"Up to now, one virtue that you could never, never accuse the President, Goodluck Jonathan, of having was resoluteness and decisiveness. I mean, when he waves to crowds when riding in a motorcade he does so with a limp movement that involves only the fingers and wrist of his right hand in the manner in which the Queen waves condescendingly to her subjects. Jonathan is so irresolute, so lackluster that from the late Yar' Adua's "Seven Point" agenda he settled for a "No Point" agenda. When your presidency rests on a "No Point" agenda, you can substitute "transformation" as a keyword that is so vague that you can never be held to any concrete benchmarks of achievement. In the councils of the world's heads of states, his voice hardly rises above a squeak and he excites neither curiosity nor disdain. But now he is resolutely unbending in his resolve to remove the so-called oil subsidy, a policy that will bring untold misery to an already pulverized populace. Forget the fact that in this one act of manly, courageous, militant resolve Jonathan is doing the bidding, the dictate of foreign economic and political forces that say that Nigeria is broke and must adjust according to policies determined in Paris, London and Washington. Forget also the fact that Boko Haram is laughing hard at this show of manly resolve by Jonathan. Think only of this: now we know that the President can indeed act with resoluteness. When his foreign handlers crack the whip."--Biodun Jeyifo
Jeyifo: Ghana Must Go' And The Euro Crisis: Some Lessons For Africa And The World (2)
When times are good, we are generous and kind-hearted; and we are especially welcoming toward the "strangers" or "foreigners" in our midst. But when times are hard, we grow mean-spirited and ungenerous; in particular, we become insecure in our present and future prospects, especially as these prospects pertain to others, foreigners and kinsmen alike. This is human nature, isn't it? Was it not this more or less permanent aspect of human nature that was played out in the "Ghana Must Go" debacle in West Africa in the 80s and is currently being played out in the resurgence of racism and xenophobia in Europe in the wake of the crisis of the Euro?
We must resist this recourse to so-called permanent aspects of human nature as a reliable or useful explanation for events and processes that are mediated by changing and varying historical circumstances. Falling on "human nature" for an explanation in such events and processes is like falling on the fact of mortality, the fact that we will all die someday, to explain the reality of death for particular individuals and social groups. One can die of too much of the good things of life, just as many people die of too little of life's benevolence. The particular deaths that result from each of these conditions are as different from each other as night is different from day.
When times get very tough and people in Africa, Europe or any other region of the world begin to act with great meanness towards neighbors and foreigners, we must look, not to some vague or generalized aspect of human nature, but to the specific contexts in which these negative emotions are unleashed and deployed. At any rate, for all of us on the planet it is very important to grasp the essential aspects of what is happening now in Europe as the countries of that economic power bloc respond to the worst financial crisis of the last three to four decades. This is because this crisis has rekindled age-old debates and struggles around how capitalism organizes the distribution of wealth when times are good and the distribution of "pain" or scarcity when times are rough. At the heart of these debates and struggles is the survival of welfarism and the social democratic state as the benign and human faces of capitalism.
For Western fiscal conservatives that are more or less permanently wedded to neoliberalism and monetarism, deficit spending by the state to support the policies of the welfarist or social democratic state is the real problem not only because deficit spending cannot be sustained indefinitely but also because an individual, a family, a country that more or less permanently spends more than its revenues fundamentally weakens its moral fiber. These fiscal conservatives contend that the welfarist state is over-bloated, that there must be massive cutbacks in all areas of public spending or else the state will go completely bankrupt. A very special and portentous contention of these European conservatives is that immigrant "foreigners" from diverse areas of the world – Eastern Europe and West and Central Asia; North Africa and Central and South America; Black Africa and the Caribbean - have swarmed into the Western European heartland to enjoy welfarist bonanzas they have not historically helped to build.
The vigorous push to either substantially reduce or altogether dismantle the welfarist, social democratic state has generated the protests, the resistance of social groups and classes that see their present and future life chances in the survival and expansion of welfarism. For these social groups and forces, the real problem is not deficit spending to sustain the social democratic state and its welfarist policies. Rather, the real problem lies with deep structural deformations within capitalism itself in the way that the financial services industry, as the motive force of contemporary capitalism, continuously uses deregulation both to concentrate wealth in extremely narrow circles and to divert investment capital away from the real economy. In the light of this central contention of the champions of the project to ensure the survival of social democracy in Europe, there are two essential components of the real problem: one, a growing gap, a chasm even, between the few haves and the rest of society; two, the emergence and consolidation of a highly leveraged economic order in which unregulated speculation around debt portfolios have become far more central than the production of goods and services for human needs.
Part of the complexity of the political economy of Europe in the grip of the crisis of the euro is the fact that it is not unusual to find masses of ordinary people who simultaneously believe in these two contending views of the fundamental nature of the problem. In other words, there are millions of people who scapegoat "foreigners" for the problems besetting welfarism and at the same time that they see the banks and the financial services industry as the root cause of the debt crisis. At any rate, the intimidation and fear factor around the possible collapse of capitalism cannot be ignored: the thinking here is that if the banks and the financial institutions fail completely the entire economic order will collapse like a toppled deck of cards and the shock waves will reverberate throughout the world. As for the upswing in racism and xenophobia and the scapegoating of racial and national minorities for crises that are in actuality generated by structural deformations in contemporary capitalism, the response is unambiguously clear: the political parties and movements and the right-wing politicians that exploit jingoism and xenophobia must at every level be ideologically and politically be combated. We must not be complacent.
In West Africa in the 80s, progressive and radical forces and movements were not quite able to mount effective opposition to the "Ghana Must Go" debacle. The consequences of that failure still haunt and stalk the present. With an E-passport, people in the region can now cross the national borders with far greater ease than at any other period in our postcolonial history. But Pan Africanism and the dream of African unity and the aspiration for continental integration remain far more elusive now than in the period of my youth and young adulthood. A similar specter haunts the parties and forces of the Left in Europe as the prospect of economic ruin or long-term stagnation resuscitate the nostalgia for a Europe without Arabs, Turks, Africans and Moslems, a Europe that never was. The Non-European immigrant minorities are of course in Europe to stay permanently; o that extent we are unlikely to see a phenomenon of the order and magnitude of the "Ghana Must Go" debacle. Indeed, a wholesale redrawing of maps of racial and national belonging in our world is being redrawn as I write these words. In one extreme limit instance of this phenomenon, Chinese nationals are buying up land and settling in small bands in many countries in Africa. For we live in a world, an order of life in which the physical spaces and resources are finite. All the more reason for us not to be complacent, not to think what is unfolding now in Europe is too far away, too remote from our pressing local and regional problems and challenges.
Three Cheers for Goodluck Jonathan
Up to now, one virtue that you could never, never accuse the President, Goodluck Jonathan, of having was resoluteness and decisiveness. I mean, when he waves to crowds when riding in a motorcade he does so with a limp movement that involves only the fingers and wrist of his right hand in the manner in which the Queen waves condescendingly to her subjects. Jonathan is so irresolute, so lackluster that from the late Yar' Adua's "Seven Point" agenda he settled for a "No Point" agenda. When your presidency rests on a "No Point" agenda, you can substitute "transformation" as a keyword that is so vague that you can never be held to any concrete benchmarks of achievement.
In the councils of the world's heads of states, his voice hardly rises above a squeak and he excites neither curiosity nor disdain. But now he is resolutely unbending in his resolve to remove the so-called oil subsidy, a policy that will bring untold misery to an already pulverized populace. Forget the fact that in this one act of manly, courageous, militant resolve Jonathan is doing the bidding, the dictate of foreign economic and political forces that say that Nigeria is broke and must adjust according to policies determined in Paris, London and Washington. Forget also the fact that Boko Haram is laughing hard at this show of manly resolve by Jonathan. Think only of this: now we know that the President can indeed act with resoluteness. When his foreign handlers crack the whip.
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