over the spoils of office among Nigerian politicians and political parties. Thus, we can see that the inner movements of contemporary Nigerian religion and politics are, in their essential contents and logic, completely congruent.

    It is well, compatriots. Stay blessed. If you look carefully at the quoted lines from Soyinka’s 1983 song in our second epigraph, you will find, dear reader, that by the time you get to the last line, the repeated inscription has become more compact – and frenzied: “share am, share am, share am!”. I suggest that by moving from “share de gari” that plays on the name of the President at the time – Shehu Shagari – to the more colloquial and demotic “share am, share am, share am!” Soyinka moves us from the bitterly divisive and nation-wrecking brinksmanship of sharing the spoils of office among our political elites to sharing the national wealth and patrimony equitably among all groups and classes in the nation. The major way, perhaps the only way that this can happen is by de-concentrating the vast accumulation of power, authority and patronage in the presidency and the executive governorships in the states of the federation.

    Additionall, reducing the great concentration of power in our current bloated presidency and its arrant re-inscription in the thirty-six governorships in the country will take electoral politics in our country away from the bitter negative regionalism that surrounds it at the present time. Let me put this in plain language so that the essential point that it entails may be fully grasped: no politician and no political party will be prepared to tear the whole fabric of the country apart, as so many now do, if the office that he or she is seeking either at the federal or state level does not have the vast concentration of power and authority that that the presidency and the governorships now have. To those who think that this is the pipe dream of an idealistic sermoniser, I say, quite simply, that among the nations of our continent and the developing world, Nigeria is not typical but is an aberration in these matters.

    “The South has had two successive presidencies, so it now the turn of the North”. “The nation’s wealth comes substantially from the Niger Delta, so what is wrong in a man from the Niger Delta seeking a second term in the presidency especially since this is the very first time that that exalted office has gone to a person from the region”. “All the governors in the state have come from the north senatorial district since 1999; it is now the turn of the south senatorial district”. These are the sorts of slogans, the rhetorical gauntlets that are being thrown at the country and the world by our politicians and political parties as we approach 2015. John Campbell, a former U.S. Ambassador to Nigeria, in his widely debated book, Nigeria: Dancing at the Brink, expressed this same sentiment in dire predictions for the future of the country. There must be a balance between the “Christian South” and the “Moslem North” in the sharing of presidential power in our country, Campbell warns, otherwise Nigeria will never know peace or may even break up. Apart from the fact that the “South” is not all Christian and the “North” is not all Moslem, Campbell completely ignores the fact that the first problem with the Nigerian presidency is that it contains a vast, wasteful, and corruptive concentration of power. But no single ruling class party in our country has taken the reformation of this malformed instrument of misrule as a vital part of its vision and mission.

    Stay blessed, compatriot. It is well. Don’t lose hope, even though there is and there will be much suffering in the land before and after 2015. Nigeria will not break up. It is the presidency and the executive governorships that will eventually break up so that equitable distribution can at last take place in our country and restitution replace the great suffering in the land, God willing, Inshallah!

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • The “Arewa” North and our parasitic federalism and kwashiorkor democracy (2)

    The “Arewa” North and our parasitic federalism and kwashiorkor democracy (2)

    The gains evidenced by the creation of the NDDC, Niger Delta Ministry, Amnesty Programme, 13% derivation and even the Jonathan Goodluck Presidency have only meant more wealth for a handful of individuals in the region. Overall, the average Ijaw youth, for instance, is as distant from better life as he was when Major Isaac Boro was in the swamps fighting to defend the autonomy of the Niger delta Republic which he proclaimed. And therein lies the danger. A more ferocious army is gradually building up as the little gains from the long years of struggle continue to move in concentric circles of a greedy and insensitive elite class.
    Abraham Ogbodo, “New Militants For the Niger Delta”, The Guardian, Sunday, May 26, 2013

    Dear Itse:

    Last week, I rather very briefly touched on an observation that the fiercest opponents of fiscal federalism based on resource control are Northern conservative supremacists, while Southwestern and Southeastern conservatives and centrists tend to be its lukewarm supporters. Permit me to now expatiate more substantially on this observation, given my strong belief that it’s historical and current ramifications lie at the heart of the crises of nationhood and community that not only threaten our existence as one country but is also at the base of the horrible economic and social conditions of the overwhelming majority of Nigerians in every single part of the country.

    As you pointed out several times in your piece that prompted this series, Nigeria at the moment of its emergence after political independence from British colonial rule was based solidly on fiscal federalism and resource control by each constituent region of the nation. I would add that as a matter of fact, this claim has a longer history, for Nigeria at the point of the amalgamation of the North and the South in 1914 was also based on fiscal federalism and regional resource control. Indeed, this historical fact is so central to your arguments in your article of May 26 in particular and, more generally to your thinking on fiscal federalism that you insist absolutely that we must revert back to this long history before our country took the wrong turn of doing away with fiscal federalism and constitutionally enshrining and politically enthroning the bloated federalism that has turned the states into fiefdoms controlled by a bloated and infinitely corrupt and wasteful federal government at the hegemonic centre of affairs in the country. Since this view or position is so central to your thinking as well as the thought of nearly all fiscal federalists, whether conservative or progressive, let me repeat it: we must go back to the long years and decades when the constituent, federating regions were considerably autonomous of the federal government that in fact substantially depended on contributions from the regions in form of taxes.

    In all seriousness and without diminishing the case for fiscal federalism at the present time, I wish to argue strongly that reverting to the past on the matter of fiscal federalism needs far more careful thought, far more rigorous theoretical analysis and historical interpretation than most fiscal federalists, whether conservative or progressive and democratic, have given it. To put the matter as simply and as concretely as possible even though we are dealing with a very complex set of issues that altogether have caused so much destructive violence, unsustainable and maladjusted development and crisis-ridden disruption of peaceable community in so many parts of the world, we did not move from the fiscal federalism of the past into the bloated and parasitic federalism of the present peacefully and in full possession of the best parts of our human nature, individually and collectively. This is the heart of the matter and democratic and progressive fiscal federalists must realize that they must not – and indeed cannot – leave this issue out of their consideration. Permit me to expatiate on this observation, this claim as graphically as possible.

    Dear Itse, please let us consider the not so curious fact that the two most opposed regions of the country when it comes to fierce opposition versus equally fierce support for fiscal federalism in our country also happen to be the poorest and the least developed parts of the country. I speak here of the North and the South-south or the Niger Delta respectively. Additionally, let us think of the fact that these are the two regions of the country that have given rise the deepest and most ferocious armed insurrections against the Nigerian state, specifically in its incarnation in the bloated and wasteful presidency. I speak here of Boko Haram in the North and the “militants” in the Niger Delta. It so happens that these are also the two regions of the country with the widest gap, the deepest chasm between a demographically tiny but unspeakably wealthy elite and the rest of the population of the region. And let us not leave out of the equation the fact that the North and the Niger Delta are, in these matters, merely the worst manifestations, the most egregious instantiations of what is true of virtually all the other regions of the country: a small obscenely wealthy elite; extreme poverty and economic hardship for the vast majority of the population; insecurity of life, property and personal possession for all, rich and poor, the powerful and the marginalized. Democratic and progressive fiscal federalists cannot afford to make light of or worse, completely disregard these very widespread and even defining features of the political economy of our country that came into existence with our move from the fiscal federalism of the past to the thieving, wasteful “barawo” and “jaguda” federalism of the present.

    Dear Itse, I write of these issues with a sorrowful but not pessimistic consciousness of the historic fact that these things that we are experiencing with our imploding and wasteful federalism have happened and are still happening in so many parts of our continent in particular and in other parts of the developing world in general. Nearly everywhere in our continent where an extractive economy has become predominant over either agricultural production of export crops and/or middle grade industrial production of light consumer goods for export, these same distortions of community and development have come in their wake. South Africa under apartheid and the Democratic Republic of the Congo in almost the entire period of its post-independence existence are the worst examples, but the list contains other serious cases like Gabon, Sierra Leone, Angola, Mozambique, Liberia and Guinea Bissau. And if the historical allusions in Joseph Conrad’s novel, Nostromo, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, are to be believed, this matter of extractive economies and the violence and disruption that come in their wake have deep roots in the 19th century in other parts of the world, especially in Latin America.

    I hope that the readers of this piece can deduce from the discussion so far that there are no easy solutions, no beguiling nostrums available to us with which to deal with the crises and challenges that we face in the historic transition from our past of fiscal federalism and regional resource control to the present nightmare of our bandit republic, our kwashiorkor democracy. The image of kwashiorkor appeals to me because of the symbolic meanings that we can extrapolate from the bloated stomach juxtaposed with a main trunk and limbs that are atrophied, all supplanted by an oversize head. Both the distended stomach and the misshapen head contain no sustaining food for nourishment or thought; they become massive precisely on account of a deprivation that is so severe as to be almost inhuman. I cannot think of a better image or metaphor for the real “democracy dividends” our peoples have been given since the transition to civilian rule from the preceding military autocracies that were the dress rehearsals for the post-1999 period. Again, let me say that this kwashiorkor democracy finds its worst deformations in the North and the Niger Delta, the two extremely opposed regions of the country on the all-important issue of fiscal federalism and resource control.

    Dear Itse, let me in conclusion say that nothing I have said in this long open letter to you is a repudiation of fiscal federalism and resource control. My central argument in the series revolves around two major issues. First, I strongly believe that fiscal federalism cannot credibly and productively be invoked in our country without giving due recognition to the extremely violent conditions that accompanied and still sustain our historic transition to the present bloated, wasteful and exploitative federalism. When we had a truly federal system and the regions were relatively autonomous, this was largely because the surplus that sustained each region of the country and made them self-dependent came from cash or export crops produced in the regions themselves. With the emergence of an extractive, offshore and foreign-dominated industry as the mainstay of the economy, the basis of the regions’ and states’ self-dependence and relative autonomy have been more or less almost totally eroded. And we must never forget for one second that this historic transformation was accomplished by great violence, a violence that continues to this day in both statist and non-statist expressions.

    The second of my two concluding issues is far more complex than the first one. Let me state this as simply as I can without oversimplifying things. I believe that the only truly helpful and productive way that we can invoke fiscal federalism as an issue that can unite all true progressives, radicals, democrats and patriots is to link it with the fate of the vast majority of the poor, the looted and the marginalized of all parts of the country. I say this without sentimentality, with my feet planted firmly on the soil of realism and hope, pragmatism and idealism. If I am not mistaken, fiscal federalists and their opponents, routinely, even emphatically base their claims and counter-claims on the either principle of derivation (pro) or national unity (con). As far as I am aware, the only notable radical and progressive intellectual that has tried to combine these two principles of derivation and national unity is the late Yusuf Bala Usman. But he did so on the basis of an argument that was so bizarre that it more or less divided progressives of the North and the South. This argument rested on the claim that Niger Delta crude oil belonged to the North as its point of derivation because the oil of the Niger Delta creeks actually had their deep geological origins in the North, even though their point of extraction is in the South. It is significant that in this argument, Bala Usman never talked about those whose lives and futures have been blighted by crude oil extraction in the South and the North. Also significant is the fact that Usman made this argument in a debate with G.G. Darah who on that occasion did speak on behalf of the poor and the exploited, but only of the Niger Delta.

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • The “Arewa” North and our parasitic federalism and kwashiorkor democracy (1)

    The “Arewa” North and our parasitic federalism and kwashiorkor democracy (1)

    [Being an open letter to Professor Itse Sagay]

     

    All the big guns of Arewa North were resolutely committed to this project – Malam Adamu Ciroma, Professor Ango Abdullahi, Alhaji Lawal Kaita, Dr. Junaid Mohammed, Malam Tanko Yakasai, etc. In addition to these gentlemen, the Northern Governors and virtually all the political elite of the Arewa North believe that only one of themselves is entitled to be the president of Nigeria, based on where they come from, and as a group representative, regardless of merit, quality, qualification or track record. [My emphasis]

    Professor Itse Sagay, “The Appropriation of Nigeria by Northern Irredentists”, The Nation, Sunday, May 26, 2013

    Dear Itse:

    I don’t know if you have ever heard of a wisecrack that used to be told at the expense of Professor Ango Abdullahi, one of those you identified as the core group of Northern irredentists that you subjected to a blistering critique in your article in The Nation on Sunday, May 26 2013. That devastating critique is of course what prompted this open letter to you. The wisecrack I am alluding to here concerns a satirical nickname by which Ango Abdullahi was known by many of the radical lecturers and students of Ahmadu Bello University when he was the Vice Chancellor of that institution. The nickname was “VC-without-CV”. The nickname arose from the rather very well known fact that Abdullahi became a professor and later Vice Chancellor with a curriculum vitae (CV) that was so mediocre that, but for his connection to powerful conservative forces in the North, he could not have become a Senior Lecturer, let alone a Professor and Vice Chancellor with that kind of “CV”.

    Our tertiary educational system has fallen on bad days and North and South, East and West, many academics with poor or grossly inflated CV’s have become professors and vice chancellors, at least since the early 1980’s. Indeed, the crises of quality and relevance in our tertiary educational system is so bad, so acute that it is nothing short of miraculous that we still have professors and some Vice Chancellors that are of world class stature, that are indeed a match for their counterparts in other parts of the world – the world in general and the world of academia in particular. I make this observation so as to let you and my other readers know that it is not my intention in this open letter to you to make a singular or exceptional case of Ango Abdullahi as the infamous “VC-without-CV”. Far from singling out Abdullahi, I start this letter with his case only in order to draw your attention to a very crucial fact of our national political history that was almost completely absent from your article. This is the fact that Ango Abdullahi and the other scions and kingpins of the Northern irredentist or conservative establishment that your article so scathingly and mostly justifiably pilloried, were fiercely opposed in the North itself. This is not the only issue that I wish to take up in response to your article, but it is a central issue, one on which, in my opinion, hangs many of the other issues that I wish to raise in this two-part series. For this reason, permit me to dwell for a little while on this Ango Abdullahi case and the special circumstances that made me become aware of it. As we shall see, these circumstances as a matter of fact constituted a vital part of the activist lives that you and I and other colleagues lived when we were colleagues at the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ife in the early to mid-1980s.

    Dear Itse, you perhaps sense that I am adverting here to ASUU in which we were all very active in that period, so much so that that organisation was the linchpin of the progressive and radical struggles that we waged within the universities and beyond the walls of academia in the struggles for the political and ideological soul of our country. But what you may not immediately recall but would hopefully accept as a true account is the fact that whatever we achieved, whatever valuable lessons we learned came from the fact that we managed to forge powerful, almost unbreakable links, North and South and East and West of the country. And we managed to forge those links in spite of the extremely vigorous efforts of the powers that be within and outside the universities to keep us from forging those links by playing upon and manipulating differences of region, ethnicity, religion, ideology, and culture.

    I speak here with the authority and special experience of having been the National President of ASUU from 1980 to 1982; Immediate Past President and member of ASUU’s National Executive Council from 1983 to 1986; and Representative of ASUU on the Central Working Committee (CWC) of the Nigerian Labour Congress from 1984 to 1987. Absolutely everything conceivable and practicable was used to divide and keep apart radicals and progressives from the North and the South. Ango Abdullahi, as Vice Chancellor of ABU (one of the major first generation universities in the country) and a core member of what you call Northern irredentists in your article was one of the resolute opponents of ASUU radicals and progressives. I must add that here that as an opponent, Abdullahi was also urbane and articulate. But his opposition to radicals and progressives of the North and the South working together in unity and common purpose was unwavering. Thus, ASUU in particular and the country in general were extremely fortunate that in ABU radical and progressive activists, Abdullahi met his match: He was vigorously opposed within ABU itself; and his attempts on behalf of conservatives and irredentists of the North to prevent a link up with radical and progressive activist lecturers and professors from the South were soundly defeated. Moreover, this is still true of ASUU today as it was true of ASUU 30 years ago when you and I and other colleagues at Ife were stalwarts of the organisation.

    Dear Itse, with the profile of ASUU then and now that I have sketched in this discussion, you can understand why, as I read your engrossing article with many of its valid and original ideas and suggestions for justice, progress, peace, and development in our country, I kept asking myself why you almost completely left out this dimension of our political history in which irredentists and conservatives of the North have always been opposed within the North itself and more generally in the country by an alliance of progressives and radicals of the South and the North. I was in particular worried by the implicit notion in your article that the only opponents that Northern irredentists have historically had to contend with consist of only two formations: Southern irredentists and conservatives on the one hand; and on the other hand democratic fiscal federalists like yourself. In your article, Is’haq Modibo Kawu, a columnist of the Vanguard Newspaper stood for Northern irredentists and conservatives while Kingsley Kuku, President Jonathan’s Adviser on the Niger Delta stood for their Southern counterparts. [By the way, you might be interested to learn that as an undergraduate, Kawu was a dedicated insider within the countrywide movement of radical and progressive university students in our country]

    For those reading this piece that did not read your article that prompted this open letter, I find it necessary to emphasise the fact that even though your main quarrel is with “Arewa” or Northern conservative supremacists, you made it absolutely clear that you are no less opposed, no less wary of the malign politics of Southern irredentists in general and their diehard Niger Delta fellow travelers in particular. What I particularly found uplifting in your article was the clarity with which you linked both Northern and Southern irredentism to the destructive brinksmanship of the do-or-die, all-or-nothing struggle for control of the bloated, infinitely corrupt and wasteful Nigerian Presidency that is at the heart of the parasitic federalism and kwashiorkor democracy that currently has our country and its teeming masses in their iron grip. In my opinion, every democrat and progressive in our country should take to heart what you say in the following cautionary words from your article: “The bloated, corrupt and inefficient federal government (has become) the centre of titanic and destructive struggle for control. States’ indolence and parasitic tendencies follow, resulting in an unproductive and underdeveloped country. This destructive template must be reversed”.

    Needless to say, these observations show that I found much to admire and endorse in your article under review in this series. And this is consistent with much that I have read of your views and positions on the political, constitutional and social crises bedeviling our country at the present time. In my review of these views and positions of yours, I can say quite candidly that I consider you one of the most productive thinkers on democratic federalism in our country at the present time, with special emphasis on where federal jurisdiction and spheres of authority and control stop and states’ rights, obligations and responsibilities take over. I do not agree with every single one of your views and positions, but in general, I find that like many other progressive scholars and public intellectuals from every part of the country, you are driven by a passionate disdain for our political elites and their corruption, their narrowness of vision and their lack of the imagination and the will to do what is right and in the interest of the country and its masses of the disenfranchised, the looted and the marginalised. But I do have one big caveat and it is this: You seem to place all your hopes for the future of our country in one factor, one factor alone above all others and this is – fiscal federalism (that you also often call resource control). Indeed, perhaps it is useful in the present context to quote what you actually say regarding this particular article of faith of yours in your article of May 26, 2013:

    “Clearly, instability, tension and crisis will continue to bedevil Nigerian politics as long as the Federal Government continues to control and disburse states’ resources. Introduce fiscal federalism and allow states to retain their resources in return for payment of taxes for the operation of the Federal Government and immediate peace will descend on the country and everyone will head for his state for the generation of revenue and for the promotion of development. All will be quiet on the federal front and the desperate do-or-die battle to have the Presidency will abate”. [Page 22]

    One does not have to be an opponent of fiscal federalism (as many Northern conservatives are) or even its lukewarm supporters (as many Southwestern and Southeastern conservatives and centrists are) to know that by itself alone, fiscal federalism will never even remotely come near a just, honorable and productive resolution of many of our most serious crises. In other words, ours is not a crisis of nationhood and community in which we can say seek ye first fiscal federalism and all else shall ne added to you. Yes, fiscal federalism is necessary, and vitally so, but it is a beginning, not an end, a point of departure, not a port of arrival. In next week’s continuation of this series, we shall expatiate considerably on this observation, with special emphasis on the issue with which I began this piece: the links as well as the discontinuities between radicals and progressives of the North and the South in their confrontations with local and national formations of conservatives and irredentists.

     

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Chinua Achebe: His wondrous passages

    Chinua Achebe: His wondrous passages

    [Being a revised version of a tribute written for Transition Magazine, U.S.A.]

    Chinua Achebe had more than the standard allotment of respect and fame for writers, including even those who in their lifetime achieve great acclaim. One of the most notable expressions of this respect bordering on adoration came from one who is himself a celebrity among celebrities, Nelson Mandela. In their long time in the prisons of the South African apartheid system, above all other writers it was Chinua Achebe’s works that sustained the spirit of Mandela and the other giants of the anti-apartheid struggle. “The writer in whose company the prison walls fell”: That is how Mandela described the liberation of psyche and spirit that he and his mates felt when they encountered Achebe’s brooding and deeply insightful novels on colonialism and its complex legacies for Africa, the West and the rest of the world.

    I had not yet read of Mandela’s uncommon praise for Achebe’s writings when, as a member of a volunteer team of professors of Cornell University that taught in both medium and maximum security prisons in Elmira and Auburn in upstate New York, I taught Achebe and Frantz Fanon to some inmates of these prisons. A disproportionately large number of these prisoners were African American, and all were men. I think these factors account for the fact that more than all the other Cornell volunteers, the inmates felt a very special emotional bonding with me since I was the only African male in the group. But beyond this, Achebe, shall we say, provided the real fulcrum for that emotional bonding – Achebe in dialogue with Fanon. Fanon was not exactly a hard nut to crack for the prisoners, but the mix of flights of spellbinding psychoanalytic and philosophical musings with visionary and prophetic prose was a bit too abstruse for them.

    With Achebe, things ware different. His stories, his prose style, and the depth of his wisdom made an apparently deep impact on the prisoners. With very little prompting from me, many of these prisoners – some of whom were lifers who were serving time for extremely violent crimes – used Achebe’s works to throw further light on my explications on the more schematic or programmatic aspects of Fanon’s theories of radical decolonisation. One surprising thing in this was the fact that the two Achebe novels that I taught the prison inmates, Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, told harrowingly tragic stories of the failures of anti-colonial revolt, whereas Fanon’s books mapped difficult but ultimately victorious paths to decolonization. When I probed the sources of this deft move by the prisoners, they revealed their deep empathy with aspects of Achebe’s novels that I hadn’t at the time paid much attention to, aspects to which their own situation had apparently made them far more responsive. Chief among these was the startling fact that beneath and beyond the main plotlines of failed and tragically flawed nationalist revolt against colonialism, Achebe’s novels told scores of mini stories of ordinary men and women whose humanity, resilience, and self-empowerment were not crushed, could indeed not be crushed by the otherwise powerful and all-conquering forces of colonialism and imperialism. This experience, this revelation served as the catalyst for two of the most important among the half dozen essays and monographs I have published on Achebe: “For Chinua Achebe: the Resilience and Predicament of Obierika” and “An African Cultural Modernity: Achebe, Fanon, Cabral, and the Philosophy of Decolonisation.”

    The passage from the heroic world of Mandela and his prison mates at Robben Island to the world of hardened criminals and other carceral subjects in America’s prison colonies is typical of the centrality of passages between incredibly diverse spheres of sociality and community that Achebe as writer and public intellectual traversed in his life and career. One of the most portentous of these passages is the journey in his works in fiction and non-fiction into virtually all the literary languages of the world. He got extensive commendations, inquiries and plain “thank you and thank you again” correspondence from men and women, old and young, the highly literate and the modestly schooled. And these came from all the continents, all the regions of the world, and all stations in life.

    This liminality, these wondrous passages into nearly every corner of the world of letters on the planet pose tremendous interpretive challenges to us. Achebe is one of two or three of the most popular, most widely read contemporary authors and yet he is a writers’ writer, an author who was/is deeply respected by some of the most influential authors of the past half century like James Baldwin, Nadine Gordimer, Doris Lessing, Toni Morrison and Wole Soyinka. He is a towering pioneer figure in modern African literature but he is also in the front ranks of the rarefied canon of World Literature. He is a constant subject of discussion in the popular presses of Africa, Europe and America but he is also an endless source of debate and controversy among literary scholars all over the world.

    As much as these passages are constitutive of Achebe’s fame and renown, they cannot be taken as self-evident or self-explanatory. Of course it is not the case that “explanations” that don’t explain much, that are in fact rather tautological have not been proffered as interpretive keys for unlocking the enigma of these exemplary, border crossing passages of Achebe across the typically fragmented publics of writing and cultural production in the African continent, its Diasporas and the world at large. For instance, here is one such “explanation”: Both the popular mind and the world of scholarly researchers and exegetes have focused almost exclusively on Things Fall Apart, ignoring other writings of the Nigerian author like the infinitely more complex Arrow of God and the fascinating and reflexive meta-narrative that is Anthills of the Savannah, thereby making the passage from the “high” to the “low” and back again to the “high” a fairly easy one to make. Here is another “explanation”: Things Fall Apart cemented Achebe’s celebrity status among both “naïve” readers and the professoriate of letters because it enabled legitimacy for African writing in the upper stratospheres of academia to be tokenised without compromising that legitimacy with racial and cultural condescension which, for a long time in literary history, had been a constant, almost inevitable precondition for granting legitimacy for any intellectual or cultural production from our continent.

    These “explanations” are neither false nor redundant. But they are external to writing qua writing. In other words, they do not even remotely engage the fact that both the passionate enthusiasts and the sometimes equally passionate if more politely and discretely self-restraining opponents of Achebe as an author base themselves on his writing. And on this central issue of writing, and in particular on the nature and status of Achebe’s writing, we are caught between two fundamentally opposed notions or traditions of writing. Writing, the best writing, must draw attention to itself, to its forms and modes of self-constitution: this is the fundamental article of faith of modernists and postmodernists alike, even if both camps differ in big ways on the specific terms for self-display and self-reference in writing to be manifested. Conversely, writing must not unduly draw attention to itself; it must find a balance, an equipoise between what needs to be expressed and the formal and linguistic means for its expression. That is the classical and much older but still extant tradition of writing to which – so goes the determination of the arbiters of taste in the contemporary world of letters – Achebe putatively belonged. I would personally argue that Achebe actually made the passage to and from these two seemingly opposed traditions in several of his writings in both fiction and non-fiction. But that was not the judgment of the border guards of modernist and postmodernist literary culture and thought. This, it seems to me, lies at the root of why the so-called “highest” prize, the Nobel Literature award, was denied him.

    In all, I personally met Achebe only a few times, on four, perhaps five occasions, only one of which was at his home at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka when he taught and lived there. But among contemporary authors, he was among the select few to whom I felt a great closeness because I found myself returning again and again in the last four decades to his works. He was a master storyteller who had the quite unique gift for folding countless stories of ordinary women and men into the big, “world-historical” currents and forces of modern culture and society. In certain key areas of artistic vision and humaneness, I think he quite easily surpassed nearly all the other great novelists on colonialism – Conrad, Kipling, Forster, Orwell, and Ngugi. First of all, Achebe took the humanity of both coloniser and the colonised for granted; he neither deified nor demonised one or the other, coloniser and the colonised. By contrast, most of these other great novelists of colonialism could not, did not entirely escape this trap. Secondly, Achebe forcefully showed that both sides in the colonial divide were simultaneously subjects and objects of powerful forces whose outcomes they could neither control nor predict. And thirdly, Achebe had a deeply tragic sense of life and history that was however leavened by irony, wit, humor and a calm openness to the absurdities of existence. As perhaps the single most important historical force in the making and the unmaking of the modern world as a global community structured by and in inequality and interdependence, colonialism needed a master novelist and essayist whose works could resonate throughout the world in the West and the Non-West, among both the ex-colonisers and the ex-colonised. It was given to our own Chinua Achebe to be the novelist and essayist who rose to successfully engage that challenge.

    With his recent death, another passage, perhaps the most significant of all, has taken place. I once joked that Achebe was second only to his own creation, Okonkwo, the protagonist of Things Fall Apart, as the most famous Igbo person in the world. But that was about half a decade ago, long before Achebe’s demise. With the number and scale of the outpouring of the mix of grief and celebration from all parts of the world that followed the notice of his transition, Achebe, it now appears, is second only to Nelson Mandela as the most famous African in the world. I don’t think the near unanimous judgment that he has achieved immortality through his works is premature.

    In due time, Achebe’s works will undergo passage into the regime of posthumous commentary and debate, free of both the positive and negative consequences of their imbrication in the towering presence and subjectivity of Achebe himself. I am thinking here in particular of his last published book, There Was A Country. The anger, the bitterness and the outrage caused in many quarters by some of the views and claims made in the book will stay with us for some time to come. But I personally see no portent at all in the fact that this last book was the most controversial among all of Achebe’s writings. His legacy is much vaster than the controversies engendered by that book, just as it is also absolutely unconstrained by the Nobel Prize that was not awarded to him. Speaking about the loss of another great Nigerian, Wole Soyinka once remarked that that personage will walk tall among the ancestors. With my unabashed rationalist and humanistic idealism, I read that benediction as meaning that the departed had entered the hallowed ranks of the true immortals of all ages. So let it be with Chinua Achebe.

     

     

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu