Let me thank the moderator for calling all of us to task on the informal sector as an important aspect of Nigeria's national existence. I am all too glad I could lay my hands on something on which I can be educated and which can contribute to the ongoing debate about the national well being of Nigeria. All I think I have done is simply to identify what I've observed for a while as a 'citizen' of Nigeria. I am therefore also waiting for Prof. Olukotun to contribute a magisterial piece that will move the debate forward and enable small fry like me learn from the mouth of the elder.
While we await that contribution, permit me to share an elaboration. I will do this by responding in part to Prof. Harrow's historical reconstruction of Ibrahim's graphic statement. For Harrow, ethnicity should be seen more as a construct rather than an original sin.
"ethnicity wasn't an original sin; it is the current sin, reconstituted
as if it were an originary identity, a response to a period of
insecurity and weakness".
I agree with this historical trajectory and it gives us the foundation for arriving at where we are now as a 'developing' state. By 'original sin', I think what Ibrahim meant is simply that the foundation for the construction of ethnicity was laid at the emergence of the Nigerian state by both the colonisers and the postcolonial leadership. The failure of that leadership as well as the dynamics of postcolonial politics in Nigeria compromised the promises of independence for the majority of the anticolonial masses in Nigeria. That, we can say, is the beginning of the fundamental problem of suffering in Nigeria. Philip Zachernuk, in Colonial Subjects: An African Intelligentsia and Atlantic Ideas (2000), gives a very damning analysis of the pre-and post-independence roles of our 'founding fathers' that contributed, in a large part, to where we are today.
I hazard the hypothesis that the dream of national integration became fatally aborted with the inability of the nationalists to come to term with the question of how a law and order state founded on an exploitative logic could birth social transformation. From then on, the imperative was to attend more to what can be called the national, rather than the social, question. The former concerns how the unruly diversity created by the Lugardian amalgamation can be brought under a mechanical unity. The latter concerns how that diversity can benefit from the social transformation of their lives. Unfortunately, the leadership failed to see the intimate connection between the fulfilment of the latter and the achievement of the former. It is in this sense, for me, that nationalism became an elitist bubble that burst every time it confronts the raw edges of the people's deprivation and suffering. What has happened to our beloved NYSC and the Quota system?
How are the hapless masses expected to react to the volte-face of the nationalists after independence as well as the gradual but steady impoverishment of their existence through the steady and inexorable collapse of formal structures? Of course, find their own meanings within an informality that answers to a Geertzian logic of commonsense and ontology. The informal sector is, for me, a penumbral, elastic and contradictory site of confrontation for, and enactment of, meanings. To follow Geertz, it is a web of significance individuals have spun for themselves to enact their understanding of what they are capable of doing in socio-economic terms.
Remember, as far as I am concerned, informality was created from the imperative of suffering. It is an ongoing attempt to make suffering sufferable. And its structures are therefore not erected to deny that suffering, but to deny that "life is unendurable" and meaningless outside the spheres of the state. The informal sector therefore speaks to an instrumental social existence and the ontology of survival that attends it.
It is within this penumbra of informality that all kinds of activities-white, black, grey, paradoxical-operate The realm leaves the beast of ethnicity to roam largely unfettered. It is the realm where jokes abound about the owambe Yoruba, the cunning Ibo, the Hausa who is eternally a 'mola' (a dunce, largely a perjorative corruption of 'mallam') and the rascal Warri guy! Within the realm, my constructed 'Yoruba' identity sits snugly with me than the fact that I am an igbomina person. Ethnicity enables the struggle for existence beyond the vale of tears called the state! We mend our roads (for instance, like my own axis of the network that broke down barely three months after it was 'mintly' commissioned), organise our own security, provide our own foods and enact our own existence. We also freely and ethnically caricature and confront anyone who attempt to hinder such meaningfulness.
Outside of this loose realm, of course we come together for the sham ritual of integration when Nigeria confronts, say, Brazil in an international soccer match. After this-and woe to the leadership if we are beaten silly-we return to burrow in our informality beyond the lures of patriotic zeal. I give you an instance: Do you imagine there can be a comparison, in terms of attendance, between a Man U versus Barca match (on the one hand), and a Nigeria versus Togo match? I don't think so. If I watch the Nigerian match, it is likely for the reason that I am a football addict, not because of any patriotic zeal. The informal sector, I repeat, was constructed from the deadwoods of nation-building.
For proper national integration to commence, it must commence at this level of informality, paradoxically. It is paradoxical because informality is meant to operate beyond the scope of government and in opposition. Nation building must commence there because it packs an untapped national energy that our leadership have failed to see all the while beyond their instrumental perception of informality as another avenue to increase revenues and line the already obscenely bloated pockets.
Thus, if I must be patriotic, the state must come to my rescue in answering the social question that confronts me daily. If it does not, to hell with patriotism! The leadership can go on singing their lonely songs of national unity.
Adeshina Afolayan
Sent from my BlackBerry wireless device from MTN
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