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Tag: Talakawa

Who is on talakawa’s side?

The state of the talakawa. That is the story we hardly tell in the whole theatre of banditry. Yet we know that it is the poor in the north who do everything. They are poor so the elite can preen. They wash their clothes, clean their cars, secure their homes, flatter their vanity in songs and dances, cook for them, fight for them. When it is over, they die for them. They are the lambs on the slab.

For those who know them, they are called the almajiris. They are innocent on the streets, pan in hand with beggary looks. When I was a youth Corps member in Wudil in Kano State, I had one as friend. He ran errands for me. Mosquitoes upended my joy and he was by me day and night like a son as I tried to shake off the pangs and shivers of malaria. I don’t remember his name now. But I know he needed some mentor or official policy to redeem him from the life of a happy mendicant.

I remember boys like him today, and I wonder what and who he is today. Is he in the throes of banditry? Oliver Twist or a redemptive tale like Pip in A Great expectation? Is he still in the precinct trying to live out his days under the mercies of a kitchen, or a dinner leftover, or working like another friend I had in Kano city known as Sunusi, who was a security person but who could read every word of the newspaper?

That was what we should contemplate as we await details of the sweet morsels of 16 tomahawks that rattled southern Sokoto. Some are trying to spin it in different ways. To some, it is America invading northern Nigeria. Some said it is the government of Tinubu, who allowed an imperialist to undercut our sovereign pride. Gumi, the irritant foul mouth, would rather have Turkey do it.

Read Also: Tinubu must complete eight years as president – Wike

What is left out is the little boy and little girl, their fathers and mothers in the underbelly of the north. The man who had been paying fines or taxes just to retrieve masara or shinkafa from his farm. The mother who cannot travel without fear to her daughter’s wedding or son in the hospital. The fellow who has lost all hope because the bandits have destroyed all lifelines and he has caved in to their logic of brigandage. He now survives supplying them food and medicine. Of the mother who now carts her daughters to their beastly arms as aquiline comforts.

They are the ones who live in the underbelly of Sokoto and Kebbi and Zamfara. They are the little fellows whose children lay in bunks and are ferried away by the goons of plunder. They are the ones who get slaughtered on the highways, on the farms, on the way to mosques. They are the defenceless citizens who seek mercy but get death.

They have no one to cry to and nowhere to scream, except to their boy wonders of Ak47 and in their lairs in the forest glades of hate. They are the folks we must think about this season. We must not look at the bullets that torch the goons, because they have no mercy in the fibres of their beings. We must not look at it with the eyes of partisan fights because the first people we must fight for are those who have no Ak47 or armoured cars or who do not have bank accounts in Abuja.

Hence, it was a pity when a section of the northern elite has kept quiet and tried to weaponize the misery of the folks for partisan benefits. But it is this section of the northern elite who have shown no pity for the commonfolk. They are not only politicians but a few clerics and even intellectuals and media. They think the fight to stop the hoodlums is about fighting against a region. We have heard about the tormented soul of Gumi and his cohorts and a few politicians including men like Nasir el Rufai and Prof Usman Yusuf, although the small fellow had said nothing at the time of writing. He had tried to turn ploughshares into swords, seeing a north and south duel when it should all be about lifting the real small fellows in the north. His successor is showing him how to do it.

Thank God not all of the northern big men think like Gumi and some top media fellows who see fire when there is light. The fellows who do live in the secluded luxury of feudal rampart. They are not affected by all the hoopla of bandit carnivores. Their children are not in those schools. none of the reports has indicated that even the Kebbi incident involved a big man’s daughter. No. Their children are either in a top school in an impenetrable enclosure in Abuja or in the London at Eaton, or in Switzerland or in Canada or in Dubai or the United States.

They do not need the hospitals. They go for checkups in the U.K. or Germany, when they are not splashing huge sums in choice clinics in Abuja or Lagos. They do not have to go to a bank in town. They have dollars at the ready, and they will spend at will. They have their homes in secure precincts, and their security guards are armed to the teeth. If you get past the security, the homes are fortes.

They do not need to go to the markets where bandits storm and loot and kill. Their kitchens sizzle with aromas inside a fortress of their homes, and all the choice dinners and lunches and breakfasts are chummy between their tongues and lips.

The poor pray in public mosques. The rich talk to God from beneath their roofs. They pray in peace, except when they fortify their ride to and from the place of worship.

They are immune from all the news of the slaughters and tears in the villages and towns in the north. Hence some, like Bashir Dalhatu, who was an Abacha crony and now the leader of Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF), can compare them to the Niger Delta militants. And they are saying we should coddle the goons.

It is sentiment like this that gave birth to Aminu Kano with his Northern Elements Progressive Union (NEPU) and later the People’s Redemption Party (PRP) and he held sway in Kano and Kaduna, and some of the northern progressives today still see him as their ancestor. Alhaji Kano still personifies the tendency of talakawa empathy today as we can see in Kano and Kaduna where strong strands of people empathy still assert themselves.

It is a time like this that we know who is on the people’s side and those who are in the cocky circle, looking down on the majority with disdain and make merchandise of the talakawa and politics of their aches and pains. This is not the time to turn the people against their helpers as Shakespeare narrated in his play Coriolanus.

December 29, 2025
A Talakawa Guide to the Jonathan/ PDP-Buhari/APC Roforofo Fight

Two people dey yab/Crowd dey
Two people dey yab/Crowd dey look/Roforofo dey! Fela Kuti, Chorus, “Roforofo Fight”
1. The class in power is about to kick out the party/government in power!

The late Claude Ake, following Karl Marx, used to insist that we must always distinguish between the ruling class, the class in power, from the particular government or party that may be in power at any particular moment in history. The one is a part of the whole that is the other. In other words, the party or government in power represents only a part of the totality of the ruling class, the class in power. This is easier seen in the institutions and practices of the developed bourgeois democracies of the world. In the United Kingdom, sometimes the Conservative Party is the party in power and at other times the Labor Party supplies the government in power. In the United States, sometimes it is the Democratic Party; other times, it is the Republican Party. Though completely absent in the federal seat of power, this distinction between the class in power and the party/government in power is not unknown in Nigeria. At state and local levels, opposition parties often wrest control from the PDP as the dominant, hegemonic party of our political elites, our ruling class and vice versa. What we are about to see in the 2015 general elections is unprecedented: the ruling class, the class in power, is about to kick out, perhaps forever, the party and government in power.

The ostensible reason for this is the abysmal record of the PDP as the party and government in power at the center. The litany of PDP’s and Jonathan’s political misrule and mismanagement of the country’s economic and human resources is all too familiar. The corruption and squandermania are so vast, so incorrigibly resistant to control that Jonathan’s own Finance Minister, Mrs. Okonjo-Iweala, once said that she would be satisfied if she could reduce the waste by as much (or as little) as 4%. 70% of Nigerians live in dire poverty, even as a minority of the wealthy lives in fabled and lavish opulence. Our youths who constitute the largest demographic bloc in the population can expect nothing but a future of joblessness and uncertainty. Under the PDP and Jonathan, our educational system at all levels has become one of the most mediocre in Africa and the world; indeed, there is now no “Nigerian science and technology” to talk about. With the exception of a small segment of elites that live in fortressed, ultramodern mansions, for most Nigerians insecurity of life, property and personal possessions has become the very texture of daily existence, month after month, year after year. Of the Nigerian “brand” in the world at large, infamy as one of the worst places on the planet in which to do business has become an almost unshakeable fixture in the minds of not only the world’s transnational corporations but also of Nigerian businessmen and women.

As important as these factors are, they do not constitute the real basis for why the Nigerian ruling class is about to kick out PDP/Jonathan as the party/government in power. Simply put, the power brokers in the Nigerian ruling class are dumping the PDP and Jonathan simply and unambiguously in order to save themselves by expelling the leviathan before it brings the house down on all their heads. Not content to misrule, mismanage and lay everything to waste on a colossal scale, PDP/Jonathan wanted to wipe out all the other ruling class parties by transforming the political order into a fascist one-party state in which it will be the only party with a national spread, a country-wide plurality. This would have been unattainable even if PDP/Jonathan were a model, high-achieving party and government in an ethnically and culturally homogenous country. But in a linguistically and culturally diverse country with a deep chasm between the haves and the have-nots, PDP/Jonathan overreached themselves.

Obasanjo’s relentless verbal assaults on Jonathan; the mass defections from the PDP; the revolt of many of its governors; the merger of parties with only very thin connections between them only on the basis of ousting Jonathan and the PDP from power: these are some of the manifestations of the historic fact that, as some organisms shed their skins for new ones, the Nigerian ruling class is about to send the extant ruling party into political and historical oblivion and cobble together a new one. Where this will lead us, no one knows, but the consensus is that anything at all is better than the hole, the cesspit into which Jonathan/PDP are burying us. In what follows, I contend that that is not the end of the story.

2. APC as the new party/government in power will not commit class suicide!

It is of course not absolutely certain that Buhari/APC will oust Jonathan/PDP. Though Jonathan/PDP cannot win on their terribly dismal record, they may well attempt to rig themselves into a perpetuation of their misrule, their ‘failing-state’ paralysis. In the governorship elections in Ekiti and Osun States, the level of militarization of the electoral process was unprecedented; and for the first time in our electoral history, we saw hooded men of the state security apparatus arrest opposition party leaders and activists en masse. PDP/Jonathan may well attempt a repeat performance of these intimidating and coercive quasi-rigging tactics at the national level.

But PDP is a stricken, wounded formation; it is as much buffeted by cyclones of inner implosion as by the external headwinds of a realignment of regional, ethnic and religious forces in which the Northwest, Northeast and Southwest zones are the dominant brokers. To these can be added parts of the North-central and South-south zones. The PDP is all too aware of these shifts in the zonal realignment of forces. And this awareness will temper its desperate will to rig itself into a firm grip on power. At any rate, this in effect means that the APC is the product of zonal or horizontal forces within the ruling class; it is nothing remotely close to a vertical class realignment of forces across the great dividing lines between the haves and the have-nots in our country.

Let us be completely frank and unambiguous on this point. If Buhari/APC wins the 2015 elections and replaces Jonathan/PDP as the nascent party/government in power, its priorities will be governed by a drive to present the kinder, fairer and perhaps less corrupt side of our ruling class to Nigerians. An anti-corruption zealousness will probably be its most ardent legitimating program. In Nigeria and around the world, this will win it considerable credibility, goodwill and support. But it will not differ substantially from the ideological and broad policy orientation of the Jonathan-PDP party/government. The massive and unconscionable privatization of public enterprises and national assets will continue, with its unashamed excesses of the primitive accumulation through which rich and powerful Nigerians extract capital from the state to buy and privatize our national assets. The awesome powers of incumbency and patronage of the Presidency will be left intact under an APC/Buhari government/party; indeed, it may be expanded and made more imperious. And we will continue to have one Head of State and 36 mini heads of states, with the monumental wastage in the cost of governance that this entails. Finally, massive expenditure to substantially reduce or abolish poverty and to work for full employment has never been a major ideological or policy hallmark of any of our political parties. It is a stretch to think that in power at the center, APC/Buhari will embark on this path to redressing the great gap between the haves and the have-nots when its constituent parts have never done this in the state and local governments they have controlled.

3. A kinder and fairer face of the Buhari/APC govt. in power must be deepened by a social movement of the talakawa and those who struggle with and for them

Because at the present moment we are in another electoral cycle, the idea, the myth is once again very current that people hold their destiny in their own hands by voting for those who will represent their interests, who will make government work for the governed. But this is a half-truth. The ultimate achievement of elections is that they ensure that rulers cannot and must not take the ruled for granted, that it is in the power of the ruled to throw out rulers who have not performed well, who indeed have performed atrociously. Other than that, when elections are over, when an election cycle has run its course, the electorate must remain vigilant and mobilized if it wants to get the same attention it got during the election cycle. Nigerian political parties and politicians are notorious in their post-electoral cycle tendency to abandon their election promises and pursue instead their individual and class interests.

In this particular historic context, this tendency will be magnified a hundred times, a thousand times by the fact that the defeat of the Jonathan/PDP will mean that the APC/Buhari party/government will have thousands of positions to fill and new patron-client relationships to forge as it positions itself to become the new ruling party. The thinking seems to be that the one and proper way to become the ruling party is to effectively distribute the spoils office among all the competing groups of elites in the country. One does not have to be a prophet to predict that ethnic, religious and geopolitical balancing in appointment to public offices and award of contracts will be the first order of the new ruling party and the government. The tragedy of Nigerian progressive mass politics is that the masses themselves too often get sucked into this maelstrom of ruling class manipulation of ethnic and religious differences in the sharing of the spoils of office and power. I contend that the euphoria of the defeat of Jonathan/PDP will make the independent self-mobilization of the Nigerian masses a particularly onerous task. But that said, we must prepare ourselves: as one ruling party goes into the oblivion of time and history and another one takes its place, this will mark something totally without precedent in our political history. In that case, how immensely fitting would it be for the Nigerian masses and those who fight with and for them to push relentlessly for real social justice and a dignified existence for the most disadvantaged in our country.

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

December 21, 2014
Talakawa Liberation Herald (33)

It is difficult to decide which is more absurd, more laughable, President Jonathan’s denial this past week that the national treasury is broke or his assertion that the financial illiquidity of the federal government is limited to July 2013 and is caused exclusively by so-called “pipeline vandals”. As can be seen in the epigraph to this piece, this was what Jonathan told the nation and the world last week: that the country is not broke; that our national economy only experienced a hiccup in July from the nefarious activities of pipeline vandals; and that those who are saying that the country is broke are doing so out of ignorance and political mischief.

The president is of course completely wrong on both counts. As at the end of this past week, the monthly allocations from our national coffers to the 36 states of the federation have reportedly not been paid for the months of July, August and September. Fearing punitive reprisals from the presidency, the governors have not made their frustration and desperation public. But privately and off the record, they have been grumbling bitterly as they have been trying to meet their recurrent expenditures without the allocations from Abuja. Thus, if you want to know whether or not Nigeria under Jonathan is broke, ask the governors, whether they are in the ruling party, the PDP or in any of the opposition parties.

The truth is that thanks to corruption, waste and squandermania on a colossal scale, Nigeria is at the moment broke, very broke. Indeed, most pundits and commentators on our national economy have been saying this for at least the last four to five months. And if this is the case, for Jonathan to say that the drop in oil revenues in June allegedly caused by the activities of gangs stealing and selling our crude oil is all we have to worry about is to be both naïve and disingenuous.

I am not indulging in mere or gratuitous name calling here when I assert that the President is being both naïve and disingenuous in making these two assertions. He is being naïve because he obviously does not know or is untroubled by the fact that every well informed person in Nigeria knows that the country is broke – and not only from the work of “vandals”. And he is being disingenuous because he obviously and quite deliberately wants to avoid responsibility, indeed glaring culpability for the sorry state of our national economy. This piece is motivated solely by this consideration: we must not allow the President to duck his responsibility for both the state of the national economy at the present time and the untold suffering that the generality of our peoples are experiencing on account of the terribly inept and mediocre stewardship that Jonathan has exhibited as the occupant of Aso Rock starting from the time when he was Acting President to the present moment of the third year of his own incumbency. My central argument is that the President comes from a line of political rulers since the inception of the current Fourth Republic in 1999 who have badly, even criminally, mismanaged our national economy; however, Jonathan has far surpassed every previous ruler in incompetence, wastefulness and squandermania in the management of the national economy. Let me now write directly in illustration of this claim.

The national “savings account” of Nigeria is the so-called “Excess Crude Account” (ECA). Established in 2004, it was created so as to conserve our oil revenues in order to make its accumulation serve as a buffer against the often wide fluctuations of the world oil market and as a sort of “rainy day” fund for the future or long term needs of the country and its peoples. In other words, the ECA is a strategic federation account that calls for the greatest act of prudence, patriotism and responsibility in its management by our rulers, especially the President. As at 2005, the balance in the account stood at $5 billion dollars. Between 2005 and 2010, this balance grew rather exponentially such that by the time Jonathan became Acting President in 2010, the balance stood at around the whopping figure of $20 billion dollars! But ever since then, the account has been relentlessly drawn down and wastefully depleted. For instance, at the beginning of this year, the balance in the account was $11.5 billion dollars; now it is under $4 billion. At this rate, it will be close to zero at the end of the year.

It is worthy of note that Jonathan has never given any explanations for why in less than three years, he has drawn down and more or less completely depleted the savings in the Excess Crude Account (ECA) from a beginning balance of more than $20 billion dollars to less than $4 billion dollars. It is no mitigation of his culpability that, with regard to where all the monies he has withdrawn for the national savings account went, Jonathan has faced no determined questioning from the Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC), the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) or any of the other leading and usually vocal advocates of good, accountable governance in our country. That being said, and with a certainty that is informed both by present dire circumstances and even more bleak future prospects for the majority of our peoples, I am arguing here that it is neither too late nor too soon to start asking Jonathan and his administration what they have done with the vast sums of money that have been withdrawn from the ECA. To this I would add that as much as the President himself, the Coordinating Minister for the Economy, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, has much explaining to do. If, as seems likely, they will not give any explanations at the present time, we must keep our options open so that sometime in the future, changed circumstances will compel them to render an account of their stewardship of our national treasury.

For now, it is fortuitous for us that Jonathan has left many clues for intrepid souls willing to get to the bottom of this scandal as to what he has done with all the monies that have disappeared from the national savings account under his watch. One of the most astonishing of such “clues” is the N2.58 trillion naira that was paid to both real and fake, actual and phantom oil marketers under the humungous oil subsidy scandal of 2011 in which staggering sums of money were paid for refined petroleum products that were never imported into the country and distributed to Nigerian consumers. In essence this was a “subsidy” to a cabal that comprised many of Jonathan’s cronies and backers during the presidential elections of 2011. To get a sense of the scale of theft and waste entailed in this scam, the sum of N2.58 trillion naira paid out was nine times (900 %) of the budget for oil subsidy for that year, 2011; and it was nearly two and half times (250%) of the total national budget for the whole country for the year. As I have explained several times in this column this is quite easily the greatest single theft from our national coffers in the entire 53 years of our collective existence as an independent nation. Moreover, although all the persons and companies to whom the looted sums were paid are known, together with how much each person or enterprise was paid, not a single naira, not a single kobo has been recovered and paid back to the national treasury from the monumental sums looted in that mother of all scams in our country.

President Jonathan has never said a word, never given any explanation for how it came to pass that the N2.58 trillion naira that was in excess of both the particular oil subsidy budget and the more general national budget for 2011 disappeared from the national treasury. We must never forget this fact whether or not Jonathan remains in office beyond 2015. But then we must ask ourselves: Why have the Nigerian peoples, especially as represented in their professional, civic and activist organizations and movements, not confronted Jonathan at every point with the sordid, lurid details of this mega-scam? For it is precisely due to the fact that he has never been seriously confronted on this scam – and many others – that Jonathan was emboldened this past week to assert, against the facts and the realities, that Nigeria is not broke and pipeline vandals are the only culprits we should worry about and go after.

As a matter of fact, Jonathan at the press briefing last week in which he made these absurd claims went so far as to argue that contrary to what anybody may think or say, corruption is not as bad in Nigeria as people make it out to be. Indeed, it is useful to quote Jonathan himself on this point: “If everybody continues to say the problem of Nigeria is corruption, then the feeling is that corruption is our major problem”. In other words, it is only because people say so that corruption appears to be our most important problem; if people stop saying so, corruption will cease being our most important problem! Who has any doubt that behind this facetious and distorted nominalism of Jonathan is the false bravado of a ruler who has never been seriously confronted or challenged on the billions of dollars and trillions of naira that have disappeared from our national coffers since he took office as Acting President?

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

October 6, 2013
A moment to reflect on the Talakawa condition in Nigeria and our world

Talakawa: Hausa, noun: Of or pertaining to the poor. The poor as a social category, as a community of the desperately needy deserving of the solicitude of the wealthy and powerful

Herald: English, noun. 1. A person, event or thing that precedes or comes before; forerunner, harbinger. 2. A person, event or thing that proclaims or announces: A good newspaper should be a herald for truth.

Dictionary.com (online)

This Sunday, February 24, 2013, I begin this weekly column in The Nation. Readers accustomed to reading my column, Talakawa Liberation Courier, in The Sunday Guardian, will immediately recognize that there is an echo of that column’s title in the title of this new column in another newspaper: Talakawa Liberation Herald. I could have retained the former title in this new discursive context, this new journalistic space. But since my “migration” from The Guardian, so to speak, represents for me a momentous event in my journalistic work of more than forty years in the Nigerian press, I decided that it was necessary for me to also change the title of the column.

Perhaps some months or maybe even a year or two from now, I shall write fully on why I left The Guardian for which I have written continuously since it was founded in 1983, perhaps the only one left among the old or aging writers, academics and commentators that were there at the beginning of the Guardian group. For now, all I will allow myself to say is that I left without rancour or bitterness but with a great deal of sadness and anger. In the meantime, my “migration” to The Nation, I feel, is an occasion that provides a unique opportunity to reflect on the column itself, hoping in the process to clarify both for myself and for my readers what it is I have tried to do – and continue hoping to do – with and through the column. In a nutshell, this exercise entails the question of the informing perspectives, ideas and values on which the column is based. And of course, with regard to these perspectives, ideas and values, the central concept is the term “Talakawa”. Concerning this concept, I wish to address two central propositions, two cardinal theses that the readers of this piece will find as startling and as confounding as I find them. What are these two theses or propositions?

In our country, Nigeria and in many regions and nations of the world, age-old cultural definitions and social meanings attached to the poor as a definite, recognizable demographic category are changing beyond recognition to include social groups and strata that would never have been remotely close to the actual and potential ranks of the desperately poor or needy. That is the first of our two propositions. Permit me to expatiate on it carefully.

Now, I do not speak Hausa and neither can I claim to have deep ethnographic knowledge of Hausa culture and society. What I do know about the meanings attached to the term “Talakawa” comes mostly from information I have gleaned over the decades from colleagues and comrades who both speak the language and have insiders’ ethnographic knowledge of its culture and traditions. From these colleagues and comrades, I have learnt that with the addition of the suffix “wa” to any ethnic or social group, a distinct collective identity is inscribed on the designated group. Examples are “Hausawa” or “Yarubawa” for the Hausa and the Yoruba ethnic groups respectively. I have learnt also from these “native informants” that in the wake of the oil-boom and the rise of a class of arriviste nouveau riches whose special symbol of new-found, lavishly spent wealth was the Mercedes Benz, the term “Benzawa” was coined on this same principle of adding that suffix, “wa” to identify and draw attention to a particular social group. [Incidentally, in Kiswahili, we have “Wa-Benzi” for the Hausa “Benzawa”, the same word serving reverse roles as suffix in Hausa and prefix in Kiswahili!]

At any rate, the most important thing that I wish to draw attention to in the term “Talakawa” is implied in the first of the two epigraphs to this piece. This is the idea of the poor as a community of the destitute and the needy deserving of the benevolence of the wealthy and the powerful. Behind this idea is the historic fact that in many traditional and strongly hierarchical societies of the world, most of the poor remain poor generation after generation. Through unexpected good fortune, a few individuals in a particular generation might escape the scourge of desperate poverty but for the most part, most don’t and do not even expect to. To repeat: that is what the term “Talakawa”, in its traditional or received historical and cultural meanings, basically implies: a social identity, a worldview in which life circumstances and chances are more or less permanently fixed. I may be wrong, but I strongly suspect that this is what many readers of this column will instinctively think about when they see the term “Talakawa” in the title of this column.

But capitalism in all parts of the world has changed that profile forever, giving new twists to what is involved in being within the ranks of the very poor, thereby opening up the range of experiences attached to being a member of the “Talakawa”. Abstractly, theoretically, there is no single modern capitalist country or economy in the world in which moving out of age-old, generation-to-generation poverty is completely or effectively blocked from anybody. People move from rural farming communities to the cities, they move from one job to another, and they move from one trade or profession to new ones perpetually, all in the hope, the promise that they stand a chance of having better lives than their parents and grandparents. But except in the richest countries in the world with high-income economies, most people in our country and our world in fact remain poor and only a sprinkling among their offspring will have better lives than they had.

“Talakawa” has historically become a broad, inclusive term that includes millions of factory workers and wage labourers who earn significantly less than the national, regional or local minimum wage; hundreds of thousands of vendors and hawkers whose daily and monthly trade turnovers are unbelievably paltry; uncountable numbers of grossly underpaid teachers and junior clerical staff; multitudes of pensioners and old people without solvent children to act as their social safety net in their last years. As I have repeatedly tirelessly in my column in The Guardian, 7 out of every 10 Nigerians live below the absolute poverty level; in some parts of the country, the figure is close to 8 out of ten in rural areas. In other words, and to use an analogy to drive home the point, like the group of animals that when molting completely shed their old skins, the term “Talakawa” has taken on new meanings, new expressions that were unthinkable in the traditional meanings attached to it. This is why unlike the “Talakawa” of old, the new “Talakawa” cannot expect – and at any rate will never get – the consistent, regular paternalistic benevolence of the wealthy and the powerful; they must fight it out by themselves, with the non-paternalistic help and solidarity of members of the elite who take up their cause. This leads logically to the second of our two propositions which, in my opinion, is far more confounding than the first proposition.

In the new millennium, the demographic constituencies of the “Talakawa” have been massively expanded by new patterns in which the young and the highly educated are significantly represented. Two years ago, the Central Bank Governor, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, gave the figure of over 20 million as the statistic for unemployed high school and university graduates with no prospects of employment anywhere in sight. This alarming figure is further compounded by the fact that the median age for Nigeria is 19. For those unfamiliar with the concept of the national median age, what it basically means is that 50% of Nigerians are below the age of 19 while 50% is above that age. If you raise the computational age to 30, then you get more than 65% of the Nigerian population below 30. In other words, there is a vast demographic bulge at the younger age strata of our population and this bulge feeds right into present and future specters of being and/or becoming “Talakawa” among considerable numbers of the young of our society.

We might choose to take some comfort in the fact that this phenomenon of great numbers of young and educated people falling into joblessness and poverty is indeed a global phenomenon, the effect – and resultant cause – of spirals of global crises in world capitalism. As the saying goes, misery loves company! In some European countries like Greece, Spain, Italy and Ireland, the figures for unemployed, educated and restless youths are close to 40%. And drawing from a personal experience, I have simply been stunned by the number of my undergraduate students at Harvard University who, in the last half a decade or so, have been expressing to me grave, terrified misgivings concerning what the future holds in stock for them.

Each region and nation of the world must of course seek its own answers, its own solutions to the specter of being and becoming “Talakawa” – without of course being indifferent to issues of great inequalities between the various regions of the world. In the case of Nigeria, I wish to give as much emphasis as I can muster in saying that poverty, or the “Talakawa” condition, is the one single factor that unites all our ethnic and regional communities. Show me any one single geo-political zone, any state or group of states in the country where the poverty rate is better than the 7 out of 10 absolute poverty level and I will eat my words. Show me any part of the country in which, no matter how well the elites are doing politically and economically compared to other regional, zonal and ethnic competitors in the political class, the masses of the people are faring better than ordinary folks in other parts of the country and I will mortify my spirit by attending an all-night vigil of one of our most fanatical evangelical sects!

Indubitably, the “Talakawa “ question is the bottom line of all the crises bedeviling our country since it is both directly and indirectly linked to all the other crises and challenges. This, by the way, is why this column can never possibly exhaust the range of issues it can and will take up. Beyond this and more impersonally, I would argue that the “Talakawa” condition ought to be the first item of discussion in a sovereign national conference that will sooner or later have to be convened if Nigeria is to survive as one unified, egalitarian and democratic society. In the weeks, months and years ahead, I hope to join my voice to the voices of other members of the “commentariat” [this playfully ludic term is, I believe, Victor Ifijeh’s] in The Nation and other organs of popular and progressive national conversation in our country.

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

February 26, 2013
A Moment to Reflect on the Talakawa Condition in Nigeria and Our World

Talakawa: Hausa, noun: Of or pertaining to the poor. The poor as a social category, as a community of the desperately needy deserving of the solicitude of the wealthy and powerful

Herald: English, noun. 1. A person, event or thing that precedes or comes before; forerunner, harbinger. 2. A person, event or thing that proclaims or announces: A good newspaper should be a herald for truth.

Dictionary.com (online)

This Sunday, February 24, 2013, I begin this weekly column in The Nation. Readers accustomed to reading my column, Talakawa Liberation Courier, in The Sunday Guardian, will immediately recognize that there is an echo of that column’s title in the title of this new column in another newspaper: Talakawa Liberation Herald. I could have retained the former title in this new discursive context, this new journalistic space. But since my “migration” from The Guardian, so to speak, represents for me a momentous event in my journalistic work of more than forty years in the Nigerian press, I decided that it was necessary for me to also change the title of the column.

Perhaps some months or maybe even a year or two from now, I shall write fully on why I left The Guardian for which I have written continuously since it was founded in 1983, perhaps the only one left among the old or aging writers, academics and commentators that were there at the beginning of the Guardian group. For now, all I will allow myself to say is that I left without rancour or bitterness but with a great deal of sadness and anger. In the meantime, my “migration” to The Nation, I feel, is an occasion that provides a unique opportunity to reflect on the column itself, hoping in the process to clarify both for myself and for my readers what it is I have tried to do – and continue hoping to do – with and through the column. In a nutshell, this exercise entails the question of the informing perspectives, ideas and values on which the column is based. And of course, with regard to these perspectives, ideas and values, the central concept is the term “Talakawa”. Concerning this concept, I wish to address two central propositions, two cardinal theses that the readers of this piece will be as startling and as confounding as I find them. What are these two theses or propositions?

In our country, Nigeria and in many regions and nations of the world, age-old cultural definitions and social meanings attached to the poor as a definite, recognizable demographic category are changing beyond recognition to include social groups and strata that would never have been remotely close to the actual and potential ranks of the desperately poor or needy. That is the first of our two propositions. Permit me to expatiate on it carefully.

Now, I do not speak Hausa and neither can I claim to have deep ethnographic knowledge of Hausa culture and society. What I do know about the meanings attached to the term “Talakawa” comes mostly from information I have gleaned over the decades from colleagues and comrades who both speak the language and have insiders’ ethnographic knowledge of its culture and traditions. From these colleagues and comrades, I have learnt that with the addition of the suffix “wa” to any ethnic or social group, a distinct collective identity is inscribed on the designated group. Examples are “Hausawa” or “Yarubawa” for the Hausa and the Yoruba ethnic groups respectively. I have learnt also from these “native informants” that in the wake of the oil-boom and the rise of a class of arriviste nouveau riches whose special symbol of new-found, lavishly spent wealth was the Mercedes Benz, the term “Benzawa” was coined on this same principle of adding that suffix, “wa” to identify and draw attention to a particular social group. [Incidentally, in Kiswahili, we have “Wa-Benzi” for the Hausa “Benzawa”, the same word serving reverse roles as suffix in Hausa and prefix in Kiswahili!]

At any rate, the most important thing that I wish to draw attention to in the term “Talakawa” is implied in the first of the two epigraphs to this piece. This is the idea of the poor as a community of the destitute and the needy deserving of the benevolence of the wealthy and the powerful. Behind this idea is the historic fact that in many traditional and strongly hierarchical societies of the world, most of the poor remain poor generation after generation. Through unexpected good fortune, a few individuals in a particular generation might escape the scourge of desperate poverty but for the most part, most don’t and do not even expect to. To repeat: that is what the term “Talakawa”, in its traditional or received historical and cultural meanings, basically implies: a social identity, a worldview in which life circumstances and chances are more or less permanently fixed. I may be wrong, but I strongly suspect that this is what many readers of this column will instinctively think about when they see the term “Talakawa” in the title of this column.

But capitalism in all parts of the world has changed that profile forever, giving new twists to what is involved in being within the ranks of the very poor, thereby opening up the range of experiences attached to being a member of the “Talakawa”. Abstractly, theoretically, there is no single modern capitalist country or economy in the world in which moving out of age-old, generation-to-generation poverty is completely or effectively blocked from anybody. People move from rural farming communities to the cities, they move from one job to another, and they move from one trade or profession to new ones perpetually, all in the hope, the promise that they stand a chance of having better lives than their parents and grandparents. But except in the richest countries in the world with high-income economies, most people in our country and our world in fact remain poor and only a sprinkling among their offspring will have better lives than they had.

“Talakawa” has historically become a broad, inclusive term that includes millions of factory workers and wage labourers who earn significantly less than the national, regional or local minimum wage; hundreds of thousands of vendors and hawkers whose daily and monthly trade turnovers are unbelievably paltry; uncountable numbers of grossly underpaid teachers and junior clerical staff; multitudes of pensioners and old people without solvent children to act as their social safety net in their last years. As I have repeatedly tirelessly in my column in The Guardian, 7 out of every 10 Nigerians live below the absolute poverty level; in some parts of the country, the figure is close to 8 out of ten in rural areas. In other words, and to use an analogy to drive home the point, like the group of animals that when molting completely shed their old skins, the term “Talakawa” has taken on new meanings, new expressions that were unthinkable in the traditional meanings attached to it. This is why unlike the “Talakawa” of old, the new “Talakawa” cannot expect – and at any rate will never get – the consistent, regular paternalistic benevolence of the wealthy and the powerful; they must fight it out by themselves, with the non-paternalistic help and solidarity of members of the elite who take up their cause. This leads logically to the second of our two propositions which, in my opinion, is far more confounding than the first proposition.

In the new millennium, the demographic constituencies of the “Talakawa” have been massively expanded by new patterns in which the young and the highly educated are significantly represented. Two years ago, the Central Bank Governor, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, gave the figure of over 20 million as the statistic for unemployed high school and university graduates with no prospects of employment anywhere in sight. This alarming figure is further compounded by the fact that the median age for Nigeria is 19. For those unfamiliar with the concept of the national median age, what it basically means is that 50% of Nigerians are below the age of 19 while 50% is above that age. If you raise the computational age to 30, then you get more than 65% of the Nigerian population below 30. In other words, there is a vast demographic bulge at the younger age strata of our population and this bulge feeds right into present and future specters of being and/or becoming “Talakawa” among considerable numbers of our the young of our society.

We might choose to take some comfort in the fact that this phenomenon of great numbers of young and educated people falling into joblessness and poverty is indeed a global phenomenon, the effect – and resultant cause – of spirals of global crises in world capitalism. As the saying goes, misery loves company! In some European countries like Greece, Spain, Italy and Ireland, the figures for unemployed, educated and restless youths are close to 40%. And drawing from a personal experience, I have simply been stunned by the number of my undergraduate students at Harvard University who, in the last half a decade or so, have been expressing to me grave, terrified misgivings concerning what the future holds in stock for them.

Each region and nation of the world must of course seek its own answers, its own solutions to the specter of being and becoming “Talakawa” – without of course being indifferent to issues of great inequalities between the various regions of the world. In the case of Nigeria, I wish to give as much emphasis as I can muster in saying that poverty, or the “Talakawa” condition, is the one single factor that unites all our ethnic and regional communities. Show me any one single geo-political zone, any state or group of states in the country where the poverty rate is better than the 7 out of 10 absolute poverty level and I will eat my words. Show me any part of the country in which, no matter how well the elites are doing politically and economically compared to other regional, zonal and ethnic competitors in the political class, the masses of the people are faring better than ordinary folks in other parts of the country and I will mortify my spirit by attending an all-night vigil of one of our most fanatical evangelical sects!

Indubitably, the “Talakawa “ question is the bottom line of all the crises bedeviling our country since it is both directly and indirectly linked to all the other crises and challenges. This, by the way, is why this column can never possibly exhaust the range of issues it can and will take up. Beyond this and more impersonally, I would argue that the “Talakawa” condition ought to be the first item of discussion in a sovereign national conference that will sooner or later have to be convened if Nigeria is to survive as one unified, egalitarian and democratic society. In the weeks, months and years ahead, I hope to join my voice to the voices of other members of the “commentariat” [this playfully ludic term is, I believe, Victor Ifijeh’s] in The Nation and other organs of popular and progressive national conversation in our country

February 24, 2013