AND JUST WHO ARE THE NIGERIANS?

I don’t recollect that this question was directly posed in any of the myriad of foreign radio and television reports and commentaries on Nigerian Elections 2007 that I heard; nonetheless, it was a question that was never too far from the surface details of the reports and commentaries: Just who are these Nigerians? Simply stated, it took the breath of many foreign journalists and pundits away that any nation could be so blatant and crude in enacting electoral fraudulence on such a massive a scale. The presupposition behind this was that even fraudulence requires some subterfuge, some competence, some finesse and a fraudulence which, by any standards in the world, was so inept, chaotic and open called for special understanding.

Since most Nigerians are used to mediocrity and corruption operating in the open absolutely without any cover, we may too easily dismiss this special curiosity of the outside world about us, about what seems to be our special lien on blatant and unashamed fraudulence and corruption. But I suggest that if only in this matter, we would do well to pay attention to what the outside world says about us, how it perceives who or what we are. At any rate, I intend to subject this matter to some scrutiny and reflection in this week’s column and the one that will appear next week. This week, I intend to focus on what the world sees in us and next week, I will shift gears and deal with what the world doesn’t see, doesn’t know about us, including things we don’t normally see or know about ourselves.

Part of what the world sees in us, or knows about us derives from the reports sent back to their home countries by the foreigners who either live among us or come for visits or short stays in our country. This is part of “globalization” and Nigeria is thus not an exception in this regard, except for the sad fact that at this point in time anyway, Nigeria is one of the most hellish of places in the world and the unpleasant things to see and experience in our country far outweigh the pleasant things. But a great deal of what the world knows about us comes the operations of a vital aspect of economic globalization in the new millennium: a great assiduity in the collection and dissemination of facts, data and statistics on the Internet about every region of the world and every single one of its nations and peoples. I strongly recommend that every computer literate Nigerian pay periodic visits to the search engines of worldwide web (www) of the Internet to glean what the world thinks of our country.

By my reckoning, three things stand out over and above all others in the Internet concerning what the world thinks about Nigeria and these are the fact that we are the most populous nation in the African continent; the fact that we are the world’s seventh or eighth largest producer of crude oil; and “419.” But consider the following fact: as of the time of typing out this piece on my computer (Thursday, June 7, 2007), the “hits” or items available for perusal on the internet for each of these three items are Nigeria itself, 107,000,000; oil in Nigeria, 3,690,000; “419,” 133, 000,000. Thus, at one hundred and thirty-three million “hits,” “419,” which is defined as a “criminal racket known as the Nigerian money transfer fraud.” has more items than “Nigeria” and “oil in Nigeria” combined. “419” arose out of and from Nigeria, it did not grow out of thin air; however, it has apparently ballooned far beyond its source. As the saying in Achebe’s Arrow of God metaphorically describes this state of affairs, the thing caught in Nte’s trap is much bigger than Nte himself.

This is metaphor at its most suggestive and it will take us far in making connections between otherwise distinct and separate events and realities in our public, national affairs. For instance, in the light of this metaphor, “"419” pertains not only to “money transfer fraud,” but to diverse aspects of the malaise of our national corporate existence - the pervasiveness of fake and dangerous drugs and medications on the shelves of pharmacies and hospitals throughout the country; examination malpractices galore and at all levels of the educational system; abundant stories of fakery, adulteration and bogusness in the delivery of goods and services in Nigerian trade and commerce; Olusegun Obasanjo’s declaration in May 2006 when his third term agenda failed woefully that there had never been any third term agenda and we had all simply imagined it; Maurice Iwu’s declaration that Elections 2007 had been a grand success that would be remembered and celebrated by future generations as a watershed moment in our political evolution. Abroad, in the outside world, the odium and vexations of “419” attach to everything Nigerian: virtually all the major universities in Europe and North America now hold bachelor’s degrees from Nigerian universities suspect and as a consequence they use all kinds of unorthodox means to evaluate Nigerian applicants for admission to postgraduate training; we consistently rank very high in Transparency International’s annual list of the most corrupt countries in the world; at nearly all the world’s airports, a Nigerian passport draws special attention which often entails scrutiny of Nigerians beyond what nationals of other countries are subjected to.

The list or profile is indeed endless of the pervasiveness of “419” in all aspects of Nigeria’s corporate existence, where “419” implies, not just “money transfer fraud” but corruption, fakery, bogusness, decadence or “shakara” of all sorts and involving, with no discrimination whatsoever, Nigerians of all social groups and classes, rich and poor, the rulers and the ruled. At least, this is how the world sees us and if we must be frank with ourselves, this is how we tend to see the matter also. Indeed, the ultimate ironic twist to this matter may well be the fact that while the outside world sees itself as the potential “victim” of Nigerians’ “419,” Nigerians of all groups and classes also see themselves as the victims, potential or actual, of the same phenomenon.

It is at this level where all distinctions vanish that we must recognize the limits of metaphor. “419,” no matter in what light the world or ourselves see it, is not bigger than Nigeria; it is not greater than the sum of the country’s reserves of collective will, memory and agency that could be mobilized to confront the myriad of problems and crises that confront us at the present historic stage of our (under)development. If the thing caught in Nte’s trap is bigger than Nte, he does not have to confront it alone, and without a memory of the resources available in his community and the world. This is something we will take up in next week’s column, this matter of what the world doesn’t know, or care to know about us, often with our own connivance.

All day long on May 29, 2007, in my apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.A., I listened to radio broadcasts of the BBC and NPR (National Public Radio of the U.S.) on the inauguration of Umar Yar’ Adua as Nigeria’s new president. Among the many things put across the airwaves in these broadcasts, two items stood out. One was the fact that in the entire period of Nigeria’s post-independence history, this was the first time that one civilian administration was handing power over to another civilian administration. The other item repeated again and again in the broadcasts was the so-called crisis of legitimacy that Yar’ Adua and the ruling People’s Democratic Party faced on account of the fact that Elections 2007 had been universally condemned at home and abroad as the worst polls ever held in Nigeria. What was my reaction to these two items?

On the first item, I rejoiced and in fact, I am still rejoicing. But not for the mere fact that for the first time in our political history, power was being handed by one civilian president to a successor civilian administration. Obasanjo’s administration was “civilian” in name only. The man had a deep, surfeited contempt for due process, for the rule of law. He flouted the rulings of the country’s highest court many times and at a moment of truth rare in his regime, Ahmadu Ali, the National Chairman of the ruling party, a retired military man like the president and personally handpicked by him, declared that “garrison politics” was the order by which the country was being governed. I rejoiced on May 29 for the simple fact that my mind went back to May 2006 when Obasanjo’s third term bid was crushingly and humiliatingly defeated by the united will and action of the Nigerian people. Without May 2006, May 29, 2007 would never have happened.

I rejoiced also because Obasanjo is gone forever from Aso Rock. Deep in my bones, I know that the overwhelming majority of Nigerians feel this way too. Whatever dreams of remote control of Yar’ Adua and the political process Obasanjo may nurse, the fact remains that he no longer has the awesome power of incumbency to shore up his petty-mindedness, hypocrisy, megalomania and incivility. For let us never forget the simple fact that while the world is full of egomaniacs and hypocrites, very few of them ever have the concentration of institutional power over a whole people that Olusegun Obasanjo enjoyed for eight years, at a terrible cost to the Nigerian people. Obasanjo tirelessly spoke of laying solid foundations for democracy in our country, but he was personally extremely autocratic; and he had little respect for the institutions of the democratic ethos like the legislature and professional associations. Indeed, most of his addresses to the Nigerian nation were couched in the idiom of maximum condescension, matching and almost exceeding the scale of the paternalism of the British rulers of colonial Nigeria. Definitely, I pray never to have to endure another occupant of Aso Rock in the mould of this "born-again democrat" who was anything but a democrat.

So if it is safe to assume that Yar’ Adua will be different from Obasanjo, the questions is: Will the difference matter? This question leads me to the second of the two items highlighted in the radio broadcasts that I heard on May 29, 2007, this being the matter of the crisis of legitimacy. I suggest that if Yar’ Adua proves to be decisively different from the man who handed power over to him, it will be with regard to this question of the crisis of legitimacy. Let me explain.

At its most elementary level, the crisis of political legitimacy can be likened to the profound unease of a robber baron who knows that the whole world knows of the illegitimate sources of his wealth. But then the question arises: for whom is there really a crisis? If the robber baron knows fully well that he can easily buy his way to “legitimacy,” as far as he is concerned, there is no crisis. A crisis exists for the robber baron if and only if he cannot simply buy his way into legitimacy, knows that his rivals and enemies and the most important segments of his community cannot either be bought off or browbeaten into submission. Olusegun Obasanjo is a political agent of this ilk; so also is the vast majority of the members of Nigeria’s political class. In Yar’ Adua’s place, Olusegun Obasanjo would not have felt the slightest pang of the unease of the legitimacy crisis. Throughout his years in office either as a military dictator or as a civilian hegemon, he felt that his “legitimacy” came from de facto incumbency, derived either from the barrel of the gun or from blatantly rigged elections; he never remotely felt that it could come from the people. Moreover, Obasanjo knew deep in the marrows of his political bones that virtually all the members of the political class in Nigeria share this cynical, opportunistic attitude to “legitimacy.”

Umar Yar’ Adua is fully in the know about this moral bankruptcy of Nigeria’s political rulers. And so it is not unlikely that he will seek to either buy his way to “legitimacy” or obtain it by the use of the repressive and coercive instruments of state power. But there is another side to Yar’ Adua and this can be found in those aspects of his political existence that go all the way back to the idealism of his young adulthood when he was an avowed Marxist and radical democrat. By all accounts, some of these aspects carried over into his policies and actions as Governor of Katsina State. So we can assume that Yar’ Adua knows that there is distinction between a false “legitimacy” and a true legitimacy, knows that the reason why Nigeria knew neither peace nor security in the last eight years was precisely because Obasanjo hedged all his bets on the side of false “legitimacy.”

I end on a very concrete note. By the time he left office, Obasanjo was a universally hated and despised political ruler. Somehow, he deluded himself into thinking that this was because Nigerians were an ungrateful people who could not appreciate all he was doing for them, all the “reforms” he was putting in place for the future. On those “reforms” we shall have much to say in the coming weeks and months. But every Nigerian who was not on Obasanjo’s purse strings knew that life and life chances got immeasurably worse under Obasanjo, that the unequal distribution of the country’s wealth worsened in the last eight years and that this got so bad that Nigerians of all classes, rich and poor, lived under the shadow of an insecurity the like of which we had never seen before in this country.

Let it not be said of Yar’ Adua that he is like the axe handle which came to the forest and for a while had the trees deluded into thinking that it was one of them.

Part 2

When Frantz Fanon gave that profoundly simple and memorable definition of the “Negro” in 1956, African Americans had everywhere in the segregationist deep South of the United States in fact started refusing to sit at the back of the bus. But segregationist racism was not yet over and this was precisely Fanon’s point. For though sitting at the back of the bus was not the worst degradation or oppression that American blacks faced, it was perhaps the most appropriate symbol of al the other oppressions. To the extent that they were no longer obeying the ingrained, internalized compulsion to sit at the back of the bus, the recognizable “Negro” as supremacist whites knew him or her was a figment of the racist imagination. For the full human complexity and worth of real “Negroes,” you had to look beyond the beings forced to sit at the back of the bus. How does this apply to the subject of this and last week’s column, this being Nigerians as the world apparently perceives us?

For an answer to this question, we must go to the essence of the lesson of Fanon’s brilliantly ironic definition of the “Negro,” circa AD 1956. This lesson is: you must never take the full measure or worth of a people when they are beaten down by years, decades and generations of oppression and corruption of values, when they are at the worst moments of their collective existence. If you do so, you are either wittingly or unwittingly complicit in that people’s oppression or you are profoundly ignorant of human nature in its permanent and historically variable forms and expressions.

With the possible exception of the nearly three years of the civil war, the last twelve years, four of which were under Sani Abacha and eight under Olusegun Obasanjo, were unquestionably the worst period in Nigeria’s postindependence history. On the Sani Abacha years, the least said in the present context the better. All one can say is that apart from the very short period when he was testing the waters and consolidating his iron grip on power, Abacha never for one single moment pretended that he was a “reformer;” and he was indifferent, even contemptuous of what the world thought of him. Obasanjo, on the other hand, had himself proclaimed the “Father and Founder of Modern Nigeria” even as “modern Nigeria” became about as unmodern as it has ever been since we gained political independence from Britain. The Nepatitis darkness which descended on the entire nation in the last year of his rule was a literal expression of the symbolic and material darkness which engulfed our country as the value of the national currency plummeted, joblessness and insecurity became endemic, and barefaced lawlessness and thuggery became the choice weapons of Obasanjo’s closest political allies, very visibly and volubly abetted by him.

For me, the single most eloquent testimony of the Obasanjo years is the fact that under him, and again with his very active encouragement, the worst form of unctuous religiosity descended on our country as we became simultaneously the most God-obsessed and seemingly God-forsaken nation on earth. In the terrible “holiness” of this religiosity, charlatans and fakes of the worst kind could steal, plunder and swindle, all the while invoking Jesus and God and his angels and heavenly host. Even as he openly and blatantly rigged two series of elections and when he could no loner rig for himself tried to change the Constitution to perpetuate himself in office, Obasanjo never stopped invoking God and godliness. A plague on all false prophets and “reformers” in our land, sacred and secular!

The matter of this newfangled religiosity which pervades the country at the present time is important in the context of this discussion because it enables us to avoid the sort of sweeping, undiscriminating generalizations which the outside world often makes about Nigerians. Simply put, in a congregation of say twenty people, only one, or two, or maybe three are the false prophets, the charlatans. The rest tend to be people of faith, a faith which maybe simple but is also often utopian and optimistic, desirous that the world be a better, more just and “righteous” place. And there is also the fact that within the ranks of the clergy, the “shepherds” are men and women of vision and rectitude and compassion. I draw the authority for this assertion from the fact that I have personally met such men and women, both lay and clergy. But I do admit that from the noise, cacophony and sheer chaos of the hundreds of thousands of sects which abound in the country today, the image, the appearance of contemporary popular religion in our country is that of a mirror reflection of the fragmentation and alienation of the economic, social and political order.

The world draws its image of Nigeria and Nigerians from this convergence of chaos, fragmentation and alienation on so many fronts, religious, ethnic, political and economic. But we must never lose sight of the fact that this is Nigeria of the Abacha-Obasanjo years, with their foundations in the Babangida and Buhari regimes. In other words, only in the last two decades when we things have been at their worst for the country, has Nigeria become universally stereotyped as one of the world’s most corrupt, chaotic and unlovely places.

There are generations of Nigerians alive, both old and young, who know from memory and from direct experience that there is far more to Nigeria than the dominant images thrown up by the turbulence, the misdirection and, above all the brutal inequities of the last two decades, especially of the last twelve years. There is a common saying in radical contemporary cultural criticism that we are the stories we tell about ourselves. By “stories,” this saying means all manner of narratives, tales, anecdotes, jokes, rumour and other fictions that constitute social life not only as it is lived but also as it is either stereotyped and deformed or re-imagined and transformed. Note that the saying places an emphasis on ourselves, not on others and their stories about us. Note also that the stories we tell do not come out of nothingness, but come from the sort of cities, villages, streets and houses we live in, the roads and highways we traverse, the jobs that sustain us or, conversely, the lack of jobs that fail to sustain us. In this column, we will tell and review many stories, mostly from our country and continent, but also from other lands. One repeated undercurrent of these stories will be Nigeria’s place in our contemporary world. In the next two weeks, we will review stories concerning the local and global sources of the great restlessness, the chaotic energy that seems, but only seems to set Nigeria and Nigerians apart from the rest of the nations and peoples of the continent of Africa.

Notes and References

1 First published in The Guardian (Nigeria) online, http://www.guardiannewsngr.com/sunday_magazine/article29, Part 1: June 10, 2007 and Part 2: June 17, 2007.

Biodun Jeyifo. “And Just Who Are The Nigerians?” West Africa Review: Issue 11, 2007.