The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tatalo Alamu

  • The Buhari administration: Prospects and problems

    The Buhari administration: Prospects and problems

    It is said that thunder hardly strikes twice at the same spot. If the now civilianized former military ruler from Daura is remembered for little else, he will be memorialized as the man under whose watch thunder struck the Nigerian political firmament twice. It is no mean achievement. Let us now elaborate on this political conceit.

    In March 1984 and after the first hundred days of his first coming, it was clear that the lean ramrod straight infantry general meant exacting business. Now thirty one years apart, and after another hundred days of the new civilian regime headed by the selfsame but now retired general, Buhari has again shaken Nigeria to its political foundation. A brief historical detour is in order.

    At the close of the month of December 1983, a group of senior military officers led by Major General Mohamadu Buhari , as at then the General Officer commanding the Third Division of the Nigerian Army based in Jos, overthrew the  civilian regime headed by Alhaji Shehu Aliyu Shagari. There was widespread jubilation and applause across the length and breadth of the nation. The joyous mood of the nation was captured in the enraptured refrain: “Happy new year, and happy new regime!!”

    It is interesting to note that when Buhari was toppled twenty months later in a palace coup spearheaded by the then Chief of Army Staff, Major General Ibrahim Babangida, the applause, if any at all, was muted.  There was no general jubilation except among disaffected factions of the political class. As far as the general populace was concerned, it was a play of giants among military juggernauts in which Nigerians were nothing but spectral spectators.

    But as fate and divine destiny would have it, thirty years after his ouster by his colleagues, Buhari has been returned to power as a civilian after another major ruling class implosion and this time on the cusp of a pan-Nigerian revolt against corrupt and inept civilian rule. This was after three storied attempts in 2003, 2007 and 2011 which ended in tears and much gnashing of teeth.

    This time around, nothing could have stopped the Buhari momentum as it swept the cobwebs of elite mischief and ancient feuds before it. Never in Nigeria’s history has the national multitude rooted and rallied valiantly for one individual. Since no one can argue with a political volcano, the utterly remiss and renegade Nigerian ruling class quietly slunk away after one last ditch attempt to torpedo the entire process.

    It should be noted that the old military coalition which swept Buhari to power was an inchoate, contrary and contradictory amalgam comprising of careerists, rightwing power venders, professional coupists and a sprinkling of genuine nationalists officers. Very soon, the stress and strains began to manifest and it was clear to the discerning that a military showdown was all but inevitable.

    It was said that Alhaji Shehu Shagari, the ousted and absconding former civilian president, aborted his precipitate flight around Lafia upon learning of the headship and composition of the new military junta. It was not a revolution, so to say. It was an orderly revolt among military orderlies of the oligarchy.

    Demonstrating astonishing political virginity, General Buhari himself did not help matters. A devout  traditionalist obviously insulated from the then prevalent national mood and temperament, he addressed a press conference denouncing those who were insinuating that Alhaji Shagari was brought down to Lagos in chains. This was at a time when Shagari’s deputy, Alex Ekwueme, had been hauled into detention where he developed a beard that would make Nebuchadinazeer wince in fearful admiration.

    By the time Buhari was ousted, what was perceived as the less than evenhanded handling of the cases of corrupt self-enrichment and other sensitive national matters had cost the administration considerable elite sympathy particularly among the Southern factions. The powerful ASUU gave up after dismissing the junta as the military wing of the NPN.

    Wole Soyinka, soon to be ennobled—or ennobeled—was on fearsome rampage tearing the administration to pieces at every available forum. Two respected civil war stalwarts from the west tore into the administration. In a coup de grace, the inevitable General Obasanjo gave a lecture at UI in which he warned that Nigeria was not the exclusive property of a section and must not be so ruled. It was the beginning of the end.

    In retrospect, it can now be seen that just as the military amalgam that originally brought Buhari to power was inchoate and irredeemably conflictual, the civilian coalition that has brought him to power almost thirty two years after is even more inchoate, contradictory and roiling with mutually exclusive political tendencies. It has already occasioned much stress and tension in the polity. The senate is lost to a desperate counter-revolutionary group who do not care a hoot about Buhari’s messianic mission.

    It is only a mere hundred days into Buhari’s civilian administration and writs are already flying all over the place. Investigative organs are being legally defanged or disabled on a daily basis. The masses who are still solidly behind Buhari do not own either newspapers or electronic organs of counter-revolutionary dissemination of virulent nation-tearing propaganda and they can only watch in fearful dismay. It is obvious that if thunder can strike twice, so can retrogressive reaction.

    What remains is at this point is to take a prospective analysis of the balance of forces, the problems that may fatally entrap Buhari this time around as a result of certain persistent political peccadilloes and the political formations that will shape up in opposition to the retired general in all their structural, systemic, ideological and institutional dimensions. This should serve as a political primer and mnemonic device for the retired general as well as a handy manual for a chronically conflicted nation.

    In a brilliant, profoundly ironic comparison of the two Bonapartes, Karl Marx once observed that history often repeats itself, the first time as a tragedy and the second time as a farce. In an interesting gloss on this passage, Terry Eagleton, the notable Anglo-Irish Marxist literary theorist,  has noted that it was not just that Louis Bonaparte was a pathetic parody of his more illustrious uncle but that that was the way Napoleon Bonaparte himself would have appeared had he shown up around that time: A regressive caricature of his former self. In other words, time changes everything and change also must time itself.

    It is important to save General Buhari from becoming a self-parodying caricature of his former self. The first time he ruled Nigeria, it was as an absolute military autocrat with all the power, the symbolic aura and paraphernalia of military despotism. This time around as a civilian ruler, he can no longer tap into or avail himself of such wide, untrammeled powers. Military rule is passé and the international community abjures autocratic civilian rule.

    But besides all this, and much more importantly, the National Question, in the intervening decades, has been critically exacerbated and Nigeria has become a roiling cage of contrary nationalities clawing at each other to death.  The Nigerian post-colonial state is completely demystified and desacralized. Nothing is sacred or sacrosanct anymore.

    President Buhari should therefore not be surprised or miffed if every step he takes to bring succour and solace to Nigerians irrespective of tribe, creed or region is subject to stringent scrutiny and every appointment is viewed from ethnic, religious and regional prism. Many will cock a snook at him just for the fun of it. Others will try to derail him out of bitter primordial malice, and he cannot resort to extra-constitutional measures in a just bid to sanitize the nation without calling into question the fragile national fabric. The Nigeria political elites have never been this bitterly polarized.

    Yet it is a scary and precarious situation when a seeming revolution cannot employ revolutionary methods to deal with a historic mess. The former general just has to get on with the job within the circumscribed and constricting ambit of law and order.  Unlike the first time around when he was able to slam a tense somnolence on the nation by sheer military muscle, many more writs will erupt this time around as his sense of justice, evenhandedness and fair play is called into question by ethnic barons and ideological charlatans who have suddenly found their voice after keeping quiet when Jonathan’s misrule appeared to favour their section.

    However, one thing Buhari has going for him which his military regime did not enjoy is massive international support and global approval. Having helped to bleed Nigeria senseless through its tacit support for executive pickpockets, the west is now showing some remorse about the fate and tragedy of the greatest conglomeration of Black souls in the world. Buhari should be able to leverage this global opprobrium for looters of our national patrimony irrespective of their status as the internal battle against corrupt enrichment gets underway.

    But character is fate as the ancient Greek sages noted.  What may eventually derail President Buhari are certain character traits which may be admirable when viewed in isolation but which when viewed holistically may represent a classic instance of how personal virtues may become political handicaps in the ethnic hotbed and political bedlam of fractious nations.

    For example, Buhari’s contempt for the Nigerian political class is legendary .This contempt is well-deserved and shared by many patriotic Nigerians. But such was this contempt that the first time around,  it didn’t allow him to even contemplate a Transition Programme for a return of the country to civil rule. The enemies who would eventually oust him pounced on this.

    This time around, the same contempt is driving Buhari to throw the baby away with the birth water by stiffly ignoring the call for another look at the structural misalignment that has hobbled the nation’s march to authentic nationhood. The president sees it as mere political irritation but it may eventually be discovered that without this drastic structural surgery, good governance and probity may simply not be enough.  An opportunistic but expired faction of the political elite has already latched on to this as causus belli, knowing how it resonates with wide sections of the nation.

    The other problem is Buhari’s seeming inability to transcend a confining cultural and religious milieu. Nobody can grudge a man for his fidelity to the spiritual and cultural conditioning of his political habitus. This is in the nature of human acculturation. But to rule a fractious multi-national nation like Nigeria requires far more cosmopolitan gamesmanship and metropolitan expansiveness than the president has shown. No one is asking him to admit contrary elements into his inner spiritual chambers, but he needs to widen and broaden his political associations in order to avail himself of the political, economic and spiritual intelligence that he will need in the struggle to redeem Nigeria.

    If he has not been told, then he must be told that he could not have come to power without this .That critical political intelligence, economic surveillance, cultural patrolling and intellectual trouble shooting will be quite decisive as the battle to redeem Nigeria shapes up in the months ahead. The first time around, General Buhari did most things right, but left his military flanks exposed which proved fatal.

    This time around, President Buhari has been doing most things right while leaving his political flanks exposed which may prove equally lethal. The senate fiasco ought to have taught him a lesson. Even as the benefits of his nationalist reforms are beginning to kick in, he will still need a countervailing patriotic political cadre to shield him from political hyenas and to serve as the conduit pipe and transmission belt of a new national consciousness. It is morning yet after a mere hundred days and whatever the elite carping about posts and postings, Mohamadu Buhari is doing very well.

  • Akin Ambode, a nice chap finishes first

    Snooper has been watching and following the intrigue-soaked, fiendishly quicksilver political milieu of Lagos with quiet animation. In the Fourth Republic, Lagos has gradually replaced Ibadan as the epicentre of progressive politics. It is the nerve centre and engine room of the transformational politics that has taken the old west and now the rest of Nigeria by storm. Have political brains and will travel. As the column never tires of positing, the artillery of knowledge is superior to knowledge of artillery.

    But all over the world and particularly in post-colonial societies, progressive clans are a fractious troublous lot, quarrelling openly and quietly making up behind the scene even as the machine constantly purges itself of unworthy accretions. It is in the nature of radical organizations seeking changes to be riddled with even more violent contradictions than the status quo they seek to supplant.

    Early in life, snooper developed a mantra which often sees him through political turbulence. It is that no matter what happens, the party is supreme. You may quarrel viciously and violently before decisions are taken, but once they are taken you have to abide by them. This mantra was taken from an old western political warhorse whose one-liner retort to internal protest was: (Wo, parti o gbodo fo!) Look, the party must not break up, no matter what!

    This is why it is meet to congratulate the Lagos state governor Akin Ambode over his sweet victory at the electoral tribunal. Now that the electoral hurdle has been scaled, it is time for the calm and methodical fellow to unfurl his bag of surprises for Lagosians.  Humane, polished, cultured, sincerely solicitous of other people’s wellbeing, and impeccably well-mannered  , Ambode is quite a revelation in the coliseum of political roughnecks.

    In the course of the last electioneering campaign, snooper sat down alone to drill the then gubernatorial aspirant and found his logical and intellectual grasp of issues, political, economic and even cultural, a tad short of prodigious. His answers were extensively well-researched and deeply thought out, shorn of pomp and pomposity. His quiet unassuming mien belies a ruthless streak which does not take hostages when sufficiently roused. Well-educated, well-travelled and very cosmopolitan in outlook, Ambode should take Lagos state to the next level after the labours of earlier avatars.

    Here is wishing the governor a successful tenure. Good guys also finish first.

  • Catharsis before closure

    Catharsis before closure

    Aristotelian drama in Nigeria

    As the Buhari administration settles down to real business, the consequences of the last general elections are beginning to unfold before us in all their ungainly profile. Once again, elite division and disorientation are shaping up in their ethnic, cultural and regional particularities. We are beginning to see a sneak preview of the antagonistic forces that will shape up to, and shape in turn, the contours of the new regime.

    Let us get this clear. We have argued several times in this column that in inchoate colonial contraptions conveniently described as nations, elections do not resolve National Questions. At best, they sharply accelerate the national contradictions or at worse they exacerbate them. While the Nigerian masses are swooning over the dramatic improvement in some aspects of their daily existence, there is a resurgence of elite mischief over the seeming ethnic and regional insularity of the president.

    There is therefore a sense in which it can be argued that President Mohammadu Buhari is both the nemesis and saviour of the Nigerian ruling class. As nemesis, he must purge them and whip them historically into line. As saviour, he can redeem them and save the nation from ethical implosion.  On this crucial point, we can only conclude with the great historians of the past that in human societies, there are certain periods when certain exceptional individuals encapsulate the drama and cruel dilemmas of the age. It is beginning to look as if Buhari is such an individual.

    Going forward in divinely ordained reprieve from the hangman’s noose, or going into well-deserved oblivion as it seems to be the secret wish of some sections of its errant ruling class Nigeria, as we know it, is passing before our eyes. No matter what happens or does not happen, this country will never be the same again after the second coming of the man from Daura.

    We must revert to our favourite Lenin quote: “There are decades when nothing happens and there are weeks when decades happen”. The old iconic revolutionist should know, having earlier lost his own beloved brother to the Tsar’s implacably proactive executioners. Revolutions do not suddenly erupt on the stage, and in a jiffy. They are usually a chaotic combination of remote and immediate causes.

    But because revolutionary circumstances represent a radical rupture with the past, they are usually accompanied by much tempest and turmoil. The world is no longer at ease. There is a foul and fearsome distemper abroad. As the old ruling class expires before our very eyes and the long-suffering masses finally find their voice, there is fear and trembling in the land. A drama of restitution is playing itself out. It is a chain of actions and reactions the end of which no one can foresee.

    For decades, Nigeria has been roiling in an organic crisis of state and nationhood.  An organic crisis, as this column never tires of reminding us, occurs when the ruling class fails in a major national endeavour or its own self-imposed mission. From the current chaotic mess, it is obvious that the ruling class has failed in the project of giving Nigerians a sense of genuine nationhood and has been utterly remiss in the economic empowerment of the desperate citizenry. It has accordingly lost its raison d’etre.

    The failure of a particular ruling class is not the absolute historical tragedy it seems as long as there is a viable and coherent alternative to step into the void and vacuum. This is where the problem seems to lie at the moment. The old order is dead, but the new is taking its time to emerge from the womb of time. It is a revolutionary situation without genuine revolutionaries. President Buhari’s messianic populism may just not be enough and being a democratically elected leader, he cannot revert to the draconian despotism of old or seek revolutionary measures to handle the situation without provoking a nation-threatening backlash.

    Yet if the sanitisation of the policy is stalemated by a recourse to legal chicanery or by a combination of ethnic and religious blackmail by desperate factions of the political elite, Buhari may be panicked into losing the surefootedness and assurance with which he has proceeded so far. As the dazed and traumatised Nigerian populace continues to bray for vengeance and restitution , the Nigerian post-colonial state is besieged and embattled on many fronts by non-state actors. It is a novel situation which is structurally, systemically and ideologically different from Buhari’s first coming.

    It is just as well, then, that the trope from the stage and acting comes in handy at this point. There are moments when dramaturgy imitates life and there are moments when life itself is indistinguishable from compelling drama. At this point, the Nigerian post-colonial state and its restive denizens resemble a vast Aristotelian theatre as the action approaches a climax.

    May the good Lord bless the ancient Greek. They were a wise and sober lot. Their tragedies were in fact barely disguised ancient morality plays designed to inculcate certain morals particularly the virtues of rectitude, humility, decency and sobriety in the citizens of that glorious civilization. When exceptional men and women who owe much to the society are brought low by their fatal failings, they must pay restitution. This is the ideological principle on which dramatic tragedy is anchored.

    This is what is known as catharsis. Ordinary people shudder at the plight and fate of extraordinary people and are bound over to be of good conduct when they witness how great men can be unhorsed and brought down to bare earth. No tragedy is complete without this cathartic expurgation of unwholesome emotions and desires as a way of moral rearmament for the entire society. No crime against humanity, irrespective of the status of the person in society, will go undetected and unpunished by the stellar array of ancient gods no matter how long it takes.

    This is why those who urge President Buhari to move on without exacting restitution and justice on those who looted Nigeria dry are dead wrong and profoundly mistaken. The poor people of this country and those who are crying from their untimely graves will not be silenced until they have seen justice done. The large scale and unprecedented burglary of the Nigerian exchequer has put Nigeria in an ethical cul de sac from which it cannot emerge without wholesale cleansing of the land.

    There can be no untimely closure until there is timely catharsis. Even if this is what Buhari manages to achieve in four years, it shall be said of him that a man once came to this land who laid the foundation for good governance and moral rectitude. Without this ethical salvation, Nigeria is doomed as a viable nation.

    Democracy is usually an elite driven affair.  For a long time, this column has been warning the Nigerian ruling class to put its house in order and to get its act together.  In every sane and sober society, the political elites act as the glue that binds the whole nation together. But when they allow pressures from down below and from the margins to overwhelm the political architecture of a nation, the ruling class loses the initiative to hostile elements and everybody is imperiled.

    There is every possibility of mob rule and mob justice.  This is what should concern the organic intellectuals of a decadent and retrogressive ruling class and all those fanning the embers of religious and ethnic opposition to Buhari’s sanitising imperative. There will be no place to hide when the dam of popular fury breaks as the solid wall is already breached—if the foul public mood is to be believed.

    In retrospect it can be seen that the feckless and heedless Goodluck Jonathan ruled the country in deliberate political extremis as if he was convinced that after him the deluge would be such that Nigeria would cease to exist as a viable entity. In his complicated simple-mindedness, Jonathan might have decided that he would be the last ruler of Nigeria as a corporate entity if he didn’t have his way in ruling the country in perpetuity. Only this can explain the psychotic state larceny that took place under his watch.

    But having failed in this Samsonine option, having failed in his bid to bring the national roof crashing on his head, the former president and his hench-people must be ready to pay restitution to the land. It will be unfortunate if this looks like or is seen as ethnic and religious witch hunting. Jonathan could not have come to power based solely on the votes and sole endorsement of his ethnic nationality. He was elected on behalf of the Nigerian ruling class. In civilised climes, the ruling class sacrifices its own once they transgress certain bounds. Every now and then, as an English wag famously put it, an admiral is quartered to encourage others.

    However, it may well be the case that Jonathan ruled the country in political, religious and economic extremity as a result of sullen resentment against past and howling injustice in the land. If that injustice cannot be redressed without opening a Pandora’s Box or resorting to extra-constitutional measures, a case can be made for letting the poor man and his accomplices off the hook once restitution has been made and stolen money recovered.  A genuine foundation for justice and equity would have been laid and Nigeria can start on a clean slate.

    But it is an ethical quicksand for General Mohammadu Buhari which would require utmost political sagacity and statesmanship rather than unwise self-righteousness. It will also require him looking out of the cultural conditioning of his immediate habitus. How does he balance the demand for prompt and instant justice of a political mob that has sniffed blood with the delicate architecture of a multi-nation nation that has endured five and a half decades of serial abuse in the hands of various political and military hegemonies?

    Perhaps history will be very kind to the Daura born former infantry general. Twice in his lifetime, it has been the unfortunate lot of this man to be called upon to salvage a nation after a major ruling class implosion and at periods of revolutionary combustion.  The first time around, aborted catharsis occasioned by the failure of Buhari’s corrective mission in particular and military messianism in general led to a thirty year wandering in the political wilderness for the country. This time around, the nation’s tattered and thread worn fabric cannot endure such a historic rigmarole. The consequences will be more immediate and far more devastating.

  • Okon takes the president to court

    As the historic trial of looters and freeloaders of the national patrimony gets underway, fierce legal fireworks are crackling across the length and breadth of the country. Trust Okon not to miss the epic legal melee. The crazy boy has cottoned in on the latest road show and has been as busy as a bee hauling and logging hefty tomes of archaic law books in and out of the house.

    “Okon, who is the owner of all these books? I hope you have not been burglarising some law chambers?” snooper demanded.

    “Oga sebi dem say dem wan try people? Small time all dem Yoruba lawyers for Lagos go dey look for dem yeye  gown. Abi stealing of dem evidence na evidence of dem stealing?”, the mad boy retorted.

    “But who owns these law books?” snooper  insisted.

    “Oga leave me o jare. Na dis one dem dey call contract stealing. We don tell Okechukwu make him remove all dem books for all dem law office for Lagos. Dem Yoruba lawyers go cry. Bayelsa trouble dey sleep, Fulani and Yoruba yanga wan wake am. We don tell una people say stealing no be corruption. When all dem mala and dem Oloye dey steal  all dem oil money you no dey complain. Opiya man come thief dem remaining dollar and dem wan jail everybody”, the crazy boy snorted.

    It was not surprising when Okon showed up early one morning with a retinue of riverine stalwarts and other menacing swamp-dwellers with an aptitude for fracas and urban affrays.

    “Oga, I don take dem Buhari man to court and dem say make I come now now”, the crazy boy drawled with a triumphant glee.

    “I see”, snooper grunted with muted relish, hoping that the mad boy will get his comeuppance in court. Even the normally contrarian Baba Lekki took a dim view of Okon’s prospects.

    “O ma se o, omode yi a w’ewon. It is a pity Ogunmuyiwa , Baba ewa ,is late”, the old man lamented.

    “Baba you don come again? Abi kainkain don scatter your head again? Who be dat Yoruba herbalist?” Okon demanded with a wicked grin.

    “Ha wereee! Ogunmuyiwa baba ewa na old magistrate. If him dey alive na for prison you go die”.

    After this sharp exchange, it was a sleepy and bleary-eyed snooper that followed the mad boy to the magistrate court as he was borne aloft by his rogue retinue chanting Efik war songs. As soon as we got to the court premises, snooper got a foretaste of what to come. With drunken gusto, Okon accosted a light-skinned policeman on duty.

    “Ah Yellow, no accidental discharge today oo. My change still dey with you”, the mad boy scoffed as the embarrassed cop quickly slunk away. The fireworks started almost immediately as the magistrate, a genial matronly enforcer and obvious veteran of many legal skirmishes, swept in and ordered proceeding to commence without any fanciful rigmarole.

    “Where is the plaintiff?” the magistrate demanded and Okon leapt to the floor.

    “Point of incorrection!” the mad boy screamed. “I no be plain thief at all and I no dey steal for dem plane. Na dem Haric people dey do dat nonsense and na  dem generals dey thief dem whole plane  “.

    “I see. What is your occupation?” the magistrate inquired with a polite smile.

    “Ha thank you my sister, uwannem maranma. Na only for Sikira dem give me dem certificate of occupation. I beg dem Fashola  boy sotey, he no gree. As he don comot office now, if him come play football for Surulere again I go wire him labalaba leg bad bad”, the mad boy shouted.

    “Look, what do you do for a living?” the magistrate demanded with a hint of impatience.

    “Ha, ha, my sister, I get dem oil block for Arepo after we come drive dem Yoruba people comot from dem area. Dem come with them egungun and I beat dat one too, silly silly. Abi na dem Diezani give me dat one too?” the boy demanded as laughter rocked the entire court.

    “In fact what is your locus standi in this matter?” the old lady demanded as she appeared to have lost her cool and patience with the impertinent lout.

    “You see make una no vex. I don tell dem Yoruba people sotey say locusts no dey stand. Dem dey bite. He get time like dat one I dey farm for Itigidi and dem locust come bite everything, dem even bite dem old man blokos”.  Okon sniggered.

    “This must be a mad fellow!  Case adjourned sine die” the ageing magistrate screamed as she packed her things and fled into her chambers leaving security people to throw out a screaming Okon.

  • The trial of Bishop Kukah

    The trial of Bishop Kukah

    Poor Mathew Hassan Kukah! He has had it up to the nape of his cassocks. The torrents of abuse have now transformed into a tsunami of vilification. It was just as well that the week ended with the congregation of Catholic Bishops removing the ground from under Bishop Kukah by wholeheartedly supporting President Buhari’s anti-corruption hurricane.

    Never in Nigeria’s public history has a hitherto respected man of god tumbled so fast in public esteem. Never has a man so widely admired for his cutting intellect become a master of pompous equivocation and fatuous obfuscation. Never has the implacable Nigerian intellectual lynch mob been so fast and furious in dismembering and devouring its victim.

    It is a sad spectacle, and a consuming Nigerian tragedy to boot. Many of us who consider ourselves friends and admirers of the gutsy and cerebral Bishop of the Sokoto Catholic Diocese can only watch in pained silence as the man of god appears to unravel in a drama of self-demystification. But in revolutionary situations, everybody must answer their fathers’ name and one must be ready to drop a friend because of principles rather than drop principles because of a friend.

    These must be revolutionary times in Nigeria indeed. It is only in revolutionary times that people lose total respect for priestly cassocks and other symbols of traditional authority. It is only in revolutionary times that the sacred become desacralized in bitter profanity and people move from hero to zero. The man of the people becomes the enemy of the populace. The dark night does not recognize sacerdotal distinction.  As the mob brays in implacable distemper, the expiring ruling class that has held Nigeria hostage must note this development.

    Bishop Kukah’s superiors in the Nigerian Catholic nomenklatura  must be clicking their tongue in sagely relish. A child can have as many new clothes as an elder, but he can never have as many rags. Many of the superiors of the Sokoto Bishop must be rubbing their palms in smirking satisfaction. Only the barely discerning would not have noticed a certain froideur, a chilly discomfort among the Catholic hierarchs as Kukah rose to secular apotheosis as a liberating theologist and friend of the rich and powerful at the same time. As the Yoruba will put it, nobody must stop a youngster from climbing the hill of Langbodo.

    In retrospect, perhaps it will be said that the Sokoto bishop chose the wrong time to cross the Homeric frontline between the Nigerian powerful and the teeming powerless; and between whistle blowing against the powerful or becoming a loud and brash megaphone of its rearguard rally. Not even the most gifted and proficient trickster knows when the trick will fail, and in revolutionary situations one cannot be too careless in his choice of enemies.

    The last straw, it seems, is Kukah’s stirring at the behest of the controversial Peace Committee. Let it be bluntly and baldly stated that this committee is not about peace at all. It materialized as a last ditch ruling class initiative to force General Buhari to accept dishonorable defeat and hence to stave off the revolutionary turmoil and anarchy that would have accompanied electoral miscarriage. It is a wearisomely familiar Nigerian ploy to impose “peace” in the absence of social and political justice. But they misjudged the mood of the nation and the fact that Nigerians have had it with their ilk.

    Bar a few misguided ones who are glad to be dredged up from peat bog of political oblivion and the odd naïve do-gooders, most of our newly minted peaceniks are compromised scoundrels working for the old regime and traditional mischief-makers on a typical pay day. Available reports indicate that some of them were already privately gloating about the inevitability of a Jonathan victory. They came to bury Buhari and not to praise him. But it bombed spectacularly. Perhaps this is one of the “spectacular” things that Jonathan did which Kukah  referred to with deliberately oblique disingenuity.

    Having failed in their core mission, they have now transformed into a “peace” council to disturb the peace of the nation, and to stalemate the inevitable sanitization of the polity. They have gone about endlessly chattering about due process and the fact that this is a democracy and not a military order. One wonders how democracy and due process would have fared had they succeeded in suborning the sovereign electoral will of Nigerians.  Let this be the last time President Buhari will give them a decent hearing.

    Kukah’s attempt to defend the motive of the peace council has brought a gale of angry denunciations on the internet and social media with many of them charging the Catholic supremo with perfidy and betrayal. This columnist read about three hundred of these angry rebuttals and only a few were willing to stake their integrity on the integrity and honesty of the bishop. It was redolent of pent up fury and misgivings, as if they have been waiting for Kukah to cross the line.

    Kukah’s  attempt to correct a purportedly mischievous slant that gave the impression that the council went up to President Buhari to bargain for a soft landing for the disgraced and discredited Jonathan drew even more tempestuous  tirades. And then in the unkindest cut of all, a shadowy and hitherto unknown organization going by the name of CUPS came out to directly impugn Kukah’s integrity and claims to probity in a well-detailed allegation of sleaze and corruption.

    This column will refrain from publicizing the salacious and insalubrious details, but they go to show how far Bishop Kukah’s stock has fallen. It is a remarkable development and no matter his public grandstanding and defiance of the gravitational pull of seamy scandals, the plucky priest must be having some anxious private moments. Even if they remain at the level of mere allegations, that they are ever broached at all shows how public perception can be influenced by the power and putrescence of offensive associations. The bishop’s cup is full and it overflows indeed.

    It may well be too late to ask the august catholic prelate to return to base. For a man of such calm and deliberate mien, such choices are not lightly made in the first instance. As we have said, everybody must answer to his patronymic in these perilous times. Like a savage hawk remarkable for its hunting prowess and ferocious precision, the Nigerian ruling class knows the particular moment to home in on its intended prey and which foibles and personal peccadilloes to zero in upon.

    In a postcolonial society infamous for its political dysfunctionality , the transition from  civil society activist to state actor is a very precarious affair indeed. In Nigeria, only few people, if any at all, have been able to manage the transition without major scars. This is because inchoate and disadvantaged civil society feels abandoned and neglected by one of its own. Like vultures waiting for the ethically deceased, they bid their time waiting to take their pound of flesh or carrion and the quiet hysteria of private abandonment soon gives way to the public hullabaloo of angry and messy divorce.

    The Catholic Bishop of Sokoto Diocese seems to have had it coming for quite some time. There might have come a time when a practical patriot like Kukah might have come to the conclusion that it might be better and more nation-rewarding to remonstrate with the Nigerian powers that be at close proximity than to demonstrate against them from a far distance.

    As a minority scion of the most minority of ethnic formations, Kukah might have concluded that he stood no chance raising hell among the hell-bound  majority monsters—as he himself once memorably dismissed Nigeria’s major ethnic formations. It may well turn out to be a bridge too far, but in the brutal power calculus of Nigeria’s political coliseum, innocence is not a virtue but a symptom of suicidal naivety.

    Who will then speak and speak up for the Nigerian minority ethnic subaltern? As a devoted watcher of Nigeria’s volatile and explosive political gymnasium, this columnist entered into a private correspondence with the father who art in Kaduna then over his seemingly seamless transition from civil society activist to state actor.  Yours sincerely wanted to know whether the transition was conscious or seemingly unconscious. It was a particularly illuminating exchange whose details must remain private and confidential.

    What did it for this columnist was Kukah’s out of proportion reaction to a Soyinka piece detailing the ills and ailments of the Nigerian postcolonial state. As usual with the implacably agonistic Nobel avatar, it was a merciless and astringent critique dripping with venom and vitriol. The old literary lion does not take hostages in these matters. But anybody who has watched Nigeria’s descent into political infamy over the decades would side with Soyinka’s angst about the fate of his beloved country.

    What seemed to have drawn Bishop Kukah’s particular ire was Soyinka’s damning conclusion that nothing good could come out of the Nigerian state as it was constituted. It is interesting and intriguing that Soyinka’s response to Kukah was a mixture of puckish humour and elderly irritation. Subsequent events seem to have proved the Nobel laureate right.

    Thereafter, certain changes in Kukah’s public personae became noticeable as he moved closer and closer to the sanctuary of state power. An imperious swagger seems to have been added to the bouncy gait even as a pompous and pomaded puffery became the order of the day. A moody irascible brio and prickly condescension became the sine qua non of Kukah’s public engagements. The bishop’s secular beatitude was in full progress.

    But such beatitudes do not beautify, and neither do they ennoble in the tumultuous and turbulent context of a postcolonial nation roiling in crisis and contradictions. In such circumstances and situations, it is the bounden duty of all men of god to speak truth to secular power and not to become carpetbaggers and reactionary rearguard rallying points for the retrogressive and anti-progress rump of a failed ruling class.

    The current pope is an outstanding exemplar of this sacred moral responsibility to the powerless of the earth; and so was the old much admired and revered Polish pope, the illustrious Cardinal Karol Wojtyla. We dare say that in the last decade and a half beginning with the Oputa Panel, Bishop Kukah has been rather remiss in that historic and sacred duty. If it is not too late, this gifted priest should find his route back to public restitution and redemption.

  • Impatient with patents

    The Economist is at it again. The influential and agenda-setting London weekly magazine is famous for testing the fast moving waters of global modernity particularly as they concern the intellectual, political and economic exceptionalism of the west. You may not always agree with its Anglo-American side-nettings but there is no point denying the intellectual verve, the brilliant prose and the logical bravura of its merciless exposition.

    In its penultimate edition, the great London magazine set the cat of innovative and paradigmatic thinking among the pigeons of modernist mediocrity by arguing convincingly, it seems, for the abolition of the regimen of patents as we know it because it stifles and stymies scientific discoveries and their immediate application. Set innovation free, the iconic intellectual powerhouse of western domination screamed.

    Oh dear, oh dear. This is the intellectual equivalent of The Economist’s  economic mantra of deregulation and the free market, this time at the level of ideas and practical innovations in a  universe of monological ideas pretending to the status of global verity. How can patents which are the fathers and guardians of invention become the enemy of progress and the inflow of vital scientific developments to the expanding frontiers of the knowledge economy?

    The argument is set forth with compelling brilliance and a surfeit of damning empirical evidence. It would appear that in a world in which innovation and invention are driven solely by profit motive rather than a genuinely human desire to solve human problems, prospective patent holders and their Shylock legal protectors have become enmeshed in a tangle of obstruction and obfuscation which prevent knowledge sharing and the swift application of urgent innovations for the benefit of humanity.

    But where does that leave Africa and particularly Nigeria where both patents and innovative scientific thinking are at their rudimentary and almost primitive level? Only scientific innovations original to Africa and innovative thinking that focuses on the political, economic and spiritual peculiarities of its people will set the continent free. As a conquered and psychologically subdued race, we are yet to embark on this arduous journey of self-discovery.  To discover the world, you must first discover yourself.

    Yet in the great sanctuaries of innovative thinking of the world, whenever great scientists and people of profound cutting edge intellect are gathered, you can be sure that at least one of these avatars is of African extraction.  From the days of Hannibal, the great Roman general of Carthaginian extraction, Africa exports what it doesn’t have in abundance only to import what it has in abundance. This is the surest route to continental extinction.

    But the journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step. It is very heartwarming to note that President Buhari is thinking of gathering together a team of entrepreneurs and practical scientific innovators that will seriously address the problems of technological underdevelopment in Nigeria and the dearth of original ideas applicable to our dire and desperate situation.

    Penultimate Thursday, snooper spent the entire afternoon at Ikoyi Club mulling over the prospects with Femi Olugbile, one of Nigeria’s leading psychiatrists and innovative thinkers. A star student in medical college, tears welled up in Olugbile’s eyes as he lamented the professorial penury that has overtaken many of his colleagues and former teachers. The truly gifted must chafe at the current Nigerian university system and the abysmal self-abasement of its most outstanding and illustrious denizens.

    The problem, in his view, is that most of the research in Nigerian universities is geared towards climbing the professorial ladder without any thought to applicability or naturalization. This is the syndrome of aping western epistemology which Lee Kuan Yew dissects so brilliantly. After the tomes of erudite irrelevancies and professorial ennoblement, the journey back to the village and bucolic bitterness begins.

    By midnight, Olugbile had sent forth his thoughts on the matter as encapsulated in a recent lecture on patents and intellectual property. It is an engrossing read. In Britain, the Industrial Revolution was powered by small scale industries and relentlessly inventive thinking. When scientific innovations meet ready sponsors, the frontiers of knowledge and enlightenment expand dramatically, spiritual hocus-pocus retreats and a nation is on the road to self-created prosperity and stable governance. These are the resources for a redemptive journey for Nigeria.

  • On the Northern Question: two exemplary positions

    On the Northern Question: two exemplary positions

    If you ignore the National Question, it will not ignore you. This is because nations are never a settled, unquestionable affair; they are forever in question. As we have seen with some of the world’s oldest nations, particularly Spain, Great Britain, Canada, Russia, the Philippines and many Latin American countries,  affronted nationalities are questioning the very basis and essence of the nation, often in scary armed critiques and bloody confrontations.

    But as we have seen in the many brutal and bloody civil wars in post-colonial Africa, particularly in Nigeria, the two Congos, Central African Republic, Somalia, Mozambique, Angola and now the two Sudan, National Questions are never settled by force but by exemplary statesmanship and visionary pacting which address the fears and grievances of political elites.

    Often, many of these elite formations use the National Question as a mask and platform for bitter power struggles and deep state intrigues, or as rearguard rallies after electoral shellacking. That is neither here nor there. It is in the nature of politics and politicians to complicate and problematize the National Question, particularly in the absence of a genuine nationalist elite formation and its overriding ethos.

    The creation of a nation particularly by colonial fiat does not and cannot come with the creation of nationals. That task is left to visionary nationalist elite groups. An Italian patriot famously snorted after the Garibaldi unification by sword: “Now that we have created Italy, it is time to create Italians!”  Many African nations were created by the colonial overlords with enemy nationals deeply embedded, making the task of genuine nation-building a forlorn Sisyphean quest.

    In postcolonial Africa, particularly multi-national Nigeria, these nascent colonial creations continue to roil in crisis and contradictions with mutually incompatible nationalities in a war of all against all. Like a stubborn and unwavering limpet stuck to a rock, the nationality question is deeply embedded in the National Question, implicated and furiously implicating. The tsetse fly does not kill a cow, but it can make life very uncomfortable and worthless indeed.

    This is not a question of tribe or tongue. Either as a regional bloc or as individual entities, most Nigerian nationalities are permanently engaged in a driven quest for self-validation or self-determination which often erupts as an armed critique of the state or the nation itself or a determined bid to bend or break the nation to their private will. But in the absence of a powerfully driven and historically motivated national elite formation, it is like trying to feel your way out of a funeral sack; it often feels like being buried alive.

    For example, in the old west, despite the bravest visionary efforts of Obafemi Awolowo and his progressive successors to collar the region and drive it in the direction of western modernity and modernization, the lingering ideological efficacy of its old powerful feudal structure still continues to play lead violin with the Yoruba nationality forced to feel and probe its way towards modernity like a stalled caterpillar. This can be seen in the cultural politics surrounding the transition of the Ooni, the spiritual father of the Yoruba people.

    In the old east, the general conviction is that the Igbo nation has never been able to throw up a visionary and purposeful political elite to match and valorize the republican dynamism, entrepreneurial brilliance and outstanding creative gifts of the people.  The result has been perpetual perfidy and betrayals which in the tumult and turbulence of a dysfunctional nation often eventuate in unhealthy bitterness and tantrum-throwing which in turn jeopardize inter-elite harmony and cooperation.

    As for the Ijaw nationality and its failed hegemonic bid, discerning Ijaw nationalists will for long rue the postcolonial incubus which has foisted an inept and corrupt leadership on the ethnic group at its most critical hour of need. As General Obasanjo recently hostilely averred, this leadership lapse will haunt the ethnic formation for quite some time to come. But as Kafka once noted, “it is not that what you say is false, but it is so hostile”.

    Yet of all the regional blocs and nationalities in Nigeria, it is perhaps the north that has been most critically shortchanged and left holding the wrong end of the stick. Political success is the mother of economic and cultural failure.  Unlike other regions, colonial conquest and occupation met a ruling class which had by dint of its own internal conquest and occupation leavened by political guile and astute engineering imposed a measure of order, stability and cohesiveness on the entire region. If this superior feudal politicking has allowed the north to dictate the political terms in post-independence Nigeria, it has also left some hideous social contradictions in its wake.

    Colonial occupation met the north stoutly facing the Middle East and Islamic civilization for succor and political guidance. This is a fact of historical congruence and spiritual consanguinity which cannot be wished away. The problem is that after it was thrown out of Spain and after the debacle of the Ottoman Turks in modern day Serbia in the fifteenth century, Islamic modernity has been reeling relentlessly from the hammer of western modernity and modernization.

    As this relentless western modernity impinges on the north destabilizing and compromising its classical Islamic feudal political structure and economy even as it hammers away at its Wahhabist spiritual hegemony through the advent of western education and the menace of globalization, we have been witnessing a horrid reenactment of the Middle East horror in Sahelian Nigeria. It has even occasioned the rise and hegemony of a northern officers’ class reminiscent of the occupation of Egypt by slave soldiers of the Mamluk caste for almost five hundred years. Welcome to Boko Haram country.

    It is just as well, then, that the Boko Haram threat is about to be completely degraded by a rejuvenated and re-engineered Nigerian military. But unless the root political and economic causes of this scourge are addressed and in the light of relentless globalization which is an equal opportunity transmitter and transmission spacecraft for spiritual merchandise and Islamic radicalism, we may witness the advent of even more horrid and murderous mutants in the future.

    Luckily for Nigeria, There is a breath of fresh air and optimism blowing across the country which is kindled by President Mohammadu Buhari’s return to power and exemplary personal example. It is unfortunate that age is no longer on the retired general’s side. Buhari’s announcement of a multi-billion naira rehabilitation plan for the ravaged north east is a step in the right direction. This project must now include a holistic plan for the compulsory education of northern youths and the economic empowerment of its underclass which will wean its desperate peasantry and disoriented hoi polloi away from the sedulous and seductive lore of the paradisiacal paeans of Islamic militancy.

    What the north and by extension the rest of the nation need is a modernizing Ataturk who will take the entire country by the scruff of the neck and push its political, economic and spiritual structures into compulsory modernization. A primitive economic structure can only breed primitive corruption and mammoth greed associated with hunter-gatherers not sure of the next meal. One does not need to like Buhari’s face or stern visage to associate with what he is doing. This is Nigeria’s last chance. Whether his shameless traducers are willing to admit it or not,  Buhari has got many things right.

    Yet the National Question, like an old impertinent and unwanted guest, persists and subsists. It will not go away. Turkey was a culturally and religiously homogenous nation which made it relatively easy for Mustapha Kemal Ataturk to deal with rump of the Ottoman Empire he bravely carved out. But the modern world is no longer driven by arms and their bearers but by the force transcendental thinking.

    A modern Nigerian Ataturk must combine the visionary modernizing genius of the old Turkish hero with the cultural and intellectual nous and sensitivity which must allow him to see Nigeria as a multinational nation with nationalities in relatively autonomous and mutually incompatible stages of political, economic and spiritual  developments. This not only requires astute political engineering, but simultaneous synchronic and structural discriminations and rigorous differentiations. Whether Buhari has these or is driven by a solitary messianism without commensurate conceptual scaffolding remains to be seen.

    But the national question waits for nobody as it aims at the jugular of fragile and inchoate nations. As if to remind us of unfinished business, the northern in the national Question reechoed recently in a stormy collision of ideas between two of the brightest political stars the northern Nigerian firmament has thrown up in recent times.

    Malam Nasir el-Rufai , the governor of Kaduna State, needs no introduction. Brilliant, bold, tempestuous and with a hint of temperamental irritability with opposing ideas, the pesky, pint-sized accidental politician does not take hostages. Often controversial but with a cause, el-Rufai has established quite a reputation as a radical iconoclast and northern gadfly who does not care a hoot about protocols and procedures for political hostilities. In a starchy conservative milieu, this may come across as impish arrogance, but there is considerable merit in el-Rufai’s hell raising.

    Ever since he became governor,  el-Rufai has seized the central northern state by the scruff of the neck dragging the bull screaming and kicking to the watering hole of modernization. When he is not severely downsizing the bloated and unsustainable structure of governance, he is busy abolishing the customary practice of state Sallah munificence. When he is not busy pruning down and “rationalizing” the unwieldy ministries, he is tirelessly scissoring the mammoth workforce.

    There are faint hints of the infamous IMF conditionalities about these reforms and more than a whiff of text book monetarist economics. Nasir el-Rufai often comes across as an unfeeling, hard-hearted patrolman of the World Bank autobahn. But it is better to do something and be wrong than to do nothing and be right. Corrective measures often come from the collision of proactive errors and practical insights.

    It is a desperate situation indeed. It is however el-rufai’s attempt to banish beggars (but not begging) from the streets of Kaduna that has drawn the ire of Shehu Sani, his fellow party man and senator from the same Kaduna state who has accused the governor of pursuing anti-people policies. Urbane, courteous and impeccably well-mannered, Sani  comes from an illustrious line of radical civil society activism and high wire political networking.

    Begging and its corollary of alms giving, particularly in the north, is a culturally sensitive and spiritually explosive affair which should be handled with tact and caution. But it should be noted that begging was never a profession until alms giving was religiously codified as a sign of spiritual ennoblement and charity towards the perpetually impecunious and begging itself is spiritually transformed as a symptom of honorable poverty. Dishonorable poverty breeds revolutions and republican perversities.

    But for the distinguished senator and civil rights activist, these selfsame beggars and despised mendicants form a considerable part of his constituency.  They are his people. He was not elected by beggars to abolish beggars –and begging. In a conservative society, this is the politically correct stance to take. In the event, it is el-Rufai’s monetarist conservatism with its echoes of brutal modernization that tilts at the edge of radical iconoclasm and visionary innovation.

    It is intriguing however that neither Shehu Sani nor Nasir el-Rufai has come up with a holistic and  comprehensive programme about addressing the phenomenon of begging in the north which strikes at the root of the problem. This must involve a regimen of drastic reorientation, compulsorily mass-education and what the great Brazilian sociologist has called “conscientization” of the people. But this is tantamount to striking a fatal blow at the vital artery of the old northern ruling class.

    If it is sufficiently scaffolded and theoretically integrated to become a coherent ideology, President Buhari’s messianic populism may be of help here. It has been established in political philosophy that the greatest good that can come from government is the maximum happiness of the maximum number of citizens. From different ideological spectrums, the Lula advent in Brazil and the Lee Kuan Yew experiment in Singapore have shown how it is people for bold visionary governance to lift a nation and its people from the trough of poverty and indignity to global reckoning.

    How this will pan out in Nigeria remains to be seen. But that this debate is taking place at all between two of the northern luminaries of their generation is a pointer to the political and intellectual ferment that has seized hold of Nigeria and the first astral sign of a post-PDP Nigeria. In sixteen years of misbegotten rule, this kind of intellectual contention that is potentially regenerative in its sheer disruptiveness of the existing order never took place on an inter-party basis not to talk of within the same party in the same region and the same state.

    Once again, we wager that the APC has its work cut out for it. What the “thrilla in Kaduna” is showing is that the new ruling party cannot afford to slam arbitrary textbook policies on the whole nation without first coming to terms with the political, cultural, economic and spiritual peculiarities of its constituting units and mutually contradictory constituencies. The National Question is still very much alive and kicking at us.

     

  • Re-presenting the Under-represented: Toward A Recovery of the American Dream in Higher Education

    Re-presenting the Under-represented: Toward A Recovery of the American Dream in Higher Education

    Utopia Postponed

    Chairman, dignitaries spiritual and temporal, distinguished audience, I want to begin by thanking the organisers of this forum for a timely and wonderful idea, an idea which is in keeping with the finest tradition of the Catholic Church and this remarkable institution of higher learning. As Shakespeare has noted, great reckonings always begin in small rooms, and I am sure that when viewed retrospectively, the deliberations of this forum will be seen as a remarkable and worthy intervention in the educational process of the United States.

    Let me assure the organisers and sponsors that whenever and wherever human history is recorded, there is always a special status and pride of place accorded to the nobility of those who seek a voice for the voiceless and give a helping hand to the helpless.The Roman Catholic establishment is very much part of this noble tradition, and the founding sisters of this university are illustrious exemplars.

    We can even go back in history to the example of Jesus Christ whose radical humanism often led him to a risky identification with the poor, the meek and the wretched of the earth. I say all this not to flatter or to cajole but to place before you the incontrovertible facts of history. In the course of this address, I will show how certain historic personages of the Catholic Church, from Bartolome de Las Casas, the seventeenth century catholic archbishop of Chiapas, to the Abbe Henri-Baptiste Gregoire, a leading French abolitionist of the early eighteenth century, played crucial roles in re-presenting the misrepresented.

    The phenomenon of under- representation is one of the crucial challenges of our time. At the level of contemporary global politics, it has bred wholesale alienation of national communities, alternative cultures and even civilisations. It has ruptured the old international order and it threatens the very paradigm of the nation-state.

    On the other hand, it has spawned in the alienated several desperate measures which range from a strategy of excluding the excluders to what has been described as the logic of perverse connection which invariably means a resort to international crime in order to connect to the grid of the global economy. This often involves deploying the technology of globalisation to achieve ideological ends widely at variance with the goals of an American empire in denial.

    I have put things in this global perspective in order to secure a broader canvas. What concerns us at this forum is not under-representation at the level of global politics, but under-representation at a national and even more fundamental level of human endeavour. We are talking of under-representation in higher education in the United States. It is indeed a supreme irony of history and the human condition that a nation founded on the ideals of freedom and equality, and on the ruins of the feudal injustices of the old world should find its own system of higher education riddled with gross inequities.

    Despite affirmative actions and other ameliorative steps, and despite the struggle and efforts of the civil rights groups and other concerned agencies, the cruel reality of under-representation in the American higher educational system stares us in the face in all its vertical and horizontal dimensions. And this is not just an academic exercise. The symptoms of this national malaise are as clear as they are threatening: cynical distrust of government and political institutions, alienation, social dislocations of biblical proportions, and a progressive loss of faith in the American dream.

    This is what has brought us here today. My address is predicated on the fundamental premise that certain philosophical and ideological correctives are imperative before effective political actions. Without such a foundation, all actions, however heroic and spectacular, are ultimately futile and an invitation to anarchy. In the words of a famous Nigerian novelist, we must go back to where the rains started beating us. As intellectuals, our principal responsibility is to think and illuminate the path of mankind. Before mounting the political barricades we must first remove the philosophical barriers. As Hegel has noted, if reality is inconceivable then we must forge concepts that are inconceivable.

    My address is structured around the major trope of re-presentation. My argument is that before under-representation came misrepresentation and before full representation there must come a re-presentation. In other words, we must first decode and properly understand the hegemonic strategies by which wholesale communities, races, groups are first “othered”, and then compelled to come to terms with their disadvantage as if it is a naturally ordained phenomenon.

    If one were to take a long view of history, it is possible to see this insidious manipulation of military and economic advantages for the purpose of political and intellectual subjugation as a trans-historical phenomenon which is certainly not without its utopian impulses. The anguished cries of Shylock, Shakespeare’s embattled Jewish merchant of Venice, as he tried to reassert his humanity in the face of widespread denial, comes to mind as a grim and timely reminder of the fate of stigmatised minorities however rich and powerful.

    At certain points in history, a people or a society, consciously and unconsciously, often invest themselves with the divine mantra of the bearer of a new telos whose historic destiny is to lift the rest of humanity, often by the bootstraps, to a higher level of civilisation. Yet the immense human suffering often engendered, the world-historic agonies, the cruel and merciless rationalism unleashed on innocent populace are simply staggering and often grossly disproportionate to the eventual benefits to mankind.

    In the event, it compounds and complicates the quest for an ideal society and the redemption of humankind. The question begging for an answer is this: How did the United States of America which was supposed to represent a new beginning for mankind, away from the inequities and iniquities of the old world, come to be haunted by this ancestral sin?

     

    In the Beginning

    In 1809, more than half a century before the outbreak of the American civil war, the Abbe Henri-Baptiste Gregoire, sent a manuscript of a new work to Thomas Jefferson, a founding father and the third president of the United States. The book was a celebration and commemoration of essayists, writers and scientists of African extraction who had found their way to the west. It was titled, De La Litterature des Negress. Despite his principled opposition to slavery, Jefferson’s view of the intellectual capacities of black people was notoriously truculent and characterised by savage dismissals.

    In an infamous passage from his Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson noted thus of the African American: “It appears to me that in memory they are equal to whites: in reason much inferior, as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid; and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous”.

    This remarkable diatribe was coming on the heels of the literary exploits  of the trio Equaino, Cuguano and Sancho, former slaves of African descent, who seized late eighteenth century literary London by the scruff of the neck and were feted in all the leading saloons of England’s capital for their astounding feats of imagination. Being very well-connected to the metropolitan circuits of the old world, Jefferson could not have been unaware of the literary triumphs of these exemplars. Perhaps it was a case of prejudice compounded by deliberate ignorance. Gregoire’s treatise could have been a well-aimed and profoundly clandestine attempt to help Jefferson modify or moderate his unhelpful worldview.

    But it was an uphill task. The same views resonate in the works of European intellectuals and philosophers such as David Hume, Emmanuel Kant, Friedrich Hegel and even Karl Marx. As far as Marx was concerned, India and the African continent lost nothing in the wanton destruction of their old culture by the European conquerors as it was a culture shot through with idiotic superstitions and morbid myths.

    As late as the late twentieth century, the celebrated historian, Hugh Trevor Roper, would dismiss African history as characterised by a dark void in one long night of savagery. And as the early nineteen fifties in post-bellum Atlanta, a grand lady of a house would be so shocked by the discovery that a moonlighting African American houseboy could read that she would exclaim: “Vernon can read!!!” This later became the title of the autobiography of the “boy” in question, Vernon Jordan, corporate lawyer and golf course crony of William Jefferson Clinton.

    This rather inauspicious beginning marked the insertion of African Americans into the educational system of their new country and has ever since determined its less than glorious trajectory. Not only were black people regarded as unlettered savages, the very idea of educating them was forbidden and criminalised. Specific laws were enacted making it a criminal offence to enrol them in schools. The situation was later to create its own macabre absurdities. Several African Americans who triumphed over this legal adversity by sheer fortitude and indomitable will were later to find themselves confronted by an impossible situation.

    On a book signing tour, Fredrick Douglass, the former slave, was advised by his Abolitionist sponsors not to sound too posh and educated lest people began to doubt the veracity of his story. An infamous review of a slave memoir in The Christian Examiner of 1839 opens with the immortal put-down: “We read, in what professes to be the language of a slave, that which we feel a slave could not have written…” Not only must the minority subalterns not speak, they must also not write. And thus was sown the seeds of contemporary under-representation of African Americans in higher education in the United States.

    From the other end of the spectrum, the story is no less appalling and sordid. Fifty years after the conquest of the Inca civilisation by the Spanish conquistadors, the genocide of the Amerindians was so cruel and compelling that Bartolome de Las Casas, the Bishop of Chiapas, and himself a Spaniard, was moved to protest. The local populace was treated worse than the animals of the conquerors. According to a moving account: “The majority of the Spanish military, administrators, and colonists, hungry for gold and power, saw the occupants of the new world as irrevocably Other, less than human, or at least naturally subordinate to Europeans. In a blistering philippic, La Casas notes: “The nature of men is the same and all are called by Christ in the same way”.

    For those interested in history as a museum of atrocities and of man’s inhumanity to man, we can move to nineteenth century Congo and the brutal and systematic elimination of the local populace by King Leopold of Belgium. Two centuries earlier in the same area, the Portuguese had completely decimated the proud people of the Kongo kingdom and carried off virtually the entire populace to the new colony of Brazil through the slave port of Luanda, the capital of present day Angola. When the Portuguese arrived fifty years earlier, they had met a social structure and political administration vastly superior to the one they had left behind at home. But it was an administration without military firepower, and the people paid very dearly for this historic remission.

    But what goes around must come around, and the whirligig of time often brings its own revenge. In the third decade of the nineteenth century, Mexico, with its native Indian populace and overlay of the old conquistador class, finally came within the rifle sights of the triumphant and relentlessly expanding new nation. Having succumbed to a dissolute and corrupt military oligarchy, Mexico presented a classic case of political disorder and social turmoil.

    The philosophical launch pad which facilitated the military subjugation of the Mexicans was known as the doctrine of manifest destiny which held that it was the God-ordained destiny of the United States to bring civilisation, economic prosperity and good governance to the rest of the continent and possibly beyond. This was the stirring of empire, and although this strain of messianic covenant as God’s chosen people has always been present in America, it was in 1845 that John O’Sullivan gave it an authoritative seal in an influential article for The Democratic Review.

    Up till today, many Mexicans regard Los Yanquis with suspicion and sullen resentment. But with the conquest of Mexico and forcible acquisition of a large swathe of its territory, the United States became host-and hostage- to three major minority groups: native American Indians, African Americans and Hispanic Americans. It is no wonder, then, that these groups represent the most under-represented groups in higher education in America. When it has been persistently and consistently drummed into your ears and drilled into your head that you belong to an inferior race and that you are naturally sub-human, it is very hard to rise above the history stupor and the morass of self-pity.

    Naturally enough, you begin to evolve strategies of containment or stratagems of accommodation to a hostile reality of modern enslavement. This is where misrepresentation leads to under representation and structural exclusion induces self-exclusion. In such circumstances, the very notion of an American dream becomes a tall order, an ideological sweetener for the bitter reality of injustice and inequity. The threat of this disequilibrium of opportunity to racial and social harmony in the United States can be better imagined.

     

    Recovery and Re-Presentation of the Subject:

    What the above historical excursion has shown is a drama of misperception and wilful misrepresentation played out across history, across time and across different societies. What we can learn from this is that there are no naturally inferior people, races or societies. This is merely an ideological stigmatization designed to maximize temporary historical advantages and justify economic belligerence. No society is exempt from this. By the same token, history does not confer any special status on any people or society.

    In the interplay of opportunities and unique circumstances, the relay baton for human advancement, as we have seen, often shifts. As it emerged from the long night of the dark ages, the “modern” west has had to define itself and construct its identity not only in total opposition to and exclusion of all that had come before, but also against an inter-lapping barbarous other. This is merely one of the founding myths of modernity as it wilfully ignores the crucial contributions of non-western societies, particularly the Muslim and African worlds, to the very notion of modernity.

    Identity, then, is a function of difference. But while to differentiate is normal and in order, to discriminate on the basis of difference is not and is profoundly subversive of the very basis of our common humanity. The struggle for a just representation in higher education in America must proceed with this re-affirmation of our mutual humanity and the common ancestry of humankind. But while the struggle for political justice and equity proceeds apace, the under-represented, rather than succumbing to self-pity or reconciling themselves to the status of second-class citizens, must also gird their loins to make a positive intervention on the education stage both collectively and individually.

    For groups long suppressed and repressed, long ideologically conditioned to seeing themselves as naturally disadvantaged, this may be a tall order indeed. But it is a banal truism that heavens help those who help themselves. And one is very pleased to note that integration of minority groups into the mainstream of higher education in the United States are already evident in many of the thoughtful proposals for this forum. From the redemptive spirit in African American sports, the need for blacks and other minorities to utilize available educational support in USA, computer literacy training for older adults, to pedagogical alternatives for the marginalized and the growing need for on-line higher education. These are all immense resources for a journey of hope and redemption, and the recovery of the American dream in higher education.

    Indeed as history has shown, the great ideas for moving a society forward do not come from hegemonic groups that are happy with the status quo but from the ranks of the marginalized and excluded. These momentous insights are often wrenched at great personal costs and immense suffering. We recall Sigmund Freud writing with what he himself has modestly described as a “a modicum of misery”.

    We recall Antonio Gramsci, a consumptive hunchback, being thrown into jail with the war-cry: “We must prevent this brain from functioning for twenty years”. Unfortunately for Mussolini, it was precisely in prison that Gramsci wrote his best work. And we must remember the example of Franz Kafka, wracked by consumption and tuberculosis, a victim of multiple displacement, who nevertheless went ahead to create some of the most haunting allegories of the human condition.

    Let me caution, however, that while we struggle for political justices and equity and we deploy all available intellectual resources in the quest for the full representation of all marginalised groups in higher education in the United States, we must not allow hatred to dwell in our heart. For this is ultimately self-defeating. We return then to the good Bishop of Chiapas, Bartholome de Las Casas , who reminded the conquistadors that humankind is one.

    If this is turned on its head, we discover that we are all guilty of marginalizing and oppressing the other. From the phenomenon of Mfecane or dispersal visited on South African nationalities by Chaka, the late Zulu conqueror, the reality of Arab slavery in Black Africa even at this moment, the colonial ravages and despoliation in the old and new world, to the current decimations of globalization, there is no record of human advancement which is not at the same time a record of barbarity—to paraphrase Adorno. And as Albert Camus has observed, “There is a solidarity of human-beings in aberration”.

    But while we regret the dark spots of history with all their trauma and pains, let us also remember the bright moments. In the United States. let us recall the examples of great and good Americans like George Washington who declined to reign as the sovereign monarch of his beloved country and chose to be ruled as an equal citizen; Abraham Lincoln who sought a just human solution to societal conflicts; and of course the man we all honour this month, Dr Martin Luther King, who had a dream of an America rid of social segregation and under-representation and was happy to lay down his life in the pursuit of that ideal.

    When we recall the strivings of these great icons of social and political justice, even as we add our own modest contributions at this forum, we can come to the conclusion that the utopia represented by the United States and incarnated in the American dream has merely been deferred. My task is done. I thank you for the excellent opportunity.

     

    • Keynote speech by Professor Adebayo Williams at the forum: Under-Represented Groups and Education: Challenges for the 21stCentury.

    February 12-13 2004 , J. E. and L. E. Mabee Library, University of the Incarnate Word, San Antonio, Texas.

     

    • Adebayo Williams was the Amy Freeman Lee Distinguished Chair of Humanities and Fine Arts

    University of The Incarnate Word, San Antonio, TX78209

     

  • The king did not die

    The king did not die

    The king is dead, long live the king! This paradoxical formulation all but summarizes the acute existential dilemma of all people with kings. For such people, the death of kings is not a funny matter at all. It is a terrible disaster. It portends chaos and millennial disorder. It is a radical disruption of the sacred order of being; the reign of anarchy. Things fall apart indeed and the centre can no longer hold.

    So therefore for these people, the king cannot and in fact must not die. As the sacred and supreme law-giver of the tribe, the king cannot die just like that. As the father and protector of the tribe, the death of the king provokes a sense of panic and a feeling of acute helplessness and vulnerability.  The people feel naked.

    Who will now defend them against the cruel marauders from across the great rivers and the mighty mountains?  Who will shield them from the fiery swords of sworn enemies and the outrageous arrows and slings of fortune? Who will take their propitiatory offerings to angry ancestors? And who will save them from themselves?

    Far away from home, and in bitter captivity, the ancient people of Israel remembered their king:

    By the Rivers of Babylon, where we sat down

    And then we wailed, when we remember Zion

    For the wicked carried us away in captivity

    And required from us a song

    How can we sing King Alpha’s song in a strange land?

    For people of kings, the mystery-shrouded disappearance of a particular king after the end of his golden tenure this side of the abyss of transition is but a minor coitus interruptus in a long and intense copulation between the ruled and their ruler. It is romance. It is a labour of love and affection. In the absence of pressing contenders, death itself is magically transformed into a stout ally of the ruling class; the principal Praetorian guard of the sacred order of divination and secular divinity.

    The king does not die. He can only magically transit to the other side in a world of continuity and contiguous reality between the living and the dead. When this great ritual of royal disappearance is managed very well by the crack custodians of the commonwealth, the great sages and savants of the traditional society, it is a seamless and painless transition. But when it is not, it is Anubis resurgence. The world shakes with stress and distress.

    Time, however,  has proved the greatest enemy of the old order and its ruling classes. In Africa after they have failed to shake off a particularly vicious post-colonial sovereign, they often leave things to inevitable death, better known as a biological coup d’etat. For example, in  Zimbabwe they are all reconciled to the fact that the old Wizard of Harare might be around for quite some time. Human agency is eventually put in the shade by human ageing.

    It is obvious that the ancient framers of the Yoruba constitution and its kingly passage never reckoned with the passage of Time itself and the colonial irruption which abridged the power of traditional authority. Neither could they have bargained for globalization and its dire consequences, particularly the virtual abolition of time and space and the eruption of global means of communication which subvert and undermine the power of modern states not to talk of traditional kingdoms.

    This past week, the Yoruba people of Nigeria experienced what is it like to be caught in the whizzing whirlpool of the unequal contest between tradition and modernity and the ceaseless surveillance which often leaves the state better surveiled than it is capable of surveilling  its own citizens and better electronically patrolled than it is capable of electronically patrolling its determined denizens. It is an epic confrontation on the scale of Things Fall Apart and Death and the King’s Horseman.

    But this time around, it was not canons and maxim guns booming but computers bleeping and sophisticated phones flashing. Satanic twitters and tweets abound. The pressing and ever present conflict between modernity and unsecured tradition always leave the latter holding the wrong end of the stick. This is even more so in an inchoate multi-national nation like Nigeria without an overriding national ethos.

    On Monday evening, snooper began picking some unusual vibes and signals from the international tell-tale circuits. The global electronic eavesdropping commune began converging like virtual vultures. The heavy hints all led towards one conclusion: something unusual was happening or about to happen in the principal House of Oodua. A caller asked yours sincerely to investigate from local sources, but the columnist quickly met a brick wall or got gnomic evasions for answer.

    A few days earlier, snooper had stumbled on the information that the Ooni of Ife, Oba Okunade Sijuwade, had been flown abroad in an air ambulance following serious medical developments which could not be readily accommodated in any Nigerian hospital. This information was considered to be too politically sensitive to be inflicted on the public. In any case, it is believed that among Yoruba royalty, deliberate orchestration of death or its brutal proximity is part of an elaborate ritual of life enlongation. Buyers beware.

    When snooper reported back to the person who had initiated the original inquiry, he was told to forget it because the great Iroko fell a few minutes earlier.  After a brief silence only punctuated by pained sighs, the person requested for an immediate adjournment of conversation.  Yours sincerely spent the next hour listlessly roaming around the house. Then at about 11.30pm, a phone call came through which all but confirmed developments. If he was still in doubt, snooper was admonished by the caller, the news was already on the facebook.  That did it.

    Thirty six years earlier when the last Ooni, Sir Adesoji Tadeniawo Aderemi,  joined his ancestors, the forces of globalization were yet to take firm roots. There was no viable internet, no gsm, no bb, not to talk of facebook, twitter,hashtag and all what not. The royal transition was superbly choreographed, with early warning signals and coded palace-speak.

    The world has since become one vast cyber Kibbutz. One pin drop from one end of the globe instantly registers in another part thousands of miles away. The first sign of defeat for tradition was the very moment the Ooni was taken out of his palace for medical rehabilitation in a land thousands of miles away from home. That sealed the route for a quiet return to the palace in whatever form and turns the royal translation into the first publicly enacted departure of a major sovereign .

    The following day after most national dailies had broken the news of the passing, Ife palace chiefs rallied valiantly by insisting that it was all a rumour, drawing attention to and sustenance from similar mischief in the past. But a few hours later, Saharareporters, the impish and irreverent on-line news service, swiftly countermanded this by insisting that the king had truly departed. A day after, a major daily reported the Nigerian High Commissioner in England paying a condolence visit to the family of the monarch.

    There are important lessons to be learnt from this remarkable encounter between the old order and rampart forces of the new world. You cannot argue with an earthquake or remonstrate with its scalding and molten lava. In the unending and ceaseless confrontation between globalizing modernity and the forces of tradition, wise societies and sober nations negotiate their own terms of entry and accommodation.

    This is what Singapore, Japan, India and the Asian Tigers did and is what China is doing. This what Russia did politically and militarily but not economically. This is what the heroic Cubans did after a tense half a century face off. You must never allow yourself to be frog-marched and dragooned to modernity. The failure of Nigeria to live up to its billing often shows up in dramatic and expected ways.  The irresponsibility of our ruling class haunts us and hunts them in a way and manner we can never foresee.

    When you shortchange others, you also shortchange yourself. Had we used a fraction of the money stolen to build good roads, many lives, including our traditional rulers often slaughtered like propitiatory rams on our high ways, could have been saved. Had we built world class hospitals, there would have been no need to airlift our revered monarch abroad in the first instance and the notable Yoruba culture and tradition might have been spared a humiliating encounter with the rampaging forces of unrelenting modernity.

    So, did our great father, the Alase ikeji orisa and Arole Oodua die on Monday?  No, no, the king did not die and the king cannot die. But when we allow modernity to trump tradition through our careless greed and gluttony, the kingship institution suffers a near fatal wound. May the throne of Oduduwa survive for many more epochs.

  • Forgery and fudge in the senate

    And whilst we are still on the subject of the fearsome confrontation between the old order and the forces of rampaging political modernity, it is meet to report that after the initial hiccups and frontal insubordination to the dictates of the majority party, the House of Representatives is settling down to good and honest business at last.

    Snooper monitored the proceeding last Wednesday and was very impressed by the depth and clarity of presentations. Particularly outstanding in deportment and submission was Honorable Shehu-Shagari.      The Speaker, Yakubu Dogara, was masterfully in charge, evoking calm comportment and regal equanimity. It was all redolent of promise and good tidings.

    Meanwhile as this was happening in the lower chamber, the upper chamber, the senate, compromised in the eyes of discerning compatriots by forgery and fudge and by the sheer illegality and illegitimacy of progeny and provenance of its leadership, was digging in. The old axiom that when you are in a hole, you stop digging does not cut any ice with its leading lights or lightlessness. They are furiously digging in.

    The senate began business with a rousing acclamation of its errant leadership. This motion was supported by a whopping two and a half dozen senators purportedly elected under the APC platform. That just about did it. The aromatic smell of food in the guise of imminent juicy committee memberships could induce a feeding frenzy and unhinge the most loyal party members. This is not the time for fancy theories about party supremacy. As one of the senate’s leading luminaries has famously put, “the senate is not a party secretariat”.  The goat eats where it is tethered.

    In a classic case of chutzpah, the senate even had the great immoral courage and the brazen temerity to admonish members of the public against media-slamming of its members and to caution the security agencies against witch-hunting family members of distinguished senators. The Rip van Winkle at the EFCC who has just woken up after a millennial nap, must take this serious admonition to heart or be prepared for more mass invasion from the Tartar hordes led by the infamous brawler from Kogi.

    It is clear that this lot are beyond soap and water, and there is no point in any further remonstration or appeal to logic and national interest. Since tenacious occupation irrespective of legality confers partial ownership in the eyes of the law, the senate may yet get away with blue murder. Worn down by sheer attrition, the ruling party and the public may decide to move on and overlook the historic infringement. In a typical Nigerian judicial and constitutional fudge, it might even be argued that there is no point in disrupting legislative harmony and stability no matter how it is conjured.

    But that is assuming that a leopard can ever change its spots. After securing its flanks, this senate will resume its destabilization of the executive and the country as a whole in a most vicious manner. Its leadership, having been outed as retrogressive charlatans, can only find relevance on the corpse of a new Nigeria. They will fight tooth and nail to maintain the dead order and its diseased detritus.

    In the event, President Buhari must be prepared to take his case directly to the Nigerian people. There can be no doubt who at the moment is the overwhelming favourite of the Nigerian populace, no matter the shameless antics of the ousted party and its unreconstructed collaborators in the ruling party. Something tells snooper that this may yet end in a stormy confrontation.