Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Today's Quote

Thank you very much for expressing your concern. I will take this up too later. I find it fascinating. We are thinking along the same line.

Samuel

Samuel Zalanga, Ph.D.

Bethel University

Department of Anthropology, Sociology and Reconciliation Studies,

Bethel University, 3900 Bethel Drive, #24, Saint Paul, MN 55112.

Office Phone: 651-638-6023

On Tue, Feb 26, 2019 at 8:56 PM Emeagwali, Gloria (History) <emeagwali@ccsu.edu> wrote:

"If the masses want a better world, they have to organize and hopefully there will be ruling elites that can maybe commit

class suicide by abandoning their traditional defense of elite social and material interest to side with the masses .........."Zalanga

The entire piece was erudite and illuminating but I  waited with great anticipation for some practical  and meaningful solutions

 beyond intellectual lamentations. Your conclusion suggested that the masses have to organize. How will this happen? 

 Are you expecting a simultaneous group response from all segments.  Spontaneously generated

organization? Who will bell the cat, so to speak? By the way, who are the masses? Are you talking about the peasantry,

the landless laborers, lower middle  class collectively,   or whom?  What if there are no ruling elites willing to commit class suicide?

 Should we pin outcomes on hope? What would be your great revolutionary contribution beyond the

 lamenting  armchair?

 

Professor Gloria Emeagwali

Professor of History
 

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From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Samuel Zalanga <szalanga@gmail.com>
Sent: Tuesday, February 26, 2019 8:57 AM
To: USAAfricaDialogue
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Today's Quote

 

To me, trying to account for the future by just examining personalities, is like focusing and ending on appearances. I recognize the role of individuals or persons in history but the individual's ability to achieve anything cannot be divorced from the structure and process of a society at a particular historical juncture. Why is it that in Islam even though the Prophet's work started in Mecca, he could not initially create an Ummah there but did so first in Medina and at one point he had to send some of his followers to Ethiopia as refugees? Why did Jesus lived his life and died without changing all the pharisees and the sadducees? Why not use just miraculous power to transform them? Context matters. By context, I do not mean using it to defend injustice but to understand how injustice works in a very complex way where individual choices and social structure and context play a dialectical roles.  

 I am from Bauchi in the former northeastern region of Nigeria and Dogora won his seat again. He represents a part of Bauchi State that my mother comes from. So for a lot of reasons I am interested in his work. He is an ethnic and Christian minority and that he rose as a minority in Bauchi State to that position is really something fascinating. But wait until you know the behind the scene things that took place for him to rise to that position. It seems like given the nature of the Nigerian social structure and process, it is hard to come to power without reaching some bargain with the "devil."

I am glad he was reelected but during the campaign he gave one very interesting speech in Dass, the headquarters of Dass Local Government. Given that he is now no more in the APC but PDP and not in good terms with the governor of the state, while addressing his supporters in Hausa language towards the end of the campaign, he revealed sensitive information about embezzlement by the Governor of Bauchi State. The amount is in billions. The governor employed over one thousand ghost workers who shared the same BVN number. Dogara mentioned some of their names, their date of birth and their salaries. In his speech, he asserted that he is the Speaker of the House of Representatives and fourth in rank in the nation's hierarchy of political elites, but he also acknowledged that he does not have immunity from prosecution. The governor, however, has immunity. So Dogara publicly challenged the governor to take him to court on the allegations that he (Dogara)  made against the Governor, if the governor was sure that Dogara was just fabricating the allegations. I wish you understand Hausa, then I would forward you the audio recording. 

But the immediate thing that came to mind after listening to the audio recording was that while what Dogara did was fine and excellent, if there was no rift between him and the governor, which led him to leave APC for PDP, we will never have heard this skeleton in the cupboard. So what does his renegade role as speaker or that of the Senate President really mean in terms of personal / public ethics and social responsibility. As someone from Bauchi state committed to the masses, if I were Dogara, I would have revealed this information as part of public service and social responsibility long ago. Dogara is not going to be poor even if he had lost his seat because of telling the truth. This is what I mean by the need to go beyond focusing on appearances by going deeper to understand underlying realities beneath the surface. Did not Dogara participate actively in "padding" where a lot of corruption takes place on both sides of the isle?

The ideal is that we want elections without rigging. And we want a diverse political elite. But diverse is what sense? Just because political elites come from different parts of Nigeria does not guarantee genuine commitment to the masses. It may help with what Donald Horowitz calls feeling of "Group Worth."  But the foundation of it all is ethical and moral  commitment. Simply because you have elites from different parties and all are highly educated is not a guarantee that they will behave or use their office ethically. What we know and how we know it is kind of an intellectual question and process but what we decide to do with it is another, i.e., one of moral and ethical commitment. Two people with the same knowledge or position may end up using them differently depending on the moral and ethical compass that informs their judgments.  

Indeed, winning an election in a free and fair manner is one thing, excellent and beautiful as it is, but that does not automatically guarantee that a person who won a political contest that way is automatically going to be committed to operating in an ethical manner in his or her public service role. We  have seen this a lot in the U.S. Thinking so ignores the underlying structure and process of the Nigerian patrimonial political system where ethnic leaders and patrimonial elites assume that they can tell you who to vote for. The elites from Bauchi at the federal level make no impact on the lives of ordinary peasants or  rural women unless if the peasants or rural women have some political connection and access to the elite; and even if they are Muslims, that doe snot mean they will automatically have access to the elite. This is true in any part of Nigeria. Our elites have no comprehensive program of social and economic development for all people based on citizenship. It is all about personal access. 

For instance, who said that the social and material interests of the  Igbo elite is the same as that of the woman pushing wheelbarrow by the side of the Enugu -Onistsha Express way, trying to sell something to make a living and her capital is less then maybe one hundred dollars? Persons like her exist across all parts of Nigeria and are used by ethnic elites to claim legitimacy, but once in office, they do not care about them. I know this is true in my state. And even when the political elites  provide public service to the masses, the elites expect  the people to thank them as if the elites used their private money. If one is not committed to public service, they have no business getting into politics. But we know the majority who get into politics do so not for public service reasons just as many go to church not for salvation.  

If the salary of the Nigerian Professor or Vice Chancellor is paid for by the public treasury, then when such persons are on their official seat, they should not treat it as personal fiefdom. It is public money that is used to hire them to perform such role. Saraki's relationship with many ordinary people in Kwara is like that of ruling elites and families in the North where as Mahmood Mamdani characterizes it, one of "Citizen and Subject." The concept of citizenship is still not well-established in all parts of Nigeria. It is there in the constitution and at appropriate times, people make reference to it but on day to day basis, it means little and this is close to sixty years after independence. We cannot just focus on individuals in power while ignoring this structural foundations that set the parameters of social relationships and decisions that are made in all regions and local governments in the country.

Any public officer who does not show consistency in his or her moral and ethical standing and reasoning on issues, whether he or she is from the East, West, North, (wherever) and even my family, I have no reason to trust him or her because of the capricious nature of their moral and ethical reasoning. One problem is that we tend to focus just on the official roles of the persons while ignoring the fact that irrespective of the distribution and presumed balance of power, without deep ethical and moral commitment or discipline, people will misuse their office. 

Even here in the United States, the book by  titled "The Naked Public Square" by Richard John Neuhaus shows that difficult as it is to talk about morality and ethics in a society characterized by pluralism and uncertainty, if you just keep ethics and morality outside the public square by making it naked, you will suffer certain social consequences that are damaging as Michael Sandel highlighted in his book "What Money Can Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets."  Sure, the other fear is where people use their moral and ethical reasoning rooted in a particular faith tradition to colonize the public square, which has failed even in the United States. 

Today in the U.S. much public policy is rooted in the use of "incentives" or "incentivization" to persuade people to do the right thing. Presumably, there is no more need to cultivate some deliberate moral and ethical commitment or duty in Kantian terms, to do things in a certain way because it is the right thing to do; we just do it because of the incentives provided. We remain silent about the deeper moral foundation.  This results in what some call "methodological atheism" which a major frame implied in many public discourses in Nigeria today. Just follow this method or that, and everything will be alright, as if all laws in a country are  rooted in moral and ethical principles that take the common good and public interest seriously.  There is no short cut to progress. We have to go back and start thinking about basic elementary principles of morality and ethics and how to cultivate them and internalized them. When I ask my students in the U.S. whether they want me to treat them with respect because they will evaluate me at the end of the semester and I need good  course evaluation for my professional growth, or whether they want me to treat them with respect because they are humans with human dignity, they all tell me that they prefer the relationship to be based on their human dignity. The way our elites campaign and relate to the masses in all ethnic and religious groups and regions is not rooted in the fundamental recognition of the human dignity of the person. It is just a transaction, I lament this. 

Long ago, Plato emphasized the need to figure out the truth and acquiring the correct knowledge as the best path way to create a just society. Aristotle, his student would later clarify that it is not enough to have the knowledge or know the truth (important as they are), if you want a good society. In addition to that, you have to habituate people to cultivate the habit of doing the right thing or what they consider to be the truth or ethical for the common good. Living out the truth or what is ethical, is challenging and costly in diverse ways and today we live in fast-paced society. Many Nigerians assume if they get educated people, men and women of timbre and caliber as some call them, and such people follow procedure then everything will be okay. Following procedure and the rule of law are important, indeed very important but Alasdair MacIntyre argues in "After Virtue" no system will specify all guidelines for making decisions that will promote the common good and so the persons in charge have to use judgement in carrying out the details and specifics of decisions in the interest of the general public i.e., the common good. It is in those details and specifics of decisions that ethics and morality matters. The U.S. at one point imposed sentencing guidelines that reduced judges to become like robots. In the long run, it did not work because there are many issues that come up in sentencing that sometimes require judgement beyond just what the law broadly says, which means even when judges are trained, if they have no moral and ethical commitment in making decisions, the system will not really work. 

Ancient Athens was not a perfect society, but I always thought it was remarkable that some Athenians asked a formidable leader like Pericles and the ruling elites around him that:  why do Athenians value democracy and see it as something dignifying for humans but they deny it to certain people who are also humans such as was reflected in the Melian Dialogue where the Athenians literally massacred the people of Melos for not surrendering to the political agenda of the Athenians to create an empire?

I hope Nigeria and Africa will have elites that will be careful based on the cultivation of moral and ethical courage to ask, why they deserve certain things but the Nigerian or African masses do not. In this respect, I subscribe more to social realist epistemology that sees appearances on things happening on the surface as indicators of something much deeper beneath the surface. We need to understand what is going on by searching deeper. 

Using that method of reasoning, whether Atiku or Buhari wins, and whoever one's ethnic champion is, analysis that starts by looking at the structure and process of Nigerian society, especially the social structure from the bottom up will conclude that the masses should not expect any fundamental change or transformation in their lives. Sometimes the masses benefit but not because they are the main focus, they are rather just a means to someone's or some people's ends. They are treated just as pawns in the political chessboard or "surplus people" for being irrelevant to the neoliberal incarnation of bourgeois society, where human beings have become human capital where their relevance is judged in terms of strict economic calculations. If they are irrelevant in the equation, they are just like "surplus people" unfortunately. Analyzing Atiku, Buhari, Dogara or Saraki, per se, though important,  since it does not get deep to understanding the principles underpinning this kind of economy, seems superficial. And it is easier for elites to manipulate the masses if they keep the masses as "surplus people." One fundamental question that needs to be addressed is whether the logic of the neoliberal economy is a foundation for Nigeria's and Africa's sustainable development and future. Analysis of Atiku and Buhari often does not get deep into that.  Even the United States is struggling with that as Arlie Hochschild discusses in  

Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right.

If the masses want a better world, they have to organize and hopefully there will be ruling elites that can maybe commit class suicide by abandoning their traditional defense of elite social and material interest to side with the masses, thereby opening  a political opportunity structure for reform in favor of the masses as discussed in the book "Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail" by Piven and Cloward.

Samuel

Samuel Zalanga, Ph.D.

Bethel University

Department of Anthropology, Sociology and Reconciliation Studies,

Bethel University, 3900 Bethel Drive, #24, Saint Paul, MN 55112.

Office Phone: 651-638-6023

On Mon, Feb 25, 2019 at 5:46 PM Chidi Anthony Opara, FIIM <chidi.opara@gmail.com> wrote:

If you know the agenda of the next four years, you would be weeping not laughing. There would be no "renegade" Senate President, House Speaker and Judges to restrain the bull this time! He will never need your votes again!

CAO.

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Chidi Anthony Opara is a "Life Time Achievement" Awardee, Registered Freight Forwarder, Professional Fellow Of Institute Of Information Managerment, Africa, Poet and Publisher of PublicInformationProjects

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