Tag: Germany

As the title of this piece indicates, I am in Bayreuth in Germany and it is exactly a week after the inauguration of the new administration of Muhammadu Buhari. It is the day of the deadline for sending my piece for the week in this column. I am here for the 41st annual conference of the African Literature Association (ALA), the largest professional association of scholars and critics of African literatures in the world. Femi Osofisan is also here, as are many other Nigerian scholars and artists. As a matter of fact, Soyinka put in a brief appearance as a special guest on the first day of the conference on Wednesday. He gave a short and characteristically very sharp and witty informal speech at the formal opening ceremonies, a speech in which he called the assembled confreres and the world’s scholars in general to become more proactive, more “fundamentalist” in the defense of freedom and life, given the opposing “fundamentalism” of terrorists and jihadists in their assault on life and freedom of thought and religion in many parts of the world.

This is the first time in more than a decade that I am attending an annual conference of the ALA. This is because I stopped going to conferences of all professional associations a long time ago. In this piece, I cannot go into why I took that decision. But I can reveal the fact that I finally made an exception for this particular conference because I happen to be in Germany for another reason at the same time. As a matter of fact, when one of the conference organizers heard that I would be in Germany at the time of the conference, she contacted me and persuaded me that whatever my reasons for stopping going to conferences were, it would be unthinkable and unacceptable that I would stay away from this conference that coincides with the time of my stay in Germany this summer. Also, I was easily persuaded because the theme of the conference this year interests me a lot. It is “African Futures and Beyond: Visions in Transition”. When you are getting into the eighth decade of your life, the future interests you a lot. This is not because very little of it will occur in what is left of your biological existence but because you want to think, you want to project far ahead into what you and the present living generations will leave for unborn, future generations, for posterity.

Not unexpectedly, many at this ALA conference have been asking me and other Nigerians present here what the future holds for our country with regard to the relatively peaceful transfer of power from one running party to another and the inauguration of Muhammadu Buhari as Nigeria’s new President. I am sure that if the theme of the conference had nothing to do with the future they would still have been asking Nigerians here present the same question. All the same, one recognizes the fact that the questions that we are being asked at this conference are in part sparked by the theme of the conference. In other words, while for a long time now nothing in our country has been a source of hope for the future of Africans at home and abroad, this ALA conference on Africa and its future is taking place at precisely an historical moment when Nigeria is at last sending out signs of hope for the future of the country and the continent. This piece is about this portentous convergence between the theme of the conference and the unfolding events in Nigeria. Concretely, I deal with what I have been saying to people at this conference who have been asking me what to expect with the changed circumstances in Nigeria, especially with regard to the new ruler, Muhammadu Buhari. In other words, what I have been saying to people at this ALA conference is what I am now weaving into the expanded text of this piece on futurity in the “new” Nigeria.

The future looks promising in the “new” Nigeria, I have been telling people at this ALA conference, but only with the caveat that we bear in mind the fact that the change from the erstwhile ruling party and President provides a new space for fresh starts and initiatives that we did not have before now, that in fact had been almost completely blocked. Other than that, there is nothing inherently hopeful and full of bright portents for the future in the mere change from one ruling party to another. Indeed, on the very specific theme of futurity itself, Nigerians have to be doubly, even triply cautious. This is because while the ousted ruling party in particular and Nigerian political elites in general had been very vocal in espousing the dream of a Nigeria that would have one of the largest economies in the world, they had done everything possible to make the realization of that dream impossible. Of course, no one at the ALA conference had ever read about or heard of “Vision 2020”. This did not surprise me in the least because I know that in the years of the rule of the PDP, the great majority of Nigerians also knew little or nothing about “Vision 2020”. When life in the present is so full of a great and ever expanding scale of a lack in the basic necessities of life – jobs, amenities and security of life and possessions – the last thing that you think about is a document, a construct promising on paper a Nigeria that will be one of economic powerhouses of the world. This is symptomatic of a larger problem that I now wish to address, this being the willful and almost irrational negative orientation toward futurity among our political and intellectual elites.

Perhaps the single most expressive sign of this negative orientation toward futurity among our elites is the speed with which many outgoing governors went after foreign debts with only a few months, in some cases weeks, before their departure from office. This is of course first and foremost a cynical manifestation of the predatory greediness of many of our rulers: a governor who will not be in office when the crushing burdens of servicing and paying off the loans are being extracted need not worry about such burdens. But beyond this, it also shows that the future is negatively configured in the collective minds of our elites and perhaps also, our peoples themselves, thanks to the power of ruling class ideologies and practices. The basic thinking behind this seems to be why worry now about a future that is not yet here, a future that lacks any definable, concrete features, a future, finally, that will either take care of itself or be taken care of by God, IJN?

It would of course be a mistake to think that a positive and empowering orientation toward futurity is totally absent in our country – as if that was even possible in any nation on the planet. After all, like nearly all other governments in the world, Nigerian governments are obliged to outline the development process in accordance with mandatory Five-Year or Ten-Year Development Plans that are periodically released to the nation and the world. What I have in mind here is the suggestion that in the end, a positive and empowering orientation toward futurity is a joint venture between the rulers and the ruled; in the best of circumstances, the people, the ruled, provide the motive force for this partnership between the rulers and the ruled. Let me be very clear about what I mean by this: the rulers, the governments at the centre and the states are not in the driver’s seat of history and the future; no one is. On account of this fact which some consider tragic and others consider ironic, God or some other avatar, sacred or secular, fills in the void. I personally consider this a hopeful portent for if no one is really in the driver’s seat of history and the future that fact ought to impel us to become proactive in the movement toward a future that always and forever looms on the horizon of the present.

This is why I believe that a strong, self-aware lobby on behalf of the future must come into being and flourish in our country if the space of possibilities that have opened up in Buhari’s “new” Nigeria is to take root and bear fruit in the fullness of time. You might say that such a lobby could emerge if only there existed traditions of positive orientation toward futurity in our country. I happen to believe that this is in fact the case. For contrary to the view of some racist European philosophers, African languages, philosophies and religions were not lacking in a robustly positive orientation toward futurity. Moreover, the idea is not as abstract and contentless as it seems. It is best seen perhaps in ideas pertaining to significations and practices around sacrifice. Parents sacrifice a lot to put their children through school; they give up satisfactions and conveniences that make life in the present livable not to talk of enjoyable, so that in the future their offspring may have better lives than theirs. Small communities impose heavy financial levies that they can ill afford so that a new hospital or clinic may be built in a village. Finally, national wealth is saved in robust currency reserves, not consumed in orgies of conspicuous consumption by elites besotted by squandermania; those reserves are put to use in times of need in the future.

Let that lobby on behalf of the future emerge and emerge quickly in Buhari’s “new” Nigeria. It may well be our final guarantee that the new space of possibilities will bear fruit. One of the first tasks of such a lobby or pressure group is the reversal of priorities away from recurrent expenditures toward capital projects in the annual budgets of all the federal, state and local governments in the country. As a matter of fact, Buhari has promised that this is something that is very much on his mind, something he will try to implement early in his administration. But the truth is that without a powerful movement of the people for its implementation, Buhari will not and can never be able to implement the kind of administrative revolution that this will require for its consummation.

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu