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Category: Biodun Jeyifo

  • The “commentariat” in a time of present and looming crises: a personal credo [For Dr. Stanley Macebuh, RIP]

    The “commentariat” in a time of present and looming crises: a personal credo [For Dr. Stanley Macebuh, RIP]

    It is essential to educate the educator himself…

    Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach (From Thesis Number 3)

     Ko ni su wa; ko ni re wa (We shall not succumb to defeatism; neither shall we become weary)

    A Yoruba proleptic saying

     

    The question that prompted the musings in this piece is this: Why do I write this column unfailingly every week? To this question, I could respond at a very high level of generality mixed with a desperate hope and idealism and say that I write the column to prevent myself from succumbing to crippling despair. There are two closely linked reasons for this. First is the fact that there is so much that is horribly wrong with our country and the world in which we all live. Secondly, despair is easy, it is tempting because there does not seem to be any forces, any movements on the horizon of the present capable of countering the weight and the direction of the terrible things happening in our country, our continent and the world. In such a historic national, continental and global context in which so much is terrifyingly amiss and so little seems capable of setting things right, writing a weekly column is, at least, a means of keeping hope alive for oneself and one’s readers. Admittedly, this is a very high level of generality for a question as simple and as direct as why one writes a weekly column, but it is – I hope the reader will agree with me on this – a valid, or at least a plausible reason.

    However, rather than starting from such a level of generality on the subject of why I write this column every week, I choose instead to start from a very concrete and particular factor, one that, as far as I am aware, has not been adequately engaged. This is none other than the fact that, without consciously ever intending to do so, I have become a member of what, in an arresting and playful neologism, Victor Ifijeh, the Editor-in-Chief and MD of The Nation, calls the “commentariat”. In other words, I write a weekly column because I am part of this new community or brotherhood or phalanx of the commentariat. I shall come back to the frankly idealistic and desperately hopeful reasons why I write this column, but first, I wish to explore this concrete and particular context of the rise and expansion of a “commentariat” as the background for what I write every week in this column.

    Now, the business of this “commentariat” is to write, punctiliously and diligently, opinions and analyses that are presumptively intended to add depth and perspective to the news reporting that is the main business of newspapers in particular and all forms of broadcast journalism in general. Now, my central observation here is the enormously significant historic and cultural fact that in the last three decades, this commentariat has emerged as perhaps one of the most important features of broadcast journalism in Nigeria. In the present context, I shall say only a little pertaining to the factors that gave rise to this crucial development in Nigerian journalism. Definitely, the role of The Guardian was decisive in this development for it was the first newspaper in Nigeria that more or less forever closed the gap between the popular and the scholarly, the “lowbrow” and the “highbrow” in our country’s newspapers and newsmagazines. In this respect, the role of the late Dr. Stanley Macebuh was cardinal for without him, without his visionary acuity and his intellectual influence, The Guardian could never have had the impact it had on the intellectual content and tone of Nigerian journalism. One proof of this assertion is the fact that the further that that newspaper has moved – in time and in perspectives – from the kind of intellectual leadership that Stanley Macebuh embodied and practiced, the more it has lost its pioneering, leading role in our country’s journalistic culture and ethos.

    Dear reader, does the neologism “commentariat” evoke the word “proletariat” more than it does “secretariat”? For me it certainly does. This, I would argue, is not accidental. For in general, newspaper columnists in Nigeria tend to be progressive, at least in the broadest definition of the term. This, by the way, is also partly a legacy of Macebuh’s years at the helm of affairs at The Guardian, for he it was who first gave liberalism, especially in its vigorous and ambiguous encounter with radical leftist ideas and activists in our part of the world, an intellectual rationale, a foothold in the popular imagination, and an institutional base in news reporting and analysis.

    I am not necessarily saying here that the great majority of columnists and contributors to intellectual and political debates in Nigerian newspapers and newsmagazines are convinced or consistent progressive liberal democrats. Far from this, our community of the commentariat reflects all the real and manufactured divisions in our country – ethnic, regional, religious, ideological and economic. But at the same time, I think that it is important to acknowledge that it is difficult to find columnists of note or credibility in our country who can mount a vigorous and coherent promotion of reactionary and hegemonic positions that sustain the status quo of power, wealth and authority in Nigeria.

    One reason for this is perhaps merely circumstantial: the powers that be, the scions of the political and institutional status quo in our country are so bankrupt that it would require a totally unjustifiable level of cynicism and opportunism to give them intellectual and ideological backing. But I would also ask the reader to think of this enormously crucial fact: We live in a time of deep and perpetual crises, so much so that Nigerians under the age of forty do not know that at one time there was a fairly stable status quo in this country even if the period – roughly between the decade before independence and the outbreak of civil war – was not without its own crises. But that was then. Now, in the present, we are in a prolonged period of endemic and perpetual crises. This, I contend, is the background for the idealistic and (desperately) optimistic basis for why, speaking only for myself as member of the commentariat, I write this column unfailingly every week, even though I do have a full-time job as a professional academic. I would like to conclude my reflections in this piece by briefly elaborating on this particular issue.

    Metaphorically speaking, the malaises of the national body politic are like the diseases and ailments of the physical body: you feel them concretely, existentially. This is what it means to live in a period of perpetual and endemic crises, some of which are minor but most of which are severe and acute. Let me give examples and expressions of these crises, these malaises of the body politic, making them as concrete as possible by giving some instances from daily life at Oke-Bola in Ibadan, the neighborhood in which I live. Here are some of the minor expressions of these crises. First, for a neighborhood that used to be a fairly low-density area in my childhood, it is now far gone beyond a high-density area: it is now more or less a ghetto with virtually every inch of available space built up. Seventh-Day Adventist Primary School that I attended as a child now has no playground, no school farm or garden as these have all been taken over by buildings. There are virtually no municipal services in the area: every household, every family has to make arrangements for water supply, sanitation and waste disposal, and security of life and possessions. The population of the neighborhood is overwhelmingly dominated by youths, the great majority of them not only unemployed but with no real prospects for the future. Most of the factories at the nearby Oluyole Industrial Estate closed down more than a decade ago and nothing has replaced this major employment base of the neighborhood and the city. Public or street night life is now completely gone, for by 9 p.m., everybody is inside their homes. This, in a neighborhood which in my youth had one of the most vibrantly entertaining and recreational night life in all of the southern part of the country. But religion thrives and there are dozens of churches and mosques in the neighborhood: Praise the Lord! If you have no jobs, no prospects for the future, at least you have Jesus, you have Allah, and you have the pastors and the imams.

    As nearly every reader of this piece knows, this profile is a microcosm of the rest of the city of Ibadan and the rest of the country. And as depressing as this profile is, what is truly frightening is the feeling, the intuition that the worst is yet to come, heaven help us! And as if that is not bad enough, there is hardly any indication that there is a movement afoot, a movement in its embryonic stages perhaps but that will eventually sweep away all this rot, all this suffering, all this insecurity. Those who wonder how we, the members of the commentariat, find subjects or topics to write about every week without running out of steam perhaps do not know that decadence, suffering and insecurity of life and existence all constitute inexhaustible sources of matter on which to write week after week, ad infinitum! But this is a great contradiction, this conundrum in which, so it seems, the commentariat feeds on and thrives on crises that impoverish and diminish the quality of life on such a vast scale. What is the way out of this contradiction, this conundrum? That is the billion naira question.

    Speaking for myself and a few other colleagues within the community of the commentariat that I know well, perceptive and insightful commentary and analysis, though badly needed in our current conjuncture of endemic and perpetual crises, can and will never replace movements of the Nigerian peoples for real and meaningful change in the conditions of their lives. The commentariat is a part within a whole; it is not a substitute for that whole. Moreover, as Marx observed in the first epigraph to this piece, there is a need for the educator himself to be educated. The very process of commenting on the crises we are all living through, admittedly unequally, is a composite testing ground for our commentaries and analyses. I am not engaging in hypocrisy when I assert here that one of the most productive and useful benefits of writing this column is the fact that I learn a lot from the experience, especially in light of the absence of the mass movements of workers, professionals and intellectuals that were such a vital part of my young adulthood. Thus, compatriot, I write every week and will keep writing as long as possible in the hope that what I write may provide a little light, a little illumination in the vastness of the enveloping darkness that is a product of the crises we are currently living in. But I have no illusions: if we are lucky, writing may be a spark for the changes we are seeking, but it can never be a substitute for it.

     

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

     

  • Big for nothing? Nanometers to the rescue! – A lay, secular sermon in a light mood

    Big for nothing? Nanometers to the rescue! – A lay, secular sermon in a light mood

    Esu threw a rock yesterday; it kills a bird today/Esu throws a rock today; it killed a bird yesterday/ Esu sleeps in the courtyard; it is too small for him; Esu sleeps in the bedroom; it is still too small for him; Esu sleeps inside a palm kernel; now he has space large enough for him to sleep in!

    From the praise chants to Esu, the Yoruba trickster god Nano: a combining form with the meaning “very small, minute” used in the formation of compound words, e.g. nanoplankton. In the names of units of measure, it has the specific sense “one billionth”, e.g. nanosecond, nanometer, nanotechnology.

    Dictionary.com (online)

     

     

    If my memory is not playing tricks on me, one of the words that had a deep and exceptional fascination for me when I was a child in primary school was the Yoruba word, ‘firi!’ (Yes, with the exclamation mark). Roughly translated, it means something that happens, something that flashes by in the twinkling of an eye. More expansively, firi! (please think of it only with the exclamation mark, compatriot) means something that is so brief, so instantaneously transient that it is gone even before you have perceived it, even before its presence has registered in your mind, leaving only the trace of its passage. Firi! Oh word and concept that filled my youthful imagination with wonder! In my imagination, in my mind’s eye, you opened up vistas for which, at that very tender age, I had no words and no speech! That is until about five decades later, when I encountered the word, the concept “nano”, especially as compounded with those units of space and time, meters and seconds to give us nanoseconds and nanometers. In nanometers especially, I at last found a scientific, technological correlation to firi! But more on this later in this lay, secular, iwalesin “sermon”. First, we must talk about that other phrase in the title of this piece, that term of abuse, “big for nothing”, that I remember now also in the reflected light of a particular use that we had for it in my youth.

    In Nigerian pidgin, “big for nothing”, as we all know, stands for huge size or number without sense, without discernment and sometimes without compunction. In my youth, boys who were corporeally and vertically challenged by being much smaller than their age were the special prey or target of bullies who invariably tended to be physically much bigger than their years. For the small boys, the ultimate putdown for their gigantic tormentors was, yes, “big for nothing”! Of course, this was usually shouted from the presumed safety of considerable distance between the abused child and the bully. I remember also that in my school’s football team that we called the “First Eleven”, the positions of full backs, right and left, were usually reserved for the biggest boys in the school. The thinking behind this, I suppose, was that you needed size, combined with cunning, to counter the nimble-footed strikers of opposing teams. On the whole, the calculation worked, sometimes so much so that some full backs who were as big as our teachers had legendary renown as terrors to all strikers, nimble-footed or not. But sometimes, the thing did not work and then one encountered the incredible spectacle of a swift but pint-sized centre forward running circles around a full back the size of a giant. I remember in particular one big fellow with the nickname of “Akanmu Jaji” who had size but not – shall we say – a lot of grey matter inside his occiput. As a result of this, we could not dispense with his renown as a right full back, but neither could we be indifferent to the fact that, with his lack of discernment, he could as much cause our “First Eleven” penalties as save it from almost certain goals by the jitteriness that took control of strikers when he approached them. For this reason, though we all thought of him as “big for nothing”, this was whispered only among us; no one dared to say it to his hearing! [Akanmu Jaji, this is all coming back to me from memory of things that happened more than a half century ago. If you are still alive and happen to be reading this piece, please know that I was not one of those who called you “big for nothing” behind your back!)

    If, so far in this “sermon” I have given the impression that “big for nothing” is a malaise that comes from nature, let me quickly and emphatically assert that this is not the case at all. Whether one is big, medium or small, in height or girth, has no inherent connection at all to being brainy, resourceful or humane. What is at issue here is the extremely fatuous notion that the bigger a thing or a country is the better, together with the associated belief that with size and numbers come superior endowments or status. And on this account, which country in the world is more benighted than our own country in the association of size and numbers with inherent worth? Which nation, definitely on the African continent but also perhaps in the whole world, is more smitten by this ideology, this false consciousness that equates size with status than our beloved country, Nigeria? If, compatriots, you feel that this observation, this claim is an exaggeration, an expression of the habit of seeing nothing good in Nigeria that is itself a very Nigerian habit, than I ask you to please carefully consider the following few observations that I have randomly selected from a myriad of commonplace realities in our national public life.

    First, there is the widespread belief among Nigerians from every part of the country that because we are the most populous nation on our continent we are, or have a manifest destiny as the “giant of Africa” no matter how foolishly and wastefully we use our national wealth. Secondly, there is the regularly bruited boast of the ruling party, the PDP, that it is the largest ruling party in Africa, as if that claim can rid the party of the odium, the colossal scandal of the abysmal level of its misrule in every single one of its three presidential administrations since 1999. Thirdly, what of the claims of Nollywood directors, producers and actors that the Nigerian video film industry produces more films annually than any other national film industry in the world, not excluding Hollywood and Bollywood, the national film industries of the United States and India respectively? No one has done independent research to validate this claim, but even if it is factually or literally true, does this erase the fact that we produce more trashy products, more extremely poorly made and distributed video films than any other country in the world? Finally, what of the fact that with the President and the Executive Governors of our thirty-six states we have more major and mini heads of state than any other country in the world with the possible exception of the United States? And yet what good has this done the country? Has it not in fact made us the country with one of the very highest administrative cost of governance in the world? And are these not all indications or expressions of “big for nothing” writ large and inscribed into the very lineaments of our national psyche? To put this in the plainest form possible, hasn’t the obsession with size and numbers become a fetish that we tend to see as a magical or divine protection against all the things that are terribly wrong with our present way of life?

    If my observations and reflections so far in this piece point to the simple ethical and spiritual proposition that big and numerous are not necessarily or inherently good, I would like to say that this is definitely part of my purpose in this piece. So also is the corollary proposition that oftentimes, small and minute will do as well if not more than big and numerous. But this “sermon” has far more important or substantial things to explore than such undoubtedly beneficial moral and psychological truths. This leads us to the enormously important world of ideas, practices and technologies connected with nanofabrication whose central place in the productive and communicative processes of contemporary global civilisation is absolutely not in question.

    I have two and only two purposes in bringing this discourse on nanofabrication to bear on this lay “sermon” on our national obsession with size and numbers. One is this: Compatriots, please pay attention to nanofabrication; it is central to many of the things we take for granted in the contemporary global civilisation of which we are a part, things that we ignore or pay scant attention to only at our cost. This is the second of my two objectives in this piece: In one way or another, the ideational and practical applications of nanofabrication have always been with us, with our humans species; if this is the case, we are only returning to some of the best and most positive aspects of our heritage as humans when we turn our attention, our curiosity to nanofabrication.

    Is one billionth of a second or of a meter thinkable, not to talk of being practicable? I confess that with only the evidence that I can collect or sense or even intuit with my five senses, the answer to this question is a ringing, categorical no! If you, dear reader, can think of not a billionth, not even a millionth but a thousandth of a second or a meter, I can’t. But then here is the core of this conundrum: there are now so-called super-colliding super-computers that can measure and calibrate at the rate or speed of one billionth of a second or meter. Not only this, there are now thousands of devices and practical applications in everyday life that give concrete proof to this dizzying idea and claim of the measurement of space and time in infinitesimally minute but phenomenally efficient quantities.

    For want of space, I will in this discussion give only one example, partly because it bears direct relevance to my profession as an academic and partly because I have never stopped being simply dazzled by it. This is it: In my travels around the world in connection with my work, I carry with me a mini laptop computer that weighs less than five pounds; in the little carrying case that comes with this mini laptop are small pouches into which I place flash drives each of which has a dimension of about two inches weighing a few ounces. And yet, and yet again, with this extremely compact baggage of mini laptop and flash discs, I carry with me books and monographs of hundreds of thousands of pages. In other words, anywhere I am in the world, I have nearly everything I need to keep on working without the need for checking out books and journals from the local library.

    I think of the wondrous fascination with the word, the idea of firi! (always with the exclamation mark, remember compatriot) in my childhood. I think of the lines of the first epigraph to this essay and the beautifully poetic enigma of Esu’s abrogation of simple, literal and linear conceptions of time and the paradox of his finding the most ample room for his being only in the tiniest of spaces. I see in these two prefigurations of nanofabrication. “Big for nothing”, your day of reckoning has come! Let all our rulers, all our political parties, all our emergency contractors, all our corrupt public officeholders hearken to these good tidings and take note!

     

     

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • No infrastructures, no hardware? Don’t worry, software will sustain you! (2)

    No infrastructures, no hardware? Don’t worry, software will sustain you! (2)

    Compatriots, you can text all you want, own as many handsets as your job or your fancy impels you, and hold multiple phone conversations as either a habit you can’t help or actually find fulfilling, but if your nation, your region of the world does not have the infrastructures necessary for modern life, software will not sustain you! As a matter of fact, in such a state of profound disjunction between hardware and software in modern civilisation, you will in all likelihood be condemned to live out the time allotted to you on this earth in a more or less permanent state of anxiety, insecurity and, worst of all, the replacement of reality and the hard, unbearable facts of life with delusions. And this will be your lot, your “fate” whether you are rich or poor, a person of substance or a member of the multitudes of the disenfranchised and marginalised. Is this an exaggeration, an overstatement? Well, let us examine the contention carefully through some very concrete and very well known experiences that virtually all Nigerians share in common in this software civilisation of the new millennium.

    One of the most seemingly trite but nonetheless immensely frustrating of these experiences is the one captured by the well known legend of “network error” that bedevils attempts to make phone connections in our country, an occurrence that happens at all times without rhyme or reason. In my line of work, I travel a lot in our continent and around the world. I don’t know about the experience of any person reading this piece who also happens to be a constant traveler, but I can state unequivocally that I have never encountered “network error” in any other country in Africa or the world at large. Perhaps worse than “network error” is the more sepulchral “the telephone number you are trying to call does not exist!” After my initial shock of hearing this “non-existence” ascribed repeatedly over two weeks to a number that I call fairly regularly, I had no recourse left than to turn the experience into a psychologically compensatory joke. In the joke which happened when I called the number of a person sitting right beside me only to be informed that the number belonged to the virtual world of nonexistence. It so happened that this “joke” was enacted between me and a sibling who had just been discharged from hospital after a bout with a very serious medical emergency. With this on my mind, I told my brother that he could at least take comfort in the fact that it was his phone number and not himself that was said not to exist!

    I readily concede the fact that these are vexatious but for the most not dire, not life threatening misadventures with poor and unreliable GSM services in our country. But from these particular cases, let us we move to indubitably more ominous experiences. And so I ask: Can we ever be able to get an accurate assessment of how much is lost in revenue and peace of mind through the constant breakdown in internet access in private and public, personal and commercial activities due to either power outage or the overload and collapse of the local or national bandwidth? I have lost count of the number of times when I have gone to my bank only to be told that “the network is down” and I have to wait or even come back later. I have lost count – and my capacity to be outraged – of the number of times when the modems for internet access through my laptop have either worked at the speed of a chameleon or a tortoise or, worse still, completely failed to get me connection for days and weeks. [You might say that the cybercafés are there, but they also are not immune to these same problems, apart from the fact that I work on and with my laptop at all hours of the day and night] And need I add that in my experience, these extremely frustrating and wasteful expressions of IT backwardness and inefficiency in access and the provision of other services are worse in our country than most of the other places I have visited in Africa and other parts of the world?

    We might well ask why these things are so bad in Nigeria. And indeed, this question is often posed in our newspapers and radio and television commentaries in our country. In my experience, two standard answers or explanations are often proffered. One is this: the number of subscribers to IT access and services in our country has far outstripped or overtaken the installed infrastructural capacity of the providers and the resulting overload can never be resolved until the gap between demand and capacity is rectified. The second reason is related to the first and it is this: like consumers of all other services in Nigeria, subscribers to GSM services and IT access do not enjoy adequate enforcement of legislation and guidelines protecting the rights of consumers and their advocates.

    These explanations are of course factually correct and things might indeed get better if the problems they highlight are addressed and resolved. But there is a third answer or explanation that is not articulated enough or is expressed rather tepidly and it is this: The vexations and frustrations that we experience with GSM and IT services are related to other endemic problems like power outages that drive up production costs in Nigeria and cripple productive economic activities; roads and other physical infrastructures that are not only vastly inadequate but also constitute death traps for all, rich and poor; and hospitals and clinics that are unsanitary, unsafe and poorly maintained. I suggest that it is this particular explanation that leads us to the heart of the matter in this series concerning modern life and civilisation and the historic connections – or disjuncture – between the infrastructure and software of production and consumption, both for what is essential for bare life and what is an excess, a “supplement” that makes life richer and more fulfilling. Let me explain with regard to what I think of as Nigeria’s rather unique and negatively exemplary experience of the disjuncture between infrastructure and software in modern civilisation.

    In virtually every region and country in the world, the infrastructures and institutions that we now take for granted as part of modern living grew out of two separate but intimately connected processes. One is the diversion of hundreds of millions of people, on a continuing and seemingly perpetual basis, away from farming and rural communities to towns and cities where the diverted communities join an ever growing actual and potential work force. The other, separate but related process or phenomenon is the growth of cities, megacities and metropolitan conurbations that are vaster than anything the world had ever known. Virtually all the infrastructures and institutions that we now consider vital to life as we live and experience it as part of a complex and sustainable modernity grew as both a response to and a motive force for these two processes: safe, motorable roads, highways and rail systems; factories of both heavy and light machinery and equipment; regular and sustained power generation and supply; access to clean, potable water and its sources; facilities for health care delivery and public and private sanitation that must forever be well maintained; and institutions for instruction, research and innovation that must not only keep the generality of the present generation educated and well informed but must also reproduce future generations of informed and enlightened human beings. Of all the countries in Africa and perhaps in the rest of developing world, Nigeria surpasses all others in the scale of these twin processes of diversion of populations from the rural to the urban and the growth of large towns, cities and conurbations. At the same time, Nigeria is unbeatable in the inadequacy of the infrastructures and institutions necessary to cope with the two processes.

    The story of how what I have in this series been calling the “software” components of modern life came to connect with the fundamental infrastructures and institutions of modernity is a fascinating and complex tale. In all honesty and humility, I confess that it is a tale I am still trying to understand as fully as I think necessary. For this reason, I shall only be scratching the surfaces of this subject in this series. This entails only the briefest detailing of, in my own opinion, two of the more spectacular and by now indispensable dimensions of this new software civilisation. Here is the first one: “machines” and technologies that can, through preprogrammed apps, “think”, calculate and calibrate for us; that can probe the innermost recesses of the body and its internal organs for us; that can clone living tissues and organisms; and yet these “machines” are so infinitesimally small that they are measured in nanoseconds and nanometers which are one billionth of a second and a meter respectively. Here is the second one: the collection, storage, retrieval, reconfiguration and transmission across the length and breadth of the whole world of infinitely vast amounts of data and information through text, pictures and abstract, non-literal images collected on microchips that are much smaller than the eye of a needle. Needless to say, other than as consumers, Nigeria and most of the other developing countries of the world, at least now and for the immediately foreseeable future, have little to contribute to the production of these wondrous “machines” of the software revolution.

    But things are not as hopeless as they might seem from the current state of things. At any rate, the very last impression I wish the reader to take from the reflections in this series is hopelessness. If the achievements of the software revolution seem so far from our reach, this is not the case with the infrastructures of modernity. These can be put in place in less than a decade. And once that happens, we can enter into another phase of history in which we might become significant players in the software revolution. At any rate, I believe that the only thing stopping us from a fully realised infrastructural modernity is the scale and impunity with which our oil wealth is stolen and wasted. Behind that, of course, is the fact that looting and wastefulness on such a colossal scale is possible only because an extractive, offshore political economy on which a parasitic rentier state has been erected like a behemoth holds us hostage and we seem unable to think our way beyond it, to see our way past it. In this respect, I would like to say that above every other consideration, what I would like any reader of this series to take away is a profound contempt for what the present administration and those before it call either “FSS 2020” or “Vision 2020”. What does this mean? It means that by the year 2020 Nigerian would have become one of the 20 biggest economies in the world. How delusional can a ruling class and/or party be? We are at least half a century behind in the installation of the infrastructures of modernity. And we are light years away from the software revolution. So compatriots, the next time your receive “network error” from your GSM provider and the next time you go to visit a friend or a relative in a hospital and you see the state of the things there, think of “Vision 2020” and separate yourself from the delusion, the fraudulent imposture of those who are looting us dry and mortgaging the future of our children and their children to bankruptcy in a land awash with petronaira and petrodollars. Go on texting, compatriots, but with the usual psychologically cleansing frivolities associated with texting, send out messages of hope and resilience that come from being not mere consumers but also potential producers in our global software civilisation.

     

     

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • No infrastructures, no hardware? Don’t worry, software will sustain you! (1)

    No infrastructures, no hardware? Don’t worry, software will sustain you! (1)

    Since, as the saying goes, charity begins at home, let me start the reflections in this two-part series with some experiences from my own personal and professional life that bear directly on the subject of the series. This subject is none other than the individual, national and global effects and ramifications of living in what I choose to call a software civilisation, the very first of its kind in the history of the world. As we shall see, our exploration of this topic will enable us to get a grasp, perhaps even to get an understanding of some of the most important aspects of modernity, especially with regard to our place in it in Nigeria, Africa and most of the developing world.

    The facts from my personal and professional life that I wish to use as illustrations for my topic in this series are three. One: I never succeeded in having my application for landline telephone installed in my house at Oke-Bola, Ibadan. My application, together with the fees I paid, was never rejected outright; it was just a case of happenstance that no one ever came to lay the lines that would have connected me to the grid. To this I may as well add the fact that those whose houses had landline telephone were only a little more fortunate than those of us who didn’t. This was because, generally speaking, the landline telephone system in our country worked so erratically, so fitfully that it could be compared to the way a car with dead batteries constantly has to be jump-started to get it to move.

    Two: I never succeeded in learning how to type fast enough on a typewriter to be able to use the machine to produce my articles, monographs and books by myself. Consequently, I always wrote in longhand which I then handed to typists to turn into typescripts for me. When I look back now, I am stupefied by my memory of how long, how laborious and tedious it took to produce all the articles and books I wrote in the period, apart from the fact that it was also a very expensive process too. [Francis Akhabue, where are you today? You made a small fortune typing for me when I taught at OAU, Ife, but I did not complain then and I am not complaining now].

    Three: When the computer emerged as an absolutely indispensable equipment for professional academic life, it took me a long, long time to adjust to this epochal development. This was so hopeless a case that for sometime when I was at Cornell University, I was one of three professors out of about sixty in the English Department that didn’t use computers and therefore could not be integrated fully into the department’s computer-driven records and communication listserve. It was only when the department decided to “bribe” me and the other two holdouts from the computer revolution by buying us the most expensive, state-of-the-art computers complete with the most sophisticated software and apps that I relented. And even after that and for a long time, the computer sat unused in my office. That is until one day when Femi Osofisan arrived at Cornell on a visit and more or less shamed and coerced me into taking my first faltering steps at mastering the use of the computer.

    Readers of this piece would have by now, I hope, sensed that there is a happy ending to this small narrative from the past of my personal and professional experience. And indeed, there is. Today, like all the other denizens of planet earth, I am the deeply gratified possessor of unbelievably cheap landless and wireless handsets that easily connect me to both the closest and the farthest quarters and regions of the world. As a result, these cheap handsets have enormously compensated for all the years and decades when I languished as an unsuccessful and frustrated applicant for a landline phone. And needless to say, I do not miss the disappearance of typewriters; gone forever is the infernally laborious task of writing in longhand before having it transformed into a typescript. With the disappearance of longhand writing in my professional and creative life, writing has become infinitely easier, more pleasurable and more fulfilling than my experience of it before I became an unabashed and grateful beneficiary of our global software civilisation. [Femi Osofisan, who among the two of us is laughing now? You got me going on computers and I shall forever remain indebted to you for it, but you are still transfixed in that prehistory of textual production in which longhand writing necessarily comes before conversion to electronic typescripts!]

    On that note, let me tarry a while longer in these reflections on the good, “happy-ending” side of the story – or stories – that I wish to tell in this series before we get to the not-so happy and perhaps even tragic narratives. Perhaps the most affecting “happy-ending” story of all is the fact that fellow beneficiaries of the software civilization are numbered in their billions. And significantly, they include some of the poorest and the most economically and socially marginalised members of our global community. The list and the range of these “talakawa” beneficiaries are almost limitless. Indeed, this is so significant that in my opinion, it ranks as one of the greatest success stories of modern life, this story that tells of how millions and even billions of the poorest people in our world, some of whose economic and social capital is far below the absolute poverty line, are nonetheless able to participate in many of the productive, communicative and recreational processes of national, regional and global economies. What am I referring to here?

    Today, the poorest people of the world can, thanks to our software civilisation, speak and text people across the length and breadth of both national communities and our collective global community. With their cheap handsets, roadside mechanics, barbers, tailors, welders, hair dressers and even vendors and hawkers can reach present and potential customers without leaving their shops, or shacks or their homes if these also serve as workplaces from which they earn their livelihood. Similarly, the poorest nations on the planet with very bad roads, with failed or failing factories and ever decreasing industrial productive capacities, with desperately poor and inadequate municipal services and amenities can, thanks to computers and software engineers and technicians, participate in every aspect of global economic processes, with special regard to the financial services sector, currently the driving engine of the global economy. Indeed, on this account, I can testify from direct personal experience that some of the services offered through online banking and e-marketing by Nigerian banks and financial services corporate enterprises are ahead of similar services offered by U.S. banks!

    To place these observations and claims in a historical perspective, consider this fact: Some 20 to 30 years ago, all of these unprecedented developments affecting the poorest peoples and nations on the planet were simply unthinkable, let alone being realisable. This is because the infrastructures, the hardware were simply either not there at all or were grossly inadequate. I mean, which barbers, welders and roadside mechanics could have had landline telephones when I, a senior academic, couldn’t? Rich and poor, who could text anybody in Nigeria and the wider world without using telegrams which only the post offices could transmit, and that with very severe limitations on the number of words that you could cram into a telegram? Which bank or financial services operator in the country could remit funds for you to relatives or friends in any part of Nigeria in a matter of minutes, not to talk of relatives and friends in the wider world? Who had any inkling that one could actually watch live broadcasts of sporting events taking place anywhere in the world when all that we knew then in terms of live broadcasts of sporting events were radio broadcasts that only rich people who had shortwave radios could tune into?

    I think nothing reveals the unprecedented impact of our current software civilisation than the fact that in many parts of our country and continent, our infrastructures are still as bad, still as inadequate as they were 20 to 30 years ago. As a matter of fact, some infrastructures are in worse conditions now than twenty years ago! But in spite of these realities, we are still able to participate as consumers of all that the world can offer though the software revolution. In other words, if we were still completely at the tender mercies of our greatly inadequate and inferior infrastructures – the physical and technological hardware of our production and communicative processes – all the amenities and services now enjoyed by everybody including the very poor among us, thanks to the software revolution, would still be a dream, a fantasy far beyond anybody’s reach. This, I confess, is what made me give this series its intriguing title: “No infrastructures, no hardware? Have no worry, software will sustain you!” But are these the last words on this covert morality tale of modernity and its satisfactions and contradictions? Far, far from it!

    Let us deal with this topic carefully, rationally. If you take the simple and globally ubiquitous handset, the bulk that constitutes the physical reality of the phone is the hardware, the “infrastructure”. The SIM card and all the micro-processes preprogrammed into the phone that enable it to be used as phone, radio, calculator, torchlight and computer screen for sending and receiving emails are the combined software. For the most part, nearly all of us take the “hardware”, the physical object for granted and instead concentrate on our enjoyment of all the facilities and services enabled by the software. But without the ‘hardware”, without the compact physical object itself that serves as both housing and enabler for the work of the software, we would be unable to get from the handset all the things that we have come to associate with it. This is the enigma, the paradox that the software civilisation confronts everyone, every society and every nation in the world at the current time. Let me express this dilemma, this conundrum as succinctly as I can: You can take the infrastructures for granted as much as you like because the software revolution enables you to do a great amount of things that all the denizens of our planet now uniformly enjoy, but if your region of the world and your nation lack the basic infrastructures of modernity, you are condemned to an experience of modern life that will be filled with great contradictions, acute frustrations and seemingly unending insecurities.

    In next week’s column we shall see how this enigma plays out in our specific national and continental context. Here is a preview of this context: on the one hand, death-trap roads, inadequate and fitful power supply, crumbling public utilities and amenities, and hospitals and health clinics that are so bad that they serve more as waiting rooms for the mortuary than temporary shelters from ill health and diseases; on the other hand, banking and financial services facilities and global phone and communication access that are in the front ranks of 21st century high-tech developments. Meanwhile, compatriots, text your friends and relatives all you want; talk to four people all at once as you shuttle from one to another of your four expensive handsets. But go carefully as you drive on our roads and highways. [KK, I swear that I am not thinking of you here!]

     

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Are there any signs or resources of hope in this troubled land (and this earth)? (3)

    Are there any signs or resources of hope in this troubled land (and this earth)? (3)

    I begin this concluding piece in the series with the very last paragraph in last week’s column which ended with three questions that will frame this essay. Here is the paragraph:

    We can be sure that no ruler in Nigeria will ever bring out the tanks and the troops to stop the vast throng of worshippers, the sea of humanity going to or coming from an MFM revival; as a matter of fact, this is something that would warm their hearts. We can also deduce from the two cases of Obasanjo’s “Third Term” bid and the Turai Yar’ Adua “palace coup” that when the masses intervene to clean up the mess created by our political class, the powers that be will also not bring out the troops and the tanks. Since they did so when the masses were on the move during the fuel subsidy removal strike, three questions arise. One: Which of these instances of mass movement and action constitutes a real source of hope for our country and its teeming masses of the looted and the disenfranchised? Two: Are these three different cases in fact unrelated? Three: What is the point in asking this sort of questions?

    My answer to these questions may surprise many of my readers and it is this: Each of these three instances of mass movement and action in Nigeria is potentially a valid source of hope for our country. Freedom is indivisible and hope exists on many levels and wears many masks. The true mark of democracy in our country and our world is that people must have the freedom to assemble, to march and to act in the public sphere for religious, ceremonial, festive or political reasons, as long as they do so without hindering or negating the freedom of others. For this reason, it is a very retrograde thing, a mark of the sorry state of our current experiment in non-military democratic governance for one kind of mass movement and action to be allowed while another kind is met with maximum use of force and intimidation. Let me put this contention in concrete terms.

    In last week’s column, I mentioned the endless sea of worshippers coming from a mass revivalist meeting of the MFM. To this I added the observation that no government, no ruler in Nigeria would ever dare to bring out the troops and the armored tanks to stop this endless throng of the faithful giving expression to their deepest faith and hope in God and divine grace, even if they stop the flow of traffic in a major city for two hours. To this we can add the fact that that all travelers on the Lagos-Ibadan expressway routinely encounter even a much bigger assemblage of communicants at the altar of religious epiphany at the “Redeem Junction”, an assemblage so vast that quite often all traffic on the most important artery of the national highway grid comes to a complete stop for hours on end. Again, we can safely assume that no government, state or federal, has it in mind to put a stop to this phenomenon that is probably without any parallel in our country or our continent.

    By contrast, consider this: In early January 2012, at the height of the very successful nation-wide strike against the removal of oil subsidies by the administration of Goodluck Jonathan, an equally mammoth procession of protesters that started at the Lagos State House of Assembly and headed towards the Gani Fawehinmi Park at Ojota was met by the troops and tanks of the 9th Brigade of the Nigerian Army that was personally supervised by the brigade commander, Brigadier-General Sani Muazu. Not only did the general and his men stop the march, Muazu, as reported in The Guardian of January 17, 2012, actually stated that once the government and the trade unions had declared that the strike was over, the protest march had become illegal and could not be permitted to take place notwithstanding the fact that this was a completely peaceful protest march that was led by legislators, academics and very prominent citizens.

    It is heartening to report that this extremely warped and stunted definition of the democratic legality of mass protests and marches in our country was vigorously contested by many prominent politicians and citizens, among them Governor Fashola of Lagos State. But there is more to this matter than verbal condemnation of the severe restriction placed by the Nigerian state on the freedom of the Nigerian masses to organize protests against the horrific conditions and realities that they face on a daily, even hourly basis. Let me explain what I mean by this assertion and in doing so bring the discussion closer to our fears and anxieties about the forthcoming state and federal elections of 2015 concerning statements that have been made – and are still being made – by many of our politicians that these may well be the last set of elections in the country we currently know as Nigeria.

    Basically, to me this state of affairs means that, once again, we are at a conjunctural moment in the politics of democratic governance in our country. There are three principal features to this conjuncture. We can deal quickly with the first two of these features. One: Only on the basis of another implosion will Jonathan get the nomination of the ruling party, the PDP; if internal democracy prevails in the run of primaries within the party before the general elections, he will not get the nomination for another term in office. But internal democracy has never been a notable feature within the PDP and we are not about to see a reversal of this defining feature of the party. Two: The other parties confidently expect that even with its looming implosion, the PDP will still rig the elections for the simple reason that it will use its incumbency and its control of the apparatus and the instruments of “legal” violence lodged in the armed forces to cow the opposition parties and the populace into submission. Against this, the opposition parties are readying themselves for a “final showdown”. Three: In neither of these two scenarios of the ruling party and the opposition parties respectively is the generality of the Nigerian masses, acting in their own interests, a factor of any real significance. Permit me to elaborate a little on this third feature of our conjuncture which, as I have observed, is, in my opinion, of far greater import than the other two features.

    The PDP, with its abysmally poor record in office, knows only too well that with the exception of a few places primarily in the South-south, it will never win nationwide on the basis of the popular support of the generality or plurality of the Nigerian masses. Furthermore, with its incumbency and its control of the apparatus and instruments of “legal” violence, the PDP is near absolute in sidelining the masses of Nigerians acting in their own interests. In contrast to this, the opposition parties are counting on the hope that the masses will not stand for another rigging of the elections and will rise up in revolt if the attempt is made once again by the PDP. However, in the meantime in the run-up to 2015, these opposition parties are doing little or nothing to prepare the Nigerian masses to intervene decisively in 2015 by taking up and fighting for their cause, their interests. In this, I think the opposition parties are putting their faith, their hope in the fact that every time that the ruling party has more or less imploded and brought the country to the edge of catastrophe, it has been the intervention of the Nigerian masses that has saved the day. In other words, one side, the side of the ruling party, has no place for the interests, the intervention of the masses of Nigerians across the length and breadth of the country; the other side, the side of the combined forces of the opposition parties, has only a very limited place for mass or popular intervention, this being on the day of judgment in 2015.

    As I reflect on these matters, my mind goes to an allegory in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus that is based on a fascinating analogy between the human body and the body politic. In this allegory which Shakespeare in fact borrowed from ancient Greek and Roman sources, all the other parts of the body – the head, the arms, the ears, the eyes and the tongue – stage a revolt against the belly on the bitter claim that, unlike each of these body parts that has a vital function for the health and well-being of the entirety of the body, the belly does nothing but simply consumes all the food that enters the body. In vain did the body protest that it does not merely consume everything that comes to it but actually processes all its intakes and converts them to nutrients that it then redistributes to all the other parts of the body. In their revolt, the other parts of the body withdraw from participation in transmitting food to the belly. Soon, however, they begin to wither, to atrophy because they find that each body part alone by itself cannot complete the cycle of consumption and redistribution that keeps all the parts of the body healthy and fit for performing their allotted functions.

    I have drawn attention to the fact that Shakespeare borrowed this allegory from ancient Greek and Roman sources. To this I must now add my feeling that Shakespeare’s Greek and Roman sources themselves were drawing on oral, popular sources that we find in almost every society and culture in the world in which a bloated stomach that is counterpoised to atrophied limbs is the ultimate mark of the diseased body, whether of the physical body or of the body politic. The kwashiorkor belly is of course the most grotesque mark of this kind of diseased body in which consumption has gone totally askew of redistribution. I don’t think I am overstating the case if I describe our current experiment in democratic governance since 1999 as a “kwashiorkor democracy” in which the collective belly of our political elites is a grotesque counterpoint to the shrunken, misshapen limbs of the masses of our peoples.

    Do I also overstate the facts if I say, ruefully, that most Nigerians in all parts of our country see nearly all our politicians and political parties in the image of the bloated belly that consumes everything and leaves nothing to the limbs, the other parts of the national body politic? The intervention of the masses of Nigerians across the length and breadth of the country is one of the few sources of hope for the country as we look ahead in anxiety and fear to 2015. For this hope to be realized, the work of preparing the masses for that intervention must begin now. Let us begin to see this not only in words but also in deeds, in policies and practices that make the crucial link between consumption and redistribution not a dream, not a fantasy on the horizon of the future but palpable realities in the lives of the vast majority of our peoples.

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Are there any signs or resources of hope in this troubled land (and this earth)? (2)

    Are there any signs or resources of hope in this troubled land (and this earth)? (2)

    On last week’s opening essay in this series, we critically explored the over-saturation of signs and markers of religious hope and faith in our country, an over-saturation which, in my opinion, leads to their neutralization. In this week’s continuation of the series, we shift to secular, rational and idealistic perspectives that base their projections of hope and faith in our capacity to work in our own best interest with the use of our minds, our rational critical faculties. I can think of no better way to start an exploration of this subject than to use a brief outline of a rational, scientific metaphysics of nature and existence as an analogy for the topic of this series.

    We live in bodies and on a planet in which things are perpetually in flux and nothing is static, even if for the most part we are rarely ever in full consciousness of this fundamental principle of Being. All the time and in waves, blood courses through our arteries and veins. All the time we breathe, inhaling and exhaling air in reverse oxygenated and de-oxygenated rhythmic flows. Though silent and hardly perceptible, these flows are essential to life, so much so that it is only when we are have difficulty with breathing that is so bad as to be life-threatening that we become aware of them. Moreover, the heart itself never stops beating as long as we are alive and it too, beats in reverse rhythmic patterns of systole and diastole. And then there’s the fact that we live – we are both condemned and lucky to live – on a planet that is perpetually in motion, at once rotating on its axis and orbiting endlessly in space around the sun. Moreover, this planet, this earthly home for our species travels around its orbit at a speed of about 1670 kilometers per hour. It is said that nature abhors a vacuum; to this we should add that nature also hates stasis.

    Pondering the ramifications of this profile, it would seem that Nigerians are the perfect incarnation of nature’s abhorrence of vacuum and its disdain for stasis. With our simultaneously notorious and celebrated restless and anarchic energy, we always very quickly move to fill any vacuum, real or imagined. We seem perpetually in a hurry, even if where we are headed is often obscure, both to ourselves and to others subjecting us to scrutiny. Nearly all visitors to the diverse countries on the African continent will tell you that Nigerians are a special breed in their volatility and their over hastiness. We seem wired to a sense of flux, a sense of “bo lo o ya (fun) mi” (if you have nowhere to go, get out of the way for me!) as if at its inception, the nation took its being from that axial tilt on which the earth rotates in its eternal orbit around the sun.

    But this analogy is erroneous. There is order, there is system, there is logic in the tilt of the earth on its axis and in its speed around its solar orbit. By contrast, with Nigerians it seems that all you see and get is a sort orbital flight and axial rotation without rhyme or reason. But this also is not exactly true. There is no complete absence of logic or, more pertinently, no total absence of intervention of critical intelligence in our national mania for volatility and frenetic excitability. The sad fact is that it is fitful, inconstant; and it too easily peters out. Let me explain what I mean by this and in the process bring these reflections closer to the question of real signs and resources of hope in our country.

    All the characteristics of the profile that in this essay I have designated the scientific metaphysics of Being are not just mere facts of nature and the universe; they became known to us through patient and rigorous study over thousands of years. It was through this unceasing study over the ages that humankind has been able to make use of the processes and forces of nature to our benefit – the nature inside and outside our bodies. We have penetrated deep into the internal organs and processes in our bodies and as a result we have come to have fuller and better knowledge of who and what we are. And this rational and critical knowledge has enabled us to intervene so as to make the work of these organs and processes better for our heath and our longevity.

    The same thing is even more dramatically truer of the study of the earth and the heavens in the planetary system. Finding that our eyes and brains are not adequately equipped to effectively tackle the awesome challenges of observation, calculation and calibration over vast distances and spaces, we have fashioned instruments that can compute faster and better than the sum of the intelligence of all human beings alive now in combination with the intelligence of all those who have ever lived. If, as we take stock of our place in the universe we are no longer terrified of all that we are yet to know, it is because our knowledge, our rational faculties have given us hope that we have the capacity to successfully confront present and yet to be discovered frontiers.

    The analogical corollary to this observation is that it has been only when Nigerians have taken critical stock of the restless energy and the volatility that seem so characteristic of the national psyche and redirected them to purposive ends that they have served as resources of hope. Without interventions of this purposive order, our restless energy and our volatility can be and are often turned to either negative, destructive ends or are domesticated and manipulated by charismatic religious zealots. Nigerians like to boast that the citizens of most of the other countries in Africa seem “slower”, seem more lethargic by comparison with us. If all that was needed for the unity, peace and progress of nations was restlessness and volatility, we would long ago have emerged as the most developed and the most just nation on the African continent which is most definitely far from the state of things in our country.

    In case some readers are inclined to see these observations and reflections as too speculative, let me put out a reminder to such readers that at critical moments since the return to civilian “democratic” rule in 1999 when deep political and constitutional crises seemed about to bring the present Fourth Republic down and plunge us back to either disintegration of the country or a return to autocratic military rule, it was the redirection of the volatility and restlessness of the masses of ordinary Nigerians to purposive ends that saved the day. Let me rephrase this claim: since 1999, every time that it has seemed that members of the political class were not only about to collectively self-destruct but also to take the entire country down with them, it has been the redirection of the volatile energy of ordinary Nigerians toward restitution that has made the difference. That is one of the most important sources of hope for our country, especially as we approach 2015 and the next circle of national and state elections. Let me put some flesh on the bare bones of this contention.

    In 2006 and 2010, the ruling party, the PDP, more or less imploded, taking most of the other political parties with it in crises that brought the country to the edge of catastrophe. In both instances, all the constitutional and institutional provisions for democratic governance proved useless in resolving the respective crisis and the ruling parties could no longer govern with anything close to legitimacy. The first case had to do with the so-called “Third Term” attempt of Obasanjo to perpetuate himself in power. His efforts to carry the PDP with him and his use of national coffers to offer colossal bribes to members of the National Assembly both failed, but Obasanjo was unrelenting. In the second case, a dying Yar’ Adua left a vacuum that was quickly and unconstitutionally filled by his soon to be widow, Turai, together with some accomplices. The power which they then arrogantly exercised was as illegal as it was corrupt and nation-wrecking. In each of these two instances, it was not until the masses of ordinary Nigerians, under the guidance of activist groups like SNG, patriotic professional associations like the NBA, civil society organisations and trade unions, intervened that the National Assembly found the spine, the backbone to rise to the demands of the occasion.

    There is a third case that is even more eloquent in its illustration of our central claim in this series that the restless energy, the volatility of our peoples, supervened by the application of rational and visionary patriotism, constitutes one of the best sources of hope for our troubled homeland. For in this particular case, the masses did not intervene to clean up the mess, to avert a drift to national catastrophe caused by the political elite; they intervened on their own behalf and in their own interest. Who, among the readers of this piece does not know that I am referring here to the massively successful nation-wide strike in early 2012 against the attempt to remove fuel subsidies? And who does not know that this particular mass intervention in their own interest so frightened the ruling party that it brought out troops to suppress the strike?

    About four years ago, on one unforgettable evening in Akoka in Lagos close to the gates of the University of Lagos, I sat with my friend, Femi Osofisan in his car for nearly two hours as an endless sea of humanity coming from a mass religious revival meeting held by the MMF completely stopped all traffic, vehicular and non-vehicular. I swear that prior to that occasion I had never seen anything like it. But Osofisan had and indeed, he was a bit bemused by my utter surprise at the phenomenon. Only when I explained the source of my surprise, my bewilderment, did he enter into a conversation with me on the event.

    We can be sure that no ruler in Nigeria will ever bring out the tanks and the troops to stop the vast throng of worshippers, the sea of humanity going to or coming from an MMF revival; as a matter of fact, this is something that would warm their hearts. We can also deduce from the two cases of Obasanjo’s “Third Term” bid and the Turai Yar’ Adua “palace coup” that when the masses intervene to clean up the mess created by our political class, the powers that be will also not bring out the troops and the tanks. Since they did so when the masses were on the move during the fuel subsidy removal strike, three questions arise. One: Which of these instances of mass movement and action constitutes a real source of hope for our country and its teeming masses of the looted and the disenfranchised? Two: Are these three different cases in fact unrelated? Three: What is the point in asking this sort of questions? This will be our starting point in next week’s conclusion to the series.

     

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Are there any signs or resources of hope in this troubled land (and this earth)? (1)

    Are there any signs or resources of hope in this troubled land (and this earth)? (1)

    Religion is the opium of the people; it is the soul of a soulless world.

    Karl Marx

     

    I admit it. Something seemingly inconsequential or even embarrassing prompted the series of reflections that begins this week on whether or not there are signs and sources of hope in our troubled nation, especially as we approach the year 2015 and the next cycle of presidential and gubernatorial elections in our country. That “something” is the acronym, IJN. I suppose everyone in Nigeria but myself knew what it stands for: In Jesus’ Name. For a long time, every time I saw the acronym – mostly through phone text messages sent to me by relatives and friends who refuse to give up on me even after futile years and decades of trying to reconvert me to Christianity – I wondered what it stood for, this IJN. Then one day last week, someone actually sent me a text message that combined both the acronym and its meaning. IJN, In Jesus’ Name: All will be well; whatever the problem whether personal, familial, national, continental, global or intergalactic, all will be well. God is in control. Christ is the answer, whatever the question.

    I intend no sarcasm in starting this series with this wry observation concerning the links between religion and hope, with particular regard to contemporary Nigerian Christianity. Like most religions, indeed perhaps more than most religions, Christianity has extraordinarily a powerful and evidently efficacious array of rituals, symbols and parables that produce indomitable hope in periods of great personal and/or collective privation. For this reason, for most members of the Nigerian Christian community, especially those of the Pentecostal persuasion, the question that serves as the title of this series – are there any signs or resources of hope in our troubled land? – is almost completely redundant, if not even blasphemous. If you have Christ, if you are born again in His name, if you serve Him faithfully and put all your trust in Him, you are not without hope and He will not fail you.

    This is both an article of faith and a materialised sign that is inscribed on countless billboards, posters and advertising slogans and legends that we see everywhere in our country, perhaps more than in any other nation on earth. Apart from the innumerable churches and mosques in our towns and cities, you will also see these materialisations of hope and faith in shopping plazas, in roadside shops and stalls, and in even ramshackle shacks of dealers in articles of commerce of every kind: “Salvation Bakery”; “Revelation Pharmacy”; “Second Coming Welders”; “Everlasting Shopping Plaza”; “Blood of Christ Nursing Home and Infirmary”; “Omo Jesu Barber”; “Hope and Mercy Hair Saloon”. A recent visitor to Nigeria who has done much traveling in our continent and other parts of the world informed me, as she was about to leave the country, that the thing she found the most intriguing about our country was the fact that, more than any other place she had ever visited in the world, the sings of religion are everywhere, to the point that not only is this reality inescapable, it is in fact a superabundant facet of the physical, social and existential landscape. If this is the case, if the physical and expressive landscape of our country is so massively dotted with the ubiquitous signs of hope and faith, on what basis can I then pose the question that gives this series its title: Are there any signs and resources of hope in our troubled land?

    The answer to this question is simple and unproblematic: Without discountenancing the importance of religion, I am referring to secular, rational and idealistic signs and sources of hope. Let me put this as sharply and as provocatively as I possibly can. Without leaving Jesus in particular and religion in general out of the equation, the question I am really posing is this: How and where can we find and expand secular, rational, critical and idealistic signs and sources of hope in our troubled country at the present time?

    We cannot leave religion out of the equation, not because the signs and markers of religion are everywhere on the horizon of the present, and not because of the undoubted God-obsession that has gripped the mass psyche of Nigerians in general, but because historically, religion has been both a source of hope and liberation for the enslaved and the powerless and a bulwark for the tyrannical social power of oppressors and exploiters. In other words, if you leave religion out of the equation, if you don’t try mightily to nudge it in the direction of social justice, peace and progress, it will, at best be neutralised and at worst be co-opted by the enemies of human equality and progress.

    This last point compels me to be completely honest about my feelings and thoughts on both official and popular contemporary Nigerian religiosity on the matter of hope and faith. In this piece, I have commented rather extensively on the fact that the signs of materialised hope and faith are so ubiquitous on the expressive landscape of our country that we can validly talk of an over-saturation. Is this not an indication of the thoroughgoing domestication or neutralisation of religion as a potential force for beneficent social transformation in our country? Everywhere you look there are all these signs of robust religious hope and faith, and yet there is a surfeit, a perpetuity it seems, of so much irreligious stealing and looting, so much unholy use of state and non-state violence and terror, so much ungodly spreading of desperation in the land. Short of a massive and totally unprecedented irruption of a miraculous or mystical transcendentalism in the economic and social affairs of our country the type of which has never been recorded in history, is there the slightest doubt that the overwhelming majority of the thousands of small business enterprises that boldly display signs of religious hope and faith in our country will never in fact ever make it to the big league of the rich and powerful in the land? Do these ubiquitous signs of religious hope and faith not in fact mystify and confuse praying with preying in the ways in which they ignore or hide the real means by which wealth and power are in reality cornered by the few to the detriment of the many in our country at the present time?

    Karl Marx, in one of the most often quoted remarks in political and intellectual history, famously remarked that religion is the opium of the people. What is often ignored is the fact that this is only half of the full sentence, for in the other half of this often quoted sentence, Marx also observed that religion is the soul of a soulless world. Side by side with often being a metaphysical opiate that deadens the traumas and sufferings of unrelentingly harsh economic and social conditions for most of our peoples, if religion is to become a real and powerful resource for hope in our country it must also begin to act as the soul, the conscience of the nation – as it has historically done in many other nations and regions of the world.

    As I have remarked earlier in this piece, in this series my emphasis will be on secular, rational and idealistic signs and resources of hope in our country and the world in which we live, the world that constitutes the outer boundary of the conditions of possibility for justice, peace and progress in Nigeria and Africa. Let me put this observation in the form of a question, though in very concrete terms: How can mystification and superstition, religious and non-religious, that are so prevalent in our country at the present time, be contained by the rational exercise of the collective mind, especially with regard to the knowledges available to us in the world of the 21st century? This question may at first sight seem laughably audacious. Our country may be world famous for the number of its churches and mosques and the size and variety of its denominational congregations, but it lags far behind countries that have solid infrastructures and institutions for teaching, research and inventions. Without such infrastructures and institutions, the gifted, active mind works in isolation, bereft of the kind of supports that make the mind – any mind – productive and socially useful. Since we do not have such infrastructures and institutions in place, how can I seriously or realistically hope for the rational exercise of the mind in our country in line with the great advances in knowledge in the 21st century?

    This question is falsely put and this is the fundamental basis of this series. There are no reasons in the world why, under the right socio-political conditions, we cannot rapidly but solidly build and maintain infrastructures and institutions of genuine learning, research and innovation that will in no time at all dissolve the fogs of mystification and superstition that now almost completely becloud the operations of the collective mind in our country. Thus, my question really boils down to this: Are there women and men in our country, are there currents of thought and action that could coalesce into a powerful movement that would fundamentally change the socio-political order in our country such that the institutions and infrastructures that seem so impossible for us to build and sustain at the present time will in short but effective order become a vital part of the exercise of the mind in our country?

    My answer to this question is, of course, yes. But I admit that it is a tentative, unsure and provisional yes. Without being sectarian or dogmatic, let me say that the reason for this tentativeness lies in the present almost comatose state of the Left, the democratic, egalitarian and humanistic Left that was a very big movement in our country in my youth and that has been the most dominant ideological, ethical and emotional force in my public and private life. Without that movement – in whatever form or expression it is reinvented as long as it is mature and genuinely humanistic – the signs and sources of hope in our country will remain very dim, very weak and impotent, if in fact things do not get far worse than they are now.

    Perhaps there is no need for me to explain why this observation is, for me at least, not sectarian or dogmatic, but I shall do so anyway. Quite simply, I am not talking here of a Left that has a monopoly on moral rectitude, patriotism and dedication. As a matter of fact, it could be said of the Nigerian Left, of the Nigerian progressive movement that it has perfectly mirrored all the social pathologies of the ruling elites in the post-civil war period. I would even go further to say that it has also been as infected with the malaise of mystification and superstition as the rulers and the ruled in our country. The apple does not fall far from the tree: the Left, the progressive movement in our country has been, in the last two or three decades, a perfect mirror of all the social ills that bedevil the country. In fact, this is the reason why, in this series, I decided to start, through an exploration of contemporary religion and the operations of spirit and psyche in Nigeria at the present time, on the subject of mystification and superstition. In next week’s continuation of the series, we shall move to the more secular domains of the operations of the secular mind and the imagination as resources of hope in our troubled land.

     

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

     

  • ‘Haha, Prof, Where Is Your Car?’ – A Lay, Secular Sermon In A Light Mood

    ‘Haha, Prof, Where Is Your Car?’ – A Lay, Secular Sermon In A Light Mood

    A nrin nile, inu n b’elesin [We have nowhere else on which to walk, still the men on horseback resent our right to a little patch of the earth]

    A Yoruba proverb whose origin lies in the emergence of mounted nobles as a distinct social group in West Africa.

     

    A  lay, secular sermon? Yes. After all, this column appears on Sundays, the day on which Christians normally expect either verbal or written sermons to be delivered. This is why, dear readers, this “sermon” comes to you today. As a matter of fact, I wish to seize the occasion of this first “sermon” to now inform readers of this column that from time to time, I shall devote the column to this special genre of the secular sermon that takes its name, its expressive identity from the fact that I am neither a priest nor a religionist in the conventional sense of the term. This in effect means that a secular sermon is addressed not to a select band of the faithful, but to the considerably wide and non-exclusionary community of the intellectually curious, the imaginatively adventurous and the truly democracy inclined. This is what today and from time to time I shall serve as a discursive “dish”, a “stew” for the imaginative palate of readers of this column.

    On that note, let us move to the theme for this first ‘sermon’ which, quite simply, is this: Walk, compatriots, walk. Walk even if you belong to the tiny group of super-rich Nigerians and own more than three, four or five cars; walk as often as is practicable and convenient; walk whenever and wherever you can; it is good for your health and even better for your soul. Walk, compatriot, walk.

    I admit it: this theme was prompted by the question that serves as the first part of the title of this essay: “Haha, Prof, where is your car?” I have now lost count of the number of times that my neighbours at Oke-Bola, Ibadan, have asked me that question when they have seen me in any part of the city walking. No matter how far from or conversely, how close I am to my house that is located at the “Seventh-Day” area of Oke-Bola, I am confronted by my neighbours, this question is always automatically posed to me: “Haha, Prof, where is your car?” Of course, the question is usually posed with far greater incredulity when I am as far from my house as Mokola or even Adamasingba as when I am seen walking closer to home, say at Dugbe or Gbagi. The presumption at the back of this question is of course unmistakable and it is this: As a “Prof”, as a member of the tiny elite in the neighborhood with a house of my own and a car, why am I without my car and out walking as ordinary, non-elite Nigerians do as a routine part of their daily life, their normal existence?

    Now before I address the reasoning, the mesh of presuppositions and assumptions, behind this question as the main body of this “sermon”, let me first of all say that my injunction to the readers of this column to walk whenever and wherever practicable or convenient has little or nothing to do with the fact that in the rich countries of the world, walking has become a faddish thing that the wealthy, the powerful and the famous do as part of their daily or weekly social or interactional rituals. Jogging or “working-out” in the gym are related or ancillary practices, but walking is the primary or the most telling indication of the abandonment of cars in order to take up other means of either necessary or voluntary physical exercise. Beside this, walking is also the ultimate mark of being health-conscious and/or being motivated by the do-gooder high-mindedness of raising money for noble and charitable causes through the so-called “walkathons”.

    Of course, I am not indifferent to the fact that this particular fad around walking in the rich countries of the world has very sound justification in the proven health benefits that come from or with walking as a daily exercise. And to be completely honest about this matter, I have myself sometimes participated in “walkathons” in which thousands, even hundreds of thousands of people walk tens or scores of kilometers to raise funds for charitable causes. No, compatriots, I am not opposed to these faddish or charitable reasons for walking as a worthwhile practice, mostly in the rich countries. But these are not the reasons why, in a poor-income country like Nigeria, I am in this “sermon” asking you, my dear readers, to walk, especially those of you with one, two, three or four cars. [Some economists and sociologists swear that ours is now a middle-income economy. I disagree. But that is another matter entirely]

    Now, to get back to the question itself that prompted the theme of this “sermon”, “Haha, Prof, where is your car?”, we must of course recognize that the fundamental assumption behind the question is that walking in our cities is – or has become – so unappealing, so soul-wearying that those who can afford not to walk are considered downright crazy if they choose to walk, I mean actually walk. One sure proof of this assertion is that I am yet to meet any neighbour of mine who has seemed satisfied with the answer I give anytime the question is put to me: I walk because I like walking, because once a while and if the distance is not too great, I like to abandon my car and, yes, walk. I really and truly am yet to meet any neighbour who has accepted this answer, at least on face value.

    Well, who can blame my neighbours for this skepticism? Is it not an open secret that the streets of virtually all our towns and cities belong almost exclusively to the masses of ordinary Nigerians for the simple reason that, by overwhelming numbers, our elites simply never walk unless they absolutely have to and even then for only very short distances? And is it not well-known that walking in the streets of our towns and cities is often a very unpleasant experience as there are virtually no pavements to walk on, and even no unpaved but cleared dirt patches for pedestrians to walk in safe margins from the paved swathes of asphalt meant exclusively for the cars and other vehicular machines? [Some optimistic activists say that the day is almost upon us when a “Pedestrians’ Freedom Charter” will be drafted and universally proclaimed to bring these matters to the forefront of prospects for progress in our country. I wish this were true, but I don’t think so. But that is another matter entirely]

    It is hard not to draw the appropriate conclusions from realities and conditions that are as palpably Nigerian as these: Just as we do not have patient-friendly hospitals and clinics, so also do we not have walker- or pedestrian-friendly towns and cities. I give the personal testimony of my own experience here with regard to the many, many times in which I have just barely escaped being knocked down and badly injured or even killed by the cars and vehicular contraptions that are the kings of the streets of our towns and cities all of which are forever struggling amongst themselves for vastly cramped and inadequate spaces. One could say that the danfos, the okadas and the maruwas are the worst offenders, but if the truth and nothing but the whole truth must be told, then it must be admitted that the glitzy cars of the elites are as well highly culpable for making walking in our cities and towns so unsafe, so dire. At any rate, I believe this is the ultimate basis of my neighbours’ skepticism anytime I tell them that my passion for walking is the only reason why I leave my car at home and take to the streets on my own God-given “footwagen”, this hugely significant fact that our cities and towns are so dangerously and even destructively pedestrian-unfriendly that it seems to defy logic – and the simple laws of self-preservation – that anyone who does not have to, anyone who has a choice in the matter will actually abandon his or her car and – walk.

    I swear that as far as I am aware of my own conscious acts and subconscious impulses and drives, I have neither a death-wish nor a masochistic streak. In other words, I leave my car at home and often walk the streets of the most traffic-congested parts of the city of Ibadan neither because I wish to make a virtue of self-mortification nor because I wish to make or prove a point. If there is any compulsive behaviour at all on my part in this matter, it is this: All my life I have passionately loved walking and find that I cannot or will not give it up now that I have a car and can afford to keep its fuel tank full as constantly as I wish. And there is a quite rational, quite calculated factor as well: over the years and decades, as the streets of Ibadan and other Nigerian cities have become more and more pedestrian-unfriendly, I have learnt to devise strategies and tactics of maximizing my safety on the road while walking. For instance, for the most part, I try to keep as clear of the edge of the paved part of the road as possible. This greatly reduces the number of errant okadas and danfos that could plow into me and knock me down. There is also this: Unless it is extremely arduous and really unhelpful, I generally walk against the flow of oncoming traffic so that I can quite clearly see what I am walking against and what is hurtling towards me. [Many vehicular contraptions plying our roads also engage in this defensive countermove of driving against the flow of traffic. I doubt that they do this for the same reason that I walk against the flow of traffic. But that also is another matter entirely]

    In the same manner in which our elites in recent years have more and more taken to air travel and abandoned the country’s inter-city and inter-state roads and highways for the great danger that they pose to all travelers regardless of class, our elites also more and more do not walk in our towns and cities because it is arduous, unappealing and dangerous. However, this does not mean that those of us who belong to this class who still walk are heroes; we are just diehard romantics who will try to keep walking for as long as we live above the earth before are eventually buried in it. This is why the theme of this ‘sermon’ is walk, compatriot, walk. The right and the need to walk as much as one can and wishes is a right that has been lost, won back and lost again over the ages from the time when horses and horse-drawn carriages began to crowd out human feet from the streets and roads of the world. This is what is captured in the epigraph to this essay: “We have nowhere else on which to walk, still the men on horseback resent our right to a little patch of the earth”. Horses and horse-drawn carriages have been completely replaced by automobiles and still those who have or wish to walk, simply walk, have a hard time in our cities and towns.

    Thus, the struggle continues. Walk, compatriot, walk. [This may open out to and connect with the great struggles for justice, equality and dignity for all in our country. I hope so, but do not know for sure. But that is another matter entirely]

     

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

     

  • ‘Before this generation shall pass’: our need for a true intergenerational dialogue (2)

    ‘Before this generation shall pass’: our need for a true intergenerational dialogue (2)

    I started this series last week with an opening epigraph from the Bible which is the following famous quotation from Christ in Matthew 24:34: “Verily I say unto you, this generation shall not pass till all these things be fulfilled”. Now, although it is not yet a million days since Jesus died, it is more than two thousand years and every single member of the living generation of those who heard this prophecy from him, old and young, women and men, died long ago. One of “these things”, one of the prophecies that Christ asserted that the particular generation he was addressing would not have passed before it was fulfilled was his second coming. As we all know, that particular prophesy has not been fulfilled even though in the more than two thousand years that have passed since then, scores of charlatans have claimed to be Christ come back to fulfill the prophecy. We even had one or two of such charlatans in our country, each with a very large flock of fervent believers and followers. Two of such bogus claimants to the second coming of Christ in our country come to mind: Odumosu, the “Jesus of Oyingbo” in Lagos; and Olumbe Olumbe Obu, the “Christ” whose site of alleged reincarnation was Cross River State.

    For those who might instinctively feel that my interest here resides in the fact that not only has every single member of the generation that heard the famous prophecy from Christ died a long time ago but that many generations have also come and gone and the prophecy is yet to be fulfilled, let me say with as much emphasis as possible that that is not my interest at all. To the contrary, my interest lies in the fact that, first, Christ was bold enough to make that extraordinary prophecy and, secondly, that he had a moral authority that members of all age groups, all generational cohorts either tacitly recognized or fully accepted. As this is a crucial observation, let me explain what I have in mind here. [Parenthetically, let me add that I actually believe that this prophecy of a “second coming” has been fulfilled many, many times since the death of Christ though not in the exact manner he envisioned it. But this is another matter entirely that I will probably take up in a future essay in this column]

    Christ died at approximately the age of 33. Moreover, most historians and theologians hold that his ministry lasted for just slightly more than three years. Thus, here was this young man who was not yet in middle age speaking to every member of the living generation of his day and getting to the core, the heart of matters that concerned every single one of them, old and young. In other words, Christ was one of those great moral reformers and visionaries in history whose message, whose “ministry” reached out across supposed generational divides precisely because the “generation” which they had in mind and about which they spoke was not only their own but the “generation” of everyone coevally alive in their day and age, all facing irreducibly common moral and spiritual crises that gave rise to equally common yearnings and aspirations.

    Since my “religion” is that of iwalesin, my reference to Christ in this essay is not an act of worshipful adoration. And I am not thinking of the example of Christ as a lone, exceptional or transcendental avatar outside of time and history – as virtually all Christians do. Indeed, I am thinking of some of the other great visionaries and reformers in history whose concern, whose passion, and whose authority embraced a notion of “generation” that included everybody alive in their country, their time or the entire planet. These figures included both men and women who, like Christ, died young and others who started their “ministries” young and lived to old age without ever abandoning the “mission” they began in their youth. Thus, the essential thing is not which age group, which generational cohort one belongs to but rather how one reaches across all generational groups to speak to issues of common concern and destiny to all. Let me cite the lives and examples of a few world-historical figures to illustrate this observation, this claim.

    Martin Luther King, Jr., died before he was forty and so did Joan of Arc who actually did not make it past her teens. When Fidel Castro made his famous “History Will Absolve Me” speech in 1953, he was only 27; and our own Anthony Enahoro was only 30 when, also in 1953, he moved the first motion for Nigerian independence. Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, Mother Teresa and Mahatma Gandhi all shared this extraordinary destiny: they started a life devoted to their country, to others and to humanity early in life and to the last day of their lives never gave up their vision for a better life for all. Indeed, what one commentator said of Martin Luther King, Jr., holds true for all the reformers and visionaries who did not make it to old age: “though a young man, he had the soul of a wise, old man” In a reverse logic, it could be said of the likes of Nelson Mandela who started their “mission” early in life and are extremely lucky to have made it to old age that though he is now an old man, he still has the spirit of an idealistic young person for whom possibilities for making life better and more dignified for all are limitless despite all the crises and challenges that we face. This is the moral core, the philosophical basis of the deep solidarities across generational cohorts on which rests a true intergenerational dialogue.

    Nothing I have so far said in this piece is meant to deny the profoundly disturbing existence or reality of deep and sometimes extremely bitter intergenerational divides that separate the older and younger populations of a country like ours and many others in Africa and other parts of the developing world. Such deep intergenerational moral, spiritual and expressive fault lines exist in many parts of the world at the present time. Perhaps the most paradigmatic of such sites of intergenerational war is to be found in slums and refugee camps in many parts of the world in which the conditions of life are so dire for all that all the sources of authority of the old are eroded and the young have no basis on which their sense of responsibility, their hopes for the future can find solid anchors and consequently, an either open or hidden but always simmering war erupts between the young and the old. This is the sort of a seemingly incommensurable and intractable intergenerational war that the epigraph for this essay from Samuel Beckett’s play, Endgame, tries to capture. For how more irreconcilable can this intergenerational conflict be than for a son to ask the father why he was “engendered” by the parent and for the father to reply that he did not know beforehand that it would be the kind of son who could and would ask such a question?

    Is this grim and spiritually desolate scenario from Endgame an appropriate analogy for the essential state of things between the older and younger generations of Nigerians at the present time? Metaphorically speaking, is present-day Nigeria the sort of vast sprawling slum, the sort of undeclared refugee camp for the great majority of its population that produces a breakdown of solidarity and mutual respect and reciprocity between the older and younger generations? With a median age of 19 and with the vast majority of our young people seemingly condemned to a future with little or no prospects at all, it would be against everything we know about human nature, everything we have learned from history not to expect a revolt of the young, regardless of the forms such revolts take, whether of criminal brigandage for extortionate ransoms; fanatical and brutally murderous religious terrorism; or armed, militant insurgency for resource control. Thinking of this, it is not difficult to imagine the short dialogue from Beckett’s play that is our epigraph this week as a sort of a perfect analogy for the non-existence of a true intergenerational dialogue in Nigeria today.

    But all is not unrelieved doom and gloom. Indeed, there is an ironic basis for hope and optimism in the very contexts that either directly or subliminally foster the “rebellions” of the young of the kind that we have in Nigeria at the present time. For these were the sorts of context that produced nearly all of the reformers and visionaries that I have mentioned in this essay: Christ, Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela. And as I have repeated again and again in this series, the world’s list of great reformers and visionaries down the ages to the present time has included women and men of all ages, from those barely out of their teens to those who were far advanced in age. By the same token, those who make the world so unsafe, so insecure and so unjust for their contemporaries that life becomes meaningless and without dignity for so many in our country, our continent and our world come from all age groups, the young and the old inclusive. To all such should our opposition and our resolve for a better world, a better legacy for those who will come after us, be directed.

    Postscript:

    As I was finishing the very last few paragraphs of this essay came the news, communicated by phone to me by my friend Femi Osofisan in an incredulous and anguished tone that our elder, Chinua Achebe, had just died. Stupefied, I immediately called Eddie Madunagu, Kayode Komolafe, Yemi Ogunbiyi and many others in the community of Nigerian literati, progressive journalists and radical democrats. I then checked the internet in the hope that this was a false rumour and not a confirmed fact. What I found gave some confirmation to the news and my spirits sank.

    As I write these words of this postscript, I do not have absolutely irrefutable confirmation that the iroko has fallen, that he is really gone from us. If it turns out that he has indeed made the great transition, then in the words of WS on the occasion of another great loss to us all, I say that I know that Chinua Achebe will walk tall among the ancestors. But if he is still with us on this side of the great divide, then, why, as an old African saw has it, that means that he will tarry much longer yet among us. He was/is one of a kind that was/is absolutely irreplaceable. And he was/is here and the world was/is not the same again.

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • ‘Before this generation shall pass’: our need for a true intergenerational dialogue (1)

    ‘Before this generation shall pass’: our need for a true intergenerational dialogue (1)

    Verily I say unto you, this generation shall not pass till all these things be fulfilled.
    Matthew 24:34, King James Bible [Cambridge Edition] Generation, noun: 1. the entire body of individuals born and living at about the same time; 2. the term of years, roughly 30 among human beings, accepted as the average period between the birth of parents and the birth of their offspring; 3. a group of individuals, most of whom are of the same approximate age, having similar ideas, problems and attitudes Dictionary.com (online)

    For most adult Nigerians whether old or young, there seems to be a great divide, a chasm even between two broad, composite generational groups: those who came of age before and those who did so after the Nigeria-Biafra civil war, with its massive infusion of petrodollars and petronaira into the economy, and the SAP-induced devaluation of the naira, with all the attendant humungous cuts in public expenditure, especially in education and health care delivery.

    Of course most Nigerians also generally acknowledge the existence of smaller units of generational cohorts within these two broad composite groups. For instance, there is said to be at one end of a spectrum Nigerians much advanced in years that had lived most of their biological and social adulthood before independence and inclusive of the first decade after that. At the other extreme pole of this spectrum are said to be the post-globalization, SMS-texting youths to whom the life and times of late-colonial and early postcolonial Nigeria belong to a misty past that occupies a tiny, indistinct part of their collective imagination. But by and large, I believe that it is the notion of two broadly composite groups of generations before and after the civil war, before and after the rise and fall oil-rich, oil-doomed nairamania, and before and after the SAP-induced turnaround in economy and society in our country that fundamentally frames all discourses about unbridgeable generational gaps in Nigeria. This is the issue that I wish to explore in the series of two articles that begins in this column. As we shall see, my central argument will be our great need to deconstruct and transcend this alleged chasm between generations of Nigerians if a genuinely democratic and egalitarian order is to take root and grow in our country.

    In order to facilitate this review of currently prevalent ideas about the existence of these two broad generational groups, permit me to make an allusion to a keynote address that I delivered at the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ife, in the year 2006 on the 30th anniversary of the award of the Nobel Literature Prize to Wole Soyinka. Titled “The Unfortunate Children of Fortunate Parents”, the speech focused on the innumerable and nearly insuperable problems and challenges faced by younger generations of Nigerian writers, artists, scholars and critics, problems and challenges that members of my own generation and our elders had not faced in our young adulthood. I confess that I did not even remotely foresee the impact that the speech eventually had on my/our younger colleagues in the arts and humanities community, even though I must also confess that I was deeply gratified that my speech had the impact that it did. At any rate, I used the countervailing terms “fortunate” and “unfortunate” in the title of the speech to draw attention to the great advantages that my generation had enjoyed but which, in sharp contrast, the younger generation sorely lacked. These include secondary and tertiary education of a very high quality; the easy availability of highly professional editing services and publishing outlets; a vibrant homegrown critical community that had both local and international visibility and influence; and a national community of writers and artists small and cohesive enough to be sustaining to us all, as individuals and as groups.

    It was with these extraordinarily auspicious conditions in mind that in that speech, I used the word “fortunate” for my generation. And indeed, we had supreme assurance in the reality of these advantages, so much so that we simply took them for granted. Superior editing and enlightened, well-heeled publishers are indispensable to good writing and its perpetuation; most of the first generation of Nigerian authors had ready access to them. By contrast, the vast majority of the younger writers had absolutely no access whatsoever to first rate professional editors; even more dauntingly, for the most part, they had to self-publish, at great financial, artistic and intellectual costs, in order to have the ghost of a chance to create and nurture a homegrown readership. Thus, their “misfortune”, in the framework of that speech of 2006, was that those highly auspicious conditions that we had taken for granted were as strange to the overall circumstances of the younger writers and artists as life-saving water would be strange to a wanderer lost in the arid, parched wilderness of a desert.

    The great point in all of this was of course the hugely portentous fact that these nearly crippling problems and challenges that the generality of our younger generation of writers and artists faced were but a microcosm of what all young people, writer or no writer, educated or unschooled, faced in present-day Nigeria. Permit me to give a personal testimony of my own graphic and unforgettable encounter with this matter when, about a decade and half ago, I visited Kuti Hall to which I had belonged as a resident in my undergraduate years at Ibadan. The tiny room that I had shared in my first year with Tokunbo Dawodu now housed five or six students. Even the dinning hall of Kuti had been turned into mass sleeping quarters for students called “squatters”. And in nearly all Nigerian universities, one heard of hyperrealist terms like “one/zero/one” or “zero/one/zero” which were supposed to represent the Spartan daily meal plan a student was compelled to follow in the face of very dire economic conditions.

    As if these were not enough, there emerged the strange phenomenon of so-called “professional students”. These were the large number of undergraduates who chose to – or were “chosen” by harsh economic realities – to linger for as long as possible in the university since, out there in the world, no jobs were available to those who had already graduated and left with their Bachelor’s, Master’s and even Ph D degrees. Nearly two years ago, the Governor of our Central Bank, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, gave the figure of 25 million for the educated and seemingly permanently unemployed in our country. By contrast, when I left university at the end of the decade of the 60s, it was absolutely unheard of, perhaps even unthinkable and therefore unthought, that a graduate from any Nigerian university would still be jobless three months after the completion of his or her university education.

    From all my observations and reflections so far in this discussion, it should be apparent that in our social genes, if not in our biological DNAs, we carry the differential markers of the decisive, formative experiences of our separate generations. This is why there seems to be such a deep chasm of memories, sensibilities and perspectives across the generational divides, making nearly impossible a meaningful intergenerational dialogue in our country. But then there arises the fundamental fact that in one old understanding or usage of the term, “generation”, we are all of us currently living in the same country and the same epoch of human history, members of the same generation. This particular usage of the term is what Christ had in mind in the quotation from Matthew 24:34 that constitutes the first epigraph to this article: “Verily I say unto you, this generation shall not pass till all these things be fulfilled”. Similarly, it is this very same idea of “generation” as a national or global community of all those living at a particular moment in time and space that is explicitly stated in the first dictionary definition in our second epigraph: “the entire body of individuals born and living at about the same time”.

    I draw attention to these other meanings and usages of the term largely because they are either totally unknown now or have almost been forgotten. At any rate, when I hear or read of conversations between our different generational cohorts – most of them very bitter and extremely recriminatory – it is almost entirely the following particular dictionary definition of the word in our second epigraph that comes to mind: “a group of individuals, most of whom are of the same approximate age, having similar ideas, problems and attitudes”. If this is the case, there would seem to arise this great intellectual challenge: If these diverse uses and meanings attached to the word “generation” are equally true, equally valid, how do we reconcile the differences and tease out a synthesis between them?

    I suggest that this problem is more apparent than real, more formal and logical than actual and substantial. For in real life, and at all times and in all places, conversations are always going on, simultaneously and referentially, intra-generationally and inter-generationally. In other words, we talk both within our own generational cohorts and across the presumed divides that separate us from other older or younger generations. I think we pay scant or no attention at all to this fact because the only divides that typically engage our attention are those, real and/or imagined, constructed around ethnicity, religion and regionalism. Occasionally, we do also talk about divisions based on class and power, but only very infrequently. But in my opinion, least of all do we talk about the fact that in one important sense, we all belong to the same living generation.

    The great challenge, the great need is to tease out the common denominators, the bottom line for all, as it were, for all of us of the generation that is coevally alive now, all full of great foreboding and little hope for what looms ahead of us as our common destiny, whether we are of the old, hoary generations or of the generations yet to cut their moral, psychic and ideological milk teeth in response to the crises already confronted or those hovering on the horizon of the present. In these common denominators that will be our starting point in next week’s concluding piece in the series, the things that separate “generation” conceived as a cohort of those of the same approximate age are folded into “generation” conceived as the universal community of all those living at the same time in a nation or in the entire world. As we shall see, there is equal blame and equal inspiration to extrapolate from the experiences of both the old and the young of our society as we confront one the most important statistical figures pertaining to realistic prospects for our national commonweal. This is the fact, compatriots, that the median age for our country is just 19.

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu