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Nigeria: The Necessity of Jihad

I was in Nigeria recently as guest reviewer at the public presentation of a book authored by my friend, Professor Iyorwuese Hagher, Nigeria’s High Commissioner to Canada. I left Nigeria convinced that unless we have a collective jihad, Goodluck Jonathan may very well decide to sleep his way through four years of blissful status quo – and, possibly, another four years after that since he has already carefully begun to fly the kite of his second term – and nothing, absolutely nothing, will happen.

I was in Nigeria recently as guest reviewer at the public presentation of a book authored by my friend, Professor Iyorwuese Hagher, Nigeria’s High Commissioner to Canada. I left Nigeria convinced that unless we have a collective jihad, Goodluck Jonathan may very well decide to sleep his way through four years of blissful status quo – and, possibly, another four years after that since he has already carefully begun to fly the kite of his second term – and nothing, absolutely nothing, will happen.

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We need a jihad. Urgently so.

Gotcha! I am not calling for the sort of jihad that immediately comes to your mind.

The bad and purulent name that the word “jihad” has acquired - for good reason - in global public consciousness devolves from the monopoly exercised over it by the genocidal Islamism of deranged fundamentalist groups and states on the one hand and the failure of genuine Moslems to globally mainstream the more pacific, more spiritual, and more intensely personal meaning of that Arabic word on the other hand.  Beyond the identity of holy war, violence, forced conversion of the infidel, and conquest that has stuck to it for fourteen centuries, jihad also means “struggle” or “striving” for spiritual growth and perfection; it also implies a philosophical imperative of self-fashioning and self-renewal on the path to individual growth; it is a call to the envisioning of better alternatives of the self and society.

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The Nigeria I encountered underscored the significance, in a very painful way for me, of the questions raised by Tony Judt in his book, Ill Fares the Land. The late thinker was writing a propos of the failure of global imagination to imaging human arrangements and society differently. Says Judt: “why do we experience such difficulty even imagining a different sort of society? Why is it beyond us to conceive of a different set of arrangements to our common advantage?” Judt ventures an answer to his own questions: “our disability is discursive: we simply do not know how to talk about these things anymore.”

We are discursively disabled in Nigeria. The first sight that greeted me on the expressway during the drive into Abuja from the airport was the spectacle of Julius Berger’s 21st century human cargo operations in broad daylight. Africans in the belly of the slave ships had more human dignity during their trip to the plantations of the Americas than the Nigerian workers in the cargo trailers of Julius Berger. Julius Berger’s idea of how to transport her Nigerian wage labourers to and from work is to weld cargo containers to eighteen-wheeler trucks (trailers in Nigeria) and sardine those dehumanized workers around Abuja in broad daylight. Luckily, somebody thought it necessary to drill holes that looked like windows on both sides of those contraptions. It just so happens that Julius Berger, a third-rate and largely unknown company in Germany, would never transport the lowliest German janitor in such conditions in Mannheim.

However, Julius Berger is not the problem. We are the problem. On the expressway, convoy after convoy of Nigerian rulers, probably returning from those useless official trips abroad, overtook the two human cargo trailers in front of me – I had instructed the driver of our own vehicle not to overtake the two trucks as the student of society in me was already at work. But the overtaking that was overtaking overtake (apologies to Fela) right before my eyes was not just the exclusive preserve of those irritating and arrogant Abuja convoys. Cars of ordinary Nigerians also swished past the trucks. At every stop to drop off or pick up more passengers, people mill around the trucks in the normal grind of life. No shaking. Nothing dey happen. I saw no demonstrable awareness of anything odd or untoward by anybody.
By now, I had forgotten my jetlag. The desire to check in at the hotel and surrender my tired bones to a blissful slumber after my seventeen-hour trip was gone. Tony Judt’s book kept coming back to my mind, his questions ringing in my ears, as I watched that fragment of Nigerian life in motion. Discursive disability, Judt calls it. Does this explain the chilling normality of the scene playing out in front of me? Does this explain the sangfroid with which fellow Nigerians – ruler and ruled, rich and poor – drove past Julius Berger’s human cargo trailers without even a wince of irritation? Just how did such a galling erosion of human dignity become normal in our collective imaginary?

I got tentative answers in my next level of observation. One of the heartening indices of the slow and painful recovery of the Nigerian society from the ruinous years of military rule is the gradual return of the middle class that the evil Ibrahim Babangida had mostly destroyed. Between the super-rich (mostly thieving politicians and a state-dependent, rent-collecting business class) and the super-poor (you know them), it is now possible for a student observing Nigeria to speak of a lower middle class, a middle class, and an upper middle class. This multilayered middle class is, alas, not the product of any vision or purpose-driven policies of the corrupt and comatose Nigerian state. It arose out of the contradictions and ingenuousness that led to the informalization of the economy. Informalization is, for the record, not peculiar to Nigeria: it is a dynamic of the African state in general.

This middle class has somehow been able to create a world of gloss amid Nigeria’s overwhelming dysfunctionalities. He is young, has two or three cars, a nice home in Lagos or Abuja and one in his village, his kids go to private schools, some of them dangerously close in quality to the private American/British/Turkish/French schools for the kids of the super-rich. He worries that the new model of one of his Blackberries is already out and makes a mental note to get it on the next family vacation in Europe. At transit points in Heathrow, Amsterdam, or Frankfurt, you bump into him. He is returning home from a business trip or a training programme financed by his employers in Abuja, Lagos, or Port Harcourt. On Facebook, his status updates announce frequently that he is thinking of changing his internet provider at home because his current provider has been misbehaving lately in Abuja or Lagos.
This group regularly welcomes hordes of new Nigerians into her ranks in a remarkable national process of social arrivism. This swelling of ranks would be a heartening indication of social progress but for the psychology of the group. This is a satisfied group and there is nothing more dangerous than a satisfied group. The group has lived in an alternative world of self-provision for so long she is no longer conscious of the existence of a state, let alone make demands of that state. Hence, she has spent the last two decades improving an alternative world, delinked from the Nigerian state, to the point of contentment and satisfaction. I know we always joke that every Nigerian is his or her own government because you provide your own services in the context of a complete demission by Nigeria’s irresponsible state. You provide your own water, electricity, health, education, security –everything! In certain cases, you even have to tar your own road.

Beyond beer-parlour and online banter about the reality of the Nigerian citizen acting as his or her own private government, what is never really probed is what happens when the sustained effects of self-provision crystallizes into group psychology and attitudes. It eventuates in what Tony Judt calls discursive disability and the loss of even the cognitive capacity to engage the state. In essence, Nigeria has produced a class that has simply brushed aside the state and created her own alternative universe. At breakfast in my hotel, I join a group of sleek and glossy professionals. They were in Abuja from Lagos to attend a conference. They work for one of the Telecom companies. Very educated guys with lively minds.

We get into the usual animated discussion about Nigeria but I noticed a slight wavelength disconnect almost immediately. My emphasis was on the need to reduce corruption and make the Nigerian state work for the Nigerian people; their emphasis was on all the things that could work better in an alternative universe that appears to have forgotten that the state has responsibilities to the citizen. Hence, progress happens for this group not when the Nigerian state is able to supply constant electricity – they have long forgotten that this is a responsibility of the state - but when Mikano supplies even more soundproofed and less fuel-consuming cutting-edge generators; one complained about the noise level of the latest water pump he recently installed for his borehole. Who makes the most efficient water pumps? The Chinese? The Japanese?

I would interject occasionally to remind them that there is a state that should be responsible for these things; that there is somebody called Goodluck Jonathan, the lastest captain of the ship of that incompetent state, who should be made to answer questions about electricity, water, or even the human dignity of Julius Berger’s cargoes in Abuja. They would nod in agreement but the next sentence would take that breakfast table back to progress defined as electricity supplied by the latest generation of Mikano’s generators and not by Goodluck Jonathan’s actions or inactions in the electricity sector.

I met and interacted with numerous groups like this breakfast company in the course of my stay in Nigeria. Conversation almost always led to the same observations on my part: we have a middle class that has provided for itself for so long it now experiences difficulty even imagining a society in which the state would minimally deliver on her own part of the social contract. We have a middle class that has difficulty imagining a different sort of society, to borrow the words of Tony Judt one more time.

And this explains why Nigeria’s corrupt and incompetent rulers get away with virtually everything. They are aware of this discursive stasis. One huge segment of the population – mostly the super poor - has been completely sedated by Pentecostalism while another significant segment keeps demanding better and more efficient generators from Mikano. Between Chris Oyakhilome’s clients and Mikano’s customers, who is left to require anything of those who misrule us so tragically?

This explains the haughty arrogance of a thief like Dimeji Bankole. This explains why the fool believes he gets to determine when and how to respond to a summon by the EFCC. Beyond the umrella provided for Bankole’s filth and corruption by President Jonathan, the outgoing Speaker understands very well that we are too discursively disabled to insist on a different society where somebody like him would by now have resigned his position and submitted himself to due legal process. We need a jihad, that aspect of jihad that implies a rebirth of one’s consciousness, in order to re-invent that new Nigerian in each of us: the new Nigerian who would overcome discursive disability, give Mikano a freaking break, and insist on electricity provided by that state in Abuja that calls him or her a citizen.

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