I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference. -Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken”Reacting to news that our friends in the Federal House of Representathieves were quibbling as expected over the N320 million they had voted for Kolanuts, Gulder, and nkwobi to celebrate the joke that the rulers of Nigeria call “Democracy Day”, Rotimi Ogunsuyi, a progressive voice in Nigerian internet listservs, wondered aloud if epe (curse) didn’t come automatically with the territory of rulership in Nigeria. Interestingly, one of Dimeji Bankole’s paid quislings, totally tone deaf to the irony and gravity of the big picture, had forwarded the story in a laughable effort to showcase his corrupt Principal’s probity. I am beginning to think seriously about the plausibility of Ogunsuyi’s funereal reading of the existential condition of the Nigerian ruler.
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The realization that we may now have to seriously consider the sinewy hands of epe in our perpetual quest to understand the frightening psychology of the rulers of Nigeria, their irredeemable kleptomania and congenital mythomania, crept in on me this morning as I watched CNN’s American Morning. Tucked somewhere in the flow of news about the tragic passing of Michael Jackson was a feature story about Masdar City, an interesting initiative of the city of Abu Dhabi, that I have followed closely now for about two years. I have written elsewhere that Nigerians of good conscience need to become serious students of governance and leadership in the Arab Gulf States of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. They have English language newspapers such as Kuwait Times and Times of Oman. Add them to your daily reading routine. Visit their extremely user-friendly government websites, especially their ministries.
Although I developed this habit largely because I teach fiction from that part of the world in my World Literature courses, I have found that personal investment in the development literature of the Gulf states has made me a better student of the Nigerian condition not only through the obvious contrasts such epistemic strategies inevitably engender but also and, more importantly, by helping me throw into sharper relief fundamental questions that have always detained me about the narrative oil. Oil is not just a resource of decreasing global geo-political importance. It is also a narrative that produces its own political cultures and over-determines the modalities of subjecthood and citizenship in societies blessed or cursed with it as the case may be.
Hence the questions: how is it that the fumes of oil produce purposeful, development-driven leadership in the Arab Gulf States and criminal rulership in Nigeria? Kuwait, Oman, the UAE, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia all have regions and provinces where their oil fields are located. Why hasn’t the concentration of crude oil in these regions and provinces produced the sort of organized banditry that the Nigerian state operates in criminal connivance with foreign multinationals in her Niger Delta? What makes it ontologically impossible – I hope nobody takes President Yar’Adua’s noise making about plans to develop the Niger Delta seriously – for Nigeria to take the road traveled by every other oil state in the world by pampering the goose that lays the golden egg? Rather, like the persona in Robert Frost’s famous poem, “The Road Not Taken”, Nigeria has insisted maniacally on taking the road less traveled. In fact, we take the road never traveled by anyone with oil and with the most minimal claim to anything called intelligence: the road that leads to the studied, purposed, and deliberate extermination of that part of the national anatomy that produces the oil. Could there be some truth to Tolu Ogunlesi’s sobering definition of Nigeria? Says Ogunlesi: Nigeria is not a country, not even a geographical expression. Nigeria is a way of doing things wrongly or leaving them undone.googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('content2'); });
These considerations crowded in as I watched the short clip on Masdar City on CNN. That clip took my mind momentarily off mourning Michael Jackson and returned it to the Sisyphean ritual of mourning Nigeria. Here is how Wikipedia introduces Masdar City in case you have never heard about it: “Masdar City is a planned city in Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates. The city will rely entirely on solar and other renewable energy sources, with a sustainable, zero-carbon, zero-waste ecology. The city is being constructed 17 kilometres (11 mi) east-south-east of the city of Abu Dhabi. In 2006, the project is projected to cost US$22 billion and take some eight years to build, with the first phase scheduled to be complete and habitable in 2009. The city is planned to cover 6 square kilometres (2.3 sq mi) and will be home to 45,000 to 50,000 people and 1,500 businesses, primarily commercial and manufacturing facilities specialising in environmentally-friendly products, and more than 60,000 workers are expected to commute to the city daily. It will also be the location of a University, the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology (MIST), which will be assisted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Automobiles will be banned within the city; travel will be accomplished via public mass transit and personal rapid transit systems, with existing road and railways connecting to other locations outside the city. The absence of motor vehicles coupled with Masdar's perimeter wall, designed to keep out the hot desert winds, allows for narrow and shaded streets that help funnel cooler breezes across the city.”
Masdar City is only a small part of The Masdar Initiative which is a testimony to the new frontiers that the human imagination can aspire to, funded by oil and guided by visionary leadership. The Masdar projects rival similar futuristic projects already embarked upon by the city of Dubai. In essence, the cities of Abu Dhabi and Dubai are in a healthy competition to lead the world into new frontiers of post-oil existence. Leaders of the world’s oil states – except one – have long accepted the reality of the end of the era of oil and are all in a race for supremacy in the emergent global post-oil political economy. Dear Nigerian reader, I need not compound your misery by going into how many kilowatts of electricity the authorities in Abu Dhabi have envisioned for Masdar City’s fifty thousand inhabitants while the unimaginative looters in Abuja cannot even guarantee six thousand kilowatts for 150 million people. Suffice it to say that something else caught my attention in CNN’s report on Masdar City: of the US$ 22 billion earmarked for the project by the visionary leaders of Abu Dhabi, US$16 billion have so far been expended on it.
I sat up abruptly in the couch. Sixteen billion dollars? Now, why would that figure sound so familiar to me? Ah, yes, that is the exact amount that the brain-dead rulers of another oil state, Nigeria, spent to guarantee darkness from 1999-2007. The Masdar Initiative is a bitter pill to swallow for a Nigerian and I advise you to fortify your system with alcohol before you google it. What we have here is a Dickensian tale of two sixteen billion dollars leading to the best of visions in Abu Dhabi and the worst of visions in Nigeria. This brings me smack back to the ontological questions I am raising about rulership in Nigeria. Sixteen billion dollars in the hands of leaders in the Arab Gulf and you get Masdar City. Sixteen billion dollars in the hands of the rulers of Nigeria and you get a visionless and totally shameless Presidency budgeting funds for Yamaha generators, diesel, candles, torch light, and kerosene lanterns to run the lives of 150 million people in the 21st century. What am I missing?
Obviously, my ontological questions are not new. Nigerians ask the same questions every day. The writer, J.P. Clark, asks such questions in a little-known collection of poems he published in the 1980s, State of the Union. Clark wonders in the lead poem why things and ideas that work so easily and seamlessly in other climes become a nightmare of inefficiency and cluelessness in Nigeria. What is new here is that my mind has been entertaining for some time now a recourse to craniology – yikes, I finally said it! – as the road to understanding why leadership is mutually exclusive with Nigeria. In essence, why are we doomed to rulership? It is tragic – but indicative of the depths of my disillusionment - that craniology would cross my mind as a possible window to understanding why Nigeria is cursed with rulership that cannot use the Niger Delta’s oil to launch her into the postmodernity of the post-oil era the way the leaders of the Arab Gulf states are doing.
Craniology, that area of science that deals with the study and measurement of the human skull, has special resonance for a specialist of colonial discourse analysis like me. I teach craniology as part of the narrative of slavery, colonialism, and imperialism. Craniology was crucial to racist white philosophers of the 18th and 19th centuries (Hegel, Gobineau, Levy-Bruhl, etc) who enlisted science in the bid to prove that Blacks, Native Americans, Indians, etc were biologically inferior to white people. White scientists in Europe and the United States went about collecting the skulls of dead Blacks and Native Americans, studied and measured the cranial cavities in order to prove that they were smaller than those of white people – and by implication contained a smaller volume of brain matter.
I have a slightly different use for craniology in the Nigerian context. Most Nigerians are convinced – without evidence – that something biologically weird happens to otherwise perfectly normal people when they get to Aso Rock or Government House in the state capitals. Some attribute the changes in these people to “something in the air that they breathe in the corridors of power” and I have heard others propose that it is in “the water they drink”. Such propositions are rife in popular culture and beer parlour discourse. I am a student of popular culture and I am not inclined to dismiss these as burukutu talk. That “something in the air or water” explains why somebody would take 16 billion of oil money in the Arab world and build Masdar City while a Nigerian takes 16 billion of the same oil money and invests it in darkness. Given the desperation of our situation and the mess that our rulers make of our lives, it may not be an outrageous proposition to measure the skull of anybody going into government in Abuja and the state capitals and remeasure their skulls when they leave office to determine if, indeed, something about the nature of power shrinks the human cranium in Nigeria. A reduction in the size of the cranium and the brain may explain why they become rulers who do not qualify to be called leaders. Desperate problems, they say, call for desperate solutions.
A frustrated Wole Soyinka has repeatedly toyed with the idea of psychiatric evaluation for the rulers of Nigeria. I am calling publicly for craniology, performed as public service by Nigerian scientists, with a large concentration of specimens taken from members of the PDP currently serving in political office. We desperately need to understand, scientifically and empirically, what happens in and to the head of the quintessential Nigerian ruler. If you think craniology is a wild proposition, consider the following scenario. A leader in the Arab world or Asia travels outside of his country and sees new technological wonders and advancements. His immediate cerebral instinct? Hurry back home and replicate everything he has seen for the benefit of his people. Often, he improves upon the original. A Nigerian ruler travels and encounters the same indices of advancement in exactly the same circumstances as the Asian or Arab leader. His immediate cerebral instinct? Hurry back home to loot in order to return and buy the most expensive villa in the most expensive neighbourhood in the country of his discovery.
How do you account for the difference in the cerebral and neurological impulses of the Asian or Arab leader and the Nigerian ruler? I say we go to craniology. This scientific method could also help us in other obverse ways. If you look at the rulership landscape in Nigeria today, there are three stellar exceptions. Even the stingiest critic in the arena of meaning will have to agree that Abike Dabiri, Babatunde Fashola, and Sullivan Chime are now leaders, not rulers. Their exemplary and outstanding service to the people of Nigeria is the only glimmer of hope some of us have left. How have these three remained impervious to whatever it is that is contaminating the air and water around them? Is there something in their cerebral composition that differentiates them from the charlatans who surround them call themselves their colleagues in governance? If yes, how do we isolate and spread their genes?
Masdar City is almost complete and is now gradually being inhabited. If you are still not convinced that we need craniology as part of a broader tapestry of explanations of the psychology of Nigerian rulers, wait until we begin to hear revelations of their initial cerebral reactions to Madar City. My good guess: it will never occur to the rulers of Nigeria to try and replicate Masdar City in the Niger Delta. Their cerebral instinct will be how to divert their loot into buying the most expensive villas in Masdar City – a project that people with oil money like them envisioned and built. If the Abu Dhabi authorities were ever to release the waiting list of prospective buyers of property in Masdar City, it is a safe guess that Nigerians would be shocked by the number of their Governors, Senators, Reps, Ministers, and Presidency people queuing up to buy property there. Craniology please!!!
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