This piece is not so much a tribute to Achebe as an interrogation of the mortuary respect that followed his transition with a focus on the contrarian perspectives of Professor Ibrahim Bello-Kano whose intervention was couched in elegant academic aesthetics and published by several print and online media.
Why do the dead, even those we have reservations about when they lived always attract adulation? There are two key explanations – one based on myth and the other on rationality. The rational explanation is that the dead cannot defend themselves while the myth is that if you say evil against the dead their spirit will continue to haunt you until you join them in the hereafter.

Contrary to the belief in some quarters that respect to the dead is a specific African tradition, it is actually a universal practice, dating to antiquity. For instance the phrase ‘mortuary respect’ dates from the 4th century and is often attributed to Diogenes Laërtius’ work ‘Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers’ (ca. AD 300) where a Greek aphorism, ‘Don’t badmouth a dead man’ was attributed to Chilon of Sparta, one of the Seven Sages of ancient Greece. There is also the Latin phrase ‘De mortuis nihil nisi bonum,’ which roughly translates to “Of the dead, nothing unless good”. In English language there are several aphoristic phrases like: “Speak no ill of the dead”, “Of the dead, speak no evil”, and “Do not speak ill of the dead”. The 18th century English writer and poet Samuel Johnson was famously quoted as saying: “He that has too much feeling to speak ill of the dead…will not hesitate…to destroy…the reputation…of the living.”

Should a public intellectual necessarily be bound by the custom of mortuary respect? I do not think so. I believe a public intellectual owes it to his craft (excuse my apparent lack of gender sensitivity here but it is all to make things easier), to detach himself from mass hysteria, outrage or encomium and search for and expand on anything he feels has been missed out in the flourish of emotionally-driven mass euphoria. If a public intellectual’s reasoning and choice of analytical categories lead him to a conclusion contrary to what is regarded as the popular position, then duty calls to take and defend that position. It takes courage to stand alone.

It is in the above respect that the contrarian intervention of Professor Ibrahim Bello-Kano receives my maximum respect. In that intervention, which is written in a compelling language that leaned here and there on the obscurantist literary form, he questioned the literary merits in Achebe’s novels. I agree with most of his comments, including some of his comments on Anthills of Savannah, Achebe’s last novel, generally thought to have been written when Achebe had either lost interest in writing novels or his skills in the craft had gone into terminal decline.

Despite agreeing with most of Professor Bello-Kano’s critical comments on Achebe’s works, I must quickly add that none of those comments is original. As a matter of fact in 2006, my publishing firm, Adonis & Abbey Publishers (www.adonis-abbey.com) – a publisher of academic books and journals since March 2003 – published an even more critical work on Achebe’s writings entitled Achebe: The Man and His Works by Rose Mezu, a Professor of English, Women studies and Comparative Literature at Morgan State University, Baltimore, Maryland, USA. Between 2007 and 2010, the same company incubated and published the academic journal, African Performance Review for the African Theatre Association, where on every issue, I read with relish scholars ‘tearing apart’ the works of such great literary giants as Achebe, Soyinka, Osofisan and Ngugi wa Thiong’o.

Professor Bello-Kano’s critique of Achebe’s Trouble With Nigeria (1983) for neglecting the influence of system dynamics when Achebe claimed that the ‘trouble with Nigeria is squarely that of leadership’, is spot on. But it is also not original. In fact the structure-agency debate in the social sciences (the capacity of individuals to act independently and make free choices contra a patterned set of arrangements which influence or limit available choices and opportunities) has been ongoing since 1903 when the German non-positivist sociologist Georg Simmel published his seminal essay, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’. The younger Achebe had in fact in No Longer At Ease (1960), through the character Obi Okonkwo, identified the trouble with Nigeria as being systemic.

In that novel, Obi Okonkwo was such an independently minded character that when his community sent him to England to study law – at a time the voice of the elders approximated the voices of the gods – he disobeyed them, followed his heart and read English. Obi Okonkwo also had the courage to stand alone on several fronts, to the disappointment of his community: He married an ‘osu’- which was an abomination among his people, he refused to use his position in the civil service to favour ‘his people’ in employment and he hated to his marrows the deeply entrenched corruption in public life.

However, despite Obi Okonkwo’s moral Puritanism, he was forced by certain societal pressures to take his own bribe and was caught. In this work therefore Achebe demonstrated that the problem with Nigeria, at least in terms of corruption, was systemic and not that of moral lapse or leadership.

The type of contradiction between what Achebe saw as the ‘trouble with Nigeria’ in No Longer At Ease (1960) and in his booklet of the same title is not uncommon among great thinkers and writers. Karl Marx, generally regarded as one of the greatest political, social and economic thinkers of all time, grappled with such contradictions in his works. For instance in his ‘materialist conception of history’, Marx gave the impression that socialism would succeed capitalism independent of men’s will because capitalism, following the ‘immutable law of history’, would sow the seeds of its own destruction. By the time Marx and Engels published the Communist Manifesto in 1848, Marx had shifted his position and had come to believe that the socialist era would only come about through proletarian revolution.

In the structure-agency debate (on which of the two is the key propellant of history), it could be argued that while the younger Marx, just like the younger Achebe favoured ‘structure’, the older Marx, just like the older Achebe, favoured ‘agency’.

Several of Professor Bello-Kano’s critical comments on Achebe’s last work, There was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra, are legitimate. Certainly the book has flaws – on interpretation, generalizations and even proofreading. However one senses a desire by Professor Bello-Kano to hide behind academic aesthetics to soldier for the North. For instance I find his efforts to smell out any hint of the inferiorization of the North in Anthills of Savannah, quite stretched. The impression one gets is that the whole contrarian piece was inspired and animated by this desire to soldier for ‘his people’. Given the brilliance that shone in the Professor’s piece, this is most disappointing as it is an appropriation of the day-job of ‘area boys’, internet warriors, ethnic-watchers, one-dimensional journalists and such ethnic/regional contraptions as the Arewa Consultative Forum, the Ohaneze, the OPC and others.

In advanced countries, Professors of Bello- Kano’s standing try to find new frameworks and theoretical constructs that will raise the level of the conversation and discourse such that bigoted ideas are marginalized. This is why in several such countries, racist organizations like the KKK or British National Party are never banned but the ideas they purvey are equally never mainstreamed because the acceptable analytical categories and frameworks ensure that they will remain marginalized.

By electing to soldier for a piece of geography using the same ethnic and regional pedestals he inveighed against as his tools of counter narratives, Professor Bello-Kano becomes guilty of the same reductionism, of seeing issues mostly in terms of the static binary of ‘we versus them’ which he accused Achebe of. The irony is that most of those who soldier for pieces of geography in every part of the country dare not go to stay for a longer period in their village, and will, in private conversations, frankly tell you that ‘my people are terrible’.

Since the ‘withering away’ of the Nigerian left, there has been a yawning dearth of efforts to develop an alternative vision of society and new analytical constructs away from this essentialist constructions of ethnicity and religion. And when public intellectuals, who ought to know, join the rat race of ethnic and regional finger-pointing, it becomes unfortunate.

Achebe’s last book is flawed but it has already done a great service to the country. War propaganda on both sides of the conflict meant that each side has its own story, including of heroes and villains. Achebe’s book by generating counter narratives, has forced many of us to revise what we thought we knew about the war, which was led mostly by young radicals and rascals in their 20s and early 30s.

In my opinion what could be considered as ‘sustainable’ outrage against Jonathan’s action was the obvious filial connection between the two – Alamieyeseigha was his political benefactor and his fellow Ijaw. The argument that the pardon is a setback against the fight against corruption is however neither here nor there because the presidential prerogative of mercy is bestowed on people who are accused of committing crimes or have been convicted of committing crimes – not on innocent people. It is not a prize award or national honour for distinguished service to the nation but a show of mercy on the beneficiaries. It is like arguing that because US Presidents routinely pardon drug barons such a show of mercy constitutes a setback in the global fight against illicit drugs.

Largely because of the lack of any scientific method of determining who will benefit from presidential pardons, most of such acts of mercy are inherently controversial. In the US Article II Section 2 of the country’s Constitution, empowers the President to “grant reprieves and pardons for offences against the United States, except in cases of impeachment.” While a reprieve reduces the severity of a punishment but retains the guilty pronouncement of a court, a pardon removes both punishment and guilt. This heightens a pardon’s controversial nature.

Historically US Presidents have used the power of pardon to heal rifts in their national psyche as George Washington did when he pardoned leaders of the Whiskey Rebellion. James Madison similarly pardoned Lafitte’s pirates after the War of 1812; Andrew Johnson pardoned Confederate soldiers after the Civil War; Harry Truman pardoned those who violated World War II’s Selective Service laws; and Jimmy Carter pardoned Vietnam War draft dodgers. In Nigeria those who fought on the Biafran side during the Civil War (1967-1970) were granted pardon just as Niger Delta Militants received amnesty from the late President Yaradua. You do not necessarily need to have been ‘convicted’ of a crime by a court of law to be granted pardon as these instances clearly illustrate.

Apart from the above type of pardon, virtually every other form of pardon evokes controversy. For instance there was a sense of outrage across the world in 1992 when President George Bush (Snr) pardoned six Reagan administration officials involved in the Iran-Contra Affair. George Bush (Snr) was considered a close associate of one of the beneficiaries, Caspar Weinberger, who served as Secretary of Defence while Bush served as Vice President under Reagan. Weinberger and others had all been convicted for illegally conducting arms sales with Iran, which was using the profits to fund the Contra rebel guerilla army in Nicaragua. Richard Nixon who resigned as President of the US in 1974 in the face of an almost certain impeachment following the Watergate scandal was pardoned by Gerald Ford, who served as his Vice President and who also succeeded him as President after his resignation. Bill Clinton also came under fire for several of his pardons, including the pardon of tax evader Marc Rich.

There was also the case of Patty Hearst, the granddaughter of publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst. In 1974 Patty Hearst was kidnapped by the then-unknown radical group, the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA). That same year she assisted the SLA in bank robberies and other crimes until the urban guerilla group’s location was discovered by police. At her trial, Hearst claimed she participated in the criminal activities under psychological and physical duress but was sentenced to seven years in prison. She served two years of her sentence before it was commuted by President Jimmy Carter. Clinton pardoned her in 2001. Recently in South Korea, some pardons granted by the then outgoing President Lee Myung-bak in January 2013, generated national outrage because included in the list were the President’s close friend Chun Shin-il and a close political ally, Choi See-joong, both of whom had been sentenced for bribery, as well as the former speaker of the national assembly Park Hee-tae and a former aide to Mr Lee, Kim Hyo-jae, who were both jailed over a vote-buying scandal.

Pardons are controversial partly because there is no scientific formula anywhere for selecting those to be pardoned. Presidents, being humans, often bring their own emotional and filial considerations in the exercise of this prerogative. This is why it is rather surprising that the American Embassy should openly condemn the pardoning of Alamieyeseigha – when the country routinely pardons drug barons, fraudsters and other criminals and the Embassy ought to be conversant with the controversies that often dog presidential pardons. This is more especially as they have a channel of privately making their feelings about the pardon known to the powers that be in Abuja.

The above is not necessarily an endorsement of the pardon of Alamieyeseigha but to put that exercise in its proper historical and global contexts. In our own type of society, where heroes and villains are defined by ethnic and religious boundaries, a hero in one enclave could be perceived as a villain in others. Alamieyeseigha may be seen as a villain by other Nigerians but may not necessarily be seen as such by his Ijaw brethren. And if he is seen as a hero in his region and President Jonathan is from that region, it is obvious the sort of pressure he will be under to grant him pardon. Being the President’s benefactor will make that pressure even more overwhelming – unless we want to pretend that in this country our leaders are not influenced in their decisions by filial, ethnic and regional considerations. It is not the right thing to do but part of the diseases that constitute system dynamics in our country.

Otherwise why will most Governors locate new Universities and industries in their villages? Why will political leaders play the ethnic and religious cards if not so that they will be in the good books of ‘their people’? During the Second Republic top Igbo politicians were apparently under pressure to push for President Shagari to grant Ojukwu pardon. Not long ago, some top military leaders from the North converged and declared that Abacha was not corrupt – even though the rest of the country sees him as the poster-boy of corruption. It is therefore part of the character of the Nigerian State that since national political leaders often ‘retire’ to become regional and ethnic champions, their actions while in office are partly influenced by the way they want their ‘people’ to perceive them. In this sense, rather than blame Jonathan for pardoning Alamieyeseigha, we should blame it on the nature of the Nigerian State.

There is, in my opinion, at least one justifiable ground for pardoning Alamieyeseigha: while his corruption – alleged and confessed- in office is condemnable, the way he was removed from office smacked of impunity and vendetta – something that has often turned the fight against corruption in this country into a charade. You cannot rig the legal processes to achieve a desired outcome – even if you caught the thief with his fingers in the cookie jar. Gestapo methods were used to remove from office both Alamieyeseigha and the former Governor of Plateau State Joshua Dariye. The establishment of a rule of law must necessarily precede confidence-building in the justice system. I believe victims of such Kangaroo justice – whatever their crimes – deserve some form of reprieve, if not complete amnesty. And have we really forgotten the attempted abduction of Ngige in Anambra State? Why has nothing been done to fish out those behind such jungle justice as a way of sending clear message that impunity cannot be tolerated in a decent society?

The outcry over the pardon of Alamieyeseigha is good in so far as it shows that citizens are closely monitoring the actions of their leaders. But it also shows us to be a nation of hypocrites and people who like to play the Ostrich. Suddenly everyone is showing strong distaste for corruption. From a lecturer who demands ‘sorting’ to pass an undeserving student to the student leader who embezzles student union funds to the law enforcement officer who gladly looks the other way at a little inducement to the journalist who wants to be ‘induced’ before he can give a certain slant to his story to even the mechanic who will quickly exchange the new battery in your car for an old one, there is an outpouring of alarm and rage that a ‘corrupt’ man has secured a Presidential pardon. The outrage is in my opinion meaningful only if it offers us an opportunity for introspection: if I were in Jonathan’s shoes, would I really have acted differently?
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The fact that both the CPC and the ACN remained locked in merger talks after the 2011 elections despite the failure of their first planned merger could mean that both parties strongly believe they need each other. That ANPP, on whose platform Buhari sought the presidency twice and allegedly was stabbed on the back on each occasion was part of the merger plan speaks volume of the level of determination – or desperation – depending on where you stand on the issue. Also the fact that most of the non-PDP Governors have endorsed the merger cannot simply be dismissed with a wave of the hand. In this country, Governors are like the sea monsters, Leviathans. They play very crucial roles in the outcome of any presidential election, including the rigging of such elections. In essence, even if for some other reasons APC atrophies or unravels before 2015, it has already recorded a milestone as it is probably the first time that major political parties are announcing a merger in the country’s political history.

Several observations could be made about the new mega party:

One, for supporters of a two party dominant system such as in the USA– where only two parties are electorally viable while others are not precluded from contesting by law if they met certain conditions – the emergence of APC, if it endures till the 2015 election, will be a dream come true. It will, among other advantages, simplify the electoral process and reduce the cost of conducting elections. The flipside however is that the voices of certain cause groups – groups that are in the race not necessarily to win power but to highlight certain issues during the campaign such as environmental concerns or local peculiarities – will often get muffled.

Two, is the crucial question of whether APC can live up to its media hype? From all indications, the overriding concern of the people behind the new party is how to dislodge the PDP – or more correctly President Goodluck Jonathan – from power. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with that, especially for a regime that is generally believed to have performed far below expectation. The trouble is how to convince the populace that they will be a better alternative and how to manage the submerged contradictions that will flare up once this task is accomplished or fails to be accomplished. For instance shed of all rhetoric and grandstanding, is the APC any different from PDP – ideologically and otherwise? I honestly don’t think so. I see no material difference between PDP-controlled states and those controlled by the opposition. However in the sea of mediocrity, you have a few Governors across the party lines striving to do their best.

Three, can the APC survive till 2015? This is a legitimate question, given the strong characters that are driving the new party. My take on this is that if the glue that holds the new party is desperation, then it will likely seriously atrophy or even unravel before 2015. Former President Shehu Shagari is not a philosopher king by any stretch of the imagination. But after the 1979 elections, when the opposition groups started talking about mergers and alliances to stop him from being sworn in, he did say that ‘anything done out of desperation is bound to fail’. And he was right. The effort crumbled. If on the other hand the parties that merged were genuinely determined to change the lot of Nigerians from what they like to call PDP misrule, then they need to do far more to show us how the new party will be ideologically different from PDP. Grandiloquent phrases or appropriating the word ‘progressive’ cannot be a substitute for genuine ideological conviction. In this wise, Nigerians await, not just the manifesto of the new party but will be on the watch out for its likely key drivers.

Four, if APC enters the 2015 elections as a major force, can it unseat the PDP? While the next presidential election is still more than two years away – more than more than a life time in politics – if the current political arithmetic holds, APC will be in control of 11 States while PDP will be in control of 23. In reality however the fate of APC will be tied to a number of variables including the choice of its presidential candidate and whether President Jonathan decides to run or not. Since the party is most likely to present a Northerner as a presidential candidate – the Southwest will be constrained from doing so because of Obasanjo’s eight-year presidency which only ended in 2007 – Buhari will appear to be the most popular choice. Buhari’s cultic following in the region however will cut both ways: while it could help mobilize and energize the voters in the North, it may have the opposite effect in other parts of the country. This is because historically individuals with cultic following in one region such as the late Awolowo in the South West and the late Ojukwu in the Southeast tend to be deeply distrusted by others. The crucial question here is whether Tinubu’s famed organisational skills will be sufficient to convince voters in the Southwest to vote for parties rather than individuals during the presidential election.

Five, the APC has to work hard to get beyond the current thinking that it is an alliance of the North and South-west. This could be one of the party’s vulnerable spots, to be used by the PDP. Despite the PDP’s failures and shortcomings, it is still perceived as a national party with strong presence in all parts of the country. It is not tied to the charisma of any individual. With the power of incumbency, it remains the party to beat. In fact the current joke in town is that since the major opposition parties are fusing into APC to unseat the PDP, the latter may be pushed into a merger or alliance with such critical organs of the state as the Nigeria Police Force, NPF, the Directorate of State Service, DSS, as well as the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, to scuttle their dream.

Six, states, religion and regions are false analytical categories. For instance does senate president David Mark, whose hometown is quite close to Enugu State really have more in common with a Sokoto farmer than with other non-Northerners simply because they belong to the same accident of geography called ‘North?’ Does a Professor from Anambra State have more in common with an Abakiliki mechanic he can hardly understand his language than with other Nigerians simply because they both belong to the same accident of geography called the ‘East’? Despite being false analytical categories, ethnicity, religion and region have been turned into ideologies, meaning that they have now acquired independent existence and are therefore real. The crucial question here is how will ethnicity and our religious parochialism conflate with the political arithmetic that largely informed the formation of APC? Already APGA, which is factionalized claims that the Igbos were not invited as stakeholders in the new party. How will APC contain the ethnic/religious watchers?

How will the PDP counterattack? What will be the mobilizational instruments for both the APC and PDP? Will the PDP resort to the use of agencies like EFCC to intimidate and emasculate the opposition pretty much the way Obasanjo did under Ribadu? In the last election, supporters of President Jonathan were able to mobilize regional and religious sentiments on the argument that the North has ruled the longest and ‘should not see it as their birth right’. Can such a strategy work this time around especially in the face of the President’s lacklustre performance and quarrel with critical political tacticians such as Obasanjo? If APC holds till 2015 and Jonathan decides to contest, what is certain is that it is going to be a slugfest.

We are happy to announce the launch of a new fiction series for young adults for the Nigerian market. To be called ‘G-Y ’, the series is targeted at the ‘Generation Y’ – young adults who grew up in the era of flat screen TVs, Internet, Blackberry and Facebook. A key aim of the series is to help bring back the lost culture of reading books among young adults by exploring themes, in slim novellas, that will be of interest to them. Older people who are ‘young at heart’ will also find the series compelling.
In the 1980s and 1990s, McMillan’s Pacesetters and Longman’s Drumbeat series did their best to help inculcate pride in reading books by engendering a sort of competition among young adults on who has read what among the series. Our aim is to continue from where these highly respected publishers stopped.

Authors welcome

Interested authors who want to publish in the series should send a synopsis of their work (maximum word count: 1000) and a sample chapter. Each completed work must be between 20,000 and 30,000 words. For enquiries, email: editor@adonis-abbey.com

About Adonis & Abbey Publishers

Adonis & Abbey Publishers was set up in the United Kingdom in 2003 and has since become a respected imprint, with over 100 published books, mostly non-fiction. In 2004, it entered the world of journal publishing and today publishes several peer-reviewed and indexed journals. It has three in-house peer-reviewed and indexed journals – African Renaissance (published continuously since 2004), African Journal of Business and Economic Research (published since 2006) and Journal of African Union Studies (published since 2012). In addition to its in-house journals, it also incubates academic journals for a number of highly respected Universities and institutions.

Adonis & Abbey Publishers has distributions in Europe, North America and Australia. Recently it set up an office in Abuja, Nigeria, where in addition to non-fiction works, it plans to publish novellas for young adults and other books of general interest.

For more information about Adonis & Abbey Publishers, please visit our website: www.adonis-abbey.com (click on books or journals for more details on each category).

Jideofor Adibe, PhD, LLM
Publisher

In late November 2012, at the Second Annual Capital Market Committee Retreat in Warri, Delta State, Sanusi lamented the high cost of servicing the nation’s civil service and called on the Federal Government to fire at least 50 per cent of its entire workforce, arguing that it is unsustainable for the country to continue to spend some 70 per cent of its earnings on salaries and entitlements of civil servants. Understandably labour leaders and many others lampooned him, with some even calling for his sack. The Nigeria Labour Congress specifically said Sanusi must be sacked before he destroyed the Nigerian economy. I will return to this later.

Why has controversy dogged Mallam Sanusi ever since he became the CBN Governor? Does he court it? Or does it run after him? Sanusi’s ‘problem’ in my opinion stems from two sources: The first is that I feel he is a radical in a job that is decidedly conservative in nature. The second is his fascination with the English Language, which he writes with remarkable authority and even speaks better. On the positive side this could make one appear cleverer than one really is. On the flip side, too much ‘grammar’ (turenci) could lead to an undue love for the podium and limelight and a fascination with the echo and musicality of one’s words – with the attendant risks of gaffes in moments of rhetorical flourishes. I do not for a moment believe the crap that Sanusi is driven by any hidden agenda. But this is a different thing altogether.

At an event in London in 2009 to talk about the reforms in the banking sector, I asked Sanusi, if professionally speaking, he saw a tension between where he found himself, and where in his heart he felt he ought to be. Sanusi denied being a radical but admitted that when he was in merchant banking, he did feel that tension. I have read a few of Sanusi’s writings on Gamji.com and never ceased to admire his brilliance. I always felt his ‘natural’ calling would be as a radical academic – in the mould of the late Bala Usman or as the life Chairman of a brief case political party that will provide him a platform for slinging shots at the establishment – as the likes of Femi Falana and Balarabe Musa do.

Despite Sanusi’s protestations, I am inclined to see him as a ‘radical’ or ‘revolutionist’ – in the sense of someone who favours extreme or fundamental changes in the way the society is organised. Remarkably, while I regard Sanusi as a radical in criticisms of the system, as a banker, I see him as a conservative, a traditional regulator who is excessively concerned with risk management at a time Nigerian banks seem to have become more competitive and entrepreneurial. There is therefore in my opinion a tension between Sanusi the banker and Sanusi the system critic.

As with most system critics or revolutionists, Sanusi’s approaches to complex issues tend to be simplistic and as the contradictions in his chosen options become obvious, the proffered solutions tend to appear contradictory or hastily taken. A clear case in point was his recommendation that the bank executives he sacked for fiddling with depositors’ money who were then standing trial at various courts in the country deserved to die by firing squad for eroding public confidence and raping the institutions that were entrusted to their care through reckless credit and loan administration processes. Sanusi was later to recant, perhaps after he realised the enormity of the statement, saying that Nigerian bankers are honest, hardworking professionals and not the crooks he had made them to appear.

There have been several of such apparently hastily thought-out recommendations from the Mallam Sanusi, including the recent issue of N5000 bill. The typical mind-frame of a revolutionist is: we reject the institutions that govern us, let’s pull them down and erect brand new ones that will serve us better. This dictum is fine on a philosophical plane but creates enormous challenges at the level of implementation. This is another way of saying that it is OK for such recommendations to come from theorists and social critics but not from policy-makers. The problem on the ground is that if you pull down your house because you want to erect a brand new one that will be more befitting, you risk making yourself homeless while the new building is being put up with the attendant dangers from the elements – unless you have made alternative arrangements. The less radically inclined will embark on an incremental renovation of the same house, moving their belongings from one part of the house to the other as the work progresses.

It is within the above premise that we should try to locate Sanusi’s recent recommendation about sacking 50 per cent of the civil servants to save cost.

On face value, Sanusi is right because there is no doubt that the public service, in particular the civil service is bloated. Just visit any PHCN office and you will see several of their staff loitering outside their buildings like touts – largely because there seems not enough for them to do, which also explains why ten staff should visit one household to do ‘metre reading’. But Sanusi was wrong that firing 50 percent of the civil servants will lead to cost saving. It will not. Rather it will actually increase the cost of governance. There are three options here: The first is t reduce the staff strength without trying to professionalize the service. Under this scenario, there will be an increase in red-tape and corruption within the service as the fewer staff will increase their asking price to move your file from table A to table B. Here the civil service will end up being even more inefficient than it is now, leading probably to an increased use of outside consultants to get things done. The second option is to completely professionalize the civil service. This will include re-organising the recruitment modes of staff such that the service can attract the best talents available. But this also means paying competitive salaries and other emoluments commensurate with what they would get in private international firms in the country. This scenario means that having a 50 percent reduction in the size of the civil service will not necessarily mean a reduction in its wage bill. The third option is to do nothing – which shouldn’t really be an option at all.

The service Sanusi has done for the country by his recent call for the firing of 50 percent of civil servants is to indirectly draw attention to the need to reform our civil service while boldly re-igniting the debate about the huge cost of governance in the country.

Let me return to my earlier assertion that Sanusi is a radical system critic in a job that is decidedly for conservatives and pro-establishment people.

Central Bank Governors are thought to possess so much crucial information about their country’s economy that investors and analysts closely monitor their utterances even after they have left office. For instance when Alan Greenspan, who retired as chairman of the US Federal Reserve on January 31, 2006, predicted on February 26, 2007 that the US would enter into recession before or in early 2008, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped by 416 points (or 3.3 percent of its value) the following day. At that time, it was the worst one-day loss since September 17, 2001, when it lost 684 points (7.1 percent) after reopening in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

It is perhaps because of the ‘oracular’ nature of being the boss of a country’s central bank that many expect them to be rather taciturn. Willem “Wim” Frederik Duisenberg, first president of the European Central Bank (1998-2003) was noted for his bluntness and apparent inability to keep his mouth shut. In a special report on February 8, 2002, captioned, “The Wrong Man for an Impossible Mission”, the Financial Times (London) summed up the angst against the late Dutch economist and financier: “The biggest criticism of Mr Duisenberg is not over the substance of his decisions, but over his presentation. His willingness to talk off the cuff and his often vivid turn of phrase has frequently raised eyebrows among other policy-makers.” No, the Financial Times did not have Lamido Sanusi in mind, who is eminently intellectually qualified to be the CBN Governor, when it wrote that piece. But one sometimes wonders if he deliberately courts controversy by his choice of words – as system critics are wont to do.

Were you a Diaspora Nigerian, now back home in either private or public sector?. The Nigeria Diaspora Alumni Network (NiDAN), a network of Nigerians, who having spent at least one year outside the country, have
returned home (or are planning to do so) to contribute to national
development, holds its next monthly meeting on Sunday 18 November 2012 from 5.30pm. The venue is Dullion House, No.4 Ikogosi Spring Close, off Katsina Ala, Maitama, Abuja. For more details about the meeting, kindly call 08100330330. For more details about NIDAN, please visit: http://www.nidangroup.org/. Qualified new members are welcome to attend.

Jideofor Adibe,

Chairman, Publicity Committee, NiDAN

By Dr. Jideofor Adibe | NNP | October 4, 2012 -

In the first instalment I noted the effort to re-invent him as a man who could take tough decisions and stick to his guns. This was against his pre-April 2011 public persona, which was of a gentle, if diffident guy, who gives sympathetic ears to all arguments and does not mind changing his mind several times on an issue. This persona of the guy next door has been a great asset in GEJ’s meteoric political rise. I will call the effort to re-invent him as a man of conviction who can take tough decisions as the First Wave of his re-invention.

In the second instalment I observed that the re-invented GEJ seemed to be enjoying the new image of a ‘tough guy’ and with time appeared to revel in taking contrarian decisions when opinions seem to have coalesced in a different direction on a probable belief that such would enhance his new image.  I will call this the Second Wave of his re-invention. The persona in this Second Wave inevitably attracted an army of critics forcing the President to hyperbolically declare himself as the most criticised President in the world. With the House of Representatives dangling the impeachment axe and the Senate indicating it might concur with the Lower Chamber, the President knew something must give in. These seem to have spurred the Third Wave of his re-invention. I will explain.

In the Third Wave we see GEJ soft-pedalling on some ‘tough’ decisions – in a manner reminiscent of GEJ before the First Wave of re-invention. First, his tough stance on the single term tenure proposal, which he insisted there was no going back on, was surreptitiously leaked as having been shelved. Then came the backing down on the proposed N5, 000 bill apparently without first informing its author  Sanusi– after the Presidency had thrown its backing behind the proposal at the crest of popular opposition to it. Though I find most of the arguments against the N5000 bill unconvincing (I have never by the way been a supporter of Sanusi’s methods), the timing of the presidency’s support was symptomatic of GEJ’s way of doing things in the Second Wave of his re-invention. In what can be regarded as a reinforcement of this putative Third Wave of re-invention, the ThisDay of 24 September 2012 reported that President GEJ may give in to pressure from the National Assembly for the sack of the Director General, Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Ms. Arunma Oteh, and the Chairman of the Pensions Task Team, Mr. Abdulrasheed Maina.

It will be recalled that the Presidency had recalled Arunmah Oteh as DG of SEC after being  suspended by its Board and had even unethically allowed her to attend meetings of the Economic Management Team while in suspension. She was also recalled despite a resolution by the House of Representatives on 19 July 2012 requesting Jonathan to remove her from office.   The point here is not whether the House was right in asking for her sack but the ‘I don’t give a damn’ manner in which the presidency handled the issue, which was reminiscent of GEJ in the Second Wave of his re-invention.

Several observations could be made about the various efforts to re-invent GEJ:

One, GEJ’s pre April 2011 persona of a humble, diffident and unassuming guy– which I suspect to be closer to the real GEJ – had been an asset in his political career only because he started with being the Deputy Governor of Bayelsa State and later Vice President of the country. It is the sort of a ‘weak’ persona politicians in frontline positions normally want as their deputies. However while such personas could be good in playing second fiddles, they cannot survive in political frontline positions where tough decisions necessarily have to be taken. In other words, a re-invention of GEJ was inevitable and would have been done anyway if he had stayed long enough as the Governor of Bayelsa State. My suspicion is that we will still see more efforts at re-inventing GEJ as he seeks to find a comfort zone between his pre-April 2011persona and the persona of a President who has to take tough decisions.

Two, when President GEJ declared that “I am not David….I am not a General….I am not a lion….” my reading of that statement was that he was indicating a resolve to succeed despite his simplicity and unassuming  persona.  GEJ had also promised to be a ‘breath of fresh air’. Essentially, my reading of a combination of both declarations was that like the musician Frank Sinatra, the President was declaring that he would do it his own way. However rather than  being loyal to these declarations, the impression one gets is that he has been doing it the way of others or has not really found a political persona that he is  truly comfortable with.

Take the proposal about the N5000 bill for example. The impression one gets is that President GEJ seems to have been carried away by the CBN Governor’s undoubted facility with English language. In both the fuel subsidy issue and the Arunma Oteh saga, one suspects the ‘stubborn’ persona of Dr Ngozi Iweala, the Co-ordinating Minister of the Economy, as the invisible hand of Esau.  A key challenge in the re-invention of GEJ therefore is how to ‘own’ certain tough decisions and ‘domesticate’ their marketing to fit into his own persona. ‘Owning’ policies means becoming truly convinced about such policies – and not to embrace them simply because they are propounded by Cabinet members who speak eloquent English language or have ‘intimidating’ résumés.   Because some policies that flow from the presidency do not seem to be sufficiently owned by GEJ, they are often marketed using the personas of their authors rather than that of the President who should give political covers to his Ministers and aides. Consequently when such policies are pilloried, they become vulnerable to reversals because the President simply does not strongly and passionately believe in them. Under Obasanjo for instance, no one is in doubt who is in charge  because the impression is that he ‘owns’ approved policies from his Ministers and aides and then uses his rambunctious persona to market them. Under GEJ, where a few in his Cabinet behave like philosopher kings, it is sometimes difficult to know who is in charge, making it difficult for GEJ to use his own persona to market his political options.

Three, it is possible for GEJ to put to good effect his declaration that “I am not David….I am not a general…..I am not a lion……I will defeat the Goliaths in our land” and succeed. He has already done so with INEC simply by being himself and by apparently not interfering. Much of the credit for the improvement in the conduct of our elections should actually go to GEJ because the body language of the President of the country will always determine how independent INEC or any other body in the country can be. Though GEJ is not sufficiently credited with the successes in this area, the fact is that the success came because he seems to believe in INEC’s neutrality and therefore does not need to prove any toughness. You do not need to beat the drumbeat of toughness to be seen as tough. It is tough to see your party routed in an election and still congratulate the person who mauled the candidate you openly supported. This is the sort of toughness that the handlers of GEJ may want to reflect on rather than the toughness exhibited in some decisions in the Second wave of his re-invention. It is also the sort of toughness that may seem to be more in tune with the pre-April 2011 persona of GEJ.

Four, as GEJ continues to evolve politically as President, one obvious urgent area is patching his soured relationship with the National Assembly. Owing to tendencies in the Second Wave of his re-invention, the House of Representatives has threatened him with impeachment and it is ominous that in the Senate it was Senator Uche Chukwumerije, from Aba, who volunteered to lead the impeachment move in the Upper Chamber – if need be – against him. Apart from the South-south, the South-east was GEJ’s strongest base of support in the last presidential elections.  

Five, a key question is the motive in the putative Third Wave re-invention of GEJ: Is it because of fear of impeachment or because GEJ has become truly worried about the avalanche of criticisms that now trail his political options in the Second Wave of his re-invention?  Could it be a desire to return to his pre-April 2011 persona, which had served him well in his political career – as 2015 approaches?

By Dr. Jideofor Adibe | London, UK | Sept. 19, 2012 -

Shortly after President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan (GEJ) assembled a new cabinet following the April 2011 general elections, there appeared to be a gradual but deliberate abandonment of the public persona which had helped to galvanize public sympathy and support for him when a cabal in the late Yaradua presidency sought to prevent him from being sworn in as the Acting President following Yaradua’s terminal illness. GEJ’s pre-April 2011 persona was that of a gentle, if diffident man, who would readily give a sympathetic ear to any argument and does not mind changing his mind several times on the same issue. During the last presidential elections this persona made it very difficult for his opponents to demonize him or turn him into a hate figure.  GEJ’s rather touching story of how he grew up and went to school without shoes helped to solidify this persona in the popular imagination.

The efforts to re-invent GEJ as a man of conviction became very perceptible during the Justice Ayo Salami and Justice Katsina Alu saga following the suspension of the former by the Nigerian Judicial Council in August 2011. The NJC had recommended the compulsory retirement of Justice Salami for misconduct. Despite the hoopla in the media against the NJC’s decision, the ‘normally’ indecisive GEJ acted decisively, quickly accepted the recommendation of the NJC and refused to bulge despite the media campaign.

The government’s proposal for the removal of subsidies on petroleum products followed the same trend. Rather than recoil from a fight as people felt the pre-April 2011 GEJ would do, he stuck to his gun, and eventually ambushed Nigerians on January 1with the announcement that subsidies had been removed. 

Perhaps the clearest indication that the presidency wanted to re-invent GEJ as a man of cool exterior but granite interior was in the disqualification of former Governor Sylva Timipre from contesting the last gubernatorial election in Bayelsa State. The President was suspected of having a hand in the disqualification. The significant thing here however is not that the President  was opposed to Timipre’s candidacy but that he remained adamant in his opposition despite the reported interventions of  the South-south Governors, the Governors’ Forum and other eminent Nigerians that reportedly included former President Shehu Shagari and former Head of State Yakubu Gowon.

In what is now the first instalment of this piece, I noted that the re-invention of GEJ could have both positive and negative sides. One of the negatives, I underlined, is  the risk that “in a bid to show that a new tough guy has emerged, the President may fail to realise when his decisions or policy options are truly contrary to popular will.”

 Latest events may seem to suggest we may be getting close to this threshold. Let me explain:

It is true that leadership is not a popularity contest and that leaders necessarily have to make tough decisions. However the difference between a dictator and a visionary leader in a democracy is the manner in which they make such tough decisions and their timing. Many leaders that take tough decisions in a democracy often do so by trying to win the argument or at least bidding their time until opinions seem to be evenly divided on the issue. For the handlers of the President it would seem that they prefer to do very little at the argumentation stage only to strike after opinions seem to be coalescing towards a consensus against the presidential preference. It is immaterial whether this consensus is driven by rabble rousers or opponents of the President. The issue is that if you want to stop the rabble rousers, you meet them argument for argument and prevent them from mobilising popular opinion behind their own preference. If you lose it at this stage and then use presidential fiat to take a decision that will appear to be against the popular will you unwittingly enlarge the army of your critics. Instances of the presidency doing very little at to be competitive at the argumentation stage only to wield the presidential hammer are legion:

 There was first the issue of removing subsidies on premium petroleum products. Though recent events would indicate the presidency was probably right in its decision to completely remove the subsidies (the fuel subsidy cabal seems to be far more powerful than ordinary Nigerians realized), the manner in which this was done left a sour taste in the mouth. The decision was taken when the anti-desubsidisation lobby was clearly winning the debate and the presidency had given an impression that it had not made up its mind on the issue and was still consulting. But just on the first day of the year, it struck like a viper.

There was also the manner in which Arunmah Oteh, the Director General of the Securities and Exchange who was suspended by the Board of the SEC was recalled by the Government even when the House of Representatives’ ad hoc committee on the near collapse of the Capital Markets had concluded that she was not qualified to be appointed the DG of SEC. The Committee claimed that the Act setting up SEC states that the DG must have at least 15 years cognate experience in capital market operations and that Ms. Oteh did not meet this demand at the time she was appointed.

The way the regime quickly approved the proposal by the CBN to introduce a N5000 note when the opposition to the initiative was at its peak also seemed to be daring the public to do its worst. The issue is not whether the regime is right or wrong in its decision but that it could have done far more at the argumentation stage before weighing in on the side of the CBN.  It could at least have set up a committee (its favourite pastime) to examine the proposal –  to give the impression that it had broadened consultations before embracing its preferred course of action.

Having a Presidential Rottweiler is never a substitute to being competitive at the argumentation stage. In fact such an attack dog could complicate matters as Dr Doyin Okupe, the Senior Special Adviser to the President on Public Affairs appeared to have done recently, when, in response to Obasanjo’s  reported opposition  to the  proposed N5000 bill  he was quoted as retorting that “Obasanjo is an ordinary citizen”  and that his “views are not sacrosanct.”  While it is possible that Dr Okupe misspoke (after all English is not our mother tongue), the way his response came out seemed like an affront. And as everyone knows, Obasanjo neither overlooks a slight nor ducks a fight.  For someone who has made a career of helping to pull down several governments, including the ones he helped to engineer by being their acerbic critic, wisdom would have cautioned that if you cannot have  him as a friend of the regime at least try not to push him to the camp of the regime’s opponents.

The emerging new political machismo in a re-invented GEJ could lead to other costly mistakes. One such may be the recent sacking of the Power Minister, Professor Barth Nnaji for alleged ‘conflict of interest’ – at a time many Nigerians are beginning to say there have been improvements in power supply in the country. I am not by this condoning ‘conflict of interest’ by public officials – though when stretched virtually all top political officials are guilty of the same charge because ‘conflict of interest’ also includes favouring one’s community and cronies in the authoritative allocation of societal privileges. Is there really any top political office holder in this country who is not guilty of this?

I would have thought that for a man who seems to be succeeding where all his predecessors have failed, a public rebuke of any malfeasance would have been sufficient so that whatever achievement that is being recorded in this highly technical area is not frittered away. In football, some of the most talented players often have behaviour deficits which are often accommodated or managed because of their perceived critical role in their team’s success.

 In his novel Things Fall Apart (1958), Chinua Achebe told of the Okonkwo character, a man whose palm kernels were cracked by benevolent spirits but who, for fear of being thought weak, self-destructs through some reckless decisions. I really hope that the handlers of GEJ will avoid the ‘Okonkwo complex’.

The new GEJ means that if the President wants to contest in 2015 – as his body language seems to suggest he will do – the persona of a gentle, unassuming and humble man which has been a tremendous asset in his political career will come under intense scrutiny and contestation. 

____________________________________________________________

Dr. Jideofor Adibe | London, UK | August 31, 2012

Several
observations could be made about the interplay between ethnicity, hate speech
and the crisis in the country’s nation-building project:

One,
hate speech employs discriminatory epithets to insult and stigmatize others on
the basis of their race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation or other forms
of group membership.  It is any speech,
gesture, conduct, writing or display which could incite people to violence or
prejudicial action. There are individuals and groups in this country who openly
relish the freedom to rain insults and profile others by appropriating to
themselves the role of ethnic and religious champions. The problem is that hate
speech is often the gateway to discrimination, harassment and violence as well
as a precursor to serious harmful criminal acts. It is doubtful if there will
be hate-motivated violent attacks on any group without hate speech and the
hatred it purveys.

Two,
there is nothing wrong in people celebrating pride in their ethnic and other
cultural identities. It is not always a manifestation of ethnicity when someone
proclaims, ‘I am a proud Igbo, Hausa, Yoruba or Efik’. Most ethnic groups across the world feel that their way of life – their
foods, dress, habits, beliefs, values, and so forth, are superior to those of
other groups. There is nothing wrong with this.

The boundary between this love for one’s ethnic
identity (ethnocentrism) and ethnicity (which is conflictual in character)
could however be thin. When our love for our ethnic identity results in seeing
other groups as competitors or the reasons why we are not getting what we
believe we deserve to get, then there is often recourse to hate speech to vent
our frustrations on the out-group. At that point, the love for one’s ethnic
identity has become conflictual in form and thus crossed the boundary to
ethnicity. It is important to underline that
although ethnicity is rooted in the struggle for the scarce societal values –
political positions, jobs, contracts, scholarships etc – by the various ethnic
factions of the Nigerian elite, it has overtime acquired an objective character
such that it now exists independent of the original causative factors. Not
surprisingly therefore we have a group of ‘ethnic watchers’ whose only vocation
appears to be working the arithmetic of which ethnic group gets what, when and
how in the proverbial sharing of the ‘national cake’.

Three,
there is an urgent need to do something about hate speech because of its
tendency to exacerbate ethnicity and the crisis in our nation building. For instance
though the International Covenant on
Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR)
- a multilateral treaty adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on
December 16, 1966 and which came into force from March 23, 1976 –  encourages countries to prohibit any advocacy
of national, racial, ethnic or religious hatred, in practice hate speech
is  difficult to prohibit. In the US for
instance, hate speech is protected as a civil right (aside from usual
exceptions to free speech such as defamation, incitement to riot, and fighting
words). In fact laws prohibiting hate speech are unconstitutional in the United
States as most often fail legal challenges based on the First Amendment of the
Country’s Constitution which prohibited the restriction of free speech. In the
US law courts, even ‘fighting words’ – which are categorically excluded from
the protection of the First Amendment – are not that easy to separate from hate
speech.

An insight into how the American jurisprudence
protects hate speech is in the   way the
law treats the Ku Klux Klan – one of the worst purveyors of racial hatred in
that country. In a landmark case, Brandenburg
v. Ohio (1969), the arrest of an Ohio Klansman named Clarence
Brandenburg on criminal syndicalism charges, based on a KKK speech that
recommended overthrowing the government, was overturned in a ruling that has
protected rascals of all political persuasions ever since. In a unanimous
judgment, Justice William Brennan argued that “the constitutional
guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or
proscribe advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except where such
advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is
likely to incite or produce such action.” In another important case, Snyder v. Phelps (2011), Westboro
Baptist Church, which has achieved some notoriety for celebrating the 9/11
attacks and picketing military funerals, was sued by the family of Lance
Corporal Matthew Snyder who was killed in Iraq in 2006 for intentional
infliction of emotional distress after it picketed during the Corporal’s
funeral. In an 8-1 ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Westboro’s right to
picket.

There
are at least four key arguments for justifying free speech in American jurisprudence–
the importance of discovering the truth by allowing ideas to compete freely in
the marketplace of ideas, free speech is regarded as an aspect of self-fulfillment,
it is also seen as indispensable for a citizen to participate in a democracy
and there is the deep suspicion of government and a belief that only free
speech can restrain the government from trampling on the rights of the citizens.

Away
from American free speech jurisprudence, hate speech is prohibited in several
jurisdictions such as Canada where advocating genocide or inciting hatred
against any ‘identifiable group’ is an indictable offence under the country’s Criminal
Code with maximum prison terms of two to fourteen years. In the United Kingdom,
several statutes criminalize hate speech against several categories of persons.
In South Africa, hate speech (along with incitement to violence and propaganda
for war) is specifically excluded from protection of free speech in the
Constitution. The Promotion of Equality and Prevention of Unfair Discrimination
Act, 2000 in fact contains the following clause: “[N]o person may publish,
propagate, advocate or communicate words based on one or more of the prohibited
grounds, against any person, that could reasonably be construed to demonstrate
a clear intention to― (a) be hurtful;(b) be harmful or (c) to incite harm and
(d) promote or propagate hatred”.

Four,
how should the government tackle the menace of hate speech- should it follow
the American model and believe that  the
ability to live with speeches that shock or awe should be a small price to pay
for safeguarding free speech and that Nigerians should see it as part of the
process of nurturing the culture of tolerance? Or should it follow the European
and South African model that explicitly prohibit hate speech? My personal
opinion is that the government should go for a cross between the two. For
instance using the law to prohibit free speech could sometimes be
counterproductive. A good example of this is what happened in the Australian
state of Victoria where a law banning incitement to religious hatred has led to
Christians and Muslims accusing each other of inciting hatred and bringing
legal actions against each other that only served to further inflame community
relations.

I
will recommend the following measures: There is an urgent need to develop, in
conjunction with critical organs of the society such as media owners and
practitioners, taxonomy of what constitutes hate speech. Media houses through
their unions should incorporate these as part of good journalism practice and
impose sanctions on erring members who publish or broadcast hate speech-laden
materials. The National Orientation Agency, in concert with civil society
groups and community leaders, should also embark on a campaign against the use
of hate speech. In the same vein, Internet Service providers should be
encouraged to bring down blogs and websites they host which publish, promote or
give unfettered space for the expression of free speech. Above all  it should be impressed upon the political
leadership at all levels that a deep distrust of the government is at the heart
of the sort of free speech jurisprudence you have in the United States and that
Nigerians have the same level of distrust of their governments.

By Dr. Jideofor Adibe | London, UK | July 21, 2012 -

Many Nigerians have been angry that the country is ranked in the category of failed states. It should be recalled that Nigeria first moved into the league of the worst 20 cases in 2007 – when it was ranked 17th.  The following year the country’s ranking improved marginally to 19th position before deteriorating in 2009 to 15th. Since 2010, the country has maintained its 14th spot on the Index. This means in essence that the exceptionally huge security challenges the country faced from Boko Haram last year and this year appear not to have affected the country’s ranking in the Index. It is also important to underline that the country had already entered the ‘league of infamy’ in the Index before Boko Haram began its terrorist activities in January 2010, meaning that the country would still have been in the Index even without BH.  The first 20 countries in the Index are regarded as ‘failed’ states. For the fifth consecutive year, Somalia topped the ranking.

There are several issues with the Failed State Index.

One, indices are notoriously difficult to construct and even harder to perfect amid competing methodologies and data sources. The Failed State Index uses several parameters, most of them subjectively determined – population pressures, the number of refugees in a country,  how factionalised the elites of a country are, a state’s capacity to provide public services,  extent of uneven development and of course a state’s ability to enforce its statutory monopoly of legitimate instruments of coercion in its domain. Overall, the Index’s headline indicators are weighted summaries from more than 100 sub- indicators. Like most indices of this nature, conclusions you reach will often depend on your initial assumptions on each parameter. It is really on the underlying assumptions that value judgments get loaded, triggering controversies in the process. For instance just by relying on a different set of  assumptions, Noam Chomsky, the American linguist, historian and activist, in his famous book, Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy (2006) argues that the US itself was becoming a ‘failed state’ and therefore a danger to its people.  The obvious methodological weaknesses in the compilation of the Failed State Index also make it unable to capture the important differences between state collapse, state failure and state fragility, leading to an unhelpful ossification of the three into the unhelpful binary of failed or not failed states.

Obviously because the Failed State Index – like most other indices – try to capture the variables on which it is measuring and ranking states in statistical forms, it comes out looking impressive. However as the American writer Darrel Huff tells us in his very influential book How to Lie With Statistics (1954), you can use figures, graphs and tables to hoodwink and blackmail or to make yourself appear cleverer than you really are. The Failed State Index – intentionally or unintentionally has been able to do just this for eight years running – and getting away with it.

Two, it may not be out of place to interrogate the motive of the sponsors of the Failed State Index. If the aim is to provide early warning systems, then there are already several institutions and programmes devoted to studying potentially vulnerable spots such as the Crisis State Research Centre at the London School of Economics. There is a suspicion among some development scholars that the Index may not be unlinked with a desire to rejuvenate the ‘help industry’ in the West. Obviously as the traditional areas of ‘help’ – fighting famine in the Horn of Africa, AIDS in Africa,  landmines, child soldiers from Africa  etc begin to lose their allure,  the ‘help industry’ that creates lucrative jobs for consultants appears to have  come under pressure to justify the need for its continued existence or why it should be given new money. Is the Failed State Index one such creative way of ensuring that the ‘help industry’ continues to retain its significance because if states are designated as failing there will obviously be a need to do something to build their capacity so that they do not fail and overwhelm the West with refugees? Remarkably in April 2010, a group calling itself the G7+ was formed. It was supposed to be a group of seven ‘of the world’s most fragile states’. The membership of the group is said to have grown to 17 and the countries in the group claimed they came together to “share experiences” and “lobby international actors to engage more effectively in fragile and conflict-affected countries and regions”. Cynics obviously want to know at whose instance the group was formed.

Three, the Failed State Index reinforces the essentialist construction of Africa and the narratives and innuendos that go with it. Over 99 percent of the worst performing countries in the index are from Africa and other parts of the developing world. Agreed, many of the countries in Africa and the developing world are underperforming economically. But a fundamental reason why they underperform is the condition of underdevelopment which has several economic and non-economic symptoms or manifestations such as inability to provide public services and factionalised elites which engage in anarchic struggle for power because state power is often the most effective means of material accumulation in these countries. Several of the symptoms of this fundamental problem of underdevelopment are already captured in a pick-and- choose manner by other indices such as the United Nations Human Development Index, the Ease of Doing Business Index among countries, the Sustainable Governance Index etc. The condition of being underdeveloped economies naturally means that Africa’s rankings in these indices will be low, explaining why African and other developing countries are the worst performers in all available global indices. It is like four different indices each ranking people according to how healthy they look, their physical strength, how briskly they work and how fast they can run. A man who is severely ill with malaria and has suffered loss of appetite as a result will be poorly captured by each of the four indices even though his only problem is that he is suffering from malaria.  Being poorly captured by each of the four indices will lead into a self-fulfilling prophecy – the man is no good and there are ‘facts and figures’ to back it up.

Africa and other underdeveloped countries are ranked low in several global indices because these indices are abstracting the symptoms of our fundamental problem of underdevelopment and elevating them to a defining characteristic of who we are. This is both essentialist and reductionist. There is nothing genetic, geographic or pigmentational about the African condition – contrary to the impression these indices give.

Four, there is also an impression that these Indices are being mischievously used by some Western countries to promote nationalism and internal cohesion by subtly letting their citizens know that as much as things may be difficult for them, they are infinitely better off than people in several countries and they can easily draw attention to the relative ranking of their countries in these indices.  This ‘feel good’ factor is however created at the expense of others who may then become unwitting victims of institutionalised discrimination. For many in the West, the indices and their higher rankings in them are a confirmation of their inherent superiority.  Will you then blame employers who, after reading several of such indices refuse to employ people from certain parts of the world? Have statistics not shown those people are not good enough?

Five, a critique of the Failed State Index is not to deny that several countries in Africa, including Nigeria, face serious challenges. I believe that Nigeria has a severe crisis in its nation-building project.  I do not believe that as a country we can make much progress, no matter what our purported growth figures tell us, without first resolving the crisis we face in the construction of a viable nation-state.  However, despite this severe challenge, my belief is that if we move away from a focus on the political arena – which is inherently conflictual anyway -  one encounters several seeds of hope, not just in the  resilient way people confront their daily challenges but even  more importantly in a feeling that a putative ‘imagined community’ may be taking shape.