Tag: Ribadu

The thing that is coming is so strange that it has a head and also wears a hat.
Chinua Achebe, Arrow of God

The year was 1971. With my friend Professor Femi Osofisan, I was a graduate student resident of the Tafawa Balewa Postgraduate Hall at the University of Ibadan. Of course neither Femi nor I was then a professor. As a matter of fact, neither of us was remotely close to completing our Ph D studies for at that point, we were both preparing to go abroad to advance our doctoral studies, he to the University of Paris (Sorbonne) and myself to New York University. For this reason, that year at Balewa Hall was for us like a temporary holiday from academic studies of the most rigorous kind. He wrote plays and had them staged; I wrote reviews of books and theatre performances and literary journalism for the newspapers; and we both continued to act in stage plays and television dramas.

And we read, we devoured newspapers. And this is the point that I wish to highlight in this journey down memory lane to that year at Balewa Hall. For it was this daily activity of going to the newspaper vendors’ stalls in front of our Hall that drew the attention of Osofisan and myself to what must strike every single Nigerian now as an astonishing fact. This is the fact that people would stop by these stalls, take which papers they wanted to buy, and leave the monies for the often absent vendors in the absolute certainty that no one would steal the monies. Balewa Hall is at the junction where the roads leading to Sultan Bello, Kuti, Azikiwe and Independence Halls converged and so the daily traffic that went past our Hall was great. But we never heard of anyone having ever stolen a kobo from the monies left for absent newspaper vendors. Corruption was not unknown then, but it was nowhere close to the pandemic social and economic contagion that it has become in our country in about the last four decades.

I have said over and over again in this column that for the most part, I write the column with youthful Nigerians under the age of 50 as my main audience. Nigerians of my generation and those older are also welcome to the column and indeed, I often do get email responses to what I write in the column from elderly compatriots, women and men. But for the most part, it is the young that I think about, together with the future that we will leave for them. This is why I am starting this conclusion of the series that began with last week’s essay with this account of the relative low level and manageable scale of corruption in our country in my youth more than forty years ago. It is the great social tragedy, the great moral and political burden of members of my generation that are still alive and that are men and women of conscience, decency and compassion to see their country, their society descend into levels of corruption, rot and decadence that we could never have imagined and that cause unspeakable degrees of poverty, suffering and insecurity among most of our peoples, all this in a land flowing with vast wealth.

Among the multiple and diverse areas of our collective national life that I could use to illustrate this social tragedy, I choose only one – the infrastructures, practices and realities of our educational system. Nigerians under 50 may find this hard to believe or even comprehend now, but in my youth, examination malpractices were very, very rare. And when they happened they were severely punished. There were many poorly trained teachers in the primary and secondary schools, but they were for the most part very aware of their deficiencies and took every step necessary to improve themselves professionally. In the universities, standards of instruction, learning and research were very high and we took great pride in the fact that degrees from Nigerian tertiary institutions were respected all over the world.

Today, all of these accomplishments that set us firmly on the road to an equable and well adjusted modernity are in total shambles, consumed by and in an ethos in which corruption reigns with a sovereign power that has eaten deep into every sphere and level of society. Exam malpractices are so rife that they are like an epidemic of cultural and intellectual ete, leprosy. Hundreds of thousands of primary and secondary schoolteachers with certification as highly trained professionals are in reality barely literate. Moreover, they tend to be militantly opposed to retraining and self-improvement – as Governor Kayode Fayemi of Ekiti State found to his cost in the state’s last governorship elections. Our universities are so poorly ranked now that they not only rank lowly among the universities of the world but also among universities in Africa. The list goes on and on. And since the median age for Nigeria is only 19, this means that this dreadfully dispiriting list of rot and corruption at all levels of our society is all that the great majority of the living generations of Nigerians have ever known. From this fact, I extrapolate this sobering observation: as those of us of the generations that have known a Nigeria that was very different from the rot, the corruption that is now drowning our society watch for signs of what the future portends for us, we seem like the perfect example for the witty, laughable but deeply sardonic saying from Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God that serves as the epigraph to this piece: “The thing that is coming is so strange that it has a head and also wears a hat”.

For those of us who have known and experienced a Nigeria that was not among the ranks of the most corrupt societies of the world, a Nigeria in which, at Balewa Hall at the University of Ibadan in 1971, you could leave monies for absent newspaper vendors and no one would steal the monies, we should reflect on what lessons we can extrapolate from that period and pass on to the generations of our younger compatriots. That is a huge task that is, quite frankly, beyond the scope of this series of only two essays. In place of such a comprehensive review, I wish to end this series with only one example that I deem of extraordinary importance. This is the fact that we did have politicians, we did have significant factions among our ruling class political parties that made it a crucial aspect of their electoral manifestos and their policies and actions in governance to contain corruption lest it completely derail the requirements of economic and social development and the public good. This will no doubt seem like pure fantasy to most Nigerians under 50, but it is a sadly forgotten or even buried aspect of our political history. Let me draw the attention of the reader, especially the young reader, to some salient facts.

The three main ruling class parties of the First Republic, the NPC, the NCNC and the AG, were all very efficient in the management of their budgets as ruling parties in the regions and in the centre. At the Crown Agents in London in which the greater portions of their surpluses were banked, they maintained considerable reserves which were not stolen or looted by any political leader or chieftain. If, as an indigene of any of the regions, you got a scholarship to any Nigerian or foreign institution, you received your stipends in a timely fashion. All the regions were in a sort of healthy competition for growth and development of their peoples and this helped to severely curtail any impulses or temptations for looting public coffers. Above all else is this crucial fact: all these parties had within them sizeable factions of productive, modernizing elites that put regional or public interests far above personal self-aggrandizement. Even the NPC which was the most conservative of these parties had many such politicians at the helm of its affairs, for the NPC was not so much against modernization per se as it was against modernization that was too rapid and that was dominated by the South and Christianity. Perhaps the most interesting case of all is that of the combined impact of the AG and its leader, the late Chief Obafemi Awolowo, on the political economy of capitalist modernity and modernization in our country.

To put this case in a nutshell, Chief Awolowo amassed great personal fortune as a lawyer and businessman; at the same time, he zealously pursued economic and social programmes that benefitted the poor and the marginalised. He did not see one as the opposite of the other: great personal wealth; and policies and programmes that were welfarist or social democratic. Of especial significance was the fact that Awolowo took this stance into the innermost sanctum of his Party’s moral, ideological and political struggles. He knew those who were with him and those who were against him on this all-important issue of the distribution of the social surplus between the haves and the have-nots. Moreover, he formulated his political alliances outside the Western Region and his own Party around this distinction between those that merely wished to enrich and aggrandize themselves and those who were for both self-enrichment and the interests of the poor and the disenfranchised.

It is true that outside the Western Region, Awolowo was mostly seen as a Yoruba leader. Nonetheless, in virtually all the other regions of the country and among the diverse ethnic communities of the land, it was also known that he had deep quarrels with politicians in his own Party and in the other Parties that were for only their own self-enrichment. This was why he was the bellwether, the catalyst for all the productive, modernising political elites of the First Republic. At any rate, his significance for the present discussion is this: party politics in the modern world for Awolowo was not only about differences of ethnicity, region and religion, each party or politician representing his or her own part of the country; party politics for Awo was also about redistribution of wealth between the haves and the have-nots across the length and breadth of the land.

I was not and I am not now an “Awoist”. None of the ruling class parties in our country has ever moved close enough to my vision of consistent and principled progressive politics for me to feel inclined to join any of them. My concluding focus on Awolowo has one reason and one reason only and this can be put in the form of three questions. One: In the last four decades, have you, dear reader, seen, heard or read about major, bitter differences among our politicians and political parties that are primarily based on how to distribute our national wealth between the haves and the have-nots? Two: Are the emerging battle lines for the 2015 general elections not almost exclusively about where the Presidency will go? Three: Have you ever read the Preamble to the 1990 Constitution that states quite clearly that wealth accumulation and income redistribution cannot be simultaneously pursued in our country at its present stage of (mal)development?

Self-enrichment reigns supreme now, with systemic and miasmic corruption as its enabling, fructifying environment. Nigeria was not always like this. Armed with knowledge of our political history, we may yet be able to carry out reforms before it is too late.

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu