The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tatalo Alamu

  • Structural contingency and human agency

    Structural contingency and human agency

    As Justice Kutigi’s gavel brought the Jonathan constitutional conference to an abrupt conclusion, little would the eminent and distinguished jurist realise that there is a greater array of forces at play in this matter than the motley assemblage he had just dispersed. There is a touch of historical irony about all this in the sense that in the heat of human contention, a historical actor cannot see himself the way history sees him.

    An otherwise decent and fair-minded jurist, Kutigi was called upon to play the role of a political titan in order to midwife a new order for Nigeria against the run of play and the play of structural contingency. It was a role for which he was signally and historically ill-equipped. But he has wisely refused to play the political messiah, choosing to play along with avuncular relish.

    The witty Nupe man knows one or two things about bucolic wisdom. Those who are going to sell a tiger and those who are hoping to buy it must negotiate from a safe distance. Kutigi has truly and thoroughly enjoyed himself, passing the ball and the bait back to where it belongs. When the history of stumbling nations is written, it shall be said that the famed jurist and his colleagues played their part.

    The cost to the nation may be astronomical and prohibitive, but it is small beer compared to other fruitless chicaneries that have held the nation spellbound in the past. The Babangida Transition programme gulped a whole forty billion naira before it dissolved in a historic fiasco. The Obasanjo  Political Dialogue was equally prohibitive and given the underhand bribery and cajolery that characterized that exercise, nobody is ever going to know the cost. And it is morning yet on creation day.

    The Jonathan Constitutional Conference has ended as a damp squib, unable to touch the major structural disfigurations that afflict and hobble the nation. The major fault lines of the nation have surfaced once again in hideous relief. As this column has repeatedly predicted, nothing will come out of nothing. The conference was nothing but a diversionary ploy conceived as a crude weapon of consensus forgery but ending as a great charade.

    The confreres need to ask themselves why the nation is still roiling in monumental crisis with the ongoing armed critique of the state and nation by the Boko Haram insurgents assuming a national complexion, with electoral abracadabra in the air in Osun State and with a gale of impeachments turning many state assemblies into  a theatre of warfare. Surely, it takes more than additional state creations to address the issues.

    As this column has noted, Jonathan, before the conference, had two major political jokers in his possession. He could have used the conference to engineer a historic stalemate and chaos which would eventuate in a state of emergency warranting the continuation of his tenure. But judging from the way and manner the northern delegates steamrolled his core constituencies and their nominal allies forcing them into precipitate retreat each time they tried to advance, it should be obvious to the president that he has formidable adversaries who are past masters of attrition.

    Yet there is a paradoxical complicity of opposing forces in all this which speaks volumes for the impossible contradictions that beset Nigeria. While the old north wants the old structural status quo to continue, irrespective of the damage to the political fabric of the nation, the Niger Delta emergent hegemonists want the new political status quo to continue irrespective of the monumental costs of presidential incompetence to the nation. Since this is not about genuinely moving the nation forward but about maintaining privileges and advantages, there can be no meeting of mind.

    With their eye on the main centre as an avenue for primitive accumulation and an excellent weapon for launching punitive expeditions against the rest of the nation, neither Jonathan and his cohorts nor the northern power Mafiosi are interested in a radical restructuring of the nation which will lead to new fiscal equations. The major problem between the two factions is who gets what and when.

    While the northern power merchants insist that the north has been shut out of the power loop for too long and that Jonathan should leave very soon or at most at the next election, Jonathan’s supporters are insisting that he must stay put irrespective of actual performance in office because the north had in the past held on to power for too long.

    With nothing to play for, the usually visionary and proactive Yoruba traditional powerbrokers have been reduced to political contractors and wizards of the Australian season of political pools betting. These things cannot be settled at a conference. They can only be resolved by elite pacting or an outright showdown which can only encourage extra-constitutional forces always waiting in the wings.

    This is why one must feel very sorry for the few patriots who went to the conference thinking that it was a genuine call for the structural re-engineering of the nation. They have failed to factor in the role of structural contingency in human agency. Some changes are simply impossible in certain circumstances.

    Now that the conference has come and gone without making a dent on Nigeria’s numerous ailments, Jonathan has only one major joker left, which is the electoral subjugation of the nation by hook or crook without minding whose ox is gored. Even before the conference terminated in an abrupt and undignified manner, this strategy appears to have been operationalised and is already gathering fearful momentum.

    Anyone in doubt about the arrival of Jonathan’s juggernaut only have to reflect on the events of the last few weeks: the complete militarization of the election in Ekiti State in a way that suggests that the people behind this heist harbour no illusion about justice and fair play; the electoral larceny being cooked up in Osun; and, of course, the gale of impeachments which seeks to alter the political equation in states considered unfriendly or even hostile to Jonathan.

    Such has been the psychotic daring behind these political offensives and their sheer disregard for the cultural and political sensitivities of the nation that one cannot but conclude that Jonathan is determined to be the last president of Nigeria as we know it. Given the ongoing political rebellion in the north of the country and the growing economic distemper in the land, any other violent uprising of a cultural or ethnic nature may tip the country in the wrong direction.

    Jonathan may yet get his wish in any of the areas where the government is currently fishing for trouble. Nasarawa is already astir. Al-Makura is not a”Baba Mangoro” who is completely disconnected from the populace. Given the active cultural volcano in the state which simmering just below the surface and the capacity of the Ombaatse cult for maximum mayhem, one would have thought that Jonathan and his handlers would be more discerning in their choice of confrontation.

    This must now bring us to the central thesis of this intervention which is the play of forces between human agency and structural contingency. Perhaps in the end, nothing can beat this column’s description of Jonathan as a boy-emperor handed a toy rigged with explosives. Given Jonathan’s baffling lack of elementary state wisdom and his serial breach of the complex cultural sensitivities and contending political realities of the nation, one must marvel at the ironic mockery of national fate and the convergence between human agency and structural contingency which have made a Jonathan presidency an inevitability at this critical and very crucial period in Nigeria’s history.

    To perform this conceptual shifting of gears is to leave Jonathan momentarily out of the equation and see whether we can come up with some startling insights about the state of the Nigerian state.  Structural contingency is the constellation of social, political and historical forces at any point in the life of any political society.  Human agency is the capacity of humanity to determine their destiny through both collective and individual exertion.

    It is obvious from this that nobody can act in a vacuum. As it has been famously observed by Karl Marx, men make history but not under the circumstances of their choice. In other words, human agency is conditioned and in the last instance determined by structural contingency. It is only in extreme cases of extraordinary collective heroism that certain societies manage to transcend the material basis of existence to leapfrog into a new dawn.

    If we pursue this line of thought, we may come to the startling conclusion about the grim and chilling inevitability of a Jonathan presidency at this particular point in our history which is a judicious reflection of the balance of force between agency and structural contingency. Of course, it can be argued that Jonathan had been imposed on the nation by General Obasanjo. But that is only to confirm that we were powerless in resisting the imposition in the first instance.

    Going further back, it can also be said that even Obasanjo himself is a product of our powerlessness, having been imposed on the nation by a political mafia of northern generals to watch their back and protect their interests. By this arrangement, the electors choose the winning candidate while the electorate rubberstamp the decision in “elections”.

    The only time in history when the Nigerian multitude tried to act as both electors and electorate it ended in a historic melee with the electors stepping in to vaporize and abolish both the electorate and the putative winner. That was the June 12 1993 presidential election which threw up Abiola as winner and eventual martyr of the Nigerian military state.

    The beauty of it all is that there seems to be some logic in sheer illogicality and a fundamental order to disorder. Even when it appears to be stuck in a permanent groove, there are variables to structural contingency and some variations to human agency even when it appears to be rooted in powerlessness and paralysis of the will. In the Nigerian case, there may well be a divine instrumentality to national dysfunction.

    The northern power masters put Obasanjo there to protect their interest but Obasanjo had other ideas and swiftly went after them. Obasanjo put Jonathan there probably as a clueless rookie to be manipulated at will. But it should be obvious that Jonathan is anything but anybody’s monkey marionette. In act of filial gratitude, he has gone after the political jugular of both Obasanjo and the northern feudal barons, even as he fine tunes how to decimate the dominant progressive tendency in the South West.

    It is a war of all against all which showcases an inchoate and incoherent state formation that has proved incapable of an organic transformation from a national ruling class to a nationalist ruling class almost sixty years after independence. Unfortunately and given the structural contingency, the current opposition cannot fill this vacuum as long as it remains disarticulated from forces of civil society and other potent mass organisations. It is a loyal opposition; a national coalition rather than a nationalist formation.

    We are faced with a classic political and historic conundrum. While it appears virtually impossible to move the country forward given the current structural constraints and as the failed Jonathan Constitutional Conference has shown, there is absolutely nothing stopping the country from further regressing. Yet any further regression either at the economic, political or religious level risks putting the continued existence of the nation in grave doubt and jeopardy.

    All of this, including the dramatic ascension of Jonathan and its deleterious effect on our collective existence, may represent the final working out of some deep historical and political contradictions. Like a captive audience in a horror movie, let us ask ourselves what we happen to be doing in the cinema house in the first instance.

  • Malaysia on my mind

    How much more can a nation and its stricken people take? Within a sadistic spell of six months, the good people of this beautiful and enchanting country with their quaint political institutions have suffered two major air catastrophes the likes of which are very rare and far between in aviation history.

    First, their plane flew into calamitous oblivion in an aviation mystery which remains unsolved despite feats of human endurance in inhospitable seas and the deployment of latest gadgets. Stunned and dazed by this chilling development, we mourned with the Malaysians and the rest of the world that lost human invaluable. All sorts of conspiracy theories have been flying about, but we are no nearer solving the tragic riddle.

    Now, another Malaysian plane with invaluable human capital has been shot down while flying over the apocalyptic meltdown of what used to be the Ukraine in a chilling presage of the new Cold War. When the old Cold War ended, we all rejoiced. But the new Cold War, because it is based on identity and barmy brotherhood rather than ideology, is going to be more vicious and marked by an unprecedented savage ferocity. Globalization and the democratization of the arsenal of cheap death will see to that.

    As we glimpse the site of horrific carnage and human wastage on an industrial scale, with international passports strewn all over, it looks more like a modern enactment of Dante’s inferno. Stunned and even more disoriented, we mourn with the good people of Malaysia and the world at large. It doesn’t rain but pours, and it has been pouring in the enchantingly named Kuala Lumpur.

  • The changing nature of nationality

    The changing nature of nationality

    The world learns about itself in new and unexpected ways. While it is true that old habits die hard, new fancies tend to catch on very quickly, leaving everybody breathless. As the 2014 World Cup wings to a memorable finale this evening with Argentina trying its luck against a revved up German soccer wehrmacht, there are many things that would remind one of a changing world.

    One of these is the growing reality that soccer may become a simulated war game enacted by men with superior military brains and exceptional psychological stamina. If anyone was ever in doubt, the 7-1 vaporization of Brazil by the German soccer machine laid to rest forever the old notion of the beautiful game as a moveable feast of joyous passing, gyrating body movements and ecstatic acrobatics.

    The Germans play without frills or freebies, and with a ferocious focus on the empty space between the goalposts. The charming but naïve Brazilians often croon about the open and flowing nature of their game, and the fact that they could allow their opponents to score as many goals as they can as long as nobody held their own fleet feet in fetters.

    But that was before they invented spatial and structural marking which eliminates the old man to man marking but whose devastating oversight function is unprecedented in the annals of human hindrance. It is a tight and disciplined military formation which reminds one of a dragnet of limbs unfurling as they smother the solitary limbs in contention without any fuss or fanfare. More and more, the game relies on a moment of pure magical brilliance for the exceptional player to spring the tight cordon or some ruinous lapse of concentration which is punished with swift severity.

    Ironically enough, the most telling revelation of this war of the nations on the soccer pitch is the changing nature of nationality itself and perhaps of the whole concept of nationalism. All that is solid melts into thin air in the crucible of human evolution. For decades, the forces of globalization have been eating away at the certitudes and certainties of nationality and nationalism.

    International commuters switch and switch on nationalities with the ease and facility of free citizens of an increasingly borderless world. There are now people with dual and even multiple national identities. You leave Africa as a native in the morning and arrive at an international border post in the evening bearing a new identity, thanks to work and study, or some less mentionable means.

    Often, you strongly and stoutly support the soccer team of the home country that you left behind even though you know in your heart that these boys cannot pass muster on the truly international stage. But your children have no such inhibition or ambivalence. They belong to a brave new world. Where you bloom and blossom is obviously more important than where you were born. Origin is often a source of haunting memory and inconveniences best forgotten. But it may also serve as a site of rearguard bravado against the forces of western globalization and the whole project of modernity itself.

    When the Boateng blood brothers, Jerome and Kevin Prince, entered the soccer pitch again on opposing sides during the Ghana versus Germany match little would they have known that they have been making history as far as the confrontation between the nation-state and globalization, between locality and globality, goes. It was a repeat of their June 23rd, 2010 confrontation in South Africa.

    To be sure, there have been cases of blood brothers playing for or representing different countries at one time or the other. There have also been cases of brothers representing different clubs. There are instances of great athletes and martial artists defecting to other countries even while still under oath to defend the honour and integrity of the home countries. But it is in the epic tussle between the Ghanaian Boateng and the German Boateng that the poignant ironies of contending nationalities came to the fore as never before.

    Since the two Boateng brothers bear soccer arms for two different countries, it was to be expected that when they came face to face, they might not spare each other the odd ferocious tackle. There was always the possibility of one critically injuring the other. And if it came to a real shooting war between the two countries, the possibility of legal fratricide must be very high on the cards.

    The prospects of two brothers dueling unto death are rare but not a new historical phenomenon. This one, however, comes with a novel inflection which owes its historical possibility to the forces of globalization breaking down iron barriers and old binary divisions. Had the Boateng father not been granted the opportunities of international travels, the contradictions would have remained at the level of the nation-state paradigm.

    It is useful to note how the World Cup itself owes its rise and ascendancy to globalization which tends to abolish the ancient notion of time and space. The World Cup came on the heels of dramatic developments in human transportation, particularly aerial journeys which allow humanity to obliterate different and divergent time zones with the ease and facility of a fabled magician. Had humanity been stalled at the level of nautical journeys, the logistical nightmare of transporting people and players across seas would have made the World Cup an impossible dream.

    We may yet thank God for globalization, particularly the likes of Jurgen Klinsmann, the great German soccer hero and current coach of the US soccer team. Two centuries ago, it would have been considered the highest form of state treason for a German to coach another country, particularly the bumptious and insufferable Yankees, about how to upend the great German soccer machine.

    But treason itself has become globalized and this particular variant would cut no ice with a man of Klinsmann’s Teutonic thoroughness and contempt for idiotic waffling. Judging from Klinsmann’s boundless enthusiasm for his American team on and off the pitch and the clinical precision with which he has raised the American game, it is clear that the German icon has stuck to the clause of his American contract rather than a phantom obligation to the motherland.

    This seeming infraction is unlikely to diminish Klinsmann’s iconic stature in his motherland. He will still return to Germany as a hero, if he doesn’t decide to take up an American citizenship which will be readily available. He has already paid his dues to club and country. In any case, the ubiquitous and impersonal forces of globalization have made it easier for him. Take a look at the German team as well as all the European teams at this year’s edition of the World Cup in Brazil. It is a rainbow coalition of all colour, creed and complexion. Globalization is a homogenizing Leviathan which grinds everything into conformity. Everything and everybody is grist to its crushing and compulsive mill.

    It has, however, been noted that globalization is a decidedly one-sided affair; a one-way traffic which merely revalidates the overwhelming superiority of the west and western modernity over the rest of the world. How many people voluntarily leave the west for the Third World? The balance of knowledge production is grossly and grotesquely in favour of the metropolitan centre. The ceaseless and ruthless adaption of cutting edge technology reinvents capitalism in such a way that leaves the rest of the world gasping for breath. Globalization, they claim, is just another word for the Americanization or Coca-colanization of the rest of the world.

    We do not need to look farther than the outgoing World Cup for proof that the truth is more nuanced and the reality less heavily one-sided. Slowly but inexorably, the forces of globalization have been chipping away at America’s cultural and ideological rampart. The gradual build-up of a more confident and more assured immigrant community, particularly from Africa and the human armada from Latin America who never forgot the soccer-mad culture they left at home appear to have thawed America’s resistance to soccer and the widespread belief that its almost effeminate gyrations is a psychic assault on American Exceptionalism and its Roman notion of sports as an intensely physical gladiatorial affair.

    Before our very eyes, America has become a soccer loving country. This World Cup has witnessed an unprecedented rise in American viewership. Enthusiasm for the beautiful game exploded reaching a national fever pitch during America’s last game. From a superlative futuristic bar abutting into the Pacific Ocean in a Los Angeles suburb to a dark and dingy Nigerian drinking hovel in New York, they were watching football all the way. It helped that America qualified, at least. It also helped that modern soccer has witnessed a renewed athleticism and martialization  which is in consonance with American sports’ spirit. One way or the other in this de-Brazilianization of the game, globalization has done its duty.

    So has it for the continent of Africa whose two solitary survivors were dismissed in the second round of the tournament with the continent as usual holding the short end of the stick. The first wave of globalization led to the internationalization of slavery and the enslavement of a substantial chunk of the African populace. The second wave led to the forcible cooption of the continent into the capitalist orbit. With the latest wave, African nations are being frog-matched to the post-nation frontiers without having achieved the consolidation of the nation-state paradigm.

    In a delicious and sublime instance of historic irony, it is instructive to note Nigeria stumbled to defeat from France with the two goals scored by Africans. The first by Pogba and the second an own goal scored against his team and country by Joseph Yobo, the Nigerian skipper. In its crowded eighteen, and under grave historical and political pressures, Africa always scores against itself either directly or indirectly. Neither the changing nature of nationality nor the changing epochs of globalization will put an end to that. It will take a new breed of Africans. And we have been waiting for only six hundred years.

  • Okon returns with a bang!

    It has been a long time since our boy and faithful man-Friday, Okon Anthony Okon, appeared on this page. There has been some nasty turbulence in the air. The country has been passing through some desperate times. As a result of the cruel abduction of the Chibok girls and what seems like the deliberate unfurling of armed personnel on the populace, it was decided that for his own safety, Okon  should be playing deep in his own eighteen. He was also expressly forbidden from publicly commenting on burning national issues, such as the Chibok abduction, the transformation of Boko Haram to a full blown insurgent outfit and Goodluck Jonathan’s reelection ploys.

    But there is no killing the beetle. A man who is destined for stardom is bound to achieve stardom no matter the circumstances. It was Okon’s latest “Brazilian” scam which attracted the attention of an irreverent and off-message television station owned by a Lagos billionaire. All formalities concluded, Okon, dressed like a Portuguese pirate and pole-hugging drunk, was carried shoulder-high into the premises by the usual suspects. The interviewers wasted no time with polite preambles.

    “Ha, welcome back from Afghanistan, Otunba Okon”, one of them, a sly-looking Lagos boy, opened with a knowing wink.

    “Point of incorrection!” Okon screamed at the fellow.” Number one, I no go any Afaganishan. Na oga say make I no talk because him dey fear dem sojas. Number two, I don tell una sotey say Okon no be Otunba. Otunba na yeye Yoruba title. Even dem tailor for Mafoluku dey bear Otunba. Okon be Etubom. So make dat one enter your yeye Yoruba yam head”.

    “All right, Etubong Okon. Welcome back from Brazil. I hope you didn’t return with empty hand”, the dandy Lagosian noted in smooth and sweet conciliation. But Okon was not done.

    “Dat one na Yoruba empty head talk. How man fit return from dem Brazil with empty hands after dem Germans come wire dem like dat? Even dem Abakaliki basket no fit carry all dem goals”, Okon snorted.

    “It was pure massacre”, one of the ladies, an obvious soccer fan, observed with a charm offensive. Okon immediately smelt an offside trap.

    “Ha, you see, dis na how dem Ibo ladies dey drag man for trouble. You wan make I talk about dem poor Chibok girls and wetin dem dey do to dem? Abi wetin concern massacra with dem football? Abi massacra no be dem ladies cream?” Okon sniggered as the poor woman squirmed in obvious embarrassment. Okon, lapsing into his customary bawdiness, pursued his quarry.

    “Bia, bia, my sister, wetin dem dey call dat medicine sef wey dey make man koboko very strong like dem iron rod? Sebi na Victoria abi na Niagra?  I know say dem dey call dem other one Cecilia, abi no be so?” Okon whined with devilish relish. The studio roared with laughter. Sensing that they have brought an ant-infested plank from the forest, the interviewers became very jittery.

    “All right, Chief Okon, have you learnt any lesson from the current tournament in Brazil?” the oldest man asked the increasingly excitable rogue.

    “Plenty, if you wan know. The first be say free  kick no be free. When dem Houtounji boy come finish our Onazi boy like dat, and dem award free kick, I think say dat one mean say make somebody kick dem fool freely, but no be so. Two, when dem say game don reach injury time, I think say na knife and broken bottles go settle matter. The third be say African football don kaput patapata”, Okon replied.

    “Okay, let us talk about the Ekiti election”, the other lady suggested.

    “Ha na dat one dem dey call ricesm”, Okon snorted.

    “Did you say racism?” the old man persisted.

    “I said ricesm” Okon insisted.

    “What is the philosophy?”

    “The infrastructure of philosophy is the philosophy of food infrastructure”.  It was at this point that Okon himself collapsed from drinking and philosophizing on an empty stomach.

  • History as Hubris

    History as Hubris

    (Looking back in amazement and amusement)

    With the electoral scalp of Ekiti still dripping blood from its infamous hunter’s bag, the PDP rigging guillotine is now turning its attention to Osun State. It may yet presage the end of the Fourth Republic. Osun state is the cosmopolitan jugular of the Yoruba nation. But as somebody famously observed of a Nigerian military despot, it does seem as if the rigging collective is not intelligent enough to know fear. The PDP is the modern equivalent of the Yoruba folklorist Ogboju Ode ninu Igbo Irunmole. (the brave hunter in the forest of mystery)

    Before our very eyes, Nigeria has become a forest of evil in which there is no paddy for jungle—as they say.  Yet one must marvel at the hubris of it all. As it was in the beginning so has it been at the end. Why is it that there is so much hubris in our history? Hubris, or pride and overweening self- regard , afflicts individuals, races, people, societies and nations. But it also seems to afflict certain historical epochs. Albert Einstein’s law of insanity—doing the same thing all over and expecting different results—seem to take over.

    As usual, the PDP political panzer division is led by renegade Yoruba children who do not care a hoot about the society and the nation as long as their personal ambition is fulfilled. It is not enough to say once again that they shall not pass. We need to ask far more fundamental questions. Is there something wrong and fundamentally rigged against rationality about the Yoruba leadership recruitment process, or is the Yoruba nationality gridlocked by fate to a fractious and eternally polarising political elite as decreed by Alafin Aole just before committing suicide?

    Ten years ago, on March 15, 2004, snooper laid the question bare to a distinguished audience of Yoruba elite and leading politicians at the inaugural Afenifere lecture. Why is it that each time the Yoruba nation achieves a significant degree of elite consensus and mass mobilization with grit and gruelling resolve, the wheels immediately begin to come off the armoured vehicle? The spoils of office and the politics of preferment and patronage begin to get in the way.

    As it was with Awolowo in 1962, 1979 and 1983, so it was with Abiola in 1993 and with Obasanjo’s doomed mainstream nonsense in 2003. Now in 2014 and with so many darts and poisoned arrows lobbing into Bourdillon, one is beginning to feel a sense of Déjà vu. Are the Yoruba too independent-minded for their own good, or too politically sophisticated to be locked into permanent romance and wedlock with a particular leadership formation?

    The old folks and usual suspects are restive again and anything might happen. As it is usually the case in Yoruba history, lucrative incentives from outside usually facilitate internal treachery. The Fulani conquest of their old empire was facilitated by internal perfidy. The ranking Yoruba warlord had become a law unto himself in a futile and ultimately suicidal bid for supremacy.

    According to Johnson, the fabled historian, even the fabled Prince Atiba, with an eye to his own future hegemony, deliberately allowed his flank to collapse in the decisive military confrontation. Now, conquest looms from another direction and mum is the word from those who are fixated on old battle formations. As they say in ancient Italian language, oggi a me, domani a te. (Today it is me, tomorrow it is you!)

    Sometimes, it is important to take a strategic gaze into the immediate past in order to unlock the dynamics of the immediate future. Ten years ago, when the issue of  endemic disunity among the Yoruba political elite was broached at that lecture at the Muson Centre in Lagos, there were at least three AD governors, Senator Bola Ahmed Tinubu, Aremo Olusegun Osoba and Otunba Niyi Adebayo, who bonded very well and were sworn to collective action.

    As at this moment, the trio of political musketeers have gone their different ways, and the falcon can no longer hear the falconer. One must shudder to imagine what would happen to the current ACN/APC governors in ten years time. Would they still be in the same political fold, or would they have been driven by political exigencies to bitter political enmity?

    Still looking at the ever widening Yoruba political gyre, it is useful to recall that ten years ago at the inaugural Afenifere lecture, the Publicity Secretary of the organization and one of the prime organisers of the lecture was none other than Prince Dayo Adeyeye. This very week, snooper looked on with ironic amusement as the same Ise Ekiti nobleman appeared before the senate nattily dressed and dandified  to be screened as a minister in the PDP government. Adeyeye, a former Assistant of Chief Olu Falae and two time senatorial candidate of AD/AC, left the fold as a result of the fallout of the gubernatorial dispute which led to the emergence of Kayode Fayemi as the flag bearer for Ekiti State.

    And there were others, particularly the stoic and decorous Dare Babarinsa, who left never to return. The three leading grenadiers of the current PDP onslaught on the Yoruba nation, Musliu Obanikoro, Iyiola Omisore and Jelili Adesiyan, all belonged at one time or the other to what is known as the progressive tendency. As it was at the beginning of the Action Group crisis, so it has been at the injury time of political football

    Given the current political configurations or reconfigurations as the case may be, and the ongoing deadly power struggle in the South West, one may not be surprised if Chief Olu Falae shows up at the coronation to wish his former boy a happy tenure, after all in politics the enemy of your enemy is a friend. It is all in the nature of these things.

    Last weekend in far way Santa Monica, yours sincerely was briskly roused from sleep at 2 A.M western coast time by a frantic call from Nigeria. It was from Wole Olanipekun, SAN, and one Nigeria’s leading legal luminaries. Wole is an outstanding Nigerian patriot and militant Yoruba nationalist with broad progressive tendencies. Like many of his Ekiti compatriots, he could also be brutally frank.

    It is a friendship that has lasted over forty years, dating back to our days together in the trenches against military dictatorship in Nigeria.  While Wole served as the Secretary General of the University of Lagos Student Union, yours sincerely was the elusive and mysterious chairman of the Unife Joint Action Committee with concurrent accreditation to four un-nameable campuses. We had met when snooper appeared at the Unilag campus as a non-executive member of the Ife students’ union executive which was then visiting.

    Wole’s beef was with how the fallout of the Fayose resurgence was being managed. He had obviously read this column. In his view, the Yoruba nation was poised at the edge of a precipice which has to be carefully managed to avert a calamitous endgame. Fayose was the proverbial fly perched precariously on the most sensitive part of the anatomy which requires considerable diplomatic exertion and engagement.

    With current developments in the old West, it is now even clearer that the Yoruba Question is an integral part of the National Question. There is no way out as long as everybody is boxed into this colonial cage of contraries. Despite the bold strides of its many outstanding and talented individuals to put Nigeria on the world map, it is obvious that Nigeria is dying from the kwashiorkor of failed leadership.

    The leadership lottery and the structural configuration of Nigeria are such that they will never allow the best and the brightest to step forward to rescue the nation. It is like going into competitive soccer with your tenth eleven. It is a hopeless mismatch. The lack of a visionary and integrative leadership and of a national consensus in critical areas of nation-building is telling, and it rears its head in profoundly ironic and totally unexpected ways..

    Political developments in Nigeria are often stranger than fiction, and they sometimes best the most imaginative efforts of the masters of magical realism. Had he been born a Nigerian, Gabriel Garcia Marquez would long have been driven out of business. Actual reality is so unrealistic that the budding novelist must not attempt to enter into any competition with it.

    Once again, the Nigerian nation is stumbling precariously on a steep political escarpment. The Yoruba nation is critically endangered. Huge conflagrations in Nigeria are usually preceded by civil war among the Yoruba political elite. Is history about to repeat itself? The next few weeks will answer that question. For the second time, and by popular demand, we bring you an article which took an early look at the fate of the post-colonial nation in West Africa. Written in 1961, it reads like the horoscope of disaster foretold.

  • Where the white man can’t win

    A tour of africa’s “fever coast”

    lbert J. Meyers of the staff of “U.S. News & World Report” has just toured the lands along the old “fever coast” of West Africa.

    This dispatch takes you into jungle areas of tribal rites, superstitions and abject poverty—where the politics and culture of the white man are up against baffling odds.

    Here on the Guinea coast of West Africa, you get a feeling that the white man will never really be able to understand this part of the world.

    This impression grows as the traveler moves through Cameroon, Nigeria, Dahomey, Togo, Ghana, the Ivory Coast, Liberia, Guinea, and on up into Senegal on the African bulge.

    All of these, now are free, independent, self-governing black countries, each with a vote in the United Nations. They are countries whose politicians fanning the winds of change that keep blowing up crisis after crisis in Africa. They seem as different from the white man’s world as night from day.

    In the first place, West Africa is one of the most primitive areas in the world. There are no neat and gleaming cities here, such as Nairobi, in Kenya, Johannesburg and Cape town, in South Africa, or even Leopoldville, in the Congo. West African cities don’t gleam. They sprawl steamily amid a crowding, shoving mass of black community.

    Linked to past. Sometimes, the stench in Africa is overpowering. Open drains crisscross the cities—uncovered to the flies and other insects. This is often called the “fever coast” or the “white man’s graveyard.” It isn’t difficult to understand why.

    Many of the Africans here are descendants of those who were sold into slavery and taken to America—or of those who worked for the slave traders, rounding up captives from tribes other than their own.

    The tribal system persists. Language barriers give an idea of its complexity. There probably are 400 different tribal languages or dialects. That is only one roadblock to unity. Tribal hostility is another. The tribes within one nation often are deadly enemies, yet owe common allegiance to a central government in Lagos, Accra, or Abidjan—whatever the capital of the country happens to be.

    Everywhere, you sense the strange, secretive nature of the people. For instance, with these Africans, religion takes weird forms. Witchcraft and black magic are widespread. Ritual murders still are practiced. Humans are sacrificed to jungle gods. Children are kidnapped and sold to tribes that then slaughter them in sacrificial rites.

    In West African cities, native families—husband, wife with the inevitable baby strapped on her back, other children and innumerable relatives—live in reeking, tin-roofed huts. In the bush, where most of tropical Africa’s people live, home is a mud hut with some kind of thatched roof.

    The “mammy traders.” All over West Africa there are “mammy traders”—women sitting by the side of the road selling anything from tooth paste to juju charms. Jujus are supposed to do anything from improving fertility to making the wearer invisible.

    An example of how Africans think jujus work: Recently, a Communist-indoctrinated terrorist in Cameroon killed a Frenchman out in the bush and was stripping the victim’s body when police arrived. The killer calmly went on with his work because he was wearing a “magic” juju ring sold to him by a witch doctor. He thought the ring made him invisible.

    Slogans and lethargy. A “mammy economy” seems to prevail in much of West Africa. In Accra and other cities, for instance, the Africans travel by “mammy wagon.” These rickety buses are so designated because the businesses are run by women. The “mammy wagons,” always overflowing with passengers, carry slogans on their sides, such as “Jesus Is Mine,” “Nothing Bad,” “Slow but Sure.”

    An American, talking to West Africans, discovers in them a sort of lethargic surliness. Perhaps that can be blamed on the climate. It is a climate in which disease—hookworm, tapeworm, malaria, yellow fever, leprosy—is likely to strike at any time.

    The visitor learns this quickly. Near the dirt-strip airport at Yaoundé there is a beautiful lake. Its blue waters look cool and inviting. But swimming in the lake is forbidden, because any swimmer would be sure to get hookworm.

    At the hotel here, the guest fights off centipedes, sleeps under mosquito netting, wakes up in the morning with mosquito bites anyway. He takes his malaria pills and hopes they’ll do the job.

    English with static. A white man has language trouble almost everywhere. Even in Ghana, where English is the official language, communicating is hard. The average West African, if he speaks English at all, does it with an accent that makes it seem as though he had studied it by radio, taking all his lessons at a time when the static was very bad. To an American, listening to a Ghanaian speak English is rather like listening to a phonograph being played at three or four times its normal speed.

    English, of course, is not the Ghanaian’s mother tongue. There are more than 50 tribal languages in Ghana, and the child naturally learns his tribal tongue first. Hence his tribal accent when he is compelled to speak English.

    Most West Africans—whether in the cities or in jungle villages where bare breasted women and naked children stare impassively as a car goes by—know very little about the outside world. City swelling West Africans have formed their image of America largely from the movies they have seen. In Abidjan, Ivory Coast, a cab driver asked me to send him “a belt like the shooting cowboy wear.”

    For whites, it’s “wa-wa.” The few whites who live and work in West Africa have a phrase that expresses their frustration. It is “wa-wa.” It means, roughly, “West Africa wins again—the white man just can’t win.”

    A housewife sighs and says “wa-wa” when she has told her native cook again and again to wash the salad greens in a disinfectant solution and finds that he has done so—and then has washed them again at the water tap in the yard.

    A businessman says “wa-wa” after he has waited an hour or more for a West African clerk to cash his check at a bank.

    A traveler says “wa-wa” when he has been charged anywhere from 28 cents the first time to $2 the second for the same 10-minute taxi ride.

    As an American looks at West Africa, he cannot fail to be impressed by its economic potential. There are rubber, gold and diamonds in Ghana, coffee and cocoa in the Ivory Coast, oil in Nigeria, plus mountains of iron ore.

    A mass—in parts. Moving along the Guinea Coast—that great arc bordering on the Gulf of Guinea—a traveler sees West Africa as a mass of primitive people broken up arbitrarily into small countries, independent and in ferment.

    This part of Africa was “Balkanized”—cut up into small territories by the British and French when they ruled the area. Now these territories are tiny countries, each with its own government, or about to get its own, each with its own brand of explosive politics.

    A day’s drive from Lagos, Nigeria, to Accra, Ghana, takes a motorist through two other countries, Dahomey and Togo, on the way. Split up as West Africa is, it is hard to believe that it can ever amount to much politically.

    Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah wants to unify under one flag the whole area—all of Africa, for that matter—with himself as boss. Others, like Felix Houphouet-Boigny, President of the Ivory Coast, and Prime Minister Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa of Nigeria, want a loose federation with a customs union and a common market, if anything at all.

    “No strings, please.” West Africa’s leaders have this in common: All want as much as they can get from both sides in the “cold war.” And they loudly proclaim that they want “no strings attached,” that they will be “neutral.”

    This “neutrality” takes strange forms. In Ghana—where Russian technicians are suspect—it is a pro-Soviet sort of neutrality. But in Ivory Coast, President Houphouet-Boigny says this:

    “If we Africans be naive enough to sever relations with the West, in the end we will be invaded by the Chinese, and the Russians will impose Communism on our Country.”

    The overwhelming impression, after a tour of the new nations of West Africa, is that, if this area is ever to reach political and economic maturity, it is the white man’s skills that must do the job.

    But then, this question arises: How can the white man ever understand or cope with this Africa of witchcraft and black magic, of tribal secrets and primitive customs, of mud huts and “wa-wa”?

    Source: U.S. News & World Report (10 April 1961)

  • Ekiti as Kulaks Archipelago

    Ekiti as Kulaks Archipelago

    Remember to praise your enemy and to admire your tormentors.  This Orwellian admonition is not from 1984 or any work of fiction. It is from a cameo of contemporary Nigeria. When tormentors begin to commend the tormented for their patience and grace, when famous hooligans lavish praise on their victims for their exemplary civility and courtesy after a heavy beating, you can be sure that the manipulation of human emotions has reached its zenith.

    Aleksandr Solzhenitysn might have had contemporary Nigeria in mind when he wrote his great novel of tyranny, Gulag Archipelago. The novel is a tribute to the indomitability of the exceptional human spirit in the face of state terrorism at its most savage and sublime. In its roiling contradictions, its fertile and volatile political lunacies, contemporary Nigeria often recalls both pre-revolution and post revolution Russia.

    In the face of harsh repression, even the most exceptional spirit can suddenly collapse. Faced by pure terror, the greatest of human beings slander themselves and tell unbelievable lies against themselves. When Stalin hauled his intellectual superiors and more gifted rivals before the law for treason, they confessed to unimaginable crimes they had not committed and asked for forgiveness. To clinch matters for the terrorist state, they dismissed themselves as being unworthy of mercy and deserving of the most cruel treatment ever imaginable. It is the political equivalent of having an out of body experience. You view yourself with clinical severance, as if it was someone else.

    As a result of the frenetic pace of events and the programmed disruption of normal perception, the general disorientation of most Nigerians proceeds apace. Tormentors praise the tormented when they meekly submit to their own brutalization. The meek will surely inherit the earth if they continue to show meekness, they chorus . They will be remembered and honoured for their brand loyalty, they trumpet in alleluia. They are future leaders, they chant to the already enchanted.

    The ploy is to drum out the ethical horror of the crime in the universal refrain of giving peace a chance, thereby making it impossible for the few discerning ones to think out of the box. In the event, it is now impossible to make sense of what has just happened in Ekiti. Yet it is our business to make sense out of the senseless. Otherwise, there is no point in writing a column. Is this a major electoral shellacking of the APC and Kayode Fayemi’s much rhapsodised elitist developmental politics, as we are programmed to believe or an elaborate hoax as we are forbidden from thinking?

    Let us make a confession because there is no point playing a superman in these matters. For most of the week, Snooper himself has been too distressed and pole-axed to make any sense of the bewildering turn of events. One felt like a boxer so disoriented by punishment that he went and sat on the laps of his opponent. But this time around, it is the thief who has fled with the evidence that has returned to nail himself.

    When the congenitally ungallant praise others for their gallantry, something fishy is surely afoot. It is surely curious when the ranking members of the PDP, notoriously truculent and unsportsmanlike in defeat, begin to praise a Fayemi for his quick surrender and hasty capitulation to the PDP rigging leviathan.  Up till this moment, the same PDP buccaneers did not raise an eyebrow about Jonathan’s public refusal to congratulate the new Emir of Kano. Nor did they demur about his unsportsmanlike rectitude in congratulating the opposition  for successfully holding a national convention against all odds. The two examples are instances of bitter defeat for the PDP which its leadership have refused to graciously swallow. He who comes to gallantry in political sweepstakes must come with clean motives.

    While the PDP and its accomplices and collaborators in the corrupt sections of the Nigerian media were deliberately muddying the water in an attempt to obscure another major electoral crime against humanity, it was the electorally humbled Fayemi who was trying to provide a sane and sober rationalisation of what has just happened in the land of rugged hills. In what historians may judge a moment of painful clarity and clairvoyance, Fayemi described his defeat as owing to the emergence  of a new sociology of the Ekiti people.

    If the PDP power mongers actually understand the nuanced and sophisticated dimensions of this statement, it would have occurred to them that they rejoice too soon.  Fayemi himself might have been speaking tongue in cheek in a moment of tormenting despair. Known for their rural hardiness, their folksy heroism and abhorrence of foreign tyranny, the Ekiti people have always acted in unison when they set the template for political integrity and fidelity to a noble cause. The nature of Fayose’s resurgent ascendancy is so deeply polarising that it has set the Ekiti people against themselves.

    Irrespective of party affiliation, there is now a Maginot Line between the Ekiti business and educated elite on one hand and the peasant and emergent lumpen-proletariat class on the other. Fayose, a petit-bourgeois with crossover appeal to the lumpen and peasant subclasses, has once again positioned himself as a champion of both. The canons of political contention will be booming in Ekiti land for some time to come. The kiriji sound of canon-firing will not be coming from Igbajo this time around but from the Ekiti hills. If you cannot scale the hilly ascent in haste, then do not visit the land of birds and eggheads for some time to come.

    If this is truly a revolt of the masses, Ekiti has had it coming for quite a while. Long-rhapsodised and eulogised  as the land of the educationally over-achieving, Ekiti has been falling by the wayside for quite some time. It now boasts of one of the worst records in secondary school certificate examination. In addition, there had been a growing alienation among the youth as the education industry froze up sending thousands of educated but unemployable young people swelling the ranks of the gainfully unemployed.

    As for the peasants fabled for their political fidelity and integrity, it would appear that over the years, they have grown cynical and weary of succeeding governments that could not significantly improve their lot even as they worsen the plight and prospects of their children. In the event, they have reverted to the traditional Yoruba skepticism about millennial political expectations. It is now the politics of the belly or stomach infrastructure. In the absence of any overarching social constructs that significantly improves their lot,  what the bird eats is what the bird flies with.

    It is Ekiti as Kulaks Archipelago. Remember the kulaks? The kulaks were the upper-deck Russian peasant class. They were notorious for their bizarre fetishes, their superstitious idiocies—according to Marx— and above all their counter-revolutionary consciousness. Lenin waged  a violent and vicious war against them before he could succeed in collectivising their farms for the major agrarian  reforms necessary to launch  the new socialist republic on the path of agricultural self-sufficiency. Lenin killed off quite a lot of them . Stubborn and hardy, the kulaks could not understand why they should  give up their long-held feudal family holding for some new fangled experimentation in collective farming. They fought off Lenin with savage ferocity and the state response was equally savage. In the event what was supposed to be a revolution for the masses became a social laboratory for their clinical extermination.

    Peter Ayodele Fayose does not claim to be a revolutionary or intellectual. He wears his HND badge as if it is rare honour from the British Empire. His mind is uncluttered by books or learning. This gives him a ferocious focus with an eye on the main chance. Fayose is an  equal opportunity contrarian and rabble-rouser. If there is something initially endearing about his populist bravura, the opportunity cost would soon be found very prohibitive. Those who thought that they have used Fayose to unhorse the progressive tendency in Ekiti would soon find out that Fayose’s abiding animus is not against the progressive tendency as such but elite tendency as a whole.

    Irrespective of party affiliation, the much lionised Ekiti professoriate will have to run for cover. It is not going to be a battle against APC but a war against traditional power barons, including traditional rulers who must now look furtively over their shoulders, if the heavy duty beads permit . Snooper does not think that General Obasanjo would be in a hurry to visit soon so as to update himself on Fayose’s poultry farming. Poultry politics is not for poltroons. As for the Lagos boys who were collecting monthly tithes during Fayose’s first coming, they will discover to their peril that you cannot cross the same river twice. Fayose is a shrewd businessman who knows his real political IOUs.

    As this column never tires of propounding, rigging comes in three stages. There is rigging before the election, rigging on election date and rigging after the election.  By encouraging Opeyemi Bamidele to desert his political homestead, the PDP, through its political doppelganger the Labour Party, managed to simulate a riggable environment on Ekiti.

    By covertly simulating public discourse praising Fayemi for his gallantry, his urbane diffidence and statesmanlike capitulation to obvious electoral heist, the PDP has been trying to fake a public consensus in order to make what happened in Ekiti look like a flawless and transparent electoral subjugation. This is a classic instance of rigging after the election.

    But while the collateral damage to the progressive cause and consciousness is enormous and the setback for the regional integration agenda is substantial, the reversal is not fundamental. The reason is simple. Fayose is congenitally and constitutionally incapable sober rationality and nuanced political judgement. After all, a revolt is not a revolution. A revolution requires intellectual philosophers.

    Very soon, Ekiti will be embroiled in major political tumults and tempests. Whatever may be their current political ire, a love and respect for orderliness and sane hierarchy is wired into the political DNA of the average Ekiti person. After liberating them from Ibadan tyranny, Fabunmi asked for a crown and was promptly driven out of town. Very soon, they will be looking for philosopher-kings again. And the birds and bards of real freedom will sing on the Ekiti  hills once more.

     

  • Suara bites again

    As the Mundial truly got underway in the land of soccer and samba, Okon has been as busy as a bee, smiling all the way to the red light districts of Mushin and Awoyaya. The scam was typically and quintessentially Okonian. What began as a huge and outlandish joke soon turned into a major money spinning machine, with Okon emerging as a soccer pundit, a webless blogger and historian of the mass hysteria induced by football.

    Whenever there was a missing historic link, you can be sure that the old rogue would come up with the facts. For example, Okon explained to a swooning crowd of admirers that despite the fact that the team from Mobutu’s  Zaire went to the 1974 World Cup in Germany with their witchdoctor and private supply of monkey meat, it did not prevent them from a 9-0 shellacking from Poland. Okon also revealed that the hero of the Cameroun team that qualified for the 1982 World Cup in Spain was their goalkeeper, Thomas Nkono.

    Furthermore, Okon disclosed that the name of the witchdoctor of the great Camerounian team of !990 was Baba Bamenda. That was the team that almost caused a civil uprising in Columbia when Higuita, their goalkeeper-sweeper , was spectacularly dispossessed by Roger Mila the great Camerounian striker. There was also the case of Benjamin Massing, the robust Camerounian striker, whose own soccer boot flew out from his left foot after a particularly wicked stud and was promptly red-carded. Massing sheepishly begged the referee to allow him retrieve his boot from far afield.

    Everyday, Okon’s football crowd began to multiply in the backyard. He had acquired a second hand generating set and a brand new Hitachi television. He was charging a hefty fees for entrance. A typical day began with Okon’s commentary of the day pasted on a makeshift board which usually attracted passionate discussion from other soccer louts and loonies. It was a paradise of libel. One of Okon’s efforts was titled: Barlotelli is a baboon. The crazy rogue claimed to have privileged information that the gifted but anarchic Italian maestro was the product of a forced union between a mountain gorilla and a Nubian woman.

    On Thursday afternoon, Okon’s commentary of the day attracted Snooper’s attention. It was about Luis Suarez, the gifted but troubled Columbian forward , who seemed to have developed a bizarre taste for human flesh on the field of play. Dubbed the cannibal, the Columbian wolf-boy often makes a meal of opponents’ earlobes with the relish of a professional headhunter from Papua New Guinea.  But the last one was an ear too far. It has landed the cannibal in soup. When Snooper queried Okon as to why he insisted on calling Suarez by the name Suara when he was not a Nigerian not to talk of being a Yoruba chap, Okon retorted.

    “Ah oga dem mad boy be Yoruba boy. He get one Yoruba boy for Mushin like dat and him name be Suara. Anytime we dey fight him go dey bite you when dem thunder blow come dey dabaru him head. So each time I been ask am why him dey use him teeth, him go reply say biting na part of fighting. So I think say dem Suarez be Suara”. On that note, snooper withdrew to his boudoir.

  • The crisis of knowledge Production in Nigeria

    The crisis of knowledge Production in Nigeria

    For the past 10 months or so, all the polytechnics in the nation  as well as colleges of education have been firmly under lock as a result of an industrial dispute with the federal government. The federal authorities carry on as if technical education in particular is totally irrelevant or surplus to requirement in their purported bid to transform the nation. But then even the federal universities get a fraction of what they need only after protracted closures.

    Yet at the root of the organic crisis that grips the nation is the crisis of knowledge production. A crisis of knowledge production occurs when the sum-total of knowledge available in a society can no longer guarantee meaningful and harmonious existence or serve as the solid basis for human development and self-actualisation.

    This is usually a period of darkness in which a society disabled by historic cataract gropes in vain for the answers which must come from its own exertions, or if all fail, from the antagonistic logic supplied by conquering invaders who must then cite their superior knowledge and awareness as the basis and justification for humane intervention.

    It is usually a time of dark superstitions and even darker mythologies. It is a time of murderous ignorance, with homicidal hordes on the loose. Ignorance of knowledge never leads to knowledge of ignorance. It leads to arrogance in ignorance. Those who prevail do so not because of superior knowledge or learning but because of superior brute force. Even in a society where the knowledge-order has collapsed, somebody must lead the way, if only by ignorant example.

    Leading in ignorance will not solve a nation’s problems. It can only compound them. Knowledge deficit is at the heart of the looming collapse of governance at every level in Nigeria. Yet that collapse is inevitable unless this country finds some fundamental answers to the fundamental questions plaguing its continued existence.

    Four years ago at the Convocation Lecture of the Lagos State Polytechnic, Ikorodu, yours sincerely addressed some of the contentious issues surrounding polytechnic education in Nigeria. This morning, we bring you excerpts.

  • Polytechnic Education: A recipe for visionary leadership and governance in Nigeria

    A nation is a permanent project in progress. No leader can solve the problems of a nation at once. Any leadership that believes that it can solve the problems of a nation at once is merely delusional. Often, some of these problems are unanticipated side-effects of progress and modernity itself, particularly in nations emerging from the trauma of colonial subjugation. Sometimes, they are also product of self-inflicted folly.

    What is important is for a national crisis to throw up its organic leadership with the creative endowment and visionary intellectual wherewithal to solve the crisis. But the structural disequilbrium of Nigeria is such that it throws up the wrong leader at the wrong time leading to a perfect mismatch. It is in this aspect that Nigeria has been critically challenged and shortchanged since independence

    Given the deliberate stigmatization and conscious inferiorization of polytechnic education in Nigeria, the very idea of polytechnic education as a recipe for visionary leadership appears on the surface to be incongruous and fatally flawed. How can something come out of nothing, we may ask?  How can the bargain basement stock of polytechnic education as it has been made out in Nigeria be a recipe for such a noble and exceptional phenomenon as visionary leadership?

    Yet as we shall argue in this convocation lecture, it is a profoundly ironic that the very denigration and defamation of polytechnic education in Nigeria is a pointer to the failure of visionary leadership in the country and a practical demonstration of inept governance. A leadership which slavishly follows the trends and educational patterns of other countries however advanced without first addressing the specific needs of its own people cannot by any stretch of the imagination approximate the sterling virtues of visionary leadership.

    It may be fashionable and modish to ape western parameters of educational development but it is also instructive to note that while the systematic devaluation of polytechnic education proceeds apace in Nigeria, Albert Einstein, the greatest scientific genius of the modern epoch, was a product of polytechnic education.  When we pay tributes to this preeminent avatar of human advancement, we are also paying tributes to the virtues of polytechnic education.

    With the hordes of unemployed and unemployable youths who have been sent on a wild goose chase of unviable “higher education” in universities and polytechnics with obsolete curricular and even more obsolete disciplines, alienation is leading to frustration with the entire system. The social fabric of the nation is stretched very thin and anomie looms. The social pathologies of this educational crisis are already here with us in the rise of the phenomenon of graduate armed robbers, educated malcontents, sophisticated deviants and well-polished outlaws. The society is being set up for a huge social explosion.

    This ominous background is the best context to introduce the topic of the day. In the circumstances, how can a polytechnic education serve as a recipe for visionary leadership and visionary governance in contemporary Nigeria? As it has been famously observed, the worst university in Nigeria is more recognized than the best polytechnic.  Several commentators have noted that there is an official seal to the systematic denigration of polytechnic education in the country.  This is at best the worst dereliction of official responsibility arising from a lack of visionary leadership.

    But what is a polytechnic?  As the name implies, a polytechnic is not a university. But this ought not to be a crime but a mere emblem of distinctive identity. In its classical state, a polytechnic  is a non-university higher educational institution focusing on vocational education. There are three factors at play here which often account for the erosion of parity and esteem when the polytechnic community is compared to the university community.

    First, is the false notion that because polytechnic education is mainly vocational, it is merely functional and work-driven. This notion ignores the fact that in certain disciplines, a polytechnic education is more rigorous and quality driven than their university-based counterparts. This explains the preference of employers in fields such as Banking, Finance, Engineering, Accounting and Technology for polytechnic graduates over their universities counterparts. In these fields of human endeavour, the polytechnic graduates often arrive “perfectly tuned” and programmed for easy and immediate absorption.

    The second is the binary divide traditionally erected between university education and polytechnic education which makes one inaccessible to the other. Although a carry over from our colonial heritage, this divide ignores the reality  of cross-breeding, cross-carpeting, cross-fertilisation and the transfer of talents and human resources between the two types of education that have existed across age and human societies.

    The third factor arises from the fact that entry-level qualifications for polytechnics tend to be lower than those for universities and the staff generally less qualified. While this is true, this stigma ignores the human capacity for self-improvement and continuous exertion. There are sandwich degree programmes and other avenues for self-realisation for those who start the relay race of education at a disadvantage.

    In certain circumstances, teachers with lesser qualifications, because they have more to prove, are generally more focused and more ferociously determined to impart quality education than their better qualified colleagues. Although there is usually no short cut to pedagogic distinction, it is so that under the right atmosphere, these disadvantaged students and teachers often come into their own, and it is where you end up that matters rather than where you begin from.

    The example of Albert Einstein again readily comes to mind. The German-Jewish genius was a famously lazy, sloppy and inattentive student. But this was not because he was mentally challenged but because the precocious boy had greater issues on his mind. Einstein was bored to death by the banality of his teachers and as he was later to put it: “Since I hated authority so much, God made me an authority”. How many potential Einsteins would have been destroyed in the grinding gridlock of the Nigerian educational system?

    In Nigeria, the stigmatization and discrimination against polytechnic education began right after independence when the first Cookie Commission of Enquiry set up a salary differential between university graduates and their polytechnic counterparts. Even worse is the fact that in universities, you cannot join the council in congregation unless you are a degree   holder.

    In 2006, the Nigerian federal authorities took what at first appeared as a bold and courageous step to harmonise  and consolidate tertiary education in the country by virtually abolishing polytechnic education. Inaugurating the technical committee, Ufot Ekaette, the then Secretary to the Federal Government, noted that no country could achieve scientific and technological breakthrough when less than fifteen per cent of the populace have access to university education. According to him, the existing facilities were so oversubscribed that the entire educational system faced an apocalyptic meltdown.

    With less than three per cent of the Nigerian populace having access to university education, the situation was very dire indeed. Consequently, all polytechnics were to be abolished with the minor ones becoming campuses of proximate and contiguous universities while the Yaba College of Technology and the Kaduna Polytechnic were to become City Universities of Lagos and Kaduna respectively. Crowing jubilantly about the development, the then Minister of Education, Obiageli Ezekwesili, noted that the development would lead to the creation of half a million additional university placements and immediately ease the bottlenecks that have come to be associated with JAMB.

    On the face of it, this seems to be a revolutionary and radically innovative development; an admirable example of visionary and proactive governance. But on closer examination, there seemed to be something sinister and radically obtuse going on. There is no evidence that the momentous conclusions were arrived at after a holistic, exhaustive and comprehensive study of the country-specific needs of tertiary education in Nigeria. Had there been a more crucial interrogation of the dynamics of technological and societal under-development in the nation, the conclusions might have been different.

    Far more disturbing however is the suspicion that as usual, Nigeria might have been aping developments and trends elsewhere particularly in the colonial metropole without any conceptual linkage to the country-specific crisis of education. Even the names given to the new polytechnic-turned university came with a colonial imprimatur. It will be recalled that when polytechnics were transformed into universities in Britain, many of them were given the prefix of “metropolitan” simply to distinguish them from existing universities based in the same cities. Thus was born Leeds Metropolitan University, Sheffield Metropolitan Universities etc.

    Yet Britain was actually responding to country-specific needs based on the unique trajectory of education in the country.  Polytechnics in England came with a class-slur. As dumb-down vocational centres for middle-level manpower, they were regarded as the natural habitat and havens for the educationally challenged and the socially disadvantaged flotsam and jetsam of the society. Naturally, this binary divide bred a lot of resentment and fuelled social tension.

    Eventually, the contradictions matured into an impossible systemic lock down. As better educational facilities at the secondary level led to greater successes, pressures on scarce university placements naturally led to a millennial bottleneck.  As more people gained higher educational qualifications, surplus quality staff meant for the universities had to be deflected to the polytechnic. The lack of vacancy at the professorial level due to strict establishment ratio and the fact that quality staff now marooned at the polytechnic could not be expected to reach the pinnacle of their profession led to widespread intellectual disillusionment with the system and an internal brain drain.

    Every shrewd societal engineer realizes that the presence of a radically disaffected intellectual class is a recipe for anarchy and rebellion.  In 1992, the British authorities finally caved in to the pressures. Under the Further and Higher Education Act, the old polytechnics were abolished and transformed into degree-awarding universities. Britain had attempted to solve its unique educational crisis in its own unique manner.

    If this was the trend and development in other lands that the Nigerian authorities were aping, it is clear that we have missed the boat again. Every country is unique in its educational specificity. You cannot slam on a country developments from elsewhere without first analyzing the country-specific dynamics. In this regard, ASUP’s critique of the committee decision is spot on.  Ruing over why such a momentous decision should be coming at the very tail end of the Obasanjo administration, the union of polytechnic staff dismissed the whole exercise as a superficial and retrogressive charade.

    Had the committee had more than a glancing acquaintance with the phenomenon of genuine branding and not the superficial shibboleths of Nigerian officialdom, it ought to have occurred to them that Yaba College of Technology and Kaduna Polytechnic were already successful brands in their own rights. Turning them into “city universities” actually devalues their brand. It is like asking Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Georgia Tech, Imperial College,  London School of Economics etc to drop their gloriously unique brands and become universities.

    In a remarkable stricture, ASUP noted that the committee was filled with establishment bureaucrats, equal opportunity consultants and other racketeers out to preserve and promote vested interests. In any case, we may wonder, what is the point of adding hordes of glorified graduate illiterates to an already saturated labour market?  This can only compound an already dire situation, fuelling social discontent and ultimately inviting anarchy.

    It is noteworthy that while Nigeria was trying to abolish its polytechnics, the Singaporean authorities were strengthening theirs based on a rigorous evaluation of country-specific needs.  In a remarkable speech at the closing ceremony of the annual Polytechnic Forum on 8th October 2009, the Minister of Education and Second Minister of Defence, Dr En eng Hen, outlined with engrossing perspicuity the vision behind the retention of polytechnic education in his country.  Among the reasons proffered, four are particularly compelling.

    (1)The law of supply and demand. With over 40 percent of the primary cohort demanding for quality polytechnic education, the authorities had no choice but to grant the demand of the populace. (2)The fact that the polytechnic work-force arrive “industry ready” and is readily available to fill opening vacancies in industries through what is a close symbiotic relationship between the forces of labour and the forces of production. (3)The rate and vigour of what he chooses to call “disruptive technology”. In a rapidly modernizing and increasingly globalised world new technologies intrude into our life on a daily basis which demands the constant upgrading of obsolete curricular and the constant introduction of new courses based on emergent technologies.

    For example, a polytechnic in Singapore has begun to offer Bachelors’ degree course in Computer Games Software. There is also a degree programme in Culinary Arts. Finally, there is the need for existing workforce to be retrained, retooled and even re-certificated. Rapidly evolving technology renders a degree obsolete and antiquated during the life time of the degree holder. The cure-all and once-for –all time paper qualification is no longer tenable. A person that holds a 1979 degree in Computer Science would no longer understand what is going on the profession by 2009.

    According to the minister, polytechnics are there for “jobs yet to be invented and challenges not yet foreseen”. Finally, “being autonomous, these universities can chart their own destiny, differentiate themselves and pursue revolutionary innovations”. By creating themselves anew, they re-create and reinvent the society on the basis of ceaseless self-surpassing.

    This is a radically innovative educational policy based on visionary governance and pro-people policy. The dynamic is powered by country specific needs and a close study of the Singaporean society and culture. When there is a perfect congruence between the educational policy of a nation and the societal needs, there is a positive equilibrium between the parts and the whole. Little wonder then that within only one generation, Singapore has moved from the Third World to the First World.

    Without innovative thinking, there can be no innovative and cutting edge industry for that matter. Even transferred technology requires considerable innovative thinking to be “tropicalised” and domesticated. And without revolutionary technological innovations, there can be no expanding economy. Any society caught up in a technological rut will always play host to mass unemployment and a glut of unproductive work force.

    This is the basis of Nigeria’s contemporary plight. Let me now begun to tie up the loose ends as we arrive at the conclusion. As we have seen from the above-going, it should now be clear that the virus of unoriginal thinking is more dangerous and potentially more lethal than the virus of unemployment. This is because unoriginal thinking is the original form of unemployment; a critical disengagement of the thinking faculty.

    Yes, as we have read from above, Nigeria needs polytechnic education as a recipe for visionary leadership and governance. The can do spirit, the rugged determination, the energetic networking, the constant struggle to improve self-capacity, the urge to pull oneself up by the bootstraps such as we find in the polytechnic community are all heroic ingredients of visionary leadership.

    But before these fertile resources can be milked and harnessed for national greatness, Nigeria itself will need a generous dash of visionary leadership to rescue it from the present morass and millennial  under-development. I thank you all and wish the graduands the very best in the current circumstances.

     

    Excerpts from the 19th Convocation Lecture of the Lagos State Polytechnic, Ikorodu, Tuesday, March 8th, 2010