I am saying in essence that Nigeria’s corruption is not even original. I am saying that we have been looting and stealing the intellectual property of the Tortoise. Nigeria’s presidents, past and present, Federal Executive Council members, members of the National Assembly, state governors, and local government chairmen have been robbing the Tortoise blind of his strategies of greed and selfishness since 1999. Nigeria’s unauthorized use of the Tortoise’s playbook is plagiarism.... Pius Adesanmi
BEING A LECTURE DELIVERED BY PROFESSOR PIUS ADESANMI AT THE
SECOND EDITION OF LECTURES ORGANISED BY THE SAVE NIGERIA GROUP IN LAGOS
Protocols!
My hosts, Pastor Tunde Bakare, esteemed convener of the SNG,
and Mr. Yinka Odumakin, irrepressible spokesman of the group, must be used to
thankless jobs by now. After all, they were both at the forefront of a recent
epic struggle to restore constitutional order in this country by liberating a
self-declared formerly shoeless compatriot from the chains of uxorial fealty to
the wife of his boss. The woman in question had held us all to ransom, running
a ghost presidency, cabalized (apologies to my bosom friend, Patrick
Obahiagbon) all the way from Saudi Arabia. As you all know, the Save Nigeria
Group was at the forefront of that patriotic struggle. No sooner had the
Beneficiary-in-Chief of the said struggle been liberated and helped to his
rightful constitutional station in Aso Rock than he assumed the role of the
nine ungrateful lepers who forgot to return and give thanks to their benefactor
in the Bible.
But Nigeria’s own incarnation of the nine ungrateful lepers
does more than just walk away from the scene of his blessing. He soon surrounds
himself with the usual suspects, always the worst and perpetually recycled
characters in our polity, who hastened to convince him to spit on the same
people on whose backs he rode to constitutional validity. Down the road, when
the same people rose up in response to another historical imperative of
struggle, he had been sufficiently tutored in the art of placing a knife on the
rope of the people’s legitimate struggle. Thus, in one fell swoop, Pastor Tunde
Bakare, Yinka Odumakin, Femi Kuti, Seun Kuti, Joe Okei-Odumakin, and all the
patriots who tirelessly conscientized our people in Lagos and the rest of the
country to the task at hand were contemptuously dismissed as mobilizers of a
motley crowd of sufferheads bribed with food, bottled water, and comedy.
You must understand therefore why I started by saying that
my hosts here today, Pastor Tunde Bakare and Mr. Yinka Odumakin, must be used
to thankless jobs. Indeed, so used are these gentlemen to the thankless job of
patriotic nation building, so inured are they to the insults and sorrows of the
terrain, that they may not even find anything amiss if I went straight to the
heart of this lecture without first thanking them for the extraordinary honour
and privilege they have accorded me by taking the baton of the distinguished
SNG lecture series from Professor Niyi Osundare, Africa’s most decorated poet,
one of my immediate mentors in the business of thinking and writing Africa, and
handing it over to me. By inviting me to deliver this lecture after my mentor’s
passage on this same podium a few months ago, SNG has saddled me with a
near-impossible act to follow. What makes my task bearable is the redemptive
rite of passage known in my culture as iba!
To Niyi Osundare who was here before me - iba!
To Pastor Tunde Bakare and Mr. Yinka Odumakin who invited me
today - iba!
To Mrs. Priscilla Kuye, Chairperson of this gathering – iba!
To you whose ears are here in this hall to drink my words –
iba!
I pray you,
Unbind me!
Make my young mouth harbor the elder’s tongue
On which the kolanut blossoms to maturity
Grant me, I pray, the wisdom to render unto the Tortoise
That which belongs to Ijapa
Now that I have poured cold water in front of me, may my
feet be rewarded with the kiss of cool and soothing earth as I set forth in
this lecture! Pastor Bakare, Mrs Kuye, audience, have I earned the right to
proceed with this lecture? Thank you. Nigeria’s betrayal of a certain Caesarian
covenant with the Tortoise is at the root of every problem that has made
responsible nationhood and statehood a mirage since October 1, 1960. If you are
in this hall and you are above the age of forty, then you belong in a
generation of Nigerians raised on a diet of folktales and other forms of
traditional pedagogy. If you are not an “ara oke” like me and you grew up in
the city, you may not have memories of returning from the farm with your
grandmother and waiting patiently for storytelling sessions after dinner.
However, you probably still got your own dosage of folktales from NTA’s Tales
by Moonlight.
Growing up in Isanlu, my hometown in Yagba East LGA, Kogi
state, I got my own stories principally from my mom and my grand aunty. We call
my grand aunty Mama Isanlu. She is still alive and kicking well into her
nineties. Tales by Moonlight on television was just jara, an additional icing
on the cake whenever we were able to successfully rotate the antenna of my
father’s black and white TV, suspended on a long steel rod outside, in the
right direction for reception of transmission signals from Lagos. Mama Isanlu’s
stories were the real deal. I particularly loved her animal tales. Animal tales
are a sub-genre of folktales. There is usually a bad guy, a trickster figure,
whose adventures and escapades kept us awake long beyond the telling of the
stories. In the Yoruba tradition, that trickster figure is Ijapa, the tortoise,
often trying to outsmart everybody, including his own wife, Yannibo.
This is where the problem begins. You see, the Yoruba corpus
of folktales in which Ijapa operates as a trickster figure presents a worldview
– what German philosophers like Immanuel Kant and G.W.F. Hegel call
Weltanschauung – rooted in the twin ideas of the collective good and the
commonweal. If we consider that the most basic philosophical definition of the
commonweal is the idea of the welfare of the public, then we will understand
why “imo ti ara eni nikan”, which we shall translate clumsily as selfishness
because the English language is inadequate, is one of the most serious sins and
character flaws imaginable in the worldview to which Ijapa belongs. The rounded
personhood concept of omoluabi, which I explored fully in a public lecture in
Detroit last year, is one of the cultural matrices of that worldview and nobody
who undermines the collective good can be deemed a proper omoluabi. Indeed, if
the tragedians of ancient Greece were working with the folktale character known
as Ijapa, selfishness, the sort which constantly seeks to undermine the
collective good, would be his hubris, his fatal flaw.
So engrained is this foible, selfishness, in the persona of
Ijapa that even his own wife is never spared. Thus, after years of
childlessness, Yannibo impresses it upon her husband to seek help from a
babalawo. The babalawo prepares a delicious “aseje” – porridge – which Ijapa is
instructed to take back home to his wife. The instructions were strict and
severe. Only your wife may eat this “aseje”. But Ijapa won’t be Tortoise if he
didn’t err on the side of selfishness. Oh, the porridge was delicious! Oh, the
aroma wafted into his nostrils! Oh, how he salivated until the urge became too
irresistible. He settled down under a tree and ravenously consumed that which
was meant to help his wife get pregnant. And his belly began to swell. And
swell. And swell. Shamefacedly, Ijapa returns to the babalawo, singing a song I
am sure most of you know very well. Those of you who do not know the song
surely have heard the kegite version of it made very popular by Tony One Week
in his gyration album. Pardon my poor singing talent. I don’t have the gifts of
Tonto Dikeh in the singing department but here we go:
Babalawo mo wa bebe
Alugbinrin
Ogun to se fun mi lere kan
Alugbinrin
Oni nma ma fowo kenu
Alugbinrin
Oni nma ma fese kenu
Alugbinrin
Mo fowo kan obe mo fi kenu
Alugbinrin
Mo boju wo kun, o ri gbendu
Alugbinrin.
Babalawo Mo wa bebe, Alugbinrin...
As it goes for Mrs. Tortoise, so does it go for the rest of
the community. They are also victims of Ijapa’s selfish wiles. In a society
organized for the collective good, nothing tests the solidity of the social
welfare system than famine. Therefore, during a great famine that threatened to
wipe out all the animals in Ijapa’s village, the villagers discovered a coconut
tree that was still yielding bountifully. In order that this life-sustaining
bounty might go round, it was decreed that each villager was entitled to one
coconut per day. At your allotted time, you went to the coconut tree and
intoned a song which caused a single coconut to fall from the tree and drop
directly on your back. Having the coconut drop on your back, I suppose, was
deterrence against the temptation of greed.
Mr Tortoise gets to the tree at his appointed time on the
first day and sings the magic song for his share of one coconut for the day.
Your chorus, this time is “oturugbe”:
Ori mo so
Oturugbe
Ori mo so
Oturugbe
Okan ba ja lu mi inu mi a dun, ori mo so
Oturugbe
One coconut drops on his back. Another day, another time.
But, wait a minute, says Mr Tortoise to himself, what happens if I ask for two
coconuts instead of one? I’m all alone by myself. Who is here to announce to
the other villagers that I took more than my fair share of this communal
property? If the other villagers are all mumu and they come here each day for
one paltry coconut, what’s my own wahala? Ijapa, why you dey dull yourself like
this? Shine your eyes now. Let me try my luck and see if this tree will give me
two coconuts jare. So, our friend listens to the voices in his own head and
sings:
Ori mo so
oturugbe
Ori mo so
oturugbe
Eji ba ja lu mi inu mi a dun, ori mo so
oturugbe
To his amazement, two coconuts drop on his back! He went
home dancing and singing maga don pay! Another time, he asked for tree coconuts
to drop on his back. Then four. Then five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Finally,
he’d had enough of the daily trips to the tree. The voices invade his head
again. What if I asked everything to kuku drop on me? I could take the entire
load of coconuts home and hoard it, abi? When the storm clams down, I could
even begin to sell some to trusted villagers at an exorbitant price and make a
killing. So, to the tree he went and sang:
Ori mo so –
oturugbe
Ori mo so –
oturugbe
Gbogbo re ba ja lu mi inu mi a dun, ori mo so
oturugbe
I’m sure you all know the end of this story. A mountain of
coconuts came crashing down on Ijapa, crushing his shell and causing him
grievous bodily harm. Alas, as soon as Ijapa recovers from this near death
experience with coconuts – perhaps the other animals took pity on him and
rushed him to a German hospital for treatment! – he was onto his next prank, this
time to cheat all the birds of the air who had been invited for a feast in
heaven. Ijapa convinced each bird to donate a feather to him in order to be
able to fly along with them to the party in heaven. The Nigerian practice of
“mo gbo mo ya” was also trendy in the animal kingdom of Ijapa’s era.
As the animals got ready for the trip, Ijapa, the most
cosmopolitan among the animals because of his wide travels, told everyone to
take a new name, as was the norm in civilized climes. Naturally, Ijapa adopted the
name, Mr. Everybody. Off they went to heaven. The hosts were generous. There
was plenty to eat and drink. Oh, the hosts also announced that the feast was
for everybody! Ijapa was of course quick to remind his fellow guests who
everybody was. At the end of the day, he hungry and, therefore, very angry
birds, took their feathers from Ijapa, flew back to earth, and abandoned him to
his fate in heaven. If you want to know what subsequently happened to Ijapa,
get Ambassador Abass Akande Obesere omo Rapala’s album, “Diplomacy”.
One crucial dimension to these animal tales in the Yoruba
corpus is their didactic mandate. The lessons which these stories teach wear a
severe warning label: do not behave like the trickster figure. Our case in
point, Ijapa, takes intellectual ownership of his exploits extremely seriously.
We, his human audience, are not in any way allowed to imitate Ijapa’s foibles.
Even in the case of mixed tales, where the human and the animal worlds meet and
their temporalities overlap, the human characters in those tales must heed the
same warnings as those of us who are external to the narrative process. Those
of you who have read D.O. Fagunwa, Amos Tutuola, and their London-based
literary offspring, Ben Okri, will readily understand what happens to man when
he violates the fundamental condition for dealing with the animals’ actions in
the tales. That condition, the covenant we must all enter into with the
trickster figure, is to avoid plagiarizing his actions.
When Ijapa offers his picaresque adventures in folktales as
a pedagogical canvass of behaviors that the individual must avoid, we know that
those deviant behaviors almost always come down to two things. The first is
greed, especially that form of greed which privileges consumption above all other
areas of human experience, transforming the subject into an unthinking slave of
Opapala, the Yoruba deity of hunger, the god of food, gourmandizing, and
untrammeled Sybaritism. Hence, Ijapa is at his most outrageous, most
reprehensible when he elevates his belly above the collective good of society.
In story after story, his punishment for the sin of excessive greed of
consumption is swift. Often, he barely escapes with his life to return in the
next story to enact another scenario of what we call wobia (excessive
consumption at the expense of others). The second behavior to which the
trickster figure in the folktales holds an exclusive copyright and which we are
consequently not supposed to plagiarize is even deadlier than the first sin. It
is individualism. Individualism is the father of selfishness and the mother of
nombrilism. It is what enables the will to undermine the commonweal, to harm
the collective good.
It should be clear from the foregoing that Ijapa in these
folktales comes from an ethno-national imaginary in which resides a specific
welfarist vision of society and her institutions. The commonweal is the base of
this vision. All the rules of social organization, all the institutions of
society, including monarchy, have meaning insofar as they are able to guarantee
the collective good and the commonweal. It is in fact safe to say that the
commonweal is sacred. Ijapa’s sin during the party in heaven is worse than
selfishness. By claiming to be Mr. Everybody, he was violating one of the most
sacred aspects of his culture. The commonweal, the collective, the “us” is so
important that even his language does not permit synecdoche in that area. When
it comes to the sanctity of the collective, no part can represent or claim to
be the whole. Ijapa’s language makes this clear in the proverb: “enikan ki je
awa de”. A single person does not announce his presence in the plural by
shouting: “here we are”!
In essence, you must always be conscious of your
responsibility to the collective. For instance, there is a reason why that
river or that stream is called “odo ilu” (communal river). Institutions and
codes of behavior exist to guarantee equal and fair access to this river,
especially in the dry season. To take more than your fair share of this water
is a serious ethical breach, it is deviance of the sort that could give you an
“oruko buruku” (bad name) in the community. Even the protocols of fetching
water from that stream devolve from a deep-seated social consciousness, a
certain respect for the collective good. If you are the first to reach the
stream, you do not just jump in and begin to cast your keregbe (gourd) or water
pot all over the place. You have spent your entire life being socialized into
responsible membership of the community with stories of Ijapa. Your traditional
education emphasized the mandate not to be like Ijapa. You know that you do not
want to stir the water in the river so vigorously as to make the water turn all
brown with disturbed mud and particles from the riverbed, making it impossible
for other members of the community to fetch water when they arrive.
In other words, you don’t want to “ru omi odo”. Above all,
you also don’t want to start suddenly thinking of creative ways to divert the
entire river – or 90% of it – for your own private use. That would be breaking
the covenant with Ijapa not to plagiarize him. That would be violating all the
life lessons you were taught about how to avoidbehaving like Ijapa. Do you want
me to go on? Okay, here is part two.
(PART TWO)
It is no secret that we love foreign things in Nigeria. Our
encounter with modernity, especially the version of it associated with the
material trajectory of Western Europe after the Enlightenment and the rise of
the culture of late capitalism in the United States after the World Wars, has
been a history of uncreative aping of Western culture, tastes, and modes of
being. Alas, our knowledge systems are not spared, hence we seek Western
paradigms and explanations for things rooted in our own history, culture, and
environment. Such is the case with a great deal of the literature on what most
Nigerians agree is the country’s most successful postcolonial experience of
statehood in terms of the management of resources and human capital. This
experience, which has entered the history books as one of Africa’s most
successful cases of the harnessing of resources for the betterment of the
collective, is none other than the political polity known as the Western
region.
If you explore the social science literature on the Western
region and why the man at the centre of it all, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, was able
to record developmental strides for his region that are still largely
unsurpassed in our annals, you will find no shortage of Western-derived
explanations for what happened in the Western region. You will encounter every
Western theory of statehood, especially theories and models of the modern
Welfare state, from its origins in Otto von Bismarck’s Germany to Canada via
Scandinavia that Obafemi Awolowo and the bureaucracy he harnessed and led for
the betterment of his people were supposed to have mastered. You will even
encounter the reflections of a great 19th and early 20th-century German thinker
known as Max Weber, whose reflections on the bureaucracy and the legal bases of
the Welfare state have led to the emergence of a theoretical construct known as
the Weberian state in the social sciences. You will hear that the Western
region was a micro-Weberian state at its most successful level of actuation.
What you will hardly encounter in the literature on the Western region are
studies which trace the origins of this spectacular success to the cultural
capital of Chief Awolowo and the energies he mobilized to implement his vision.
It is true that the leader of the Western region was a man
of great learning. A polymath whose intellectual depth and erudition are still
here with us in his speeches, lectures, and books. Added to his own talent and
intellectual capital is the fact his generation of Nigerians is the last generation
to have acquired what qualifies to be called great learning. You will
understand what I am talking about if your father was roughly in Chief
Awolowo’s generation. This is the generation that read the Greeks and the
Romans, studied Latin, and spoke Queen’s English, stressing the proper
syllables unlike those of us in subsequent generations who stress every
syllable. So, it is true that Chief Awolowo had read Weber and many of the
great thinkers of modern welfare statehood. However, Max Weber and European
philosophers were not what happened in the Western region. What happened was
cultural. What happened to and in the Western region was respect for the
covenant between man and Ijapa.
Although the free primary education scheme, which was
launched on January 17, 1955, has become a leitmotif in narratives of the
Western region’s success, we need to dig deeper to account for the
philosophical bases of the vision of the man who dared to dream it in the first
place. Let us examine for example the core themes of Awolowo’s 1955 budget
speech: “Of our total expenditure of £12.45 million not less than 82.6% is
devoted to services and projects which directly cater for the health,
education, prosperity and general welfare of our people. Of this high
percentage, 27.8% goes to education, 10.7% to medical services, 5.4% to
agriculture”. The key terms here are health, education, welfare of the people,
and agriculture. These are all areas directly related to human development.
However, which humans? That is a logical question because if
Squealer was able to perfectly rationalize the fact that all the resources of
animal farm were to go towards the health, education, and welfare of the few
pigs at the table, the envisioners of the Western region budget could also
perfectly have reasoned that human development was synonymous with the welfare
and the gastronomic preferments of a chosen and privileged few. So, which
humans is a legitimate question. The answer to who Awolowo had in mind as he
evolved a carefully-calibrated budget philosophy for the Western region on his
assumption of office lies in his famous three principles of budgeting by which
he meant the resources of the region would be expended on human development in
the areas of health, welfare, and education. The overall goal of this budget
philosophy was freedom of the people from ignorance, disease, and want. In
Awolowo’s vision, the Western region was going to be the very embodiment of the
collective good and the commonweal.
What was being born in this project, the Western region, was
a modern, postcolonial political apparatus whose formal institutions,
bureaucracy, and modes of functioning devolved from the legacies of British
colonialism. However, the ethos and the vision which transformed the project
into a vector of generalized human development were not British. That ethos
devolved from the cultural bases of the region’s chief envisioner and his
greatest asset – his people. I will elaborate on the point about his people
presently. Suffice it to say that the persona speaking in Awolowo’s description
of the principles that would guide the budgeting process of the Western region
and become its humanizing foundation is one grounded in the traditional
pedagogy of the tortoise. We have explored how the cultural imaginary which
produced Ijapa and his adventures promotes a conception of personhood,
omoluabi, defined by a subscription to the superiority of the collective good
and the commonweal. The budget of the Western region respected Ijapa’s mandate:
do not emulate me. Do not plagiarize my actions. Remember, I am all about my
belly and how to get more than my fair share of things meant for all of us.
You, on the other hand, are people of the commonweal.
This is the cultural praxis which informed Obafemi Awolowo’s
conception of statecraft and shaped what became the Western region. I am
saying, in essence, that we did not hear of the welfare state and the social
contract for the first time from jean-Jacques Rousseau, Max Weber, and other
Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thinkers of Europe. Our ancestors were
already using those philosophies to raise their children and forge ideas of
society and social responsibility long before our modern scholars and thinkers
dragged these Europeans into the argument.
Something else is often left out in narratives of the
Western region. I prefer to frame this second omission in the interrogative
mode. Why did Awolowo’s vision and altruism work in the region? To render unto
Ijapa what is Ijapa’s is to subscribe to the supremacy of the commonweal by not
plagiarizing the trickster figure’s selfish and individualistic proclivities.
My submission is that that is exactly what Awolowo did but was this adherence
to the collective good the only ingredient of his success? The answer,
evidently, is no. For Awolowo’s budget philosophy to be successful, those who
were helping him run the vision and examples he was setting in Ibadan across
the entire region would have had to be believers in and subscribers to the same
ethos of the commonweal. His role was to provide the vision, leadership, sense
of purpose, and example but all these would have come to naught if he wasn’t
leading a people who subscribed to the same ethos of the collective good.
Awolowo’s greatest assets were, therefore, his people and the ethos of the
commonweal to which they collectively subscribed at the time.
The success of Awolowo’s lion share budget for education
depended on implementers of that budget across the region. If they did not
share his ethos, if they decided to behave like Ijapa and steal all the money,
if every time they received allocations for education supplies across the
region, they burst out singing:
Ori mo so
Oturugbe
Ori mo so
Oturugbe
Gbogbo re ba ja lu mi inu mi a dun ori mo so
Oturugbe
What do you think would have happened to free education? Do
you want me to go on still? Nobody is bored to death yet? Okay, here is part
three.
(PART THREE)
The ethos of the collective and the commonweal as I have
explored it above is not an exclusive preserve of any people in the immediate
afterlife of colonialism in Nigeria. The landscape I have been mapping in terms
of the cultural values that regulated one’s relationship to society in the
period of our national history under discussion must be familiar to everyone,
irrespective of your ethno-geographic belonging in Nigeria. I may have tried to
explore the foundation of our national civic process during the era of the
regions from the purview of my own culture, I am sure you have all followed my
train of thought thus far, drawing parallels between the scenarios I have
sketched out and what obtained in your own corner of Nigeria. North and south;
east and west, Nigeria was once relatively a postcolonial space for ethos of
the collective good and the commonweal. This explains why Nigerians of a
certain generation look back and wax nostalgic about that era, irrespective of
our deadly faultlines of ethnicity and religion.
I am harping on these two concepts – collective good and
commonweal – to underscore the point that the physical and material fact of
modern statehood, of modern political arrangements, are just as important as
the metaphors with which citizens conceptualize such polities at the symbolic
level. As strange as this may sound, metaphors of self-fashioning are in fact
what give solidity to the political identities we refer to as nation and state.
Such metaphors may be foundational, coming from myths and legends passed on
across the
generations, as is quite often the case here in Africa. A
good number of Western thinkers of nation and nationalism also understand the
centrality of metaphors and myths to national identity. Ernest Renan understood
this in his famous treatise, What is a Nation? Ernest Gellner also understood
it in his master opus, Nations and Nationalism. And so did Benedict Anderson in
his influential book, Imagined Communities.
By defining a nation as an imagined community, Anderson was
stressing the importance of the collective mental image that the people have of
their nation and hold dear. That mental image, more rooted in metaphors and
myths than in concrete actualities, defines a people. When members of a nation
speak about “who we are” or “our values” – you’ll get an overdose of these if
you listen to American politicians in an election cycle – they are talking
about the time-tested metaphors and myths of self-fashioning to which they
collectively subscribe. This is what gives vigour to their peoplehood.
One of the most significant metaphors of American
self-fashioning is the concept known across the world as the American dream.
Such is the mobilizing power of this metaphor that nobody is indifferent to it
– whether we are Americans or not. A visit to the gate of the American Embassy
here in Lagos will give you a window into the sub-human indignities that
Nigerians endure from rude and insufferably imperious American embassy
officials just to get a chance to gain access to that dream. And we know that
in the tortured logic of Al-Qaeda, it is better to die through self-immolation
than hang around here and deal with the inevitability of the American dream.
So, what do Americans throw into the philosophical cauldron
of a concept which represents the heart and soul of their nationhood? They
throw into it their freedoms and the institutions which underwrite them; they
throw into it their self-awareness of being the authors of a system which
invests the most in the infinite possibilities of the human spirit; they throw
into it the unquenchable optimism of the can do American spirit; they throw
into it the idea of the fair shot which guarantees a certain level playing
field for the pursuit of happiness; they throw into it their faith in a system
which makes it possible to take out a car loan, a mortgage, and the occasional
vacation if you work hard; they throw into it their faith that America’s got
your back, always ready to do right by you.
These metaphors of national self-fashioning can mobilize
even more effectively than the material manifestations of nationhood and
statehood. The American flag as a concrete symbol is important but what drives
those boys in Afghanistan is their belief in the need to lay down their lives
for abstract notions such as “our values”, “our way of life”, “who we are”, in
short, the American dream. They are defending not the American flag but the
American dream. Where the American boasts the American dream, the French man
responds with “impossible n’est pas français”. Impossible is not French. Time
and space will not permit me to fully explore what this self-fashioning does
for French nationhood so let me just quip that it does for the French what the
American dream does for the American.
Like the Americans and the French, the metaphors of the
commonweal and the collective good once defined us as Nigerians building the
country, building nationhood from our different ethno-regional locations. Then
we had coups and countercoups. Then we shed blood, a lot of blood. And we lost
the regions to our self-inflicted follies and gained a perverse form of
federalism via military fiat. And things fell apart. No, I am not talking about
the civil war. I am talking about what we lost symbolically in our transition
from regionalism to federalism. Do you want me to tell you what we lost? Okay,
you must wait for the answer in part four.
(PART FOUR)
So we formed a federal nationhood in 1966 – or, to state it
more correctly, it was rammed down our throats. As is the case with all
beginnings, we had to name the new beast and give it an identity in the
province of the symbolic. We had to equip it with foundational myths and
metaphors. We had to come up with narratives that could confer on our new
project nationhood the capacity to mobilize us as citizens. We had to come up
with an identity mythos that would define us for the rest of the world.
Remember, nations define their political being-ness at the symbolic level by
reaching deep down into the collective soul of the people for the ideals they
believe best represent their values. That is the psychic function that the
American dream performs for the American people. Closer to us here, in South
Africa, that nation rode on the crest of the Mandela mystique and symbolism to
give herself the post-Apartheid identity of the rainbow nation.
What did we do when we had to make the mental leap from
building the symbolic identity of our regions – as I have tried to show with
the Western region – around the ethos of the commonweal to naming and
conceptualizing the Federal entity which emerged from our self-inflicted
régimes of violence between 1960 and 1966? The choice was to emulate other
nations in the act of psychic self-fashioning or self-naming or veer onto other
paths that would eventually evolve into something others, down the road, would
describe contemptuously as uniquely Nigerian. We could privilege a galvanizing
ideal, an aspirational identity. That is the case with the country which
decided to construct her identity based on the ideal of dreams and unflinching
belief in human potential. Another country says impossible is not French and
takes on the world on the basis of that ideal. Yet another country says she is
rainbow, the very embodiment of human efflorescence and diversity.
Federal Nigeria responded to all these ideals, all these
possibilities, with the base instinct of the belly. We travelled far and wide,
looking for metaphors of debauchery to name our federal state. We visited
Hedone, the spirit of pleasure and enjoyment among the Greeks, we visited
Bacchus, the roman god of wine, and we worshipped at the feet of Opapala the
Yoruba god of the belly. Our search for a befitting self-defining metaphor of
consumption was far more frenzied than the search of Tutuola’s palmwine
drinkard for his wine tapper. Out of these peregrinations came one of the most
outrageous acts of self-naming the world had ever seen. We reduced our federal
being-ness to a name that an average Nigerian knows better than his own
father’s name: national cake!
No matter the culture you come from, we know as Africans
that there are consequences to naming. The consequences operate at many levels,
ranging from the physical to the psychic, from the affective to the emotional.
As the proverb goes, he who hosts an oyinbo man must not be allergic to pet
dogs. When you call yourself food, you must be prepared for a psychology framed
by and dependent on the registers of consumption. Such registers as gorging,
cramming, consuming, devouring, gobbling, gulping, guzzling, stuffing, swallowing,
and wolfing food become the symbolic markers of your relationship to a state
metaphorically equated with food. Notice the recurrence of these registers in
our media whenever affairs pertaining to the Nigerian state are being
discussed.
When registers of excessive consumption shape a people’s
national psychology, it induces the sort of laziness which prevents the effort
needed to envision the production and sustenance of that which is consumed
excessively. Thus, successive generations of Nigerian leadership have
approached their national cake only from the perspective of how to gorge on it,
how to share it wantonly like tomorrow will never come. Nobody comes to that
Federal theatre of debauched gorging sparing one second to think about how to
bake that cake, where to get the flower and the icing and ensure continuous
supply of the material and labour necessary to bake the said cake. No, you
approach the Federal table with the mental laziness of one only required to
gorge and share that cake according to agreed-upon principles of rotational
gorging by the political élite. Hence, the only ideal around which they gather
in Abuja is the ideal of the allocation formula. When the metaphor of food digs
too deep into the soul of the polity, it begins to condition the social
identity of your youth. You begin to foist on your youth a certain
predisposition towards a culture of “awoof no dey run belle.”
Perhaps the worst consequence of the national cake approach
to our statehood is the atrocious élite psychology it has nurtured over the
years. From an élite and a followership who more or less subscribed to the
ethos of the collective good and the commonweal during the era of regional
governments, we transitioned into a élite of Ijapa-imitators once our travesty
of Federalism came into the picture, concentrated itself essentially at the
centre, named itself national cake, and made a brood of salivating élite all
over the country come rushing to the centre for a piece of that cake.
If you look at our post-regional history, you will easily
determine that we have produced at least three generations of leaders whose
ethos and philosophy of governance devolve from wantonly plagiarizing the
playbook of the Tortoise. Each generation of rulers has been worse than the one
immediately preceding it; each generation has been inching closer and closer to
a near-perfect imitation of the Tortoise in terms of their approach the
proverbial national cake. It is very easy to map and contrast the evolution of
social mores under the different national metaphors that have governed Nigeria.
When the regional governments defined themselves as the commonweal and the
collective good, one leader came up with a budget philosophy rooted in the idea
of the welfare of the people. Now that we are governed by the consumption ethos
and greed of the Tortoise, one leader budgets about a billion naira for feeding
himself and his wife every year. Now, what do you think a leader who allocates
a billion naira to gorging on the national cake is doing under the coconut
tree? He is singing:
Ori mo so
Oturugbe
Ori mo so
Oturugbe
Gbogbo re ba ja lu mi inu mi a dun ori mo so
Oturugbe
Wherever a crooked head goes, a crooked body wobbles along.
So, the budget philosophy of the states is no different. Mallam Nasir El Rufai
has gotten into a lot of trouble for performing an invaluable but thankless
national service of placing a critical gaze on the Tortoise budget philosophy
of the Federal and state governments in this country. If you read El Rufai’s
budget exposés, all you will see are Federal and state budgeteers struggling to
out-Tortoise the Tortoise. The rush to corner all the coconut for oneself like
the Tortoise, to be Mr. Everybody and eat all the food and drink all the palmwine
like the Tortoise, is what accounts for the mind-boggling figures in which
corruption is now denominated in Nigeria. Our state and Federal officials steal
only in billions and trillions because whenever that allocation comes from
Abuja, all they can see is the coconut tree and all they can hear is the
Tortoise asking for all the coconut to be added unto his own inheritance. And
the Tortoise-scale looting stretches and stretches until the EFCC begins to
forget files, needing to be reminded of old cases as PM News did recently in a
report entitled, “Forgotten Cases of Looting”.
FINAL PART!
And the patriarch sings: “Ojo to ro s’ewuro, lo ro s’ireke”!
The rain falls, sings the patriarch. It falls on sugar cane and bitter leaf.
The same rain falls on sugar cane and bitter leaf. Sugar cane takes its own
rain and travels the path of sweetness while bitter leaf takes its own share of
the same rain and travels the path of bitterness.
Ojo to ro s’ewuro, lo ro s’ireke.
The rain of oil falls on Dubai and falls on Nigeria. The
rulers of Dubai use their own share of the rain of oil to send their people on
the path of sweetness while their Nigerian counterparts take same rain and
condemn their own people to the path of bitterness, lack, and hunger. The
difference is that the rulers of Dubai are what the rulers of Nigeria’s
regional governments, especially the Western region, used to be: believers in
the collective good and the commonweal while the current crop of leaders in
Nigeria are the most successful plagiarizers of the playbook of the Tortoise
the world has ever known. We are therefore not surprised that they are doing
what we knew and predicted they would do to the Ribadu report: set it up for
failure from the very start and contrive a crisis along the way to discredit
it.
I am saying in essence that Nigeria’s corruption is not even
original. I am saying that we have been looting and stealing the intellectual
property of the Tortoise. Nigeria’s presidents, past and present, Federal
Executive Council members, members of the National Assembly, state governors,
and local government chairmen have been robbing the Tortoise blind of his
strategies of greed and selfishness since 1999. Nigeria’s unauthorized use of
the Tortoise’s playbook is plagiarism. Do not be like me; do not touch my
intellectual property; do not copy my ways, the Tortoise warned but we did not
listen. We stole his playbook of always trying to take more than his fair share
of what is collectively owned and applied it to our so-called national cake. Because
we stole his intellectual property, Nigeria owes the Tortoise reparations!
Ojo to ro s’ewuro, lo ro s’ireke.
And the beat goes on. And once a week, the Federal Executive
Council meets. And a Minister briefs the press about the outcome of deliberations,
once a week. And week in, week out, the briefing never changes for Council
Chambers in Aso Rock is for the meeting of Tortoise-wannabes. So, they come out
every week reeling out trillions of naira worth of approved contracts,
representing that week’s sharing out of the national cake to friends and
cronies. Those contracts will never be monitored, the funds will disappear, and
new friends and cronies are already queuing up for next week’s sharing. They
share and share and share because the only song they know is that which makes
all the coconut fall within their restricted circle of the 1% while the 99% go
hungry.
And so we need to change this song if we are to stand any
meaningful chance of witnessing change in this country. The “we” here does not
include those currently singing the Tortoise’s song in the corridors of
gorging. They have no reason to change that melodious tune and I have given up
on them when it comes to my vision for a new Nigeria. If Nigeria as is works
for you, we do not see you in the Nigeria of tomorrow. Therefore, we, who bear
the brunt of their greed and selfishness; we who understand the consequences of
the collapse of the commonweal and the collective good, must find a way to
change the song. Our new song must be one which encompasses what the owner
these lyrics was thinking when he sang:
I no go gree
Make my brother hungry
Make I no talk
I no go gree
Make my brother homeless
Make I no talk.
If 150 million people sing this song and believe in the
philosophy which informs it, that their own welfare is inclusive of the welfare
of the brother, they will gradually find their way back to the commonweal and
to our much-desired national renaissance.
I no go gree
Make my brother hungry
Make I no talk
I no go gree
Make my brother homeless
Make I no talk.
I thank you for your time
