Let the eagle eat and let the kite eat; whoever says the other should not eat, may its beak break! Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
When I compared Muhammadu Buhari and Donald Trump as political leaders last week, it was not my first time of comparing Nigerian and American political affairs in this column. For instance, in a series last year, I had compared the electioneering campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Trump with that of our own Buhari and Jonathan in 2015. Before then and over the years, I had written columns devoted to this same habit of occasionally comparing politicians and political affairs of America with their counterparts in Nigeria. In all these cases, I did not in the least think that what I was doing could be likened to comparing Doncaster Rovers, the current leaders of the English Third Division or League with Chelsea Football Club, the current leaders of the Premiership League. Rather than this, I thought of my comparison of the Nigerian president with his American counterpart in the framework of what happens in the English F.A. Cup competition. What does this mean?
Well, as the aficionados of English professional soccer know, all the teams in all the leagues of English soccer have a right to compete for the F.A. Cup.Indeed sometimes, teams from the lower divisions or leagues not only get to the semifinals and finals of the F.A. Cup competition, they actually win the coveted trophy! In other words,asit obtains in theall-comers’ F.A Cup jamboree, my comparison of politics in Nigeria and the U.S. in this column has always been based on the strong conviction that all the countries of the world have a right to aspire to the best that our common earth can give to its diverse nations and regions without regard to how rich and “developed” a country is or is not. This in effect means that just as we can and should compare Nigeria with the United States, so should we compare Nigeria with Botswana, a country which, by the way, has a higher life expectancy at birth statistic than Nigeria. As Chinua Achebe famously put is in the words of the epigraph to this piece, “let the eagle eat and let the kite eat; whoever says the other should not eat, may its beak break!
Fundamentallythen, at the bottom of all the comparisons I have made in this column between Nigeria and America is a humanistic rationale whose assumption is that all human beings and the nations into which they are born and/or assert their collective belonging and identity are equal. In a two-part series that begins this week and comes to an end next week, I wish to reflect on the ethical, ideological and political dimensions of this rationale which, against all the circumstantial evidenceagainst its claim, vigorously declares that all the nations, more precisely, all the peoples of our planetary community are irreducibly equal. But having made this categorical assertion, there is a lot left to be said.
If it is the case that Nigerians think a lot about America and all the time make comparisons between the affairs of that country and our own, Naija pundits in general do not know – or talk much about – the three ideological, political and discursive camps into which their attitudes and ideas about America and Americans are based. What are these three discursive and ideological camps?
First, there is the leftist, anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist and anti-racist camp. To those who, like this columnist, belong to this camp, it is above everything elsedefined by is a more or less permanent watchfulness over the influenceof America in the world. Adherents of this camp are especially watchful over how America’s great influence in Nigeria’s influence and the West Africasub-region can be used to consolidate American economic, military and political interests throughout the African continent. We shall come back to this group or camp later in the discussion since, as a matter of fact, it is the group to which this writer belongs, the group whose central ideological and philosophical ideas have shaped most of my activities and moral and emotional investments throughout my intellectual and political adulthood.
We can only very briefly or succinctly deal with the two other camps or groups since, though distinct, they are rather like two sides of the same coin. On one side of this “coin” is what I would describe as the mainstream of heavily pro-American, free-market politicians and pundits in our political affairs. To the thousands of members of this group, America is the ideal and idealized vision of where the future of the world lies, together with Nigeria’s prospects in that world. The most effective expression of the sheer political and ideological influence of this camp may be gauged from the fact that from 1999 to date, all the constitutions and proposed constitutional amendments in our country have been based on the American institutions, most especially the American presidential system. There are occasional calls for us to go back to the parliamentary or “Westminster model” of governance, but such calls are routinely ignored by the mainstream of our political elites.
I wish I didn’t have to say this, but there is no way of avoiding it: this ideologically and politically dominant group of Nigerians are extremely and opportunistically slavish in their imitation and appropriation of the institutions and values of American presidentialism. Apart from the questionable political salience of the things they so much like to imitate and appropriate from the American system, there is also the fact that running our political order like the American order is far too costly for a developing nation like Nigeria. Waste and squandermania in Nigerian political affairs are in the main due to corruption, but part of it comes from the beliefof our rulers that our president and state governors should have all the material trappings of power, prestige and authority that their American counterparts have. A pox on all these “follow-follow”, “Americana”Nigerian political elites!
We come now to the third group which, as I have earlier observed, is the other side of the coin of sedulous popular and elite love for and imitation of all things American. This is the ordinary woman’s and man’s “Americana”, one in which the dream, the lifelong aspiration is to go to America, to live there permanently if possible, to go on a long visit at the very least. In this aspiration, this sublime yearning, most Nigerians are like virtually all the ordinary citizens of all the nations of the world: everyone wants to go to America, everyone wants to see Disneyland and the Statue of Liberty inthe New York harbor. It so happens that though this “Americana” yearning is mostly a lower middle class phenomenon, it in fact pervades all the rungs of the social ladder. You can find it among lawyers, doctors, teachers, engineers, accountants and bank managers as much as you can also find it among mechanics, tailors, barbers, and shoemakers. And even among fraudsters, crooks and “419ers”. For those who have not read it, I strongly recommend Chimamanda Adichie’s brilliant novel, Americanah, in which this craving for all things American, this drive to go to America by any and all means, is the driving engine ofplot structure and character development in the narrative.
Let me repeat it: I place myself as a columnist and public intellectual among the first of the three groups I have been profiling in this discussion, this being the camp of left-wing anti-imperialists, anti-capitalists and anti-racists. Without going too much into details of personal biography, I should perhaps reveal here that it was in America itself that, as a graduate student in the early 1970s, I first entered the ranks of this camp – on a lifelong basis. This fact is worthy of emphasis because most Nigerian leftists and socialists don’t seem to recognize and acknowledge the historic fact that many of us were in fact “converted” to socialism and anti-imperialism in the United States itself. Even far more portentous is the fact that a great number of socialists and anti-imperialists in Nigeria do not know, or make very little of the fact that there are class struggles in the United States, that there are, indeed, strong, sophisticated and determined movements of anti-imperialists, anti-capitalists and anti-racists in America. It is one thing to doubt whether this camp will ever come to power in America or even come to a position where its ideas and perspectives will exercise significant or even decisive influence; but it is another thing entirely to ignore the fact that long before anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism arrived in our region of the world, there had been several generations of this ideological and intellectual formation in the political and economic history of the United States. Of course, the homegrown movement the country itself is by far more rooted, more promising than what any other traditions of socialism and anti-imperialism can offer us, but this does not mean that we should adopt a philistine slogan – as many Nigerian comrades do – that no good can come out of “the belly of the beast”.
If the readers of this piece did not notice that in the sentence in the paragraph preceding this one where the word “converted” is bracketed wherein I stated that it was in the United States that I was first converted to socialism, let me now draw attention to this fact. Why bracket the word, “converted” in that sentence? Well, firstly because I think we should leave the work of “conversion” to the evangelical proselytizers – there is simply too much “conversion” going on in our country right now, without the slightest sign that we are becoming a more humane and godly nation. More significantly, I wish to take”conversion” out of the discourse here because that was not what happened when, at about the age of 24, I became, then and forever, a leftist, a socialist humanist. And neither is it what I am trying to do in this piece in focusing on the younger generation. In other words, I seek not to convert but to persuade, not to preach but to argue rationally and methodically. My adherence to socialism is not based on allegiance to an abstract principle or dogma. Yes, I am proudly and assertively a socialist, making this declaration at a time, a period when it has gone out of fashion to say that one is a socialist, especially in Nigeria. But fundamentally, my allegiance is to the interests, the betterment of human beings, especially hundreds of millions who are needlessly made to suffer because political and social elites run the affairs of this nation and this world in their own selfish and corrupt interests.
Martin Luther King, one of the greatest anti-imperialists and anti-racists of recent American and global history did not seek to make any conversions in his extraordinarily eloquent speeches and writings, even though he was a man of the cloth. Berny Sanders, the vastly popular and openly leftist candidate in the last U.S. presidential elections did not “preach”; he sought to persuade, to convince the poor and disadvantaged tens of millions in America to rise up and act in their own interest. I am persuaded by the examples of these two figures – among dozens of other figures that I could invoke – that comparing America with Nigeria and any other country in Africa and the world is not only helpful but necessary. In next week’s concluding essay in the series begun with this piece, in order to draw attention to certain unknown or forgotten aspects of the crises of the reproduction of social and cultural capital in our world, I will focus specifically on a comparison between Nigeria and the United States in the field of the tertiary educational system that is in place in each respective country. As we shall see, quite justifiably, American higher education is celebrated as one of the most developed in the world. But that is not the whole picture; in the United States, there are contradictions of extremely unjust, mediocre and irrelevant education as we find in Nigerian tertiary education. Doncaster Rovers is, or should be right there with Chelsea Football Club.
bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu
