What is your impression of Nigerians and the challenges their country is facing at this time?
I love Nigeria and Nigerians so much because we are a bundle of
contradiction. You see so much… I don’t want to call it poverty but
existential challenges in every layer of society. In spite of this,
everybody is still happy. People are still bubbling everywhere and I
love Nigeria for that.
You are supposed to be in Canada. Why are you in Nigeria at this time?
There are a couple of reasons. Some are immediate and some are
remote. The immediate is that I have some lecture events to attend. One
was the NBA International Literary Colloquium which held recently in
Mina. I was the keynote speaker. I also attended the 60thbirthday of
Pastor Tunde Bakare of the Later Rain Assembly. It was a weeklong
activity which culminated in a public lecture and a book launch in
Lagos. I was invited to present the 60th Birthday Public Lecture. I had
two lectures and an opportunity to come back home. It’s always good to
come back home and enjoy the communion of kindred spirit.
Are you not going to stop by in your hometown in Kogi to take
some palm wine because in one of your writings, you talked about how
you salivate for the early-morning palm wine?
That was in a lecture I delivered two years ago titled, “Face me I
book you.” I was reminiscing about that part of life in the village
while growing up. My father had a palm wine tapper who would come at
5a.m. every morning. When my dad passed on about five years ago, I
inherited his palm wine tapper. Only that this time around, he calls me
with his blackberry phone from the top of the palm tree which shows that
things have changed a lot. Fortunately, during this visit, I am not
able to go all the way to Kogi which needs more surveillance visits from
me. By and large, Kogi is not a state that is governed to my
satisfaction and if I am complaining about any other state in my own
attempt to be transcendentally federalist in my engagement of public
institutions in Nigeria, I think there comes a time I should situate it a
lot more in Kogi State.
What do you mean by saying Kogi is not well-governed to your satisfaction?
Looking at all the indices of underdevelopment and backwardness in
this country, I think you could go back to Kogi again and again to cite
examples – whether it is Millennium Development Goals, infrastructure or
anything. There is little or no governance going on there as far as I
am concerned and people like us who come from there need to pay
attention to that. We need to let the authorities know that while we are
concerned with the broader issues about Nigeria that Kogi State is also
in our focus and that we have not forgotten that we have to also look
closely at what is happening back at home in Kogi.
How are you copping living in Canada given your likeness of palm wine, the wine tapper and other delicacies from home?
You really don’t want me to get away with this palmwine business. But
I think you are using palmwine as a metaphor for much deeper issues
around dislocation, exile, displacement, nostalgia and home. You have
been there and you know it’s always a struggle. You make do with what
you have. On the surface, there is always a bottle of palmwine which is
not the real thing but at least has the fragrance of the real thing. You
make do with that. I like using one expression that as much as
possible, try to photocopy Nigeria. Try to photocopy the culture and
photocopy what makes Nigeria tick and reproduce it over there but always
bear it in mind that photocopies and reproductions are not the real
thing. So in the Diaspora, you must essentially make it a duty to always
come back once in a while. I will give you an example since we are in
the spheres of alcoholic metaphors. In the first half of last years, you
know I recently attended a fellowship in Ghana and being based in Ghana
for one year afforded me multiple opportunities to come home to
Nigeria. I came once a month. At that time, everybody was almost into
Alomo Bitters.
So I got into Alomo Bitters and the sub-cultural world of
signification. Every alcoholic drink has a culture and subcultures
surrounding it including modes of socializing, discuss engagement,
banters and all that. But when I came back after a break of just three
months, everybody is talking about Origin. Having gone for only three
months only and hey, if you are talking Alomo Bitters, Nigerians have
moved ahead. It is now Origin, Origin, Origin. I put that up for my
Facebook followers and used that as a metaphor for much broader, much
deeper and much significant things that you miss out when you stay away
for too long. Somebody was in this country in July and came into the
discourse of Alomo Bitters just to come back three months later to meet
the discourse of Origin all over the place.
You were talking about nostalgia, displacement, exile and the
associated problems and excitement about home. It does appear and it
shows in almost all your writings that you miss home, you love Nigeria
and Africa. Why can’t you come back home and invest your potentials in
the country and continent?
Well, I think there are multiple
ways to do that. First, at the political level I am not very sympathetic
to the idea because you know a lot of my detractors will either try to
blackmail me or try to coble me into some kind of emotional and
psychological position from which some of my ideas and positions and
engagements on national issues could be delegitimised. Like saying, if
you love Nigeria so much, why not come back, or you are not even in a
position to speak about some of these things because you are not based
here. So at that political level, I am not sympathetic to their points
of view and I don’t think that location ordinarily delegitimises ones
mode of engagement with Nigerian especially in modes of intervention on
issues of advancement. I am not sympathetic to that sort of argument. At
another level, I like to think of it in terms of my fundamental
attachment to Nigeria and my unimpeachable devotion to her development
at the intellectual level especially – that is my constituency. In this
case, my location is not mutually exclusive as an errant global
cosmopolitan intellectual. I also take that identity quite seriously and
this idea of being at home in the world so that the business of Nigeria
and I hope you are not going to box me into a position that will make
me say something that will make you remember the Yar’Adua days. I am
going to say that the business of Nigeria should not necessarily be
subjected to the strictures of location. You should not necessarily be
here to make the intellectual business of Nigeria relevant and useful.
In fact, I always tell people that I am much more useful to this country
in terms of my contribution to her intellectual development than I
could ever hope to if I was based here. Out there, I have more resources
at my disposal to help individuals in universities and schools back
home in Kogi State. I have more opportunities to throw out to colleagues
over here in terms of development and grants. There are windows I am
privileged to open up to my fellow Nigerians that I may not essentially
have if I were here. Most of these factors make it possible for me to be
there and still maintain a certain level of relevance.
You have a punishing schedule and at one point you collapsed
in Frankfurt in July, maybe out of exhaustion. Why are you highly sought
after?
I am almost tempted to tell you to ask those who invite me give you
the reason. I don’t know. Maybe there is something they think I have and
they like. Maybe there are some kinds of contributions they think I can
make, not just to Nigeria because the engagements I have are mostly
about issues of Africanist knowledge production and capacity building. I
get invited a lot and I crisscross the continent giving lectures on the
politics of generating knowledge in Africa, about Africa in the 21st
century.
Does it have something to do with the fact that you are bilingual?
I think that helps a lot. People used to tell me back in the day, I
don’t know whether that is true anymore because now I do a lot things in
English Language. Back in the day, people used to tell me that if I
stand behind a curtain speaking French, you would find it really hard to
say that I wasn’t a Frenchman. I speak the Peruvian French. Yes, being
bilingual means that I have one leg in Anglophone Africa and one leg in
Francophone Africa and these are traditions, cultures and political
issues are thrown up.
Are you also familiar with the culture of these places too?
Oh yes. My good friend and poet, Ogaga Ifowodo, who is back in the
country and contesting for the Federal House of Representatives, used to
grumble that I was becoming too “Frenchified” for his liking. So if you
go into French studies the way I did, you know all my degrees are in
French and I spent time in France. Even before going to school to study
French, I was already exposed to it because of the peculiar
circumstances of my upbringing back in Kogi State. I was partly raised
by a French Reverend Father. If you take all that into consideration,
you will see the rooted “Frenchness” I got into in this Anglophone giant
(Nigeria). I have a strong French/Francophone background and didn’t
only study French to acquire the language. When France colonized a part
of Africa, they came with a philosophy of assimilation,
“frenchification,” which means that whatever is your base culture isn’t
work keeping. They brushed away everything and they pour frenchness into
you. Part of that philosophy was built into the training of French
graduates so they acquired the French culture and civilization along
with the language.
You are a cultural icon and a respected writer but you are
also a social critic which is where most of your writings are focused.
You have criticized the Nigerian establishment extensively and tend not
to see anything good in the country and those in power. What do you
really want?
There are two things that are being conflicted here. When the
spoilers and wasters of our potentials and boundless opportunities want
to delegitimise my position, they will say I don’t see anything good
about and in Nigeria instead of saying that I don’t see anything good
about them or the way they are ruling. And that is part of why I am
dissatisfied, that is why we are struggling because you have these guys
who in order to continue to rule this country the way they are ruling
and when I say ruling, I am using it interchangeably with ruining. There
is a distinction between ruling and leading. That’s why I call them
rulers and not leaders. Therefore, if I say they are rulers, I means
they are ruining the country because they are not leading the country.
One of the levels of resistance one must bring up against them is the
equation of their own personality and overinflated ego with Nigeria so
that if you criticise them, you are criticising Nigeria. If you say that
X is not a good leader, then they unleash social media attack dogs on
you. There is a constant case of sly misrepresentation and I do not
agree that I do not see anything good in Nigeria. That is what our
detractors think. My problem is that there so many things that are
fundamentally annoying about this country which cause restiveness and
dissatisfaction. There is very little things about the way the state,
our mechanisms, our institutions function in ways that fundamentally
alienate and dehumanise the citizens. I can go into specifics.
On my way to Minna, I took pictures of a Federal Government road
construction in progress – a 21st century road construction in progress
in this country. On the surface, you could see this fine layer of
bitumen or tar in a stretch of macadam which is really nice to behold.
But when you look closely, you find out that the layer is very thin.
With all the machines and heavy-duty equipment, the contractor has just
poured the thin layer of bitumen on sand in the 21st century. You want
me to tell you the layers of corruption that went into the making of
that road which is going to be washed off during the next rainy season
so that it will be rewarded to our friends so that we take part of our
cut. That’s just one example.
Are you referring to corruption in the country?
It’s everything.
Are you saying that nothing right is happening in the country?
That is not what I am saying. What I am saying is that a lot is being
done wrongly which overwhelms whatever it is they are doing right and
in the 21st century; we have absolutely no basis being overwhelmed by
mediocrity, by substandard and evil. By the way, I perfectly understand
and what I am talking about is not just limited to those who are ruling
this country. There is an overwhelming ethos and general subscription to
mediocrity as a standard and it has generally been accepted in every
facet of our lives and it applies to the citizenry. In fact, I am happy
that you are making me talk about our leaders now. For over a year now, I
have been writing about the psychology of followers which is
fundamentally wrong and we have to work on it. When you come into
Nigeria, one thing which amazes me is the proliferation of “Nollywood”
homes – lovely residential buildings. People are building very lovely
homes all over the country and you could say to some extent that there
is some level of middleclass empowerment that has gone into that process
when you see all these duplexes, bungalows and very nice things. You
could call that development – right? Yea, that is an index of
socio-economic advancement. But when you go inside those houses,
something as simple as finishing is wrong in a N10 million home. You may
be tempted to ask what government has got to do with toilets not
flushing properly in homes that also have bad plastering and doors that
are not properly fixed in a N10 million home. Years of accumulation of
mediocrity, years of the accumulation of the substandard even when there
are regulations. That is what Nigeria paid for. It is not that there
are no rules and edicts in the books. There are always there so that by
the time you are building those homes in Lekki, in Banana Island, in
Maitama, in Asokoro or these other areas, you see the façade of
excellence outside but when you go inside, you are forced to ask,
‘what’s going on here?’. Why are we in this permanent state of rebellion
against excellence? That’s the fundamental question we must answer.
You have criticised successive governments in the country and
now we want you to look back and tell us which the worst government in
Nigeria is?
I have come to a situation where I
think that that question is no longer legitimate in the case of Nigeria
– that is the transcendental comparison of the badness of successive
government. Here is why I say so. Every time we face one government in
its present, you thought it was the worst. Then the next government will
come in and you say wait a minute, looks like we had it better in the
previous administration. We thought there couldn’t be a worst government
than Obasanjo’s administration. Then Yar’Adua came along and acquired
the dubious distinction of being Mr. Snail who didn’t do anything but
allowed the country to be dysfunctional. So we thought that quite bad
and his 7-Point Agenda didn’t seem to go anywhere. I thought that was
quite bad and screamed and screamed. His illness was capitalised upon by
the so-called cabal and all those things that went on. Now this guy
(President Jonathan) tags along. When you look back at Obasanjo and
Yar’Adua, you find out that whatever was wrong with them now seems like
child’s play. I have been home multiple times since President Jonathan
came to power and I just don’t know or understand what he is up to. The
weight of corruption has gotten so bad. In fact we are not even in
position to complain about corruption because we now have bigger
problems with him which makes corruption look like Boy Scout play in the
field. We now live with layers of impunity that would make Sani Abacha
ashamed of himself. But under Abacha, one would have the excuse that we
were under a military rule. We have now democratized impunity. Under the
military, there is the monopolization of impunity by the soldiers but
what is going on under President Jonathan, am sorry to say is
democratization of impunity at every level. Every Nigerian now exercises
impunity in their little fiefdoms. I was on the road recently and
somebody brought an MLS Mercedes Benz jeep and parked it facing the
wrong side of the road. He just packed the car wrongly and left to
attend to his own business. That Mercedes jeep suggests a number of
things about the owner, assuming it was driven by the owner and not his
or her driver. Ownership of that kind of car in this society suggests at
least a minimum level of education, a minimum level of taste, a minimum
level of culture and means to have bought it in the first place. Why
did this person park in the middle of the road facing the wrong side of
the traffic and goes away. That is impunity. Market women have impunity,
taxi drivers have impunity, and everybody has impunity.
Reuben Abati was more critical of government than you are but
today, he is on the other side. When people criticise government, it is
difficult to know what they want. If you are given a job in government
or a contract, would you still speak the way you are speaking now?
That question always assumes just like when I was reading the defence
of my friend during the latest attempt by the Jonathan government to
smear him. It is wrong to think that one is screaming because you want
to draw attention to yourself or because you are waiting for your turn. I
don’t know what motivated Reuben Abati to do what he did. But I am
going to take a step at it and I hope it will be an indirect way of
answering your question.
Reuben badly, tragically, and sadly underestimated the institution he
had become. He misread the icon he had become. He misjudged the fact
that there is no service he could ever offer to Nigeria that would be
superior to what he was doing in the past. Reuben is a first-class
brain. That brain, that intellect, that power. May all of that not fail
us at the most critical moment of our lives. That is what I see when I
always think of Reuben Abati. I hope that a time will not come when I am
going to underestimate my own self because, considering what I have
been doing, the activism, the writing, effort, the energy, are all
thankless jobs that sway me from the legitimate job that puts food on my
table. I am only extremely privileged to have the kind of employer
which identifies with what I do. They like my service to the community,
service to humanity and that’s why I haven’t run into problems. I
strongly hope that a time will not arise when I will make two mistakes
implicit in your question by underestimating the value of what I
currently do, which I consider to be a contribution to my fatherland.
Secondly, and this is the most important part, people mistake service
in government as the only way to serve Nigeria. They tell me, Prof, you
are making noise now because you have not been called upon to serve or
to come and eat and I asked them, who told you I have not been called
upon to serve and how can that be possible in today’s Nigeria that I
will be doing the sort of thing am doing and at the level at which am
doing them, the audiences I have not only in Nigeria and I will not be
approached? That is not possible. It is not thinkable because I know
places I have messed up these guys very badly. It is not every time you
go public that you go and beat your chest in terms of the impact that
you have. Knowing that you will be asking for specifics; let me tell you
something. I am in the capital of a major Western power which
increasingly is becoming a very attractive destination for Nigerian
government officials. They have messed up and everybody knows them in
London and they are not taken seriously officially. They have also
messed up very badly in the United States of America and nobody takes
them seriously in the official US. They are seen as clowns. Now they
come to Canada with all kinds of intergovernmental, multilateral,
bilateral this and that. There are always delegations coming. I am also
well-known to the Canadian authorities. Do you how many times the
Canadian will phone me and ask questions about visiting Nigerian
delegations? They will tell me they are hosting a delegation of Nigeria
and ask what my take is. I always tell people who have the kind of
opportunity I have; like when a foreign government is seeking your
opinion not about your country and about certain people who are coming
and why they are coming, that is another opportunity to serve Nigeria.
Sometimes I look at the names and say these people are wonderful
Nigerians; fantastic representatives of the Nigerian people and the
interest of our country. Most times when I see the names and why they
are coming, I tell the Canadians the people are not serious. For
example, there was a time some of these clowns in the Senate came. I
think they were doing constitutional review and it has been going on
forever. So I got an email from the Canadians saying they were going to
host a delegation of Nigerian senators. They said the Nigerian lawmakers
were coming to study the Canadian Federalism. They told me that an
entire Senate Committee was coming to study federalism in Canada in
preparation for the process of restructuring Nigeria and ask whether I
would like to attend their presentation. I thought within myself how
Nigerian senators would come to understudy Canadian federalism. Of
course I saw the name of Smart Adeyemi, the senator representing me, on
the list and I laughed. I asked the Canadians who were going to host
them what they know about Nigeria that these jokers should come here to
study what Nigeria has been practicing right from the 60s. We had true
federalism when we had the regions then and that is what the Canadian
government is practicing. Ottawa has very little say in the affairs and
economy of each of the province. They own what they produce. Ottawa is
in charge foreign affairs, military and a few other sectors. I insisted
that they didn’t need to come there and should be made to stay back home
to find out how true federalism was implemented in Nigeria in the 60s.
And those were some of the things I have the power to do out there.
You keep on complaining about mediocrity while people like
you keep distancing yourself from government. Are you saying that if the
Jonathan administration invites you to come and serve you will decline?
I find a little bit of blackmail in that question when people ask. If
I reject an offer from the Jonathan government, it means I don’t want
to serve under the administration and that should not be equated with
not wanting to serve Nigeria.
But why won’t you want to serve under Jonathan government?
Why will I want to serve under a government that is dysfunctional in
everything? I would be a hypocrite. It would take a change in the DNA of
the Jonathan government to make me agree to associate myself with that
government.
If Nigeria is handed over to you and you are asked to change two things about the country. What would those things be?
It is leadership by personal example. I have been speaking about it.
It has disappeared completely from this country but it makes it so easy
for good followership. A followership is as corrupt as the Nigerian
followership has become and which is the biggest problem this country
has. A country can survive corrupt rulers but no country can survive a
corrupt followership where everybody in their own little corners have
ethos of cutting corners in everything. What legitimises cutting of
corners for the followership is because those who are in charge of
things are doing it. All it takes is one day in the life of a president
where a clear message would be sent through symbolic and evident-based
action that impunity is no longer tolerated, it will reverberate
throughout the country. It would create a miracle. The followers cannot
do anything outside the personal example of their leaders. It will take
only one day for a leader to make his life an example to the followers
for things to change. It will take the renunciation of the present
government ethos which has corrupted everybody. There is no level in our
lives that has not been corrupted. Even kids now have the mentality of
getting things quick by cutting corners and every time people cut
corners, they cheating the country. it is important to point out that
the act is not as important as the mentality that says such action is
right and the legitimacy comes from people in government.
From your informal conversations, you seem to like Ghana a lot. Why it this so?
That’s where the example comes in. Don’t forget that Ghana also has
problems of corruption and a very sharp North and South divide and
strong tribal flashpoints. Ghana has all that but they have that layer
which makes you as a Nigerian very uncomfortable. To some extent, they
have power, water and other basic things to some extent. And you begin
to wonder why we couldn’t do better as Nigerians. For example, we were
celebrating the 50th Anniversary of African Studies at the University of
Ghana, Legon. It was a long week event with international conferences
and dignitaries coming from every part of the world. It was Kwama
Nkruma’s pet project and they were celebrating it as a national event.
The event was rounded off with a banquet and the President of Ghana,
John Mahama was going to chair it. The event was going to start at 9pm
and I asked a Ghanaian colleague to pick my Nigerian friend and I on the
way. When the guy picked us we got there at about 9.10pm and we found
people milling around, chatting and about two people were already seated
on the high table including the chairman of the United Nations Economic
Commission for Africa, UNECA. I was looking at my time and it was
almost 9.20pm and I turned and told my Ghanaian colleague that I thought
their country was different and concluded that their president also
comes to events late. He looked at me and said Prof what are you talking
about? I said is it not President Mahama we are expecting? He pointed
to the high table and said, that’s him sitting there. Of course I had
seen the picture of the president a thousand times and not that I didn’t
know him. Mr. Mahama was there on the high table and chatting just like
any other person in the hall. I didn’t recognise him because of the
ease of our access to the hall. I found out that the president was
already seated before we arrived and had been sitting there all the time
we were moving around and even passing in front of him.
Are you saying there were no security operatives near the president?
My brother there was no sign that a president was in the room and the
two of us who were Nigerians were shocked. The Ghanaians didn’t
understand why we reacted that way. I tried to tell my Ghanaian friend
that if Nigeria’s First Lady, Patience Jonathan was coming to the
campus, about 12 kilometers to the venue could have been sealed a day
earlier. But here was a president sitting inside and we walked in
without being checked by any security operative. It was shortly after
that the master of ceremony announced that the programme was about to
begin. But the president was just bouncing back and forth and mingling
with people showing the demystification of power. If I heard siren in
Ghana in a year, it was an ambulance or the police. So look at that? If
power is seen as ordinary and that is taken as a philosophy from which a
leader operates, he will understand the importance of showing example
to his followers.
Your last book was “You Are Not a Country Africa.” When are we expecting another work?
I have three books in the works now. Two of them will come out soon
and one of them is for my primary constituency, that’s the academia and
the second is a sequel to “You Are Not a Country Africa,’ which involves
the collection of my satires on Nigeria. I don’t know who will publish
that. I heard from the grapevines that PREMIUM TIMES in collaboration
with Richard Ali’s outfit will be publishing that book.
You seem to be doing a lot of your writings these days on Facebook and you seem to be reflective. Why do you do that?
I have realised the power of social media and that’s part of my beat
as a scholar of culture. Fundamentally, I do literary and cultural
studies and that is my professional designation. We try to study what we
call the location of culture, the demography that I study to impact on
are there. I have to locate my knowledge generation there and so I take
what I do on the social media very seriously because my goal is to
educate beyond the classroom.
You write on a daily basis on a lot of issues spanning from Africa, to the world and so on. How do you find time to do all that?
I find time out of no time and that it why I keep collapsing.
Are you hoping to collect some of these post on the social media into a book or something?
A lot of people have suggested that I need to do a selection of some
of my best post for publication. If you look at Eduardo Galliano’s
recent books, I have forgotten the title. Galliano is that guy who was
so famous to the intellectual world but became known to the global
public. Hugo Chavez held up one of his books at the UN while abusing
George Bush. His latest book is a 400-page snippets that he had been
taking from Facebook. I am inspired by that work by Galliano and I think
I am going to look at that after we’ve finished the PREMIUM TIMES book.
Your friend Ogaga Ifowodo came back and is trying to raise
funds to contest for a House of Representatives seat. When are you going
to take that kind of step?
You know there are a lot of Facebook groups calling on me to come and
run for Senate. That’s the question I cannot exclude but when you asked
me about the Jonathan government, I excluded it. An elective position
is a totally different ball game. I don’t think I have what it takes now
to afford it and that is in terms of the nitty-gritty of the process.
No matter how good you are, no matter how good your vision is and all
that you still have to do things the Nigerian way. So am I able to do
some of these things like the question of godfathers, factions and all
that. Of course in my own case it would be any other party but the PDP.
But can I do that now? It’s not that I don’t believe in it but I know
that Ogaga could not have come without first having a very wide
consultation with his people. He is my brother and we have been talking
extensively. In fact I am not ashamed to say that I started preparing
him because I believe in him. I believe in what he is doing. If somebody
is trying to go in, in a way that is not totally like that of Reuben
Abati to capture legal spaces, then we have to encourage such people.
But I have had very pragmatic discussion with him to understand that
there would be compromises. When you know that is a fact, then you have
to prepare your mind for it but don’t lose the core of what you are
about. In some cases, you will have to be maneuvering and there may be a
particular godfather to make happy otherwise you will not get the
nomination.
When is yours likely to happen?
You have boxed me to a position. Let’s look at 2019 and see what will happen.
What position are you considering? Governorship?
I can never be the governor of Kogi State.
Why?
Thank you for asking me that question. If we don’t restructure
Nigeria, we will keep moving from discontent to discontent. I am an
Iyagba or Okun man. We belong to the Yoruba race. When we were part of
Kwara State, we were a part of the Yoruba majority in the state. So they
yanked the Okun out of Kwara State and threw them into a state where
they are sub-minority of sub-minority. Mathematically, for an Okun man
to become governor of Kogi State, you will have to secure the
magnanimity of the Igala majority and the cooperation of the Ebira.
There are so many factors to overcome. So it is mathematically
impossible until the Igalas get tired because they have the number. But
who gets tired of governance in Nigeria.
So in that circumstance, you will be thinking of the Senate?
You really want me to make a commitment? It is a theoretical possibility and that’s my academic way of giving you a no answer.
Temitope Adebamiro
