The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sunday

  • Again, the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway

    Again, the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway

    Way out of the avoidable nightmares

    For three consecutive days last week, motorists and commuters who travelled on the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway literally saw hell, when a multiple-vehicle collision occurred on the Kara Bridge, at the Ogun State end of the expressway around 2.30 a.m. on Wednesday.

    At least five lives were reportedly lost to the accidents. This was in terms of direct deaths. It is doubtful if the loss in terms of property will ever be known, given that several vehicles, some with valuable contents, were said to have been burnt in the process. Add these to the many man-hours lost by the thousands of people that were stranded on the road for hours on each of those days. Just as the lives that were lost, none of these other collateral damages can be quantified in monetary terms.

    I had cause to dedicate my column of October 3, last year, to the same expressway due to an experience I had, alongside my wife and daughter when we travelled to Oyo from Lagos, a distance of about 170 kilometres and could not return home until about 21 hours later. It was such a harrowing experience. Many people attributed this ‘vigil’ on the road to the clash of two public holidays, the Independence celebrations and sallah. To compound matters, it also fell on a weekend that the monthly Holy Ghost Service was being held at the Redeemed Camp on the axis. But last week’s experiences of people on the corridor did not clash with any public holiday. First, it had to do with the reconstruction work going on on the Long Bridge axis of the road as well as the multiple-vehicle collision.

    The Lagos–Ibadan Expressway is a 127.6-kilometre-long (79.3 miles) expressway connecting Ibadan, the capital of Oyo State and Lagos State, the commercial centre of Nigeria. It is the busiest inter-state route in Nigeria and also the major route to the northern, southern and eastern parts of the country. The expressway, which is the oldest in Nigeria, was commissioned in August 1978 by Major-General Olusegun Obasanjo. It handles more than 250,000 passenger car units (PCUs) daily and constitutes one of the largest road networks in Africa.

    Given its strategic importance, one would have expected that the Federal Government would pay attention to the road as well as ensure the construction and or maintenance of other roads that could serve as alternatives to it whenever there is a problem on the ever-busy expressway. For sure, accidents, much as we do not like them to happen will always happen, sometimes due to human error, carelessness or even dereliction of duty on the part of the government (gullies or potholes on the roads, lack of adequate traffic signs, etc). When the accidents happen, or when for whatever reason motorists cannot travel as fast as they should on the expressway, alternative routes should come handy.

    But what we have is a situation where we cannot say there is any such alternative properly so-called. Although travellers going to Ibadan from Lagos and vice versa could take the Lagos-Abeokuta Road; or Shagamu road or even go through Ikorodu, the point is; these roads are largely bad. We have craters on the roads and motorists who ply them must be ready to do comprehensive servicing and repairs after each trip; that is if they are lucky to escape their vehicles breaking down during their trip. How can we leave all our eggs in one basket, which is what the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway is at present?

    Even in normal times when there are no accidents, Lagos Traffic Radio usually gives terrifying reports of the traffic situation on the expressway, which makes one feel for people living in that corridor. Last week Tuesday, a colleague who left office at the Matori area of Lagos at about 9.00 p.m. did not get to his house at Arepo, Ogun State ( a distance of about 36 kilometres), until about 2.30 a.m. the following day because of the traffic necessitated by the incidents. His wife who left home for her office at about 6.00 a.m. on Wednesday was still on the Long Bridge as at 10 a.m. I have been wondering how people would say they slept on the expressway and had thought they were exaggerating until I experienced it in October last year. It is possible to be on the road of about 130 kilometres for a whole day!

    Concerning the activities of churches (and even mosques now) on the expressway that contribute to the traffic chaos in normal times, many people have said (and I think it is necessary to restate it) that the government is not duty bound to give them permits to establish their mega churches or mosques on the same axis. But, since the religious organisations have been allowed to build their centres there, probably because that is one of the few places they think they can have their crowd, then it is the duty of government to also ensure that their activities are done with minimal discomfort to other road users. Detailing traffic wardens to the venues of the religious organisations during their programmes is only a leg of the issue. Is it not possible to have overhead bridges in some of these places (i.e. the Redeemed Camp) so that those not connected with the activities of the religious organisations can bypass such places en route their destinations? Why must people suffer expectedly every month in the name of religious activity?

    It was as if successive governments just went to sleep after the expressway was opened in 1978, at least until 2013 when the Goodluck Jonathan administration saw the need to expand it because it was no longer able to cope with the daily traffic. Although the road is generally better now compared to its 2013 state, it is still a far cry from what an expressway of its status should be, with its many potholes; the reconstruction around the Long Bridge area of Lagos (which the contractor says poses a serious challenge because of the nature of the place) appears to be taking too long to complete. It is those who have the misfortune of passing through the place daily that can better relive their ordeal.

    Nigerians need more than assurance on this road. They have lived by assurances for too long; what they need now is action to take their nightmares away on the expressway. The problem there is compounded by the fact that motorists have no choice once they are trapped in the traffic. There are no short cuts; they must stay put until providence clears the way for them. This is not good enough; and I do not think this is the best we can get. Our leaders travel outside a lot; they should replicate on the expressway and other roads in the country some of the things they see that so fascinate them abroad. After all, as they say, “what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander”. It is in areas like this that Nigerians can feel the impact of their frequent travels abroad, thus justifying the huge resources they cough up to sustain our leaders’ foreign trips.

    As I observed in my piece last year, what is happening to and on the expressway is exactly the way we are; the way we are governed. A first time visitor to the country does not need to do much research to realise this fact. Moreover, security has been a key missing factor on the road. On the night I did ‘vigil’ there last year, we hardly saw any security beyond a few security men who broke traffic rules in their bid to clear the way for themselves, leaving the others to their own devices. Also, at night, the road is so dark, save for vehicles beaming their lights to illuminate their path. One can only hope provision has been made for security lights this time around to make the road compare with roads anywhere in the world.

    Definitely, seeing the huge number of vehicles on the expressway, the question of what happens to other modes of transportation would naturally come into mind. Specifically, what is happening to rail transportation in the country? It is true some progress is being made in this regard because the Nigeria Railway Corporation is trying to find its feet after years of dormancy. Definitely, many people will prefer to escape the nightmare on the expressway if they could travel by rail to most parts of the country. So, we expect more progress in the efforts to rejuvenate the rail sector to give Nigerians more travel options.

    It is only that we are not in a country where  research is taken seriously. Otherwise, we would have known that those who travel on the expressway frequently, indeed, those who are always on the move in the country, passing through some of our roads must have been losing their ‘joints’ and ‘bolts’ gradually due to the bad state of most of these roads. Unfortunately, we would be attributing some of the deaths and sicknesses arising from travelling on these roads to witches in the village. More unfortunately, the witches cannot defend themselves for reasons best known to them.

  • ‘Cows without milk’: the urgency of Knowledge over Cultural economy

    ‘Cows without milk’: the urgency of Knowledge over Cultural economy

    Having herdsmen in the 21st century should be discouraged; potential herdsmen should be in school like the children of the cattle they are hired to herd.

    This article is being republished in response to the federal government’s recent decision to establish a committee to examine the problem of herdsmen and farmers arising from cattle grazing. Since the committee is likely to call for ideas from the public, today’s article should be taken as a citizen’s view on a problem that has been around for a long time and may not go away until solutions are found to this nationally sensitive issue.

    Today’s title is borrowed partly from the current minister of agriculture who said last week that most of the cows in the country cannot produce milk because they do not have enough water to drink, thus becoming as malnourished as their male counterparts. This observation by Chief Audu Ogbeh captures the contradictions in the country’s agricultural system, just as it does for every aspect of the country’s way of doing things. Now that the wind of change is about to blow is an appropriate time to juxtapose development on the steam of tradition with development on the battery of innovation.

    When people try to have milk without the cow, goat, or sheep, such people attempt to achieve the impossible. But when people have cows but cannot get milk, then the problem is one of relying on wrong ways of doing things. Nigeria could as well have been the epicentre of dairy production in West Africa, in addition to producing enough beef for its huge population. But the country has increasingly been constrained by the fast pace of desertification that has robbed cattle, goats and sheep access to adequate feed and water. This challenge is not unchangeable if the political will is there. But the kind of will needed does not include being beholden to outmoded methods. It requires a sincere commitment to modernization and belief in new technology and techniques as a way of overcoming constraints imposed by tradition and nature.

    The material in italics overleaf is to show how desertification is a remote cause of the problem between herdsmen and farmers in states below the Sahel belt in the North Sahel and in many states in the South. Of course, desertification is not peculiar to Nigeria. About 900 million people in the five continents live in zones that are threatened by desertification.  But there are new techniques to arrest desertification in other parts of the world, and Nigeria must find ways to acquire such knowledge to save itself from many problems that make the country expend energy in creating easy solutions to old problems and in the process creating new, and perhaps, bigger problems. Indiscriminate animal grazing has not always been a problem in the country. Those who were born before independence would know that up to the 1970s when the Sahel had not moved down as radically as it has in the last twenty years, it was unheard of that herdsmen harassed farmers in the South, a point made recently by General Obasanjo when he said “cattle grazing was a rare sight except when a big person died in the community.” In those years, cows were brought to the south to sell, not to graze. But with raging desertification in the picture, all states are becoming cattle producing or feeding stations. The problem of desertification is not going to go away by itself; it requires sincere intervention that includes borrowing ideas and techniques of reducing desertification from other countries. In other words, policymakers need to think less about traditional ways of cattle farming and more about new knowledge that could allow cattle farmers to do so with relative ease than having to walk cattle through cities and villages.

    By cultural economy, I am referring to the role played by various forms of material and non-material cultural practice in the organisation of the economy or to cultural dimensions of economic activity—the design or marketing of any product or service. The fact that herdsmen in the past had moved from one area of the north to another before the spread of the Sahel to over 10 most northern states does not mean that herdsmen should continue to be encouraged to keep moving all over the country in search of pasture and water for their cattle. When some people argued that many of the herdsmen that caused trouble in many parts of the country came from outside Nigeria, many pundits dismissed this idea. It is conceivable that some of the herdsmen could have been foreigners from countries north of Nigeria with worse experience of desertification. Regardless of the nationality of herdsmen, it is the menace they cause to farming communities that need to be addressed rationally.

    At the rate herdsmen are searching for food and water for their flock, the tendency is high that most cattle farmers may end up moving to the south, should the Sahel continue to inch further south and no serious intervention comes from those holding levers of power to respond to a serious environmental problem. Anti-grazing statements may not have been put in a politically correct manner in some areas, but grazing is a serious economic problem that must not be allowed to transform into a political one. Solution to the problem of grazing must not be borrowed from the model of creating NECO when policymakers thought that WAEC was not working well for Nigerian students. Transferring problems created by desertification to other states is not a solution. The challenge for the ministries of agriculture and the environment is how to fight desertification frontally and how to adopt new ways to do animal production.

    To put this differently, moving away from the limitation imposed by traditional animal farming at a time that over 10 states in the north are experiencing shortage of water requires embracing what is referred to as Knowledge Economy in this piece. By knowledge economy, I do not mean just the digitisation of experience made possible by artificial intelligence in what is considered by sociologists as the third Industrial Revolution. Knowledge economy in the series under this title refers to the culture of relying on advances in science, technology, new ideas and techniques for increasing production, improving quality of products and services, and reducing the use of human or animal muscles to create value or add value.

    With respect to call for a new look at the way of raising cattle, it is the view of this writer that the time has come to find out how other countries that once used the model of moving cows and goats to wherever they can find food and water shifted to a new way of animal farming that takes whatever the animals need to them in ranches. If herdsmen were children of upper or middle-class men and women in our country, they would have cried foul for being hired to nurse cattle for the rich at great risk to their being. If the country had created an educational system akin to what exists in Kaduna today—free and compulsory basic education for all—it would have been impossible for current owners of cattle to find herdsmen to follow cattle to the length and breadth of the country.  Such difficulty must come to cattle owners if part of the goals of national development and integration include ensuring equality and equity. Having herdsmen in the 21st century should be discouraged; potential herdsmen should be in school like the children of the cattle they are hired to herd.

    The most reliable way to stop reproducing herdsmen is for the governments to commit to replacing imperatives of tradition with principles of knowledge economy in planning, designing, and organising animal and other forms of farming. It must be part of the remit of a government of change to prepare all citizens for competitiveness in a global village that is already experiencing third industrial revolution.

    To be continued

  • An American storm in a global teacup

    An American storm in a global teacup

    ( The Rise of Political Darwinism)

    The American presidential election has now come and gone. But not so its ripples. It was a political earthquake which stunned and shocked many parts of the globe into utter silence and disbelief. Never in history has an American presidential election held the rest of the world in such rapt attention. It was as if the fate and future of humanity depended on this single election.

    The rancour, the frenzy, the sheer nastiness and personalization of issues that drove the campaign might have induced an atmosphere of hysteria. It is rare to find two presidential candidates harbouring such mutual loathing and intense personal dislike for each other. If this were to be the golden age of American public duelling, only God knows how this would have ended. In earlier climes, one could hear the thunderous bellow: “Name your second!” The fact that the other contestant happens to be a woman did not seem to matter.

    No two presidential candidates could have been more dissimilar in temperament and background: the one a calmly ruthless, impeccably credentialed scion of the establishment with a reputation for being clever by half, the other a boisterously single-minded anti-establishment rabble-rouser and gladiator of crony capitalism who delights in cocking a snook at the same establishment that has permitted him to rise to the top of the economic pile while breaking most of the rules.

    As one commentator wryly put it, America was saddled with two presidential candidates, one that ought to be in jail and the other that ought to be in an asylum.But the entire drama is also a reflection of just how the new forces of communication are turning the world into a vast global village. The world is  a-changing indeed and no corner of the globe, no dark and dingy corner is too remote for the relentless beams of satellite gadgets.

    Now that all is quiet on the American front, it is time to take some lessons away for the rest of humanity. A hard-headed pragmatist, Donald Trump may be learning his first lessons in presidential politics. Having pooh-poohed and demonized globalization in the course of his campaigns, he may yet discover that the institutional and pan-national forces that drive globalization are beyond the reach of an American president however powerful and single-minded. His volte-face on Obama care may also suggest a growing awareness of certain institutional disincentives which prevent a slide into political deviancy and delinquency.

    What the rest of the world must now determine is whether the Trump triumph is a mere corrective glitch in the American political system or part of the global resurgence of right-wing fascism, a recrudescence of political Darwinism and neo-Con brutality which abolishes all societal safety nets in favour of open competition and the free market where everybody must test their strength and nerve.

    It has been noted by perceptive observers that contemporary western societies through some post-war consensus and intelligent design oscillate between the two extremes of liberal permissiveness and radical sloth and the conservative rerouting of society towards prudence and competitiveness.

    It is all there in the famous image of the Machiavelli-Leninist stick of societal progress. Whenever your ideological adversaries bend the stick of human development too far in the wrong ideological direction, you seize the stick and bend it in the other extreme direction. It is only then that you can come to the golden mean through a subtle aggregation of societal impulses and aspirations.

    So whenever left-wing liberality pushes the vision thing too far by turning the state into a huge alms house and citizens into over-pampered human wrecks who feed fat on the system without contributing anything to its development and economic growth, right-wing conservatism halts the ideological drivel by insisting that those who do not work do not deserve to eat and neither do they deserve health care.

    The right-wing resurgence and the triumph of Donald Trump can be seen as a backlash against Obama care and what is seen as an attempt to cripple human initiative and the innate ability of all humanity to lift themselves up by the bootstraps and to contribute meaningfully to the society. The modern state is not a patrimonial benefactor of mendicants and laggard flotsam and jetsam of the society but an unobtrusive arbiter and regulator in the unremitting acquisitive contest that drivesocieties to new heights of progress and prosperity.

    It was not for nothing that Margaret Thatcher was known as Thatcher the milk snatcher. The iron lady, daughter of a Methodist alderman who was brought up with thrift and Calvinist restraint, could not understand what the fuss was all about in the removal of public subsidy and state-funded licentiousness. As far as she was concerned the real public odium of state subsidy was that it encouraged permissiveness and the promiscuity of profuse breeding among the dirt poor.

    For a moment it seemed to have worked. Many voluntarily returned to work and the economy began to assume a competitive edge which was lacking during the labour years of “Sunny Jim” Callaghan. After an epic face off with the labour union which ended in humiliation for organized labour, the economy took a further shot in the arm as a resurgent middle class rallied to Thatcher’s neo-con social engineering.

    In a moment of triumphalist hubris, Margaret famously let it be known that there was no such thing as society, only individuals. It was an extreme formulation of neo-con ideology and right-wing Political Darwinism. Despite stiff opposition from left-leaning ideologues in her own party who Thatcher routinely dismissed “as wets who are not one of us”, the lady with the deadly handbag went ahead to slam an unpopular and divisive poll tax on the nation.

    For many in her party and the country at large, Thatcher had bent the stick of societal harmony too far in the other direction and it was time to seek the consensual middle ground and golden mean. It was time for Thatcherism and Reaganism, its American mutant cousin, to go. In retrospect, the tame and temperate regimes of John Major and Bush the elder in Britain and America respectively were nothing but stop-gap measures and holding devices before the advent of a hugely modernized Labour Party under Tony Blair and a renascent Democratic Party powered into office by the charismatic William J. Clinton.

    Thatcher’s seemingly casual and flippant observation is indeed a Freudian slip. In its pristine state, the neo-con society reminds one of a Darwinian state of nature, a war of all against all which emphasizes casual brutality and the survival of the fittest. Anybody who has a glimpse of this state of nature or who has watched Nature Geographic Wild and had seen animals pounce and predate on each other must have a fair sense of the sadistic prototype of the human society as envisioned by certain right-wing fascist ideologies.

    Yet even in this animal society, some animals are simply more animal than other animals. Natural predators are born not bred. A wild horse cannot become a lion.  The killer instinct is wired into the DNA of certain animals. They are genetically conditioned to go for the jugular while their herbivorous victims, however big and massive, could only offer futile, defensive kicks. Scientists applaud this as nature’s way of maintaining balance in the eco system. Are we also saying that the savagery inherent in political Darwinism is a way of maintaining balance in human ecology?

    The point is that human society is not an animal kingdom. As humanity evolved away from the state of nature which closely approximates the animal order, society developed certain mechanisms for protecting the weak and for ameliorating the conditions of the desperately needy. This is the essence of human civilization and what distinguishes it from the animal kingdom and its cutthroat savagery.

    While one can understand frustrations with those who contribute nothing to the society and are seen as a clog in the wheel of human progress, the neo-liberal argument for a kinder and more inclusive society is compelling. All people are born equal but they are not equally endowed. Even in the same nuclear family there is usually a divergence among progenies. If it were possible to gather all human resources together and redistribute them among human societies and their denizens, the usual laggards and no-hopers will soon re-emerge among new billionaires just as prosperous societies will re-emerge among the poverty-stricken hellholes of the world.

    What should now concern Africans in general and Nigerians in particular is how to develop indigenous knowledge-systems which will cure the continent of its colonial trauma and power the rapid development of politically stable and prosperous African societies. The debate in the wake of Trump’s triumph shows how the current plight of the continent owes a lot to ethnically polarized and mutually unintelligible enclaves and an absence of reasoned engagement with western orthodoxies.

    It is time to begin to look beyond competing western ideologies that have served their respective societies well. But for the purposes of international interaction, Donald Trump is the least of our problems in Nigeria and Africa. Except what we are witnessing in the west presages a fundamental epistemological rupture which will lead to the birth of new societies after much tumult and chaos, it should be clear that western societies have learnt how to take care of the aberrant outgrowths of liberal democracies.

    We must now begin to tell ourselves some home truths. Both Liberal Welfarism and neo-con Darwinism are competing and countervailing state models developed in the west as a result of their internal history. They are organic derivatives of centuries long struggle which witnessed revolutions and momentous bloodbath. They cannot be applied to African societies wholesale and without significant modifications and respect for the internal history and constitutive logic of colonial nations. While there will be points of convergence, there will also be points of critical divergence and incompatibility.

    In all modern non-western societies that have bucked the trend of underdevelopment and declining national relevance, there is always the presence of a serious, focused and committed nationalist intelligentsia. China’s combination of authoritarian politics with economic liberalisation, Japan’s transformation of its Samurai ethos and bee-like cohesion and discipline for rapid growth, the Singaporean model of political repression and developmental acceleration, the Brazilian brand of economic populism and political elitism, the modernization of feudal honour in Dubai and the combination of dynastic but dynamic caste politics and rapid innovation in India and some of the Asian tigers, have all been powered by innovative and inventive indigenous knowledge production.

    Fifty six years after independence, Nigeria is yet to have an organic and durable political structure, not to talk of a viable economic blueprint for rapid development and accelerated growth despite the country’s prodigious natural resources and intellectual endowments. Almost two years into General Buhari’s tenure the country is still busy trying to apprehend elusive executive, legislative, judicial and bureaucratic thieves. Surely, there must be some fundamental things we are not getting right. And surely, it has nothing to do with the emergence of Donald Trump or the stunning defeat of Hillary Clinton for that matter.

  • ‘Post-truth’ and the anti-globalization of the Right: reflections on language, bigotry and power

    ‘Post-truth’ and the anti-globalization of the Right: reflections on language, bigotry and power

    Post-truth: Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.
    Oxford University Dictionaries’ definition of the word of the year for 2016
    You are entitled to your own opinion; you are not entitled to your own facts.
    Daniel Patrick Moynihan

    In the prison house of language. In the wide open and free spaces of language. Or in the convoluted labyrinth of language. All are metaphors for the great variety of things we make language do for us and/or against those we hate, despise and wish to dominate, if not wipe off the face of the earth. These were the thoughts that crossed my mind earlier this week when I got the news that the custodians of the evolution of the English language at Oxford English Dictionarieshad settled on the compound word, “post-truth”, as their choice for the word of the year for 2016. I think it is safe to say that to nearly everybody who read of this declaration from the etymological gurus of the OED, the first thoughts were about the American presidential elections, especially with regard to Donald Trump and the new word that his advent has given the English language, Trumpism. [Generally, it is still capitalized; when the capital first letter is dropped to give us “trumpism”, it would have achieved its full normalization or even apotheosis] Now, though Trumpism means or implies many things, at its core is the complete indifference, the total and amoral antipathy to facts. Literally, there are hundreds of examples to give of this Trumpian disregard for facts and truth, but the one that I personally found the most annoying and confounding during the campaigns was the president-elect’s stereotype that all African Americans live in inner city ghettoes that Trump considered a war zone worse than Afghanistan. In this Trumpian construction, the millions of African American middle class and upper middle class professionals who live in suburbs did not matter, did not count; all he could see, all he wanted his overwhelmingly white and conservative audiences to see are African Americans whose conditions of life, in Trump’s opinion, are close to what they were right after the abolition of slavery.

    But this essay is not about Trump and Trumpism. It is about language in general, with special reference to the OED’s disturbing choice of “post-truth” as the word of the year 2016. Many decades ago, the highly respected American Senator from the State of New York, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, expressed the words of the second epigraph to this essay: You are entitled to your own opinion; you are not entitled to your own facts. This shows clearly that the phenomenon of substituting opinion for facts has been around in American politics for a long time. One can even go back in time and to other countries and cultures to establish the long, perhaps even ancient roots of this phenomenon of substituting opinions – very often extremely wild, improbable and dangerously untruthful opinions – for facts and truth. Thus, I think here of Aristophanes and his play, The Clouds, written and staged in ancient Greece more than seven thousand centuries ago but still incredibly relevant in our age in its dramatization of how, among the Sophists, it was considered much better to have clever opinions than truth or wisdom on one’s side in an argument or struggle. Closer tin time, I think of George Orwell’s novel,Nineteen-Eighty-four(1949),and the neologism that it gave to the English language, “newspeak” which denotes use of language that manufactures facts from mere opinion and then declares the new “facts” the very essence of truth. And still much closer in time to the present moment in history, I think of the American presidential elections of 2012 when Mitt Romney’s campaign manager made the following loud declaration: our campaign will not be dictated by Fact-Checkers! This was made in response to the many, many lies that were found in the Romney campaign’s lies about the welfare policies of the Obama administration. Indeed, I think here of the use of the prefix “post” with some key words to produce terms that are then liable to mean different things to different peoples, terms like “post-feminist”, “post-racial”, “post-Marxist”, “post-historical”, “post-political” and even “post-contemporary”. “Post-truth”, I contend, comes in the wake and wears the composite mask of these “postist” terminologies. What does this mean?

    In the present discussion, we have room or time to consider only “post-racial” and “post-feminist”. In both cases, there is a doubleness and an ambiguity in the suggestion that while racism and patriarchy seem to have respectively been transcended, those who have been the historic victims of racism and patriarchy cannot afford to rest on their oars, secure in the knowledge that racists and misogynists can never again accede to power and authority in the country or the world. In other words, the prefix, “post” suggests in these two terms that the world is beyond racism and patriarchy, at least in their old and consolidated forms; but the most astute and effective anti-racists and anti-sexists insist that racism and misogyny are still very much around, sometimes in their most backward and recalcitrant forms and expressions. As a matter of fact, in the campaign of Donald Trump in the recent American electoral cycle, racism and misogyny of the most pernicious types reared their heads and struck viciously once again. So much for talk of the post-racial and post-feminist as mobilizing, energizing terms and slogans for radical and progressive women and men!

    So far in this discussion, there has been a rather indirect or muted suggestion that terms coined from the prefix, “post” are ideologically and politically neutral, subject to use or deployment by both the Right and the Left. In general, this is factually correct, though I would argue that on balance, more leftist radicals and progressives use the terms than do right-wing ideologues. In other words, you generally cannot tell whether a pundit or an analyst is left-wing or right-wing simply by the use or deployment of any of these terms, “post-racial”, “post-feminist”, “post-political”, post-ideological” etc., etc. I think the philologists of the OED probably intend the same kind of ideological neutrality in their definition of “post-truth” though, of course, they do not seem to withhold moral critique from their definition. If that is the case, the question arises as to why I am in this essay applying the term, “post-truth” exclusively to the right-wing anti-globalists of the present period, as implied in that part of the title of this piece that talks of “the anti-globalism of the Right”. Is this an expression of ideological bias on my part?

    My answer to the preceding question is, quite frankly, I hope not. Although as a Leftist, I am not ideologically neutral, I do not however claim superior moral rectitude or sanctity for the Left. In my personal experience of intellectual and ideological struggles within the Left both in Nigeria and internationally, I have found as much opportunism and as much cynicism as can be found in the general population of all the countries of the world. If this is the case, it seems to me that there is a special reason why “post-truth” is far more in evidence among the Right than the Left in contemporary history’s anti-globalism. This observation leads to the concluding thoughts of this piece in which I address this central thesis of why “post-truth” is almost exclusively a feature of Right-wing demagoguery of European and North-American nations, with perhaps the possible exception of the Right-wing jihadists of the Middle East and its European diasporas.

    At this point in the discussion, it is perhaps useful to give a few concrete examples of the most volatile and “active” of the “post-truths” of the Euro-American anti-globalist Right. One of the most infamous is their claim, expressed as a “fact”, that global warming and climate change are nothing but hoaxes invented by globalists to keep American and European workers as perpetual victims of ever faltering levels of industrial production. There is also the feeling greatly touted as a “fact” that the United Nations is a “World Government” in disguise whose real aim is to ultimately subjugate America to the dominance of a cabal of bankers, financiers and hedge fund manipulators. The so-called “clash of civilizations” between the East and the West, between Christianity and Islam, is another major item in the obdurate “post-truth” of the worldview of these new ideological armies of the Right in America especially but also in Europe. Is this construction also an item of “post-truth” which states that the end of the world is near, that things are about to change worldwide into patterns of new alliances of friendly and enemy nations and regions of the world? I think it is. One of its strangest expressions has been the persistent belief of close to two-thirds of the American Right that Barrack Obama is not an American; that he is a Moslem whose mission in America was or has been to weaken the country so decisively that its enemies can then easily finish off the rump that remains of the once-hegemonic and exceptionalist global superpower.

    We end these sobering reflections on a note that brings all our observations in the essay to a consideration of the links between language, bigotry and power. We started by identifying and affirming the many metaphors that we have of language: as a prison; as free, open spaces of light and freedom; and as a labyrinth in which one can get lost irredeemably. In none of these metaphors is there a real or strong hint of the play of power. This is all well and good, at least nominally. Any individual, any group can play with and in language, as long as the effects, for good or ill, are confined to the self/selves and its/their immediate circles of friends and associates. But once the link is made or forged with the interests or fates of millions, of hundreds of millions, once we are talking of the survival of entire peoples or indeed of our planetary community, we are talking of language as a basis for the actualization of our worst fears and nightmares. Look carefully, dear reader, at each and all of the items in our profile of the “post-truths” of the American Right and think on this observation: with Trump in the White House and with many of similar leaders of “white nationalism” on the cusp of gaining power in forthcoming general elections, all these “post-truths” are about to become state policies of a segment of the world that has economic and ideological power far beyond any other region of the planet.

    It is not my intention to end this piece on a note of pessimism and despair. For this reason, I shall end with the following crucial observation: there was and still is an anti-globalism of the Left and the progressive forces of the diverse regions of the world that did not and does not base itself on “post-truths”. Let us hope that its ideological and moral force will be more than equal to the oncoming policy onslaughts of the anti-globalism of the Right.

    Biodun Jeyifo                                                                                                 bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Kano Shiites violence and looming darkness

    DURING last Monday’s symbolic Arbaeen trek by Shiites in Kano, nine people were reportedly killed when violence broke out between policemen and the sect. Eight of the dead were Shiite members and one was a policeman. The police had warned against any procession, citing security reasons, but the sect embarked on the trek, also citing freedom of religion reasons. The state’s police commissioner, Rabiu Yusuf, who spoke to the press after the violence, claimed that the sect blocked roads, inconvenienced the public and were armed ‘to the teeth’ with bows and arrows, machetes and catapults. A day later, the Inspector General of Police (IGP), Idris Ibrahim, justified the killings, insisting that the sect members were armed and the police had a responsibility to maintain law and order and defend themselves.

    The two police officers argued that rather than criticise the disproportionate force employed by the police in tackling the Shiites, they expected Nigerians to appreciate the sacrifice policemen make to keep the peace. Religious freedom, said the IGP incredulously, should be limited to places of worship only. It was apparent policemen had preconceived ideas of how to tackle the obstreperous Shiites far above the rights vouchsafed sect members by the constitution and way beyond the menace the police, presidency and members of the public think they constitute. The Kano killings, a disturbing progression from the December 12-14 Zaria killings in which soldiers killed and buried 347 Shiite members, and the October attacks orchestrated by the public and the police in Sokoto, Kano, Katsina and Kaduna against sect members during one of their processions, seem to illustrate how unprofessionally and provocatively the government is handling the Shiites crisis.

    What is not in doubt is that the All Progressives Congress (APC) governments at the federal and at many states levels do not have an inspiring idea of how to handle dissent and deviancy. Very quickly, and when sufficiently provoked, they often dispense with the law and the constitution. In Zaria last December, they argued that the Shiites were attempting to constitute a state within a state. How that deviancy, even if proved, justified the killing of 347 people, many of them women and children, is not clear. Why the Kaduna State government summarily also proscribed the Shia movement in Kaduna State, and Plateau State followed suit, is also hard to explain. Of course the inanity of the proscription is already dawning on the state governments. They will need extraordinary amount of killings, indeed genocide, to exterminate the sect. Such gargantuan atrocity is no longer possible. Indeed, even the Zaria killings, and perhaps too, the new Kano killings, will sometime in the future be the subject of a major probe. The masterminds of those killings and the governments which connived at them will be called to account.

    Unfortunately, Nigerians have been lulled into acquiescing to the killings on the grounds that the Shiites are a problematic sect. It is true that the sect, especially during symbolic processions, has been insufferable and imposing. It is also true that some state governments have been frustrated by their seeming impotence in reining in the very expressive and muscular sect. But it is incumbent on the government to intelligently find ways and methods of keeping the peace rather than resorting to genocide. Instigating the public to attack the sect, as happened in Kaduna, Katsina and Sokoto, leading to the death of some 13 Shiite members, is shocking and deplorable. Killing them, as was done in Zaria last year and Kano last week, is nothing but genocide for which the law enforcement agents and their minders will be called to account. Moreover, the sect’s leader, Ibrahim el-Zakzaky, has been detained without trial and without warrant for about a year in open defiance of the law and the constitution.

    What is even worse is that with each state-sanctioned deadly crackdown, the sect is being goaded into defiance until, if care is not taken, they respond violently. It happened with Boko Haram, which sadly the police themselves precipitated when they extrajudicially murdered sect leader Mohammed Yusuf and two others. The trial of the policemen accused of that extrajudicial murder has virtually grounded to an indefensible halt. The country is in uproar in many areas, with more revolts either breaking out or planned. The law enforcement and security agencies are stretched to the limit. What wisdom do Nigerian leaders need to rein in deviant citizens that they cannot find in past examples of mishandled revolts?

  • Building the Nigerian University of the future

    This week, dear reader, I have donated my space to a reader who is reacting to one of my very many assertions in this column on the ever topical Nigerian educational system, particularly the university. The opinions are the writer’s. 

    The mechanisms for the search and use of knowledge have evolved over time and education has remained at the root of this evolutionary process. Human resource development remains one of the key drivers of growth for this process. Evidence abounds however, that countries that have paid particular attention to their educational system and have encouraged the active search for knowledge through research and innovation have succeeded in creating the environment for rapid growth. These were the words of Professor Michael Kwanashe, the Vice Chancellor of Veritas University, Abuja.

    In the social structure of the middle ages, institutions of higher learning undoubtedly were centres of power and prestige, protected and courted and even deferred to, by emperors, kings and popes. This is hardly the case in modern times as the evolution of societies has produced more powerful social forces than that represented by “teachers and students”. Over the centuries, universities continued to struggle for autonomy and academic freedom. However, the freedom which the association of students and teachers sought in the medieval times to enable them operate effectively has remained under attack ever since. Kings, emperors and prelates have sought to subject universities to their strict control with little success.

    The challenges confronting Nigerian universities are numerous, with funding being at the top of the list. The funding and organization of universities vary widely between different countries around the world. In some countries universities are predominantly funded by the state, while in others, funding may come from donors or from fees which students attending the university must pay. Like many developing countries, Nigeria has very good universities. However, funding remains one of the most pressing constraints to their development. This is because funding has progressively declined as states have become unable to fund public budgets in the face of economic crisis.

    Universities generally expect support from the state and industry to undertake research and play expected roles in national development. In many developing countries, the level of support is very limited. States faced with serious challenges supporting national budgets are unlikely to invest in research in their universities. The private sector on the other hand, relies on offshore research facilities and provides embodied technology through investments in these countries.

    The division of labour promoted by globalization entails a process whereby new ideas are generated in few countries and isolated companies, and are then transmitted around the world. Local universities and research institutes cannot compete with these offshore facilities, either in stronger and older universities in advanced countries or industrial facilities which are developed by multinational companies that can finance these facilities far better than the governments of poor countries. A number of developing countries such as India among others have had major inroads into this business of self-help. Today, India competes favourably in the area of communication and information technology. However, due to institutional decay and inability to constantly review curricular contents, Nigerian universities cannot meet this aspect of their mandate. Local consumers of knowledge in developing countries are forced to patronize institutions that dominate the global knowledge industry.

    In our modern world, inclusive development has to be driven by knowledge. The country will not develop as rapidly as the population expects without the ability to generate, use and transfer knowledge across all facets of society. That is why the government appears to be waking up to the demands for university education by establishing at least a federal university in the thirty states and approving a state university in each state and granting licenses for the establishment of private universities all over Nigeria. In the month of October, 2016 nine new federal universities were approved by the Federal Government.

    The universities therefore keep increasing in the face of limited capacities. Unfortunately, however, constant disruptions of academic calendar by students and staff for whatever reasons, cultism, sexual harassment and progressively poorer quality of graduates reflect the growing decay of the system. Universities in Nigeria as in other developing countries continue to lag behind in the ranking of world’s universities reflecting their inability to meet the standards set by institutions established centuries ago.

    While states have the resources to fund their universities, they have all failed in doing so of recent in Nigeria as payment of salaries has become a nightmare while other over-head costs have not stopped flowing in the regular direction. TETFUND projects on some state university campuses have not suffered any hitch since that is where the booties come from for the executive.

    Private universities are the future of the Nigerian system, some Nigerians aver. As shown by the experience in other parts of the world, they can provide flexibility in content and the location of universities. With effective oversight from NUC, private universities would provide the diversity and dynamism that is required in the system.

    To ensure that the university system responds to the evolving situation in the country, there is an urgent need for internal reforms in the universities. The Nigerian university system is still dominated by Federal-Government-owned universities. They account for the largest number of students in the system. Lack of funds is certainly a major constraint, but universities must pay more attention to learning outcomes. The same amount of resources could produce two different outcomes based on the quality of management of the university system.

    Furthermore, the ills of the Nigerian society have very steadily crept into the Nigerian university system. Universities that were set up as national universities are no longer national in outlook but state and more recently local government universities. The various divides that characterize the wider society are rife in these institutions – intolerance of differences of opinion, differences in culture, differences in religion and ethnic differences.

    The universities around the country are losing not just what made great universities acquire the present status of world-best universities but what makes them universities – the openness to the search for knowledge and the truth. Nigerian universities are increasingly getting closed up and inward-looking tending towards increased mediocrity in the bid to claim ownership of or exercise right of control over them.

    University management must be a source of inspiration for the university community. Management has the primary responsibility of protecting the integrity of the university, and ensuring that the university fulfils its mission and vision. There is a need for institution and management strengthening in the university system. The United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organizations’ (UNESCO) report required universities to respond adequately to the challenges of African development.

    Universities in developing countries face the challenge of being relevant to their societies. They need to develop the capacity to address the challenges of developing societies in a highly biased global economy. While universities have generally mirrored those in older countries, they have largely engaged in transferring knowledge created and advanced by the developed world which of course has focused on solving problems of their societies. Nigerian universities should retain their relevance to the masses, many of whom may never see the four walls of the university but whose resources are used to sustain the universities.

    Lastly, a responsible university leadership will prioritize staff and students’ welfare and not focus on only contracts and building projects. Such leaderships have not keyed into the anti-corruption campaign of the Federal Government. Universities must be and remain the moral compass of society. If they are able to do this, the glory of the good old days and the rewards of righteousness enjoyed by the envied world-class universities would be Nigeria’s for the taking.

  • No to typewriters in our schools!

    Why should secondary school students in 2016 be asked to buy a typewriter for whatever subject?

    This was the question I was forced to ask on my facebook timeline last Monday following a request by my son who is in a federal government school for a typewriter. He and his classmates have been asked to buy the old typing machine for Business Studies.

    I found it hard to understand why in the present, modern technology-driven world, young students who are digital natives and not immigrants like me should be asked to learn typing the way I did in 1982 at the Mass Communication department of University of Lagos with Olympia typewriters.

    As if to confirm how outdated the typewriter is, it was difficult to find one to buy since they are no longer produced. We had to settle for a used one which we were not sure was still good enough to learn with. Nobody produces typewriters again, yet the school curriculum for training our children in public schools still requires that they learn manual typing.

    If my son, like most of his classmates can use desktops, laptops and IPads better than I can, why take them back to the old age machine? My facebook post expectedly triggered a rage about how largely static the curriculum for teaching in our educational institutions are. Like one of those who responded to my post stated, it is a confirmation of the institutional deficiencies and decay in our educational system.

    If the students are supposed to become leaders of tomorrow like we claim, why we should stick to training them with yesterday’s technology in the present global village we live in. How are they supposed to compete with their peers locally and internationally when we are not ready to give them the benefit of what today’s technology makes possible?

    The argument that it is faster to learn typing with typewriters is contestable considering that there are touch-typing softwares which are more user-friendly. There are those who also noted that lack of electricity may also be a problem with using computers in some schools.

    My answer is that what happens when eventually the typewriters are no longer available to buy since they are no longer produced? There is no good excuse to remain analogue in a digital age.

    Except in very insignificant cases, nobody uses typewriter again for any serious task and we cannot afford to stick to the old ways of doing things when there are better options.

    Those in charge of the curriculum and the teachers should wake up to constantly ensure that the school curriculum takes into cognisance present day realities.

    There is no point training students with outdated curriculum if our goal is to give them functional education.

    Another response aptly captures what has become of the typewriter, Olympia has fallen. There is no point raising a dead horse.

  • Okon adds kataba to the menu

    It is said that when a man is floored by a big tribulation, lesser misfortunes clamber on top. It is hard to know how the crazy boy called Okon got to know of snooper’s fiscal inability to procure his occasional after lunch cigar from the local supermarket. It may be due to the occasional lament about the evaporation of the old academic class and its occupational perks which in those halcyon days often included chomping on fat cigars.

    The austerity has even extended to international travels. The last time a friend had to go abroad, he had to make do with a ticket procured from Air Shokolokobangosay, an airline which flies Tupolev aircrafts remaindered from the old Angolan civil war and a special hardship cabin known as Comrade. Events were approaching a dark climax.

    It was with such heavy thoughts of looming class evisceration that snooper approached the house not knowing that an even more unworthy drama was brewing. The entire sitting area was invaded by the smell of raw tobacco. Adept nostrils already used to the smell of fumigating and public smoking quickly apprehended the culprit. There under greyish duvetthat had seen better days were four crude and clumsy rolls of fresh tobacco straight from provincial dead-ends.

    “What is this nonsense smelling?” snooper thundered.

    “Ha, oga no vex, na tobacco, na real kataba”, the mad boy replied with a devilish smile.

    “And what is my business with that?”snooper demanded.

    “Ha oga as money no reach buy dem original taba from dem supermarket, naim I come send demmala make dem buy dem better taba from Iseyin make oga mouth no come go idle”, the crazy boy noted with a sly wink at Baba Lekki who just walked in.

    “Is now very clear that you have gone out of your mind”, snooper stuttered.

    “ Öga, abi di thin no big enough? Abi make I put dem thin wey baba dey smoke weydey make him head dey do gbigigbigiand gbagagbaga”, the crazy boy continued.

    “Add better Indian hemp make the yeye man come smoke am make him head come kaput. Put dem seed make dem come explode for him gelede face. Na dat one demdey call real local sourcing” Baba Lekki yelled.

    “What? “snooper muttered in disbelief. Before anyone could comment any further, the crazy old crook suddenly lit up his monster pipe and huge fumes enveloped everywhere.

    “You see, that is lesson 1 in supply side Economics. You must smoke what you produce and inhale what you exhale”, the old man noted with a professorial frown and walked away.

  • Trump and fateful U.S. election

    Trump and fateful U.S. election

    ONE of the reasons the United States of America is pejoratively called the policeman of the world is its insistence on global adherence to the values and virtues that have ennobled humanity over the centuries. The policeman was not always the best law and rights enforcer, and sometimes he showed himself to be clay-footed, but he projected human rights in ways that endeared him to many counties, made him denounce Chinese and Russian abridgement of those rights, caution and cajole African countries to embrace strong institutions instead of promoting strongmen, and often try to coax or discipline the rest of the world to embrace libertarian values. In short, the U.S., despite its own weaknesses and appalling race records, rose over the last hundred years to become the conscience of the world, especially when juxtaposed against Europe’s equivocation, malleability and vacillation. Whether acknowledged or not, it was this zeal to promote and defend human rights and other great human values that have propelled America to world leadership. Military machines are a small part of that greatness.
    But that position is today threatened by the Republican Party’s Donald Trump’s victory in last week’s presidential poll. Hillary Clinton of the Democratic Party lost. Mr Trump’s life and ideas, if they are worth anything, brutally and arrogantly refute the foundations of America’s greatness. The vacuum a Trump presidency will, therefore, create will not simply foster fascist regimes, it will also obliterate any obstacle to authoritarianism, whether in Asia or more accurately in Africa, especially in places where there is no genuine democratic conviction. Even before Mr Trump won the election, some African countries had prepared their exit from the International Criminal Court (ICC), fearing that the court unfairly targets them. That exit may now be hastened. Since Mr Trump never believed in women’s rights, press freedom and the rights and liberties of minorities, his dangerous proclivity will encourage African countries like Nigeria already struggling with the constraining concept of the rule of law to pussyfoot.
    Worse, in the near future, there will be no one to fill the vacuum the US. under Mr Trump will be creating: not China, not Russia, and not Europe. The U.S. may be confronting a major tragedy of untold proportions with the assumption of office of a businessman and politician who finds the inspiring philosophies and uplifting examples of the great framers of the American constitution an inconvenience, but the tragedy is worse for Africa whose rulers have never felt comfortable with constitutions they love to amend for entirely selfish reasons, or the rule of law, which they foolishly believe limits their elbow room to impose law and order. The scale of the tragedy will begin to manifest in the next one year or so as more countries take the liberty to enact and inspire their own cocktails of repressive measures to whip their countries into line, as the Filipino president Rodrigo Duterte has already done. With the emergence of the vacuous Mr Trump, there will be no one left to give voice to the voiceless, and no one found to defend the defenceless. With so repugnant a personality promoted into the White House by essentially economic and racist reasons, it is no exaggeration to say that American prestige and power will start to erode, and with it the signal virtues that had shaped human development in the past few decades, and which America was its chief custodian.
    Commentators have focused almost exclusively on Mr Trump’s personal failings to justify their intense disapproval of him. He had trounced their darling candidate, Mrs Clinton, whose foibles are, however, not as shocking or off-putting as that of the Republican Party’s candidate. But in the end, even if reluctantly, the outraged world which had looked to the U.S. for leadership and had expected a fairly predictable and cerebral person to occupy the White House, has no choice but to concede to American voters the right to put anyone they like in office, whether that choice is sensible or not. The almost universally reviled Mr Trump will now have the distinguished honour of sitting on the chair once occupied and ennobled by George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.
    There are fears the president-elect will be unable, even incapable, of ennobling that distinguished chair. As many leading U.S. newspapers have said and defiantly reiterated in excoriating editorials even after the election, the president-elect ran a most divisive and appalling campaign that bore disturbing parallels to German fascist propaganda in the 1930s. But he won, obviously because his campaign and what he stands for resonated hugely with the electorate, especially the disaffected, anxious and dispossessed middle-class working American families, many of whom some analysts suggest would probably have voted for the Democratic Party presidential aspirant, Bernie Sanders, had the Vermont senator been picked. But whether Mrs Clinton’s loss had to do with her seeming inability to develop a resonating message or her character flaws, or with Mr Trump’s destructive manipulation of base and bigoted emotions, or with the meddling of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), or with other more arcane and complex issues, both external and local, the Democrats lost the election and must contend with that fact, including how to rebuild their party’s platforms going forward.
    Whoever won the election would have had to contend with an obviously bitterly divided America. The idiosyncratic Mr Trump will naturally have a much tougher job of healing those divisions since he was in fact the major exponent of the polarisation certain to convulse the American system for a long time to come. His spontaneity, abrasiveness, coarseness, not to say his indefensible attitude towards the media, women and minorities, are bound to reverberate throughout the system. Mr Trump, as president-elect, should naturally be transforming from a campaigner to president, assuming he is capable of that separation. But there is nothing he has said or done before and after his victory that gives hope he is in fact capable of separating the two contrasting and presumably conflicting personalities: one so repugnant it is hard to imagine it on the American throne, and the other so abysmally flighty it is frightening to imagine what damage it could do to American prestige internationally. Either way, U.S. voters may soon discover they have probably bought a pig in a poke.
    The American voter knows where the shoe pinches him, and therefore has the right to choose a president who may not necessarily fit into the perspectives, and cater to the sensitivities, of the rest of the world. But it is dangerous when, despite the developments around the world, that voter appears inured to the political events around him, especially events that have far-reaching consequences for U.S power and global peace. No candidate who understands the components of U.S. power and global dominance can afford to undermine or disregard his country’s media, or sneer at the values the country has projected over the decades, many of which have become universally accepted. By electing Mr Trump, American voters have not seemed to demonstrate the discriminating, nuanced and breathtaking understanding expected of citizens of a superpower country. They are not infallible. Nor does it seem they gave too much thought to the control insidiously exercised by outsiders on their electoral process through WikiLeaks and the alleged Russian-inspired hacking of the Democratic Party computer servers and Hillary Clinton’s emails.
    Post-election protests will not reverse the outcome of the election. They’ll only probably remind Mr Trump that the country is more divided than he thinks, and perhaps also compel him to recognise that more people actually voted for his opponent than his electoral college dominance implies. It is not obvious he would be restrained by that fact, nor by the widespread protests against his victory. He is also unlikely to understand the implications of the resurgent and probably destructive nationalism his election will engender. That nationalism was triggered by Brexit which saw the United Kingdom exiting the European Union (EU). That nationalism, which the U.S. under Mr Trump will domesticate and encourage, may sweep through Europe dealing a final death blow to multiculturalism and the balance of power that had seemed to sustain peace on the continent for many decades. That nationalism, which may gradually morph into some form of isolationism in the U.S., will, however, be unable to anticipate and checkmate the nationalism of competing powers such as Russia and the stable and prosperous China. In fact, it may even partially weaken the intricate network of alliances and military coalitions that have guaranteed world peace and stability.
    The U.S. president-elect cannot give what he does not have. Regardless of whether he surrounds himself with competent aides or not, and assuming his presidency is not hijacked like that of George W. Bush was captured by the demagogic exponents of the New American Century, Mr Trump will continue to his erratic, bombastic self. That self is, sadly, fundamentally at odds with the principles and practice of democracy. And though the simple arithmetic of his election cannot be questioned, that self really possesses instincts that are wrongly placed to detect just how pervasively his person and views chip away at the enduring symbols and ramparts of American superpower status.
    Disturbingly, many analysts are beginning to fear that the cracks they see in the U.S. may be reminding them of Rome in the Fifth century, Macedonian Empire after Alexander the Great, and even Britain after World War II when a paranoid Winston Churchill mournfully complained that the exhausting and debilitating military victory achieved over Adolf Hitler had sapped Britain of its vitality and transferred global dominance into the hands of the U.S. That country across the Atlantic, added Mr Churchill gloomily, might be too naive or too inexperienced to understand the Soviet Union, and too bewitched and undiscriminating to understand the complex nuances of the geopolitics of power. Might history be repeating itself, or had finally a moron taken the White House who is both incapable of ennobling the American seat of power and of being ennobled by it, no matter how much the system tried?

  • Trump Triumphant

    Trump Triumphant

    The Revenge of the old Right

    This past week will long be remembered in American and global history as the week when the unthinkable became the unavoidable. Donald Trump is the president-elect of the United States of America. All lovers of liberal democracy and its most bullish rampart must be saddened by this development. In a way this may presage the precipitous decline of America’s global hegemony, the unravelling of the nation-state paradigm and the resurgence of the ancient National Question even in the most seemingly secure nation on earth.

    The auguries are hideous but intriguing. In their haste to dismiss the old establishment, the Americans handed over their country and its nuclear arsenal to a man without any record of public service and one that had been adjudged by many to be temperamentally unfit to handle sensitive matters. But the nightmare having become a throbbing reality, the daydreaming must stop henceforth. Realpolitik suggests that Donald Trump must be promptly engaged before he can do any grievous damage to his country and the world at large.

    The blissful but not so innocent narrative of relentless human progress has now been dramatically halted on the plains of Middle America and in the same country where such possibility was first mooted at least in modern history. Once again, we are confronted by the fact that humankind is not a fallen angel but a rising hominid. But more important, America is sending signals to the rest of the world that the modern nation is no longer an expanded community of organic values. Everybody must find their way out of the apocalyptic cave. Picking up the pieces from this Trumpian inferno may take quite some time.

    For twelve long and lonely hours on Tuesday, yours sincerely kept vigil with the American people and the American dream. It is not for a love of hyperbole that American presidential contests have been described as “the American melodrama”. It is full of strange turns and twists. It is breathless and breath-taking in sheer electrifying drama. It is not a political fare for the fainthearted.

    It was a nail-chewing finale. For sheer poetic beauty perhaps nothing could beat the CNN female anchor who casually and offhandedly blurtedout that there was no more nail to bite. At 2 am Nigerian time when the tide began to turn strongly and finally against Hillary Clinton, yours sincerely decided to call several Nigerians living in the US. Not a single one returned the call. It was an ominously pregnant development. The called could no longer hear the caller. Donald Trump was about to be loosed upon the world. America will never be the same again.

    Yet according to virtually all known and unknown pundits, it was supposed to be history of a different and more ennobling type that was in the making. America was all set to complete a historic double. All trends and political statistics pointed to the election of Hillary Clinton as the first female president of the United States. Having elected Barack Obama as its first African-American president, America was on its way to becoming a truly egalitarian society by electing its first female executive. The gender glass ceiling was about to be shattered forever.

    But it was not be. History does not progress in such neat and linear geometrical order. America may now have to wait for years and even decades before such a perfect opportunity presents itself again, and probably in diminished circumstances. In a cruel irony of fate, the Obama presidency itself may now be viewed by posterity as a last-ditch effort by the American establishment to stem the tide of evil political retrogression and social anarchy; a heroic effort to circle the waggon before the whole country goes under in a tsunami of right-wing extremism leavened by ethnic and religious bigotry.

    A decent, solid and dignified fellow brimming with compassion and the milk of human kindness, this is not the kind of history Barack Obama would have wished to make or the kind of legacy he would have wanted to be associated with. But as this column never tires of asserting, history often moves forward by lurching sideways. In the fullness of time and when the historical meandering has run its course, Obama would be rightly regarded as an avatar of modern American history.

    Although history moves in a mysterious manner often beyond the full and immediate comprehension of humankind, there are many codes that can be enlisted in cracking the mystery. Many discerning observers have noted that there is a familiar global ring to what is happening in America. It is duly noted that the global resurgence of right-wing fascism and extreme ethnic nationalism coupled with religious fundamentalism has berthed in America and found fertile and productive soil.

    The Donald Trump phenomenon in its shrill xenophobia and crude loathing of the other is all at one with the Brexit vote that has crippled Great Britain, the persistence of ultra-nationalist parties in France, the resurgence of Neo-Nazi groups in Germany and the xenophobic murmurings despite Angela Merkel’s countervailing personal heroism, Russia’s relapse into an ancient pan-Slavic nationalism and the human fiasco the Middle East has become. This is not to talk of the devastated phantom nations of post-colonial Africa. It is a broken world crying to be fixed.

    But in order to do this we must get certain myths out of the way. As we have seen with the current demographic crisis in Europe and the revolt of the right in America, all human societies no matter the development and the sophistication behave in the same manner when faced with want, hunger, generalized fear and insecurity. They turn their xenophobic fury and paranoid resentment on those who do not belong to their ethnic and religious categories. Even in racially homogeneous societies, they pounce on those who do not share clannish commonalities with them.

    The notion of a lunatic fringe is one of the comforting myths of modern civilization. The lunatic fringe is not so much a fringe of lunacy as it is a glimpse into the darkness of the human heart in which subliminal impulses common to all are given free expression or acted out by a few. When the chips are down, the fringes disappear but not the lunacy. The genocidal Hutu tribesmen of Rwanda, the old German middle class that acted as Hitler’s compliant executioners, the implacable isolationists who voted for Brexit in Britain and the millions who have just voted for Donald Trump cannot be regarded as belonging to a fringe of the society. They are the mainstream acting in errant communality.

    To be sure since its inception as a nation, America has always boasted of such extremist, murderously xenophobic groups: White Aryan Resistance, the Ku Klux Klan, White Order of Thule, the White Knights etcwho might have been responding to the wanton brutality and savagery that accompanied the birth of America as the most modern nation the world had seen.

    Yet the notion of American Exceptionalism inheres in the fact that by coming up with rules, laws, institutions and ideals which should nudge the sweltering commonwealth of disparate souls to a higher telos, the American founding fathers and many of their successors have managed to restrict the savage contrarians to their primeval forests and the antediluvian margins of American society.

    These American titans were far from being perfect. In fact some of them were morally culpable while one or two were psychologically flawed in a profound manner. But their fundamental nobility of spirit and considerable intellectual talents enabled them to rise above their own human failings to envision a better and more humane societyand one to be guided by the finer ideals of civilization. The brotherhood of humanity, irrespective of race, creed and social status is one of these ideals.

    But where hunger and want prevail, where inequity and inequality of staggering and idiotic proportions persist, the prospects of a better and more humane society evaporate and the brotherhood of humanity disappears. The result is a hopelessly divided and bitterly polarized society which paves the way for the emergence of a reactionary right-wing huckster and hustler like Donald Trump. It is all so eerily reminiscent of the rise of NAZI Germany.

    If there is a silver lining in this cloud that has descended on the greatest liberal democracy the world has seen, it is that no society can afford to take its own goodness and greatness for granted. Donald Trump is a mere symptom of a more fundamental human malady. This is where the death of good old socialism as a countervailing global force against the grosser moral and political absurdities of savage capitalism must be regretted.

    Given the fallibility and frailty of human nature, the communist dream of a paradise on earth may represent a phantom impossibility. But while its writ was in place in vast swathes of human space, it compelled and committed the capitalist world to momentous social re-engineering which birthed a more humane and compassionate society in leading capitalist countries.

    For these nations, the fear of a communist take-over was the beginning of wisdom. With the collapse of the socialist world, the capitalist order has reverted to the sadistic prototype of the Dickensian bleak house. History works in mysterious ways and without realising it, humanizing capitalism may well have been the main historic leitmotif of the socialist challenge.

    After the collapse of socialism, America has not been helped by the intellectual and ideological quietude from other global epicentres of knowledge production. Beyond the early stirring of Negritude, all has been quiet on the African intellectual front, except the jejune mimicry of western ideologies of the right and left by its jaded middlemen of ideas. It is only in South America where an alternative narrative to western modernity has evolved, where the concept of No-Capitalism has been developed and where Liberation Theology flourished among its Jesuit intellectuals that there is a stirring of redemptive hope for humanity.

    Do we then say so long America? It may be too early to count out God’s own country. For one, its major state institutions remain in place as the seamless transition from Obama to Trump attests. The funeral of a lion is not a spectacle for domestic dogs.As the most powerful nation the world has seen, America must now find it within its soul and spirit to recover the essence of American Exceptionalism and the repudiation of its finer ideals which the ascendancy of Donald J Trump represents.In the interim, welcome to trumped America.