The differend? What does it mean? Dear readers, do not be unduly confounded by the term. It comes from contemporary French critical theory and was coined by the late eminent theorist of postmodernity, Jean-Francoise Lyotard. Drawn from the two words, differ and defer, the differend applies to the moment in a dispute when one of the contending parties finally realizes that in order to get justice, she or he must break out of the existing order of discourse or frame of rationality. Here’s an example of the differend at work: extra-judicial activism has always been used by activists and revolutionaries all over the world and throughout history to supplement or even totally replace judicial means of seeking redress for social evils.
Here is another example: throughout military history, small and poorly equipped armies have not stood in one place to fight large, well-armed armies in line with strategies derived from manuals for conducting and winning wars written by and for prestigious military commanders; they have used hit and run guerilla tactics that avoid pitched battles. In sum then, the differend is the weapon of choice for the weak against the strong, the defenseless against the protected, the powerfulness against the powerful. Thus, the differend may sound like a big, fanciful word, but what it really means is that for the talakawa of this country and the world, if they want economic and social justice, they must be prepared to use the differend, they must be ready and be able to depart from the usual or normal way of doing things, especially in speaking to the powers that be.
Bill Gates did not have to resort to the differend in his widely discussed and deservedly praised speech to the Nigerian Economic Council at which the most eminent members of the Buhari administration, including of course Buhari himself, were present. The reason for this is fairly obvious: Gates is one of the two or three richest men in the world; and quite possibly, he is the world’s most generous and compassionate philanthropist. Moreover, Nigeria has been one of the most favoured nations in the world in the disbursement of his philanthropy. It is of course always an extremely delicate matter when one who gives, even very generously, lectures the receiver of his generosity on how to run his life as this always smacks of condescension and paternalism. But by a stroke of discursive genius, Gates found the right tone for his “lecture” and this he accomplished by basing his speech on the fundamentals of our shared humanity. Giving a plethora of data and statistics, he declared that Nigeria is one of the worst places in the world into which any human being could be born. [He might have added that our country is also one of the worst places on the planet in which to die, though he did imply it] But the speech was not well received by the government, proving that the differend is what Gates should have used in addressing the stolid Nigerian men and women of power with hearts of stone!
Many commentators have rightly pointed out that Gates said nothing that Nigerians themselves have not been saying for a long time, especially the most independent-minded and prescient critics of our present political (dis)order. But it takes nothing away from us when the outside world takes up our cries for relief from the policies and the misdeeds of the predators that rule over us. Moreover, it is important to recognize that Gates was not speaking truth to power, as many commentators have mistakenly declared. He was speaking truth to the mendacious, justice to the unjust and compassion to the heartless. You can only invoke the familiar trope of “speaking truth to power” when the speaker is powerless, when what he or she says carries grave perils to her or his freedom or even life itself. Don’t we all know that Gates is completely untouchable, completely immune to any form of “punishment” by the Nigerian state? No, dear readers, Gates did not speak truth to power; he used power to speak truth to the mendacious and the iniquitous!
More precisely, Gates spoke from a long and tested tradition of the enlightened self-interest of the rich in modern Western capitalist societies that is virtually unknown in most of the developing world, most decidedly in Nigeria. This is the heart of what I have to say in this piece: there is a long tradition of enlightened self-interest of the wealthy and the privileged in Western capitalist societies, a tradition that American capitalism has taken to its utmost limits through the extent to which they have institutionalized philanthropy far beyond any other region of the world. Those who speak out of this tradition not only feel no cause whatsoever to deploy the differend in resolving disputes arising from struggles over the social contract, they in fact tend to strongly oppose any attempt to do so, any attempt to go out of the established avenues and protocols of the existing legal and political institutions. Thus, I argue that as we justifiably praise Gates for the forthrightness and candor of his speech, we must also draw attention to the implications of its location in this tradition of enlightened liberalism that is almost completely unknown and unpracticed in Nigeria. Permit me to briefly give an elaboration of the point I am making here.
Capitalism in Nigeria has not always been as illiberal, as predatory and heartless as it is now and has been for about three to four decades. I doubt if Gates and those who are praising him are aware of this fact, are aware of the fact that in the runup to independence in 1960 and for about a half-decade after that before the outbreak of the civil war, every one of the four regions was more or less run on the basis of welfarism of one kind or another. That being the case, what was lacking was a distinct group among the political and economic elites ready and willing to give to the poor and the needy on a consistent basis. The reason for this? Welfarism was considered only and purely a governmental affair, not the burden, the obligation of the rich, individually and collectively. If one looks very closely at the structure of welfarist ideas and practices at the time, one discovers that with few exceptions, there were no philosophical or “theoretical” voices enjoining the wealthy and the privileged to be philanthropic, to give to the poor if only to ensure and consolidate social peace. This is the reason why when significant state welfarism of one kind or another vanished with the advent of the prebendal, predatory capitalism of oil doom, no enlightened self-interest of a notable kind operating though institutionalized philanthropy surfaced among the rich and the privileged.
But what of the Elumelu Foundation, what of the Dangote Foundation, you might ask? My answer to this question can only be properly posed in the form of other questions: Where are the intellectual voices of consistent, sturdy liberalism in Nigeria? Especially: where are the thinkers espousing the liberalism of economic and gender equality within the capitalist order, our own Nigerian brand of neo-capitalism? What of the liberalism of social and human rights like free speech, freedom of association, a free press, an independent judiciary, secularism and freedom of conscience? Which persons consistently write in their defense?
Dear reader, can you name a single writer, pundit or commentator that is deservedly known and celebrated as a consistent thinker or voice in the propagation and/or reinvention of liberalism in our country? I think hard, very hard, and I can think of only one person and that is the late and sorely missed Stanley Macebuh. To his lonely example, I might add a few other names, Ayo Olukotun, Sonala Olumhese – and Idowu Akinlotan, to the right of the center-left location of the others. In the struggle for independence, liberal values were keenly articulated and consistently promoted, only for most of them to disappear when military autocracy emerged as the defining ethical background for Nigerian political elites even long after its formal termination. So, yes, there is an Elumelu Foundation and there is a Dangote Foundation, but who can deny the fact that they – and virtually all the other foundations in the country – operate in a liberalist void created by one of the most vicious and unregenerate predatory capitalisms in the world.
And indeed, this is the heart of the matter: as neoliberal, barawo capitalism has become more and more entrenched as the reigning mode of capitalist organization of society and economy in our country, no significant voices of consistent liberal dissent have arisen to challenge it, to reclaim egalitarian and redistributive liberalism as a philosophical and ideological realm within capitalism itself. Yes, corruption, looting, defiance of the rule of law, wastefulness, squandermania, nepotism, ethnic jingoism, religious bigotry, all these ills of the political class have been stoutly denounced. But capitalism itself, the capitalism that has privatized and massively dispossessed millions of Nigerians while falling behind nearly all the other developed capitalisms of the world, this capitalism has been left untouched by critique, that is to say, liberal-democratic critique. For there have been critiques from the Left, from the socialist and popular-democratic axes of political and ideological discourse in the country.
I submit that Bill Gates does not know, or if he does know, makes little of the fact that present-day Nigerian capitalism has very little in common with the capitalism of his country, the United States, the capitalism that allowed Gates, a gifted dropout from Harvard, to become a multi-billionaire without having stolen a single dollar in his vast cache of dollars countable in the billions. There was Gates at that National Economic Council meeting, preaching compassion and enlightened self-interest to men and women who have neither compassion nor enlightened self-interest in their minds and hearts. Mohammadu Buhari? Give me a break, as the Americans would put it! Gone, long gone, are the days when Buhari, as military dictator, following Islamic principles against usurious capitalism, wanted to refashion the Nigerian economy along the lines of a populist redistribution of credit and capital assets in favour of the poor. Under his civilian presidency, the looting has not only continued, it has been openly and arrogantly condoned by the presidency itself!
Well then, to conclude: if Gates could not have invoked the strategy or principle of the differend in his speech to that gathering, what should, or could he have done instead? He could have let it be known, within the existing civility of discourse that operates among all the economic and political elites of the world, that for a country to be a true and perhaps also benevolent capitalist order, you must at the very least not consume the capital, human and material, through unregulated and unregulatable looting. What is capitalism without the capital?
Biodun Jeyifo
bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu
