(Lecture delivered at the Keynote Speaker Series of the African Students Association, State University of New York at Oswego, November 2, 2011)
(Lecture delivered at the Keynote Speaker Series of the African Students Association, State University of New York at Oswego, November 2, 2011)
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Great Nigerian students! Great Nigerian students! Greaaaaaat Nigerian students! Greatest of the greatest of the greatest of the greatest Nigerian students! I did not get the response I expected to these declamations from you. I forgive you. Most of you present here in the audience are either Americans or nationals of other African countries. You are not Nigerian students and may even be tempted to remind me that you did not invite me here from my Canadian igloo to come and scream that Nigerian students are great. And the Nigerians among you, being undergraduates in your late teens and in an American University in upstate New York to boot, can also be excused for not knowing how to respond. Even if you were undergraduates in Nigerian Universities today, chances are that rallying call – great Nigerian students! – may mean nothing to you because the ethos that gave it ubiquity and made it the life-force and life-blood of studenthood has been emptied of meaning in Nigeria.
However, there are three men living and working here in the United States whose student lives in Nigeria are a study in the evocative power of that rallying call. Two of them are University professors and one is a social activist and a blogger: Olu Oguibe, Ogaga Ifowodo, and Omoyele Sowore. These are three pivotal names in Nigeria’s long and robust history of youth agitation and radical student unionism with roots extending as far back as the anti-colonial youth movements of the early 20th century. The anti-imperialist, radical, left-leaning, Marxian complexion of the anti-colonial youth movements would later constitute the heritage and the fount from which Nigerian student unionism would draw to construct the social vision and militant praxis which, by the 1970s, had transformed it into one of the most formidable bastions of social justice and civil rights in the Nigerian society. In 1971, the Nigerian state shed the blood of a student leader for the first time. Kunle Adepeju’s blood would fertilize a tradition of heroism through total selflessness and absolute dedication to the cause of the Nigerian masses which Oguibe, Ifowodo, and Sowore came to symbolize in the 1980s through to the mid-1990s.
At Nsukka, Benin, and Lagos, and indeed, in campuses all over Nigeria, Oguibe, Ifowodo, Sowore, and their ilk in the radical National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS) – which replaced the National Union of Nigerian Students (NUNS), screamed “great Nigerian students” to mobilize and conscientize thousands against the irrationalities of the Nigerian state – one of the world’s most corrupt, most oppressive states; they spiced their podium oratory with endless quotes and soundbites from Karl Marx, Frantz Fanon, Che Guevara, Amilcar Cabral, Eduardo Mondlane because they had a student audience that could relate to that radical library without accusing them of “blowing too much grammar”. The Nigerian state, whether it was run by military tyrants or their corrupt civilian quislings, responded with teargas, bullets, and tanks. Often, home for the Oguibes, the Ifowodos, and the Sowores of this world were dingy police cells or crappy roach and rodent-infested rooms in the underground. University authorities had a more ‘humane’ solution: hounding, rustication, expulsion!
There is something curious about the symbolism and heroism of these three men, especially Sowore. At the height of his very public career as a student union leader in Nigeria, Sowore’s podium addresses at the University of Lagos or elsewhere in town drew a maximum live audience – and I confirmed this with him – of between ten to twelve thousand charged, motivated, mobilized, and conscientized students, drinking his every word and thunderously chorusing “great Nigerian students” at his urging. Motivated by Sowore to stand up for their rights and reject the myriad injustices of Nigerian life, these indomitable soldiers of social activism would troop to the University gates or to town chanting:
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A luta continua
A luta continua
A luta, a luta, a luta continua
Vitória é certa
Vitória é certa
Vitória, vitória, vitória é certa
They would march to the inevitable embrace of the response of the Nigerian state: police bullets and teargas. Sowore would end up either in a police cell or in the decrepit warrens of the Lagos underground used by activists like him to escape the murderous Nigerian authorities. If the Nigerian authorities considered that physical and aluta version of Sowore a threat from the late 1980s to the 1990s; if they feared that version of him, they are now absolutely terrified of the latest emanation of Sowore’s praxis from his base here in America. In fact, I think it is not too much of a stretch to claim that President Goodluck Jonathan and his quislings – more on those quislings later – feel terrorized by the mere mention of that name – Sowore. Yet he is here in America, ten thousand miles away from the organized banditry and pillaging of Nigeria’s resources that President Jonathan and his handlers call governance in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital city. So, the question is: why do they fear Sowore so much?
The answer, my friends, lies in the one thing that President Jonathan and his handlers, all corrupt rapists of the destiny of the Nigerian people, can do absolutely nothing about, no matter how terrified they are of its immense powers of social reach. I am talking about the rise of social media in Africa, especially Nigeria. Here in upstate New York, it may be difficult for you to imagine Africa and social media in the same sentence, what with hunger, disease, famine, AIDS, and civil war still largely being the operative metaphors with which Africa is presented to you. It may be easier for you to imagine malnourished school kids, with distended bellies, mucus-covered noses, yaws-infested skin, visibly countable ribs spiraling across their chests like the stretch marks of a pregnant woman, learning under a mango tree with chalks and wooden slates donated by UNICEF, their teacher a volunteer from an American not-for-profit organization. It may be easier for you to imagine all of this than a well-fed African trying to decide between the latest version of blackberry and iphone 4S while furiously browsing for options on his iPad in Lagos but that, my friends, is the Africa that I know, the Nigeria that I know.
Africa is not only the fastest growing market for the technologies of the infotainment age, she also presents the rest of the world with a public sphere that has most radically been inflected by social media. My conception of social media encompasses the “imagined communities” that have been created by everything from the sms to ezines, via Facebook, Twitter, blogs, listservs, and the rest. Pambazuka News, a powerful social activist news site powered by radical left ideologies, has published an edited book entitled, SMS Uprising: Mobile Activism in Africa. The title of the book alone underscores the importance of our subject today. In addition, you are already aware of the role of social media in the Arab awakening.
Social media mobilizes in ways hitherto unimaginable. If Nigeria is at the forefront of this social media revolution in Africa, then Sowore is the heartbeat of the phenomenon itself in Nigeria, especially if we concentrate on the radicalization of the public sphere by social media. A long time ago, I encountered a poem by the great German thinker and dramatist, Bertolt Brecht, in a novel by the Guinean author, Alioum Fantouré, that I was reading. Fantouré had inserted Brecht’s poem, “Burial of a Troublemaker in a Zinc Coffin” in his novel, Tropical Circle. Please allow me to quote the poem entirely because it did not only subsequently shape my own ideology – I was ten years-old and in Form One in secondary school when I read the poem – it will also help frame the perspective in which I want to locate Sowore and his use of social media to radically inflect the Nigerian public sphere. Here is Brecht:
here in this zinc box
lies a dead person
or his legs and his head
or even less of him
or nothing, for he was
a trouble-maker.
he was recognised as the root of all evil.
dig him in. it will be best
if his wife goes alone to the knacker's yard with him because anyone else going
would be a marked man.
what is in that zinc box
has been egging you on to all sorts of things:
getting enough to eat
and having somewhere dry to live
and feeding one's children
and insisting on one's exact wages
and solidarity with all
who are oppressed like yourselves, and
thinking.
what is in that zinc box said
that another system of production was needed and that you, the masses of labor in your millions must take over.
until then things won't get better for you.
and because what is in the zinc box said that it was put into the zinc box and must be dug in as a trouble-maker who egged you on.
and whoever now talks of getting enough to eat and whoever of you wants somewhere dry to live and whoever of you insists on his exact wages and whoever of you wants to feed his children
and whoever thinks he'd proclaim his solidarity
with all who are oppressed
from now on throughout eternity he will be put into a zinc box like this one as a trouble-maker and dug in.
God forbid! Sowore is not in a zinc box. He is here in New York and very much in the service of the Nigerian people. But the enemies of the Nigerian people would love to see him in a zinc box and they tried to put him in one before he left Nigeria. And if they fear him even more now that he is far away in the United States than they feared him when he was in Nigeria, it is because Sowore is founder and publisher of one of Africa’s most successful radical blogs, Sahara Reporters, domiciled at www.saharareporters.com. Just think of the combined force of www.thenation.com, www.counterpunch.com and www.theprogressive.org here in America and you’ll come to an understanding of the revolution that Sahara Reporters is in Nigeria.
With SaharaReporters, Sowore is doing everything for which the troublemaker in Brecht’s poem was put in a zinc box. Sowore is egging the Nigerian masses on to all sorts of things. Things like making Nigerians wonder why they are third-class citizens in a country held hostage by less than 10,000 elected crooks, from President Jonathan down to local government councilors; things like making Nigerians think and ask questions about the endemic criminality of their rulers; things like making Nigerians ask why their commander-in-chief also doubles as the violator-in-chief of the country’s constitution by refusing to declare his assets. Sowore. That man is egging Nigerians on to all sorts of things.
In the interest of full disclosure, I must tell you that as I weekly columnist, I come from the stable of Sahara Reporters. But I can also tell you that, from the student leader and pro-democracy activist who addressed gatherings of ten to twelve thousand Nigerians in aluta moments in Lagos, Sowore now reaches an average of six million Nigerians at home and abroad every month because they carry his message, his “egging on”, right there in the palm of their hands, in their blackberries, iPhones, and iPads. Sahara Reporters records six million actual page views per month. Break that down into daily traffic and first time hits and you get the picture.
It also does not help the mood of the corrupt Jonathan régime in Abuja that the international community knows and reckons with Sahara Reporters.
Sowore’s work and stories have attracted attention from such global media actors as CNN and Aljazeera. Official Washington and official Ottawa takes Sahara Reporters extremely seriously. Some of the invitations I’ve gotten to address or exchange ideas with Africa policy makers in official Ottawa are due to my work for Sahara Reporters. I met a French government official recently in Ottawa who told me that, increasingly, those working on Nigeria in various Africa desks of official Paris start their day with Sahara Reporters. Now, there is no content in French in Sahara Reporters so those French officials must be using bilingual staff to find out the latest from Sahara Reporters daily.
This is the kind of global impact that has turned Sahara Reporters to a thorn in the flesh of Nigeria’s legendarily corrupt rulers. And they have good reason to fear. The power of social media is not limited to the Arab awakening. The Nigerian people have recorded a good number of symbolic victories against their oppressors; victories that we owe largely to the impact of social media and the recalibration of the public sphere. Some of you here may remember the story of Amina Lawal. Nigeria’s return to democracy in 1999 brought serious anxieties about domination and marginalization by the political elite from the largely Islamic northern part of the the country. Tribalism and religion have always been the last refuge of the scoundrels in Nigeria’s political elite. That is where they run to whenever they lose out in the sharing formula of the “national cake” that they call Nigeria.
The introduction of political sharia was the the Northern establishment’s response to their perceived loss of power at the centre. Some have argued, for good reason, that the political sharianists of the north turned that part of the country to Sharianistan. The only trouble is that their behavior had the potential to define the rest of us for the rest of the world in the 21st century. Hence, if the sharianists closed their eyes to the heinous crimes of the state governors among them who loot billions in Nigeria’s most impoverished region and decided, instead, to chop of the hands of citizen Jangedi who stole a cow, that action defined not just the sharianists but the rest of us; if the sharianists decided to stone citizen Amina Lawal to death for adultery in the 21st century, that action could also potentially define the rest of us in Nigeria. Although, Amina Lawal had a formidable legal team and her case was vigorously pursued by an army of local NGO’s, gender rights advocacy groups, and the civil and human rights community, I believe that the international backlash that the sharianists were not prepared for contributed immensely to saving the life of Amina Lawal. Her story exploded internationally via social media and the sharianists of northern Nigeria found out the consequences of insisting on living in pre-history in the 21st century.
The story of democracy in Nigeria is largely about determining which branch of the democratic process is more corrupt than the others. The presidency? The judiciary? The National Assembly? The state governments? Or the Local Government? The civil service – Federal, state, and local – inhabits a different stratosphere of corruption. In this bizarre competition, state governors have always managed to win the gold medal in Nigeria. I do not want to bore you with tragic stories of state governors in Nigeria. Suffice it to say that all thirty-six of them belong to one thoroughly redundant and corrupt assembly called the State Governors’ Forum. A few years ago, this forum dreamt up another avenue for looting the Nigerian commonwealth by arranging a bogus training program with Harvard University.
Yes, you heard me correctly, Harvard University. You must understand that American Universities, being part of the capitalist beast in this country, are not allergic to making a quick buck or two from Africa if they think that nobody is looking and if there is an African political elite irresponsible enough to help America profit from the misery of their own people. Nigeria has a limitless supply of such irresponsible elite and the Governor’s Forum typifies that trend. So, they arranged with Harvard University for an on-the-job training for Nigerian governors. Another way of saying they would pay Harvard billions for a worthless venture. And if you know Nigerian politicians, you will know that each Governor would have travelled to Harvard with two lorry loads of aides, assistants, and girlfriends, all at public expense. The corrupt governors did not reckon with the age and power of social media and their ignorance cost them.
Majek Adega, a Toronto-based progressive lawyer and a member of the Sahara Reporters family, was so outraged by the prospect of a daylight heist of Nigeria’s resources by the Governors’ Forum and Harvard University that he fired a furious protest letter to the relevant authorities at Harvard. The letter made it into Nigerian internet forums; it was tweeted; it was blogged; it was emailed; it was Facebooked! The Nigerian community at home and in the diaspora was mobilized. We were fired up, as you Americans would put it. Harvard found itself in the middle of the sort of backlash that Americans institutions consider a nightmare and opted out of the programme.
The chair of the Governor’s forum at the time, Bukola Saraki, who is now a Senator, subsequently offered incoherent and unconvincing explanations. What the Governors learnt from that experience is that their pattern of misbehavior and corruption would have to undergo serious modification in the age of social media.
The Nigerian “big man” also learnt that things would never be the same, what with Facebook and youtube insisting that they are no respecter of anybody’s oversized ego. In addition to political office holders who are automatically “big men” just by being in office, I must add quickly that every Nigerian is a potential big man, the difference between the real big man and the potential big man being opportunity. The “big man” is a nebulous category in Nigerian society. Time will not permit me to go into his sociology and atrocious psychology. The following will have to suffice: he is intellectually empty, insufferably arrogant, corruptly wealthy, tramples on the rights of everybody below him in the Nigerian pecking order, arrives late at functions, drives in a convoy, maintains a harem of Personal Assistants and girlfriends at public expense. Do not call him Mr. He is Chief, Alhaji, Prince, Elder, Otunba, Asiwaju, or Doctor (Honoris Causa). If he is a Christian, remember to add JP at the end of his name after running through his titles. JP is short for Jerusalem Pilgrim. Most importantly, he is above the law.
Ikedi Ohakim, a former governor of Imo state, and Rear Admiral Harry Arogundade of the Nigerian Navy, are two incarnates of the big man disease that I have just sketched out. Governor Ohakim had his security goons beat up a woman, Elizabeth Udoudo, in broad daylight in Lagos for not getting out of the way quickly enough for his convoy. But Ohakim even tried, as we say in Nigerian English. He only had the woman beat up in the presence of her two children. Rear Admiral Arogundade was not as humane as Ohakim when Miss Uzoma Okere failed to get out of the way for his own convoy. He had his naval ratings strip her naked in Lagos before beating her up. Oh, convoy is what you Americans call motorcade. It is the most outrageous symbol of the profligacy and corruption of Nigerian officials. Think of the length of President Obama’s motorcade. That is an insult to the Nigerian big man or government official. Their convoys of gleaming brand new SUVs must be two kilometers long. They blare sirens recklessly and irresponsibly. The capacity of each vehicles speedometer is the speed limit of the convoy. Their convoys kill Nigerians all the time in road accidents.
When he leaves office, the big man will steal most of those vehicles. The man who replaces him will award a new contract for brand new SUVs for his own convoy. And life continues in Nigeria.
When the brutes, Ohakim and Arogundade, had women beaten to a pulp in the streets of Lagos, they had forgotten that we are now in the age of social media. And because they forgot that simple fact, it cost them. Within minutes, for instance, Arogundade’s show of shame was on youtube. His name was going viral online. His title, “Rare Admiral” had become “rare animal”.
Such was the social media backlash that official Abuja, ever so reluctant to the anything about the misbehavior of members of the elite had to act minimally on this one.
(To be continued next week)
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