The State of the Future

The Enugu State Government’s recent full page advert congratulating Chiwetel Ejiofor, the British actor of Nigerian descent, for his BAFTA award was a waste of public funds but it calls for reflection. As with Sade, Seal, or David Alaba, we often try to appropriate the successes of foreigners of Nigerian ancestry in a bid to achieve some vicarious proprietary pride. If Barack Obama’s dad had been Nigerian, the world would never have heard the end of it. Consider another high achiever, Jelani Aliyu, lead designer of General Motors’ first electric car. Could Ejiofor and Aliyu have succeeded in their chosen endeavours if they lived here instead?  It is a pertinent question.

Since the 1980s, we have lamented brain drain without interrogating it seriously.

Talent flows from regions with natural resource-based economies to regions with knowledge economies. Countries with value-added economic activities offer greater scope for self-actualization and upward mobility. Extractive economies end up watching their young literally follow their oil or diamonds to foreign lands. Countries that build their economies around people clearly outperform those that base their economies on natural resources.

The world can be divided into countries oriented towards the past and those oriented towards the future. Talent flows from the former to the latter. In societies of the past, access to opportunity is determined by questions of identity and ancestry. “Where do you come from?” is the most significant question in such places and the answer to it carries bread and butter and life and death implications. In states of the future, access to opportunity is based on the individual’s potential. The operative question is not where he or she comes from but what he or she can become.

In states of the past, citizens are defined by their heritage; in states of the future, they are defined by their aspirations. In the former, ancestry is destiny; in the latter, potential is destiny. States of the past consider shared memory the basic raw material for nation-building. For states of the future, it is a shared destiny. Talent flows from the former to the latter because above all else people want to transcend the limits of social ascription and be masters of their fate.

America’s ascent towards superpower status gained momentum in the early 20^th century when it absorbed talented Jewry fleeing anti-Semitic persecution in totalitarian European societies. These societies were states of the past where rabid identity politics excluded Jews and other minorities. That brain drain resulted in immense cultural, economic and military gains for America. Similarly, after Idi Amin expelled Indians from Uganda, the country’s economy tanked while many of the refugees made for England where they established businesses that boosted British commercial life.

When Martin Luther King declared his hope that his children would one day be judged not by their colour but by the content of their character he was urging America to more fully become a state of the future. Obama frequently says that his personal odyssey as an African-American in the White House could only have been possible in America. Given his Luo ancestry, Obama’s chances of similar success in his native Kenya would have been nil. A bitter joke which made the rounds in Nairobi after Kenya’s bloody 2007 polls held that a Luo could be elected president of America but not of Kenya.

In Nigeria, access to goods like public education and employment is shaped significantly by ethnicity and religion. Institutionalized discrimination in many places disqualifies Nigerians from accessing public goods that are theirs by right. Almost every official document defines us by our ancestry or “state of origin.” “Where do you come from?” is the most frequently asked question. Obviously, a culture of excellence and achievement cannot thrive where ethnocentric mediocrity and identity politics trump meritocracy.

It is more than likely that Ejiofor and Aliyu would not have made it here. At some point, their ancestry would have proven a fatal roadblock to their aspirations as it has for millions of talented Nigerians. They might have been labeled “non-indigenes”, or found to be surplus to acceptable ethnic quotas or in contravention of federal character. But they have been accepted by societies where a person’s true worth is not divined from his bloodline but derived from his gifts and dreams. People do not choose where they are born but they can choose to maximize their potential. Societies that enable them to make those choices without the fear that their heritage is a hindrance will always lead the world. Conversely, nations that define identity as a weapon or weakness minimize both their people and their chances of growth. A nation cannot outgrow the existential constraints on its citizens.

Enterprising Nigerians are daily defying psychic and institutional barriers in pursuit of the better life. The key to unleashing our national genius is to redefine ourselves as a state of the future. This means ending the use of identity as a determinant of access to opportunity and defining ourselves by where we are headed rather than we come from. It also means practically creating a meritocratic environment where people can aspire to their best knowing that their country genuinely rewards excellence. 

To be sure, heritage matters. But what is heritage if not the stock of ancestral dreams and visions? We inherit from our forebears what they made of themselves and their times just as our children will inherit from us what we make of ourselves and our times. What better bequest to our progeny than a society in which their genius rather than their genes will speak for them?

(All images sourced online)

(Published in Thisday, March 9, 2014) 

Who is Responsible for this Mess?

It is true that time changes things. Hindsight has a way of doctoring our recollections. History is often kinder to political reputations than contemporary news cycles but none of this justifies the sort of amnesia that we habitually display. The list of honourees from the Centenary celebrations reflects the dangers of short memories. Let us leave aside the absurd acclamation of the racist Frederick Lugard and his consort Flora Shaw, or the irrationality of a free people feting their erstwhile colonial overlord or the fact that a civil war that claimed over a million casualties cannot really throw up “heroes.” It is the rendition of recent history that is of concern.

The list was a startlingly incongruent mishmash that purported to honour the human rights advocate, Gani Fawehinmi and the two men, Ibrahim Babangida and Sani Abacha, who did the most to abbreviate his life through ceaseless persecution and incarceration. Was the Kuti clan supposed to be grateful to share honours with the men who killed their matriarch and serially jailed Fela and Beko?

MKO Abiola, the winner of the annulled 1993 election, was honoured as well as Babangida who annulled the election, Abacha who jailed him and murdered his wife, Kudirat, and Abdulsalam Abubakar on whose watch he died mysteriously. Shehu Musa Yar’Adua is honoured along with his murderer, Abacha. The list reconciled Olusegun Obasanjo with Abacha who jailed him on trumped-up charges of coup-plotting. Ernest Shonekan, who continues to parade himself as a former head of government even though a court declared his regime illegal, makes the list. It was under his watch that Abacha as minister of defence ordered troops to mow down scores of demonstrators protesting the annulment of June 12 and the imposition of Shonekan’s regime.  

With the list, Abacha’s rehabilitation is almost complete. In June 2008, Babangida, Abdulsalam and Muhammadu Buhari claimed that contrary to widespread belief, the begoggled dictator was not a thief. The occasion was the tenth anniversary of his demise, the inspiration, apparently a case of solidarity among despots. It was a bizarre claim, not least because only a week earlier, the Swiss government had returned $505 million of Abacha’s loot stashed in Swiss banks. It was Abdulsalam himself who had initiated investigations into Abacha’s thievery and launched efforts to recover his hidden loot. Moreover, as head of state, Abacha had set up an inquiry headed by Pius Okigbo which indicted Babangida for the theft of $12.3 billion of oil revenue. As for Buhari, his loyalty to a former employer clearly belied his reputation as an honest truth-teller who says it like it is.

According to Richard Joseph, under Babangida and Abacha, Nigeria shifted from mere Prebendalism – the appropriation of state resources under the cover of legal rules and procedures – to outright confiscation in which government officials simply seize public assets without bothering to camouflage their larcenies with rules or procedures. Abacha’s prodigious kleptomania placed him in the ignominious company of Africa’s most notorious plundering potentates such as Mobutu and Bokassa. The general and his associates stole over $2 billion amounting to more than a million dollars for every day Abacha was in office, including weekends.

One of President Goodluck Jonathan’s favourite ripostes to his critics is that he inherited a mess from his derelict predecessors. The honours list begs the question: who is responsible for the mess? How does a country so universally acknowledged to be scarred by bad leadership constantly fete a dazzling array of supposedly exemplary leaders? Strangely, Abacha’s son, Mohammed is currently facing federal prosecution for being in possession of federal property stolen by the late dictator. What does it tell us that Mohammed was also part of a delegation of Northwestern leaders to Aso Rock this past January, an occasion on which Jonathan claimed that his administration had performed better than any other in Nigerian history?

If Abacha was truly responsible for an economic miracle, as his citation read, then the implication is that his successors, Abdulsalam and Obasanjo, in particular, destroyed that legacy. Thus, neither of them should have been on the list. Historical revisionists are obviously trying to burnish putrid reputations. Abacha left Nigeria as the world’s 13^th poorest country, a pariah nation with a $30 billion debt and a wretched income per head of $345. Oddly, while Jonathan was exonerating Abacha, Nigeria was paralyzed by fuel scarcity – a legacy of the tyrant’s era along with failed refineries and toxic fuel imports.

The irony is that Abacha and Babangida seem retrospectively tolerable only in the light of the inadequacies of their successors including the current administration. Not long ago, we were treated to Obasanjo and Babangida publicly accusing each other of running the country’s most corrupt regimes. The celebration of these former leaders raises questions about how we define accomplishment and heroism in these parts. Already, upon their assumption of office, Nigerian heads of state and presidents are decorated with the Grand Commander of the Order of the Federal Republic, the nation’s highest honour, for little more than successfully staging coups and rigging elections. It is a system that rewards the attainment of office by any means rather than what is actually achieved while in office. 

The singular message of the centennial honours list is that might is right and that power is its own justification. Where in our algorithm of hero-making does the sanctity of life fit in? Babangida and Abacha led two of Nigeria’s most murderous regimes. Honouring them airbrushes a grim and bloody chapter of our history that was marked by coup plots and state violence. Does anyone now remember the massacre of protesting students at Ahmadu Bello University in 1986? Dele Giwa, Bagauda Kaltho, Alfred Rewane, Ken Saro-Wiwa and many others would obviously have had very different perspectives on the list.

Obasanjo visited death and destruction on Odi and Zaki Biam. Unsurprisingly, T.Y. Danjuma who as his defence minister oversaw those military assaults made the list. Courts have since recognized those expeditions as crimes and awarded a multi-billion compensation package to the two communities – a clear indictment of both Obasanjo and Danjuma. In 2012, Jonathan deployed troops to suppress Occupy Nigeria protests in which close to 20 Nigerians were killed nationwide despite the protests being essentially peaceful.

Leaders that casually terminate their citizens either by commission or omission, negligence or intent, are not heroes regardless of what economic miracles they perform. They can be simultaneously applauded for their dexterity and censured for their brutality. At a time when there is much handwringing over Boko Haram’s atrocities, it should not be forgotten that bomb attacks were actually pioneered by Abacha’s security establishment in the mid 1990s. The disregard for human life that we see today is the latest iteration of a culture of violence authored by the political figures that are now uncritically festooned with national honours. No amount of hagiographical detergent can whitewash the bloodstained legacies of these men.

We are now paying a high price for being too forgiving of the sins of the powerful and too forgetful of their victims. We need to regain a sense of history for memory is our shield against perpetual oppression and posterity is a harsh judge of the forgetful.  

(All images sourced online)     

It's Time to Reimagine Nigeria

 (Text of my speech at the commemorative national centenary edition of the Abuja Literary Society’s Night of the Spoken Word on Friday, January 24, 2014)

The idea at the heart of this nation’s birth was racial redemption. At the beginning of the 20^th century, race was the barrier that divided the world. The colour line split humanity into an allegedly superior white race and a supposedly inferior black race. The generation of agitators that formed the nationalist movement saw Nigeria as an opportunity to register the black man’s presence in the modern world. They wanted to show that Africans could build a pinnacle civilization of their own. Nigeria was to be a showpiece state and an exemplary nation – incontrovertible proof that blacks had something positive to offer humanity.

In order to achieve this, our founding patriarchs had to have a certain kind of faith. They believed in a cosmic sovereign will operating in history. They believed that this being had impelled diverse communities from far-flung places to migrate over the course of centuries and eventually congregate in this space that would one day be christened Nigeria. They also believed that a force greater than Frederick Lugard’s penmanship had ordained the nation’s existence. Consequently, they did not see Nigeria as a whim of the British Empire but as the will of providence.

Now, the patriarchs were usually fractious on many issues but they were of remarkable agreement on one matter: Nigeria was unique and exceptional. Thus Nnamdi Azikiwe declared that Nigeria would be “a country of consequence” and “a force in world affairs.” As he took office as Nigeria’s first indigenous Governor-General in 1960, Azikiwe declared that Nigeria had a duty to “revive the stature of man in Africa and restore the dignity of man in the world.” Adegoke Adelabu described Nigeria’s independence as “a cosmological imperative.” Ahmadu Bello, who at one point famously described the nascent Nigerian nation as a mistake, predicted that with independence she would rise to become “first among equals in Africa.” Chinua Achebe once described Nigeria as a nation favoured by providence and burdened with a historic purpose that no other nation can fulfill

This belief in Nigeria’s manifest destiny energized the nationalist struggle and earned us independence from the British in 1960. This ended the first chapter of our national odyssey.

Our learning curve as a nation since that time has been steep. We have since learned that liberation is different from nation-building. It is one thing to achieve freedom from colonial bondage; it is another thing to seize control of the post-colonial Promised Land. The journey from servitude to sovereignty has been very challenging. We have been through so many traumas – the fall of the First Republic and the abortion of the heady promise of independence, the civil war, the cycle of coups and counter-coups, the oil boom that gave us more wealth than we knew how to usefully spend, the subsequent era of recession and austerity, the age of SAP, the structural adjustment programme, decades of military dictatorship, chronic ethno-religious violence, terrorism – through all of these plagues, we have survived resiliently against the odds. We are still here. And that fact alone gives us the impetus to face the future boldly.

Here are three lessons from our national odyssey that we must take to heart.

1. Nations are not transformed in electoral cycles but in generational cycles. It took a generation of nationalists to earn our independence from colonialists. It took another generation of nationalist pro-democracy activists to confront military despots and win us democracy. And now it falls on another generation, ours, to expand the borders of the freedom that we have now. For democracy means more than just the right to vote. Ultimately, it must mean that everyone has the means to live their dreams and be makers of their own destiny.

For our purposes, a generation is not defined by the coincidence of belonging to the same age bracket. A generation is defined by shared values. So however young or old you are, if you believe that this land can and should be better and will work for its progress, then we belong to the same generation.

2. We live in a society that constantly reminds us of our differences – distinctions of creed, clan, tribe and language. ‘Divide and rule’ was a weapon that the British used against the nationalists and delinquent political elites have long used it against the Nigerian people. But the fact is that from Talata Mafara to Brass, Shendam to Oshogbo, Nigerians want the same things. They want to dwell in peace and raise their children in safety. They believe that no condition is permanent; that tomorrow’s harvest will exceed today’s; and that the stars are ever in their favour. They believe in ‘Live and Let Live.’

We should certainly understand our differences, such as they are, but they need not define us or limit us. There is a meeting of hearts and minds that transcends geography and genetics. The diehard nativists and tribal fundamentalists may insist that blood is thicker than water but a nation is much more than a bloodline. It is as Edward Renan said “a spiritual principle” and “a moral consciousness”. We do not have to be kin to be kindred spirits bearing the burden of a common destiny. The fact that we do not speak the same language does not mean that cannot find solidarity in our suffering.

Throughout our history, our finest moments as a nation have occurred whenever we transcended these so-called differences. All our transformational struggles – the struggle for independence from colonialists and the struggle against military tyranny for democracy – were waged and won by movements that transcended our differences. These movements triumphed by welding northerners and southerners, Muslims and Christians, humanists and agnostics, the faithful and the faithless together in the patriotic agony of shared purpose. This is what we must do in our time.     

3. Thirdly, Nation-building is an act of constant imagination and re-imagination; of constant invention and reinvention. The soul of a nation is forged in the crucible of its imagination. It is poetry and prophecy, prose and propaganda; it is faith and praxis. We are all moved by the majestic proclamation of the U.S. Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men were created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

But when these words were written, these truths were not at all self-evident. The Declaration had fifty-six signatories, all white males. There were no African-Americans. At the time, blacks were considered less than human and fit only for slavery. Indeed, some of the signatories were themselves slave-owners. There were no Native Americans. The Native American civilization had been virtually wiped out. And, of course, there were no women. Now, we can look at this contradiction as an act of high-sounding hypocrisy on the part of those who wrote the declaration. But I suggest it was something more. When those men wrote those words, they were reimagining their nation and reaching for an ideal that could inspire generations after them.

It is possible for us, as a generation, to re-imagine our social, political and economic realities. It is within our powers to declare new possibilities and to reach for new ideals that will shape the next one hundred years. The future will not come until we become it; in our words, creativity and craft, in our activism, in our politics, in the narratives we are producing about ourselves and the examples we are setting for our children. Franz Fanon said that each generation must discover its calling and either betray it or fulfill it. Tonight our calling is clear. One hundred years after Lugard’s amalgamation, fifty-four years after independence and fifteen years into the Fourth Republic, it is time to re-imagine Nigeria. Thank you.