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Project Nigeria: The Struggle for Meaning

Image removed.In some of my recent interventions on Project Nigeria, I framed the question of patriotism as a struggle for meaning between those ponces of power in the service of the ideological apparatuses of the state, its fanciful myths and narratives on the one hand, and the citizens who understand only too well that patriotism should not, under any circumstances, be allowed to become coterminous with the will, ego, desires, and agendas of the ruling elite, especially where the state is held hostage by buccaneers as is tragically the case with Nigeria.


A people that lets this happen pays a terrible price. Most Americans are now considerably wiser, after surrendering pertinent initiative in the struggle for meaning by allowing lunatics like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Michelle Malkin, Karl Rove, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, and a gaggle of evangelical Christian fundamentalists to define patriotism for them and reduce it to an unquestioning faith in the cerebral debilities of George Walker Bush and Dick Cheney. An eight-year reign of neo-conservative ideological terrorism was the price of that American concession in the field of meaning. Sadly, the rest of the world also suffered the consequences along with Americans.

My submissions attracted very interesting and engaging responses from a broad spectrum of readers within and without academia. I am interested here in some of the extremely interesting insights that came up in subsequent exchanges with non-academic respondents. In such exchanges I learnt invaluable lessons in the need to de-ghettoize academic labour, bring it down from its perch on Mount Olympus, make it speak with and to the world outside, rather than the endless monotonous drone it generates by claiming meaning only for itself within the confines of the Ivory Tower. Three respondents took the time to grill me on my constant reference to Project Nigeria as a struggle for meaning, asking me to demonstrate, in concrete terms, how this undefined and slippery struggle for meaning translates to the albatross I’m making it out to be. One of the respondents, an intellectual in his own right who is not currently in academe, wondered if I was coming from Paulin Hountondji’s submissions in his seminal book, The Struggle for Meaning.

Although I have read the eminent African philosopher’s book, I do not come to the struggle for meaning from the perspective of Hountondji’s work. I am coming from the earlier work of Joshua Lund, a theorist of Latin America, whose work on the struggle for meaning has contributed significantly to our understanding of the fact that the first thing the native peoples of the Americas lost to Christopher Columbus and other marauding Europeans from Spain, Portugal, France, and England was not land and territory as is conventionally understood but meaning and the power to make land, culture, and the environment mean. This original loss was to frame the modalities of imagining that legitimized Anglo-European ways of being, especially in the United States and Canada, and established a continuum of instrumentalization of the original owners of the land. It is a pointer to who won and who lost the struggle for meaning that the Anglo-American conquerors of Native Americans subsequently developed a flair for naming mechanical things that they ride after the Indian tribes they exterminated. Today, many Americans ride Cadillacs, Cherokee Jeeps, Pontiacs, Dodge Dakotas; their military flies Apache, Comanche, and Chinook helicopters. Nobody remembers that these are all names of vanquished Indian tribes... except the Indians who mostly cannot afford the motorized devices that are so named to add insult to injury by reminding them that they lost the struggle for meaning.

If you remove the fact that the Nigerian people today are not dealing with European conquerors but with much deadlier internal colonizers, our condition replicates the essential features of the Native American situation in terms of the loss of the struggle for meaning to a fissiparous ruling elite that got the first and only shot at making Nigeria mean in the build-up to independence and proceeded to mal-define Nigeria’s foundational national myth as a reflection of the primal needs of the belly – the belly of their class. There is no nation without a foundational national myth. When that myth commands the attention and respect of the citizenry, it garners legitimacy and hegemony as leadership and followership come to subscribe to it as the fundamental identity of a perpetually unfinished nation. It becomes the most solemn definition of what that nation is about, who the people are and where they are headed with project nationhood. The national myth is the ultimate location of difference. It differentiates one nation from every other nation.

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For Americans, it is the idea of their nation as the ultimate land of dreams – the American dream. No American jokes with this solemn definition of his/her country. They have spent more than two hundred years working continuously to make that expression mean for every American. And they pack everything that defines the essence of the human into that national myth - freedom, liberty, justice, equal opportunity to use your talents to reach the full span of your potential and so on and so forth. When your country tells you to dream and proceeds to build her institutions and civic processes around the enhancement of that national philosophy, you are ready to die for such a country. This explains the pervasive sense of civic struggle in America to retain the essence of that myth – the American dream.

What Americans call the American dream, the French refer to as l’oeuvre nationale or l’oeuvre de la République. These translate literally as “national work” or “the work of the Republic”. Unfortunately, there is an entire philosophical world lost in translation here. One needs to be French or immersed in French culture, language, history, and civilization to fully grasp the centrality of l’oeuvre nationale as the fundamental and defining essence of the national project in France. Even a sleeping French man could rationalize his sleep as part of l’oeuvre nationale because they are so completely defined by that ethos. In essence, this philosophy operates in France – and for the French – in much the same way as the American dream operates in America and for Americans: the sum of national beingness and aspiration. In some ways, l’oeuvre nationale even accounts for Gallic arrogance – that conviction on the part of your average French man that his language, culture, and civilization are superior to those of every other European people. After all, we are the only ones who see those things as work and we have been at it since 1789!

Enter Nigeria. Enter Abuja! Welcome to the land of the national myth as appetiser! In fact, we don’t even have a national myth because what we have is so embarrassing it does not qualify to be labelled with the solemnity of a national myth. Where Americans have the American dream and the French have l’oeuvre nationale, we have “the national cake” in Nigeria. That is the operative national metaphor and one of the most evocative explanations of our national tragedy. It is the laziest, most unimaginative national myth I have ever encountered. If a country defines itself as a dream, that commands my civic attention because dreams are meant to be realised; if a country defines itself as work, that also retains my attention because I know what devolves from hard work; if, however, a country defines itself as dessert, and even proceeds to block majority of its citizenry from that chocolate cake, I know that I have to cut corners to get my share of that cake after which I shit and it ends up as excreta. End of story. Our own national myth holds the key to corruption.

In essence, many aspects of our national malaise are tied to our loss of the struggle for meaning and there can be no respite until we understand the full ramifications of this phenomenon. Followership in Nigeria has been largely complicit in our losses in the field of meaning. We always wait for definitions to evolve from our contemptible ruling elite. The second phase emerges when the poltroons in the editorial rooms of the media regurgitate such brain-dead definitions of nation-ness. Phase three: we the people accept the nonsense defined for us and begin to struggle for crumbs. For instance, it is impossible to read a Nigerian newspaper without encountering that embarrassing phrase, “national cake”. If imbecilic rulers define Nigeria as consumption, must the media legitimize it through endless repetition and regurgitation? And what do we the people do? We accept Nigeria as national cake – which in fact means accepting defeat in the struggle for meaning – and proceed to devote strategic civic struggle to the creation of more states and local government areas to better access the national cake! Yet, those who won the struggle to make Nigeria mean gorging and consumption cannot even produce a pin. We therefore have stupid rulers who define Nigeria as a cake but must import icing sugar, baking powder, and dessert plates and cutlery from China!

There is more. We the people made gradual concessions until we lost the struggle to define leadership. Like the definition of foundational myths, serious nations set considerable store by what they mean by leadership. To feed my mind, I read more than a dozen newspapers everyday straddling Africa, Europe, the Americas, and Asia. One gets a sense of national and regional registers and diction from such an exercise. My assessment is that no other country in the world has as many “leaders” as Nigeria. I encounter the word ‘leader’ so rarely in the world’s newspapers that I have formed the impression that every country, except Nigeria, is miserly with that word. Go to a Nigerian newspaper and it is not unlikely for some foolish PDP Local Government Chairman to refer to himself as “a leader”. Once he gets away with calling himself a leader, he will add “chieftain” and “stakeholder” to the tally in his next media interview. As usual, our newspapers legitimize such egregious abuses of the word by allowing it. Hence, the media and we the people reinforce that self-referential nonsense by creating a nation-space in which the likes of Ibrahim Babangida, Olusegun Obasanjo, James Ibori, Bukola Saraki, Andy Uba, Olabode George, Diepreye Alamieyeseigha, Atiku Abubakar, the clowns in the National and state assemblies, and everybody in the national secretariat of the PDP are free to call themselves leaders! We are lucky that Maurice Iwu is not yet calling himself a leader and stakeholder but that won’t be long in coming.


Our semantic concessions have consequences that are real and impact on lives and national destiny. When the people lose the struggle to define leadership and determine its parametres; when the media and other agents of national meaning reinforce this loss by allowing every charlatan to refer to themselves as leaders and stakeholders on their pages, we pay a tremendous price in terms of how our society evolves. For instance, we have produced a minimum of two generations of Nigerians for whom leadership essentially means the politics of the belly, spelt out in terms of the negative atmospherics of power – political office at all costs, convoys and sirens, and a vocabulary of civics lifted out of the pages of the training manual at the Nigerian Defence Academy. I have friends and relatives of my generation whose entire political phraseology is about which states or wards have been “captured” or not captured by the PDP; which chieftain “dealt ruthlessly” with which chieftain.

But we pay other prices. Often, those who participate in national discourse from the perspective of the singular importance of science and technology to national development – and the attendant need to focus our energies solely on the hard sciences and rubbish disciplines like history in our secondary schools – are not just contributing to the creation of a national attitude of condescension to ‘non-scientific’ areas of the national quest. They are also contributing to a culture of surrender of meaning by forgetting that science and technology have no meaning in the absence of the sort of visionary leadership that would translate such into concrete indices of progress in the lives of the people. Science and technology are managed by those who win the struggle for meaning. Where the people have lost the struggle for meaning and leadership is accessed and defined by charlatans, scientific breakthrough is like casting pearls before swine. Send Philip Emeagwali to Abuja and they may make him a Senior Special Adviser to the President on Tourism, Arts, and Culture. Send the famous historian, Toyin Falola, to Abuja and they may make him Minister of Health or Special Adviser to the President on Special Duties.

There is perhaps no better indication of the consequences of loss in the field of meaning than the recent collapse of the bid to secure voting rights for Diasporic Nigerians. The commendable efforts of the leadership of Diaspora Nigeria all came down to who gets to define meaning in Abuja - the meaning of citizenship. While those at the forefront of the struggle for Diaspora voting rights got all their meanings right, those with the power to translate meaning into reality in Abuja clung to rebarbative understandings of civic inclusion as a function of residence and location. They put another nail in the coffin of meaning in Nigeria.
 

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