A Conversation With Professor Nimi Wariboko, PART 2: Nigeria's Future
Introduction
In the second part of our interview with Professor Nimi Wariboko, Toyin Falola moderated the conversation between Obinna Akahara and Prof. Wariboko. Obinna is a Physics student, originally from Nigeria, at the University of Texas at Austin. The idea is to promote an intergenerational conversation and knowledge transfer.
Obinna Akahara
Hello, Professor Wariboko. Thank you again for coming on to the show. Thank you for taking my questions today. I want to go off on some of the things you talked about during the first segment of the interview with Professor Falola. You talked about having an optimistic view of the development of Nigeria. And you asked, what is the other option? So you really think that optimism is the only option? Let me focus on that. The first question I have is, where do you think the country started going wrong? When Nigeria gained independence, I think things were bright. There was a lot of potential such that people were very optimistic then. But it seems like there has been a steady decline throughout the years. So, where do you think the country went wrong?
Nimi Wariboko
We have to take a longue duree view of history to see that in 1960 we were just trying to wear a good face and celebrate. This idea that at independence, Nigeria was good is not true. There was ethnic infighting, corruption, and political violence. We now have books detailing how bad things were in the years leading up to independence. Leaders like Ahmadu Bello, Nnamdi Azikiwe, and Obafemi Awolowo were involved in one scandal or the other. There were allegations of financial corruption, mismanagement of public funds, corruption, or oppression of minorities against our political leaders at various levels at the time of independence. In the former Eastern Nigeria political leaders punished people who did not support the ruling party. After an election, the NCNC even removed public infrastructures from places that did not vote for their party. Even in the Northern and the Western regions, there were similar punitive cases. So we need to be careful in saying things were rosy at the time of independence. Things were not in order or rosy, and that was why a mere six years after independence we had a military coup. We have not really sat down to squarely address our national problems. We did not do this even after the Civil War. Rather we have allowed what I called the debris of history in the first part of this interview to keep piling up.
Obinna Akahara
We have allowed problems to keep going on?
Nimi Wariboko
Yes. It appears we are fascinated by our problems like people drawn to a car crash. People want to drive by, but they cannot; they just have to look at the spectacle. By stopping to gaze at the accident scene, they cause a massive traffic jam. So we are in that situation where every year or every decade, each set of our rulers drives Nigeria into one crash or another. The successive crashes catch our attention, and we keep piling up a massive historical and administrative jam. But no matter what has happened in history, we can always wake up one day and say our day has come. There is a great Igbo proverb that says a man's day begins when he wakes up. We have been sleeping for a long time, and it doesn't matter how long that has been. Our day will begin when we wake up. The time to wake up does not depend on what the clock says or what the calendar reads as 60. Our day starts when we wake up. I think Nigeria has not woken up. And we need to do something to make the country wake up to its potentialities.
Obinna Akahara
Thank you very much for that answer. Let me build off on that. Using the current state of the United States as an example, I feel like in some ways, democracy is not living up to the promises or its full potential. And I say that because there are many populist politicians that prey on the voting populace who are not well-educated or well-informed. Maybe there is a better way of saying it. And I'm sorry, I'm trying to build it up to the point here to connect it to Nigeria. At the time of independence, or when a lot of foreign actors came into Nigeria, they introduced a new system of government in some ways that was probably different from what a lot of African states had. So they had to adopt this new system, and they did so without fully adopting the principles of the system. I feel this poor adaptation possibly plays a part in the failure of our country. I once heard from someone that in a tribal community, it is expected that when you go to see a chief or the king, you bring a gift with you, right? Because it is seen as paying homage to that king or the chief. If you do the same thing at a government ministry, it is seen as bribery or corruption. So there is a certain lack of ability to transfer ancient or traditional African values into the modern world. So we have a clash in values. And how can we address this problem?
Nimi Wariboko
Well, first of all, every African culture is not the same. We cannot generalize how Africans approached their kings and chiefs. We cannot say that everywhere Africans carried gifts to their kings and chiefs just to see them or ask them to do their work. For the sake of argument, let me grant that your story is correct. What those people who related the story you have given here forget is that before a member of the community goes to see the king with a gift, the king has made the person's life to flourish. The king and chiefs would have created a secure community that made it possible for the citizens to grow and flourish in their own ways. Why do our political leaders and bureaucrats today forget that aspect of the traditional governance system? They justify taking money from people when even they are not doing their work.
Our current leaders also conveniently forget that in those days when people gave money to a chief, he did not spend it all on himself. He redistributed it to help the community. Today, whatever the leaders get stays in their pockets. The politician will not even do the work that will benefit the community. He would steal the money and store it in a Swiss bank account. So I need to push back on the comparison you made between the traditional system of gift exchange and bribery in modern bureaucracy.
Indeed, I get your point that we need to find fruitful ways of marrying our inherited value systems with what has come to us owing to colonialism, modernity, and globalization. The urgent task is this: How do we create a system that will flow out of our inherited wisdom or indigenous systems? We also need to borrow one or two things from outside our nations and from our contemporary knowledge in order to bring such inherited systems up to date. The political will to do this is lacking.
This is an issue that has occupied my scholarly interest for a long time. So in my 2019 book, Ethics and Society in Nigeria: Identity, History and Political Theory, I tried to generate political principles and values that might advance the political development of the country. I generated them from our own indigenous knowledge, worldview, and philosophy drawn from different parts of the country. I am now trying to do the same thing for our economic development.
Your question calls us to be intellectually honest and sincere as citizens. Let us be honest and state that the problems of our political and management systems are not solely due to the importation of foreign values into indigenous systems. The current system benefits some groups of people, an elite class of citizens, and they are the ones that want it to continue unabated. And for many Nigerians, the only problem they have with the current governance system is that it has not reached their turn to steal. The moment you put them in the administrative space, they will end up like the present corrupt leaders.
This is why I think that at this point we should not be blaming foreigners and we should start planning for people who can change the system. We need revolutionaries, people who are ready to change the system. If that commitment is there, then we can debate those issues of how best to mix and match our history and contemporary knowledge to move our nation forward.
Where would the new leadership come from? Where would that revolutionary class come from? I don't know. But as scholars, sometimes we write not for those who are alive today, but for coming generations. They might draw inspirations from the work that we are doing today and find ways to implement our ideas, to build on them, and incorporate them into their programs as they see fit. If a Nigerian scholar is working only for Nigerians of today, he or she will die of despair. As Nigerian scholars we can only hope that somebody or a group of patriotic citizens will come up in the future who might need some of what our present-day scholars are doing to map a way forward for the country. Even if Nigeria as we know it today does not exist in that future day, children will arise from whatever is going to come out from our present territory who might use some of our work today to stimulate their thinking.
Obinna Akahara
Thank you very much. I guess we are talking about restructuring now. And I know you've said that. Maybe you didn't quite put it that way, but I guess the question I'm trying to ask is, what is most important to change about the structure? What needs to be restructured? The whole system seems to be going wrong. The system seems to be failing. Isn't it as a result of the whole system or certain critical points in that system? Is it a case of lack of accountability as we appear to be perpetually transitioning from our traditional forms of government into the modern bureaucratic system of governance? It seems like something of the old forms of accountability has not necessarily carried over and has not been enforced to the same extent in our current system. I don't know if there is anything in particular you think will need to be restructured.
Nimi Wariboko
Thank you for that question. I listen to the debates about restructuring the country so we can move forward. I am not against that. If you set up a structure and is not working for the country, and has become an obstacle to human flourishing, it needs to be amended. There is no question about it.
But the call for restructuring is deceptive in one sense. This is so because any student of history or any scholar of ethics and society would tell you that in the matter of moving a state or a civilization forward, you need a minimum of two forms of restructuring. One is what I call statecraft, the governance system. How do you craft the governance structure to deliver the changes you desire? The current debate about restructuring is focused on statecraft, the governance structure, whatever it is.
But there is the second part called the soul-craft (moral formation): the virtues and morality for human flourishing. This part of any restructuring asks the paramount question: What kind of human beings do we want to become? What value systems can sustain the governance system to support human flourishing? Can we create ethos and systems that will shape a country where every Nigerian can become all that they can be given their God-given gifts, potentialities, capabilities, and the institutional supports that can be rendered?
Soul-craft is about moral formation of citizens according to their society's ethos. Ethos concerns the operational morality of a people, their deepest presuppositions, the inner guidance system of their society that defines the mutual responsiveness of citizens to one another, that conditions the kind of relationships deemed appropriate between leadership and institutions, and evokes the necessary loyalty of citizens to leaders and systems. It is ethos that shows what is the "fitting" thing to do in a situation and the "proper" expectations, roles, and functions in any given environment.
Statecraft and soul-craft need to come together in our national talks about restructuring a better set of human beings that will flourish. This is something that any student of political philosophy or history knows: you cannot create a good society if you just tinker with the administrative structures alone. But everybody seems to be silent about restructuring our "soul."
The political leaders today who are asking for restructuring should begin to restructure their own morality. And then we will say that they are sincere about repositioning the structures of governance.
The need to thoroughly comprehend how Nigerians can combine soul-craft and statecraft to build a great country is one of the reasons I diversified from the study of economics into economics and economic ethics. Economic ethics allows one to ask serious questions about the role of soul-craft, ethos, virtues, and so on in economic development and in the sustenance of civilizations. I wanted to expertly grasp the historical connections between morality and national economic development as well as understand the religious and moral bases of the ideational, economic, and technological changes that can transform the ethos of peoples into creating nations in which citizens flourish, live and live well.
Obinna Akahara
Yes, thank you very much Professor. So what I'm getting from you is this: Nigerians want restructuring, especially at the national level, but they forget we need to also restructure our morality and our values. We need to first find ways to hold ourselves accountable. We need to make sure that we are the foundation for whatever system we're going to build. We have to be that solid, moral foundation for our systems.
While you were talking about this, a few things came up. The first one is, I very much admire, like your commitment to education. I believe that education is one of the ways, probably the prime way we can impact this value system in Nigeria. There are many other things that can be impacted. But education is very key to that. I am not sure where to go from here. However, this is the next part that came to me: a chicken and egg problem. People tend to lose their values as a result of their leaders, and the leaders take their place, are able to get to the position sometimes, because of the values of the people. People will condone and endorse leaders based on their values. But those same leaders are the ones who influence the system and the people underneath. And I guess that only certain revolutionary or critical events can break that chain or disrupt the system. Do you have any views on that?
Nimi Wariboko
Well, it is a common saying that people deserve the leadership that they have. But this is not true for Nigerians at some level. The leaders were not properly voted in. They rigged elections. So we cannot definitively tell if they reflect the people or not. And we don't know what the people really want in the ways our broken systems or institutions operate.
We see cases of Nigerians selling their voting cards during election. What does that mean? It is not only poverty that pushes people to sell their cards. What it means is that they do not believe that our elections are fair, and that their votes really count. They know that on the election day, there will be a lot of violence, and so they sell their cards and stay away from the sites of violence. Once a system is broken down it doesn't really matter what the people want, and it is not accurate to say the people deserve the leadership they have. If some armed robbers enter into a man's house and begin to rule him, do we say he deserves that leadership?
Playing off on my earlier response, you mentioned restructuring, especially in the area of morality. The leaders know what to do. But it seems they are paralyzed. This is why I am hoping for new set of leaders to come along, I don't know where the new class will come from, or when the kairotic moment will arrive that manifest them to us.
But I can guess why our leaders are paralyzed. They are suffering from an old problem. In Ancient Greece they call it akrasia. It means that when somebody is not crazy, not drunk, not mentally deficient, knows the good but cannot do it. He or she cannot exercise good judgment because of the weakness of will. The person willingly lets things go wrong or make bad judgements. Our current leaders are afflicted with a severe case of akrasia, and we as a people do not give them the ancient disease. So we do not deserve them. We cannot cure their akrasia; there is no cure for them. We need to replace them.
While our leaders suffer from akrasia, we the citizen-followers suffer from amnesia. We easily lose memory of what has happened to us. Now when you know human beings that suffer from akrasia—they know what to do but cannot do it—and also suffer from loss of memory, amnesia, then you create institutions to check and balance those attitudes. We can use the institutions to catch them when they fail or fall, thus preventing disasters from happening. We need to create the strong and just institutions that will help us to unleash the potentials of this country. Let us not kid ourselves, creating such institutions will be tough.
But we don't give up on the country. We will keep trying our best until one day the Lord calls to say it is over, and then we hand over the baton to the next generation. Our current political leaders want us to accept defeat, to turn our backs on the country, so they can do whatever they want to do. Yes, we have not been able to do anything substantial to stop them, yet we keep our eyes open to watch them. That in itself is a service to the nation. The fact that we tell them our eyes are open, and we are watching them and recording their misdeeds means we are not passive. We are doing something. We are bearing witness to history. It is still an important task if this is the only thing some of us can do. Let us be our own witness, because it will be our witness to the story that will count. Maybe, our witness will inspire some revolutionary youths to turn things around.
Obinna Akahara
Yes, you live as long as the last person that knows your name, so to speak. And I guess the same thing with history and with the society, right? Events are remembered for as long as they are, I guess, told or stories are remembered as long as they're told. One last question. And Professor Falola, if you want to contribute to this, please do. How does one go about killing a god? I have heard this from some of the stories that Professor Wariboko has told. How does one go about killing a god? Because it is a tremendous task.
Nimi Wariboko
Indeed, there are records that some Africans have killed their gods. In my 2019 book, Ethics and Society in Nigeria, I related a story of how the Kalabari-Izon in Rivers State killed one of their gods in 1857. On September 27 of that year, they killed a representative animal of the god and ate it. They said they were no longer going to worship it because it had become too furious and was not able to protect them well. Kalabari say when a god becomes too demanding we will tell it from which wood we created it.
A god dies whenever a people collectively withdraw their worship. One thing to note is that in Africa, every position of power depends on the maintenance of relationships. Once people withdraw their relationship, you are dead. This is what it means to kill a god. A god is powerful as long as there are people worshiping it. It is powerful as long as there are people that believe in it. When the people turn their backs to a god, that god loses his power. Of course, its power is based on relationality in the same way that a king is a king because there are subjects. If the subjects were to withdraw completely there would be no king.
This idea of killing a god is rooted in the importance of relationality in African worldview. If you fractured a relationship enough there will be nothing to work with, to support the relevant forms of intersubjectivity; the connective tissues break down and your power as god or ruler to rule over a group of persons evaporates. I think this principle was even operational in ancient western societies—not to talk of modern western democracies. Westerners who lived 2000 years ago in Rome or Greece were afraid of Zeus and Jupiter. Today you will hardly find any person afraid of Jupiter in western societies because the relationship has been broken.
There is an important lesson here. If our ancestors could kill supernatural gods, why can't we "kill" the political gods that torment us. They are gods to us because we bow and scrape before them. But if we stand up collectively and say, "You are no more our president," "you are no more our governor," then that very big politician loses his status. That big power that you obey and worship, that you fear and to whom you offer sacrifices, the moment you join with others to withdraw your commitment to him or her, the domination is over. He or she is dead.
The death of gods is common in history. We do not often read about this, so some might think that the idea of dying gods is far-fetched. For instance, when Islam or Christianity moved into a place, it kills local gods. Many gods in the territory become powerless. If you go through history you will notice that gods have come and gone.
The Kalabari did not wait for a new religion to overthrow a wicked god in the 19th century. They did it on their own. They decided to kill one of their gods. So we don't need to wait for some Marine force or foreign powers to force these politicians out of office. We need to collectively arise and say to them "no more!" We say to them that they are nobodies from this day forward. And they will lose their power. And this is a nice way to say you can kill a politician, a god walking in our streets.
Obinna Akahara
Yes, thank you. Professor Falola, do you have any thoughts on it? I think what Professor Wariboko has said captures a lot of things. Do you have anything else?
Toyin Falola
Well, once again, let me thank you so much for granting this interview. We have two sets of interviews from two Nigerians from different generations. My suggestion is that we split them into two publications. And I enjoyed the last session better than mine. Because Wariboko's response came out more. My section of the interview was more structured, but Obinna I like yours better. Thank you so much Wariboko. We will spend a lot of time on the post-editing. And we're very grateful.
Obinna Akahara
Thank you. Thank you very much, Professor Wariboko. Yes, thank you.
INTERVIEW ANALYSIS AND REFLECTIONS BY TOYIN FALOLA
The problem of the country does not actually begin with the emergence of the Pentecostal community and their antics. Rather, groups' and individuals' political suppositions created complicated disputes which define Nigeria's political landscape. In the prelude to the attainment of independence, Nigeria's various ethnic enclaves and their corresponding leaders nursed mutual suspicion that fostered the raging on of personal issues in all political relationships. The Nigerian people allowed these conflicts to saturate into the independence period, and the age-long incubated hatred graduated to more provocative political altercations which came full-blown soon after independence. Each of the then regional leaders in the persons of Chief Obafemi Awolowo, who was the political leader of the Southwest Nigeria, Ahmadu Bello of the Northern extraction, and finally Nnamdi Azikiwe who came from the Southeastern part of the country. Each of these leaders had their internal contradictions which were not resolved before the achievement of Nigerian independence. People located in the minority were practically frustrated by several incidences of totalitarian ruling. The allowance of this systemic breakdown or imbalance contributed to the escalation of challenges and tensions that continued long after securing independence, and the carryover of these problems continued to challenge the nation's progress even in modern politics.
At one extreme end of Nigeria's political problems is the lack of integration between the existing Nigerian (or African) political philosophy and the ones adopted from the Europeans. At the other end, leaders lack the necessary political will to achieve efficiency and service delivery. For the former, there are many practices that characterized the existing political structures, and instead of careful adaptation of the political practices that would bring inclusive governance, the political leaders embraced the ones imported by the Europeans at the beginning of independence and this has come with serious outcomes, observable in Nigeria's contemporary polity. For the latter, however, the absence of the political will to bring about desirable change is another important factor that militates against Nigerian politics. As a result, the problem facing the country is a combination of forces, majority of which are domiciled in the issues identified above. When the political will is lacking, both adequate and necessary levels of economic and social transformation is abysmally low and the absence of corresponding institutions would inevitably frustrate public reactions in term of their commitment to the collective course. In essence, the poor man who has been denied the opportunity to make ends meet; or the struggling woman striving to put food on their table without success, would have little interest in the maintenance of law and order which could result in these individuals being a potential threat that disrupts any available peace. This has been the greatest impediment against Nigeria's progress.
The solution to this myriad of problems does not actually lie in Nigeria's obstinate clinging onto the political philosophy inherited from the West, neither does it remain with the reversion to Indigenous political structures without modifications. There must be a common ground. The country needs to make efforts to hybridize ideas and generate philosophies from the fusion of the two system. The reason for this is very simple. The political structures inherited from the West have not been entirely useless, contrary to the narrative pulled by some individuals. If anyone benefits from the structure and scheme, it is at least the members of the political class. And the fact that the power to modify the system and introduce a more masses-oriented system lies with the same political class makes issues worse than could be imagined. Simple logic reveals that those who primarily benefit from a dysfunctional system would want it to continue regardless of every contradictory views and opinions. As such, the system has failed to create a citizenry who is actually interested in progress in the real sense, rather it has created a group of equally hungry power hunters, seeking their turns to grab power and replicate what the beneficiaries in the elite class have done. This subtly explains the cross-carpeting that goes on in the Nigerian political landscape, as people queue for their 'turns' to hold the economic system of the country hostage and unleash their political strangulation on it at an exhilarating level.
To the extent that the stagnation of the country impedes the fullest realization of the people's potential, there have been genuine agitations about the need for restructuring, notwithstanding the fact that the quest for restructuring is typically dictated by emotions resulting in illogical action. Emotions, because a majority of the agitators believe restructuring is just a proverbial magic wand that would resolve Nigerian problems immediately, often lead to emotional solutions which fail to factor in the idea that the idea that the Nigerian elites already inherit the colonialist ideology which makes them distance themselves from the masses. Furthermore, the people hold the perception that they have only the intellectual capacity to administer the political affairs of the country, and these would be the same circle of leaders that will be paraded in any restructured government. While one is perhaps on the right trajectory to hold this optimism considering that hope is an important driver of human perseverance; however, when we consider that the elite class which has been built in the Nigerian sociopolitical space understands only power and make much investment in it to ensure that they keep it, one would understand why the form of restructuring could be a half job. One of the most efficient ways to make restructuring work is when the citizens decide to embrace a moral philosophy which allows them to have empathy, sympathy, and genuine interest of the masses at heart.
When closely observed, one would realize that the Nigerian leaders themselves are the victims of a conspiracy orchestrated by no one but themselves. They are ignorant of the devastating consequences of their actions and inactions, and they are paralyzed to proffer meaningful solutions to the problems they facilitated. As such, the deliverance of the country in the logic sense does not lie in the current crisp of the Nigerian political elite for they have offered the elastic limit of their intellectual capacity to handle the country, although with no measurable progress, or any signs of it. Therefore, Nigeria needs to produce a new group of passionate leaders who would be pragmatic about solving the country's problems. Although this projected solution also has its evident weakness for these anticipated leaders would definitely come from the group of the people affected by the systemic rot created by the failed leaders. However, we must keep the hope alive that their exposure to better political happenings and their experience gathered in the process of research and association with other civilizations could help influence their thoughts and bring about their creative interests towards true nation building. One positive takeaway from the current generation of Nigerians is that in the absence of their vulnerability to ethnic and religious configurations, they have the energy to move the country forward and contribute to its development in a myriad of different ways.
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