It is safe to assume that only the fear of a backlash from Nigerian Christians prevents Bayelsa Governor, Seriake Dickson, from declaring that his benefactor and puppeteer, President Jonathan, is I am that I am. Nevertheless, he has settled for the closest thing to that Biblical drama, albeit with a slight difference. While God did not consider it demeaning to provide an identity card in order to properly identify himself before doing business with a shoeless Moses crouched before a burning grass, Seriake Dickson conceptualizes his own deity as a deputy God, “a he is that he is” so mighty that speaking of a spat between him and lowly provincials is sacrilegious. Seriake Dickson believes that the mere mention of a spat between a provincial Governor and an almighty President or Presidency bespeaks disrespect for the highest office in the land.
It is safe to assume that only the fear of a backlash from Nigerian Christians prevents Bayelsa Governor, Seriake Dickson, from declaring that his benefactor and puppeteer, President Jonathan, is I am that I am. Nevertheless, he has settled for the closest thing to that Biblical drama, albeit with a slight difference. While God did not consider it demeaning to provide an identity card in order to properly identify himself before doing business with a shoeless Moses crouched before a burning grass, Seriake Dickson conceptualizes his own deity as a deputy God, “a he is that he is” so mighty that speaking of a spat between him and lowly provincials is sacrilegious. Seriake Dickson believes that the mere mention of a spat between a provincial Governor and an almighty President or Presidency bespeaks disrespect for the highest office in the land.
googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('content1'); });
As usual, Governor Dickson is talking nonsense because he has never been known to have a good working relationship with commonsense. We shall forgive him the supreme irony of evoking the dry bones of provincialism in a discussion in which an old woman, the President, is the protagonist. However, his self-deprecating description of the relationship between Governors and the President in a democracy, and the attendant canard about respecting the Presidency, should not be allowed to pass. It is a teachable moment, useful for public instruction in the context of repeated assaults on our people’s civic consciousness by prurient intellects within the establishment.
Italian Marxist philosopher, Antonio Gramsci, one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century, introduced and made famous the distinction between “hegemony” and “domination”, or what he calls “direct domination.” Because we are in the field of public instruction here, we shall have to simplify Gramsci considerably for easy consumption. What is most crucial for us is his definition of hegemony as “the spontaneous consent given by the great masses of the people to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant social group”. Gramsci goes on to explain that “direct domination” is exercised over the people through the apparatuses, instruments, and institutions of the state.
It is obvious that the “spontaneous consent” of the people is a key ingredient of hegemony. Institutions of state and, even, democracy acquire hegemony only with the consent of the people. Where there is no consent, you are left with direct domination and naked coercion. So important is consent to this business of hegemony and the legitimacy of the state that Ranajit Guha, the great Indian historian and one of the most influential foundational figures of Subaltern Studies, was able to reformulate Gramsci’s ideas and apply them to his studies of the colonial state in India. Indeed, most people encountering these discussions for the first time tend to associate the distinction between hegemony and dominance with Guha and not with Gramsci who originated the concepts.
googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('content2'); });
In his famous book, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India, Guha argues that the state in the metropole (i.e the West, Britain in this specific case) is hegemonic in character because it has the consent of the people and relates with them in a manner in which persuasion outweighs coercion. However, the colonial state lacked hegemony because it functioned mainly as dominance in the absence of the consent of the people. Therefore, it privileged coercion more than persuasion. Colonialism, according to Guha, is therefore dominance without hegemony.
It should be clear from the foregoing that the Nigerian state, the democracy she has advertised since 1999, and her institutions, most especially the Presidency, have never been able to acquire the consent of the governed, an indispensable feature of hegemony. The Nigerian state is dominance without hegemony. The Nigerian Presidency is also dominance without hegemony because beneath a risible veneer of democracy, she is the world’s most powerful instrument of coercion, intimidation, and repression, totally alienated from the people whose consent she cannot secure because she relates to them only through a prodigious production of lies by aides and spokespersons.
What Gramsci and Guha teach us, their main contribution to civic and public education, is that institutions of state in a democracy must work to earn the consent of the people as a precondition for acquiring hegemony and legitimacy. Respect from the people is earned by the state. It is not a divine right of the institutions of state as the miseducated spokespersons of the Nigerian state would have us believe. Now and again, you hear ignorant Presidency aides, Ministers, and recruited Governors talking nonsense about the need to respect the office of the President. What you never hear them articulate in a clear manner is the fact that the onus is not on the people to automatically respect and confer legitimacy and hegemony on the state and her institutions in a democracy. Rather, such institutions must work to earn it.
This is not the place to retail the reasons why the Nigerian presidency lacks legitimacy and hegemony. I have addressed this in numerous essays, notably in “Why the Nigerian Presidency is not Respectable.” Suffice it to say that Governor Dickson’s take on the Jonathan-Amaechi roforofo devolves entirely from a longstanding national tradition of deifying the world’s most powerful presidency. The traducers of Project Nigeria who have drafted Constitutions for us throughout our postcolonial history simply never imagined a situation beyond dominance. When you consolidate dominance, hegemony (alias consent of the people) becomes surplus to requirement in the social life of the polity.
Hence, you concentrate benumbing powers in the Presidency in a supposedly Federal democracy, powers so great that an elected governor cannot imagine a peer having a disagreement with the President. And he drags in American democracy to support his position. Such contradiction! Nigerian officials are capable of citing Hitler to support an argument about human rights. Contrary to Governor Dickson’s insinuations, President Obama does not enjoy dominance without hegemony. His office is not respected on the say-so of his aides and the decrees of obsequious spokespersons. And he is not above being challenged by “provincial” state governors. In fact, a County Sherriff or Joe the Plumber could have a spat with President Obama without necessarily disrespecting his office. When a Congressman screamed “liar” as President Obama read an address, the outrage was not about the principle of disagreement with the President but about the choice of words and the rudeness of interjection.
Needless to say, I am not sorry for Governor Rotimi Amaechi. Apart from the fact that opportunistic Governors only become activist challengers of the Presidency to feather their own political nests and not to enhance the democratic ethos of separation of powers, Amaechi’s “persecution” by the Presidency merely mirrors the persecution that he and his ilk visit on Local Government Chairmen in their domain. Such is the absurdity of our Federal democracy that we practice trickledown dominance without hegemony. Call it trickledown Oga at the top if you wish. Jonathan is Oga at the top to Governors who are Oga at the top to Local Government Chairmen who are Oga at the top to the people. And you all saw Mr. Shem Obafaiye’s index finger and eyes raised heavenward as he tried to visualize the location of his Oga at the top, sandwiched somewhere between Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit in heaven.
That is a telling description of what happens in a polity where the consent of the governed is extraneous and the state speaks only the language of dominance and coercion. Nobody understands that the people are the sole repository of hegemony. Anybody immediately above you, any political office superior to yours (never mind separation of powers and domains), is to be approached with your index finger and eyes raised heavenward. Not to do so is to disrespect so and so office. But we must continue to make it clear to Seriake Dickson that democracy only guarantees his right to see President Jonathan as his personal “he is that he is.” Democracy does not allow him to impose his personal deity on the public.
googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('comments'); });