challenge
The challenge of living in insignificant times
Being address delivered at the Benin National Merit Award at National Museum, King’s Square Benin on Saturday, 29 December, 2007
By Dr. Festus Iyayi,
Department of Business Administration,
Faculty of Management Sciences, University of Benin, Benin City.
Introduction
Ladies and Gentlemen:
The quality of our lives is determined not only by what happens to us but more so by what we make happen. The more the content of our lives has honour, justice, integrity, truth and meaning by the interaction of what we make happen and what happens to us, then the more significant our lives. Indeed, this element helps us differentiate between whether we live in significant or in insignificant times. Significant times are when man takes a leap forward, when history is made because a world that was standing on its head is overturned so that it is now standing on its feet. This is when we experience what psychologists call the ‘aha’ phenomenon. It’s that moment forward when the blind are able to see… It is that moment when we wake up from a room that is darkened by sleep and are startled by the brightness of the sun outside. It is the time in our life when we have hope and we have hope because there is honour, justice, truth and integrity in our lives.
Insignificant times, however, are when the word and the world are standing on their heads and history is being unmade. It is when the lie is painted black and dressed as the truth. It is when those who seek justice, honour, integrity and truth are perceived as mad men and women who are destined for the asylum.
Wherever we look today: whether it is America in Iraq, the recent Israeli picnic of genocide in Lebanon or the tragedy of our ruined lives in Nigeria, we see the monster of insignificant times striding the streets of our lives like a colossus. We see dishonour dressed as honour, injustice dressed as justice, opportunism dressed as integrity.
But, paradoxically, it is especially in insignificant times that the search for significant, for meaning, for greatness, for honour and integrity in our lives becomes important, because that is when the challenge of proving that we are indeed human assumes an urgency that cannot be ignored. For me, this is what makes this occasion, which is to give honour to whom honour is due, of crucial importance.
As most people will agree, in our country today, honour and integrity are in the mud or hiding in the shadows because the looters the thieves and the plunderers in the house have defaced, distorted, and burnt them so much so that while to steal is still a crime, to loot and plunder or to steal and steal and steal and steal and steal has become an honour… the hallmark of achievement.
Let us look at the list of those they have honoured in the past with the various Orders of the Niger. Let us look at the names of those who nominated the names of those who were honoured. Let us look at the longest lists of chieftaincy titles. Let us look at the owners of the paradises flourishing in the slums of our life. Let us look at the man or woman who has political substance in our midst: the godfather, the senator, the governor, the president, the Excellency, the Honorable…
If we look, we will find that what we are confronted with is a situation not only in which scoundrels are the honorable men and women in our society but also one in which not to be a scoundrel portends grave risks, threats and dangers. It is as if to defend the truth, to be truly honorable and to truly have integrity, one is not only suicidal but has ruled himself or herself out of existence.
Look at the ruin in our lives.
Between 1999 and 2007, the economic and social policies of government slashed the average life span of the Nigerian from 51 to 43 years; that is by 8 years! Although there is no open war going on in the country that is being fought with bombs and jet fighters, the death rate among our infants and pregnant women are among the highest of the high in the world. And although our country has the potential to be among the nine greatest and wealthiest economies on our earth, more than 70% of our people are poor.
No poverty, no matter the way it comes about is sufferable but ours is made even more insufferable by the fact that those responsible for creating it will not even allow us sleep with our eyes closed.
For example, look at how long it took to get that woman to step down from the odium of power after it had become clear that no mathematician on earth could add up her figures of greed. We were told N628 million to renovate a house, to change its curtains, to dig its fountains so that what would happen? So that she would sleep the sleep that no one in our 60,000 years of existence as humans would sleep? So that while the poor women in the homes emptied of hope across our land are seducing their hungry children to sleep by hanging pots loaded with stones to cook over fire flies, she can dream dreams that are made sweet by their tears? And a member of the House in the uproar of a defence elected to stand upon a table in the house and give his life for the project.
What a shame! What a shameless class of scoundrels! And since then, what has happened but that every single day should bring forward another national scandal more sordid than the previous. And so we got engulfed in the siemens scandal where we were told some public officers including ministers obtained siemens’ for well over 10 million Euros for a contract. And then after that one woman, a member of the nation’s senate and an alleged daughter of the man who as president did what Rehoboam did to his people, took another’s identity so she could cream off part of the N3.5 billion dubious contract awarded by her father just before he was forced, in tears, out of Aso Rock.
If we look behind the shoulders of these skeletons that are hanging out in the open, we find a sordid path that is strewn with a string of other mind boggling robberies. For example, the privatization programme of the Obasanjo dictatorship robbed the totally country blind. The exercise was a case of buccaneers, pirates, bandits and scavengers descending on the soul of the nation to pillage, scavenge and loot. National assets and monuments – refineries and petrochemical plants, steel plants telecommunication companies, national theatres and galleries, power plants, insurance companies, hotels, housing estates, fertilizer plants, car assembly plants, trade fair complexes exhibition centres and more – that were worth trillions of dollars were given away to members and friends of the regime at prices that are worth the change that is given to beggars. And as if that was not enough, revenues from other various sources – crude oil and gas, value added tax, custom charges, personal and company income taxes and more totaling trillions of dollars – were stolen, looted and wasted by the same bandits in control of the government and various other institutions of the state. Even secondary schools that are soaked with the blood of the nation’s struggle times were put up for auction by the scoundrels. And to add insult to injury, the bandits not only rewarded each other every year with various orders of the Niger but toasted their achievements in our very living rooms.
The thieving of national resources has been rivaled only by the thieving buccaneering, banditry and looting at the level of national politics. While every election conducted since the first elections in 1922 have been flawed, those in the neo-colonial period have assumed the character of warfare. Thus from 1960 to the present, it has not mattered whether the military or their armed civilian cousins were the ones making the bid for power. The struggle for power has been characterized by massive opportunism, fraud and violence. It is thus that individuals who did not win elections were sworn in as governors, senators, presidents or honorables.
Today in every state across the country, there are one or two or at the most three godfathers who serve power in a bowl meant for feeding dogs to the rest of the country. Counting the thirty six states and Abuja, these godfathers cannot be more than one hundred. But they conduct the selection of people for political office; they organize the burning of the vote and the silencing of the voice; they fund small vicious armies of thugs to chase out or abduct from government house those politicians and governors who will no longer share according to the agreed formula of shame; at other times, they set huge burn fires with public assets in the very presence of agents of the state.
The matter for concern today is not simply that the struggle for power has been opportunistic, fraudulent and violent. It is that the process has gathered a momentum that appears irreversible, thus with each passing year, the level of opportunism, fraud and violence in the elections has taken a major leap upwards. If the elections of 2007 have been described as the worst in Nigeria’s history and the world, then take a look at the different elections in 2007. the presidential election was worse than the gubernatorial elections while, as we are now finding out, the local government elections being conducted are worse than the presidential elections. This leads to the second frightening element in our political situation which is that the bandits in control of state power appear to learn nothing and forget everything with each election. As we are well aware, a sense of collective amnesia on the part of members of a ruling class of bandits is the surest recipe for disaster in a nation. Thirdly, equally frightening is the fact that we now find, as in many countries in Latin America that, the country is sliding into dynastic politics. Thus we find that while their fathers ruled and robbed our fathers, their children are now not only ruling and robbing us but also preparing their children to rule and rob our children.
Our situation demands that we raise fundamental questions about our lives. One class of questions that we must ask is: how come thieves always come and go, go and come, come and go with all the conversations of stolen pots from our own bedrooms? Another class of questions is why do we always watch and do nothing? How do we explain the unbearable patience of the Nigerian, of the African for suffering, for humiliation? How do we explain the fact that in spite of the fact that Nigerians are among the poorest of the poor in the world, they are also adjudged as being the happiest of the happy in the world? How do we explain the fact that as contained in a recent study that in spite of the overwhelming evidence that most African governments have the worst history of governance, their people tend to trust their governments more than other peoples in the world?
In an answer to the first, one white man from Europe, obviously with racist credentials, has said that Africans are born with the ‘thief gene’. Recently too, another white man from America named Watson credited Africans with a level of intelligence that is genetically much lower than that of whites. And, he added, he ought to know because as a Noble prize winning scientist who along with a number of others discovered the structure of the DNA, he had observed how Africans, in the very best of circumstances, had a penchant for making a mess of their lives. The idea that these decidedly racist whites and others like them are pushing is that the African in general and the Nigerian in particular is not only genetically amoral but also genetically stupid.
To follow these scientific racists, the question is, how do we also explain, if we go back in history, the triangular trade in slaves in which African rulers consciously preferred to sell their own fellow men and women to outsiders than to engage in the invention of steam engines and gun powder?
And how do we explain the fact that after more than one hundred and fifty years of the formal end of the slave trade, our rulers have substituted that form of trade in slaves for other forms of trade in bondage? For example, how do we explain our continued subservience to the IMF, the World Bank and the dictates of the most right wing imperialist circles in the world even after the overwhelming evidence of the failure of the SAPs and the new SAPs?
How do we explain the fact that while several Latin American countries were shouting “We don’t Owe! Won’t pay!, Nigeria which borrowed less than USD 10 billion and repaid over USD 40 billion in interests, principal and administrative charges still went ahead to pay another USD 12.3 billion to buy back some USD 29 billion that they were told they were owing? These certainly are important observations that demand that we take a deep pause to look at ourselves. However, in response to scientific and other racists, we would like to insist that the answer to our riddle does not lie in our genes as Nigerians, as Africans. Not all Africans are amoral or stupid and the distribution of these qualities is to be found in every race on earth in every historical period. Moreover, the number of the amoral and the stupid is not in the majority but exists as a tiny minority in every race and population. The significant question is how this minority is able to steal into power; how strongly the members of this group are represented in the leadership of a country.
The tragedy of the African, of the Nigerian is that she has been ruled for most of the time by the amoral and the stupid. The luck of the European, of the American is that she has been ruled for less of the time by the amoral and the stupid. America is today ruled by the amoral and the stupid but that does not mean that Americans as a people are all amoral and stupid. Nigeria’s economy and politics are today dominated by a small number of amoral men and women. But that does not mean that the Nigerian is genetically amoral and stupid.
Whether we are governed by a small band of amoral men and women depends upon a number of conditions. One important condition is history. A second important condition is the content of that history in the way in which it defines the essence of the current situation. Yet a third condition is the specific way in which the people engage those elements of the situation that suggest to them that they must live insignificant lives.
The act that we were colonized through violence and fraud, that the colonialists were also bandits, that they stole the jewel out of our struggle for independence and that those to whom they handed over power were not those that had been at the centre of the struggle for independence, the fact that they created an economy that is driven by greed and that there did not exist an indigenous class of entrepreneurs at the dawn of independence have been consequential for defining the essence of our situation. That essence has been an economy and polity that are designed to be dependent, to sprout greed, thievery and amoral behaviour and a ruling class that sees its cardinal role as that of maintaining and deepening that dependency, that greed, that thievery, that injustice, that amorality.
The critical point of stress in the situation has been what we have done as a people to break the vicious circle, to set our country and ourselves free. I want to suggest that this issue not only constitutes the challenge of our time but also indicates what must be at the heart of any authentic public system of honour in our situation. Authenticity in this regard means that those behind the public system of honour line up behind all that repudiates our current situation, that they are themselves men and women of honour and integrity and they abhor amorality and stupidity in all areas of our lives.
To bring this point home very clearly, let me repeat the question that Odia Ofeimun, one of Nigeria’s finest minds, asked at the centenary of the British despoliation of the kingdom of Benin in February 1897. He asked whether or what would happen if after another one hundred years of the invasion of the Benin Kingdom, the British were to return with the same objective of burning down ‘all Benin kingdom’s towns and villages’. Would we be able to defend the city against the British and ensure that its treasures were not looted? The answer to this question, he suggested determined the extent to which we could say that as a people, the Benin, or more correctly, the Edo people, had progressed in the essentials of life. I am not going to ask you to answer this question because it appears to me that the answer is obvious.
That answer also indicates very clearly that although the knowledge of one’s weaknesses ought to be the beginning of wisdom, not all are actually able or want to profit from that wisdom. We already know why this happens on the part of our rulers but it does not explain why it also happens on the part of those who are victims in the situation. This brings us to the second part of the questions that we asked earlier; how to explain the fact that Nigerians have not acted to end the abundance of misrule in their lives; in short why we have not acted to meet head on, the challenge in our situation.
In his speech delivered to the Swedish Academy in Stockholm on December 8, 2005 Harold pinter who won the Nobel prize for literature that year reminds us that:
‘political language, as used by politicians, does not venture into any of (the territory of searching for the truth) since the majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed’.
If people live in ignorance of the truth of their lives, they will continue with life as ‘the way that things were meant to be’. Moreover, the lie in their lives will very often be converted to various other forms of beliefs, including beliefs in their own impotence and therefore fear of those that create and sustain the conditions of impotence in their lives. This ignorance of the truth of their own lives may therefore be responsible for the fact that victims appear to acquiesce in their own misfortune. However, while this may be true for the majority of victims it cannot be true for those among the victims who claim to be intellectuals and are therefore in a position to penetrate the ‘vast tapestry of lies’ upon which others feed.
The question therefore returns to us as the sun returns to its resting place in the arms of the earth every night.
Let me dramatize the question by taking the concrete example of our state. Almost every intellectual of Edo state origin was clearly aware of the gross misrule that took root in the state in the state in the last eight years. The figures from the Federal Ministry of Finance indicate that Edo state alone ‘obtained’ the Federation and other accounts for billions of Naira between 1999 and 2006. we all know that virtually none of this vast sum touched the lives of Edo people during the same period. We all know that the larger part of this sum was stolen. But who among us did what to protest the situation, to change the situation? It is not enough to whisper among ourselves that we spoke with this or that person in the privacy of their bedrooms to do this and that. It is not enough because the victims did not hear what was spoken and therefore did not learn any courage or hope from it.
If the truth be told, I believe that many of us did not do anything because some of us are part of the factory that manufactures the tapestry of lies, that feeds the lies to the people. One lie that is often told has to do with kinship, with ethnicity. For example, we present the struggle for power as the struggle between ethnic groups, between clans within the same ethnic group, between villages within the same clan and between families within the same village. We encourage the victims to line up behind the thieves from their families, villages, clans or ethnic group rather than behind heroes from far away places who have invested their lives in creating significance in our lives. We deliberately refuse to tell the truth that the struggle for power only makes sense for the victims only when men and women of integrity, irrespective of where they may come from within the state, within the nation are helped to take control of the fulcrum of power.
Another reason why many of us did not do anything has to do with the fact that while some of us are outright cowards, many of us make the mistake of believing that there is only one form of courage. There is not one but several forms of courage; what all have in common is integrity. There is the courage that can speak from the public podium; there is another that walks and organizes the streets. Yet there is another that provides support to these others from the background through informed encouragement, through silent material support and through doing the right things at critical moments.
Finally, another reason why many of us did not do anything has to do with the fact that some of us invested our energies in creating and supporting the wrong organizations or by not investing energies in supporting the right organizations. If we want significance in our lives, we cannot hope to do that by creating and operating solely within an ethnic platform. It dies not matter if we call the ethnic platform a national platform. That will only add to the confusion about what has to be done. And it will certainly be playing into the hands of those amoral and stupid men and women in our midst who by reason of the fact that they are our kinsmen and women will cry an ethnic foul when they become worsted in the struggle for spoils with their true brethren from other far away places.