Professor Wole Soyinka delivered this lecture titled:
''Corporate Gains and Human Deficit'' at an event organised by Women
Arise to mark the 79th birthday of Dr. Tunji Braithwaite on Monday
September 17th 2012 at the Airport Hotelin Ikeja, Lagos.
A month of human challenges, providentially arranged for a lifelong
combatant as birthday present. Who can forget the late Tai Solarin’s
favourite salutation – May your road be rough!
Where shall we begin? Oh yes – over two hundred workers burnt,
suffocated or propelled themselves onto distant ground as a kinder form
of death. Scene of crime? Pakistan, perhaps the most densely populated
nation of sweat-shops on the globe. Right or wrong, it does not really
matter. What matters to us are the circumstances under which this
already marginalized humanity, wage slaves in the worst sense of the
word, perished. They never stood a chance. The reports testify that only
one exit was available, the rest having been locked to ensure that the
workers did not quit their shifts before closing time. Since over a
hundred years, even all the way to the dark days of crude European
mining technology, cheap systems for clocking in and out have become
routine. But not there, apparently, not In Pakistan. The workers were
sealed in, just as you slot pole barriers through barricades on cattle
destined for the slaughter house. In an emergency - of which, surely
fire hazards must be pre-eminent in any functioning mind - there is no
way out of a death so clearly foretold. The sweat shop operators, the
profiteers of slave labour, blind to all humane considerations except to
extract the maximum return for minimum wages, cram men and women into
suffocating conditions, barred and bolted to ensure that the last
micro-second of labour’s worth is not left out of reckoning. Just the
one exit. When catastrophe comes calling, the world sounds surprised. We
are inundated with sentiments of shock – as you see, I have just added
my own quota. Nonetheless, I also ask myself - why? Why the shock?
I try – and fail, I must confess - to steer clear of atrocious
clichés, time-worn expressions such as ‘capitalist inhumanity’ in
situations such as this, the rhetorical recourse that often succeeds in
merely simplifying inequitable social relationships and burying a full
gamut of labour variations under radical sounding formalae. Capitalism
today is not what capitalism was at the time of the Russian revolution.
Capitalism constantly re-invents itself, not just once, but several
times over, like a snake that sloughs off its skin and re-emerges in
sleek, seductive gloss. No, today’s sweatshops - all over the world –
but in Asia most notoriously, do not even dignify the opprobrious
categorizations of capitalist relationships. They exist simply as
dehumanization camps, where the human deficit is measured in inverse
proportion to blood profit – and by human deficit here, I refer, not to
the deadly tally of human lives after such tragedies, but the deadness
of human feeling that enables the operators of such incubators of
catastrophe to feel comfortable, day after day, week after week,
overseeing the unrelieved, soulless mechanism of the factory line.
In most instances, capitalism today, true capitalism, has learnt how
to put on a human face. What happened in Pakistan has not one vestige on
display that remotely resembles a human face. Is it any wonder that in
such conditions, extremist movements, sworn to overturn the state and
destabilize society, take root so easily? Hordes of recruits to the army
of the willing line up at clandestine mobilization hour, primed to
enter the second stage of alienation from society – the first having
been imposed on them by intolerable social conditions. But now secondary
alienation is voluntary, embraced as the sole guarantor of their
dignity. When this alternative is presented in spiritual terms – that
is, allied to the floating category of spiritual salvation and rewards
in the after-life, a new allegiance is born to a new social order, a new
state, a new nation, albeit undemarcated in actual geographical terms,
and with only a rallying-cry in place of an anthem. But a new
citizenship is promulgated, even without the possession of a passport.
That new allegiance, that new citizenship for the recruit is real,
indeed far more real than the former, whose sole reward has been the
casual disposal of a hundred, two hundred souls, sacrificed on the altar
of societal laxity with its ethos of unfeeling, inordinate
accumulation. The current situation in this very nation is a reflection
of this – but only partially.
Perhaps I should track backwards a little and call special attention
to that possession called wealth – be it as savings, as negotiable
commodity, or simply as value. Wealth fits into two broad categories –
the inert, and the dynamic. The inert comprises, primarily, of what
nature donates, even without being asked. Within this group are things
growing in the wild, equally available to man and beast – berries,
tubers, breadfruits, citrus, grazing etc. More restricted in utility,
somewhat more specialized, are items such as timber, rocks, minerals
and – yes indeed – petroleum. The dynamic wealth, on the contrary, is
the direct and indirect product of human intervention, quite different
from what the animal needs to guarantee mere survival and continuation
of its species. Let us make a note however of a dubious third, which is
virtual – and I do not mean virtual in terms of paper currency or
stocks and shares. I am speaking of ‘virtual’ as in non-palpable,
vaporous, fantasized realms – such as heaven or its equivalents in all
religions. You know the religious admonitions – ‘lay not your treasures
down upon earth’ ‘your reward is in heaven’, plus a hundred other
varieties – you’ll encounter them in virtually all religious
constitutions, known as the scriptures. We shall return to that business
of heavenly capital accumulation later on – right now, let us
concentrate on the inert, and the dynamic – both present, accessible,
and capable of measurable appreciation or deprecation in the here and
now.
How comforting it must feel to be able to direct our attention to
far-off Asia! Even more tranquilizing it must be to be able to say – it
could not possibly happen here. Is that so indeed? But perhaps those who
believe this are right. The cotton industry of the North is dead, that
same industry whose trade union, the present governor of Edo State, once
ably led. It seems ages since I last visited the factories and the
offices of its trade union. I recall being presented with a bolt or two
of fabric from its looms; at that time, the industry was already gasping
for breath. The inevitable was only a matter of time, and one must
emphasize this – it did not commit suicide. It was killed, and we know
how. It was killed by highly placed smuggling corporations that were
allowed to operate freely through our obliging borders. Corporations,
you see, are not limited to licensed businesses which incinerate a
hundred or two workers in one fell swoop. They include other forms of
enterprise which slowly starve hundreds of thousands to death and create
hordes of unemployed who are then snatched up by spiritual corporations
for the destabilization of an entire nation – in the process of which,
let us take note, hundreds of innocents in this nation are also
incinerated, gunned down, and/or blown to pieces.
This act of economic attrition - organized smuggling – received a
boost, perhaps unintended, under the military, since one of the most
notorious smugglers who had been tried and sentenced on even more
serious charges – treason – was released from prison by a successful
coup plotter. It was one of the very first acts of that iron-fisted
junta – to release the smuggler and economic subversive. ‘After all’,
remarked that Maximum Ruler, ‘he only tried to do what we succeeded in
doing – overthrow the civilian government.’ The chequered career of that
single individual has yet to be fully narrated – to claim that he
single-handedly shut down the garment industry in the North and may be
considered a major remote cause of what the North is now experiencing
would be, perhaps, an exaggeration, but it is not far from the truth.
No matter, the consequences are the same. Close down industries, and
open up recruitment centres for the army of unemployed – the skilled
workers, the factory-liners, the commission dependent salesmen and
women, the retailers and extended circles of dependants of a thriving
industry. So, what is the difference? Only that maybe it would have
been more honest to have locked those workers inside a factory, then set
fire to it – then we would have taken care of the menace of the
unemployed once for all, instead leaving them roaming all over the
countryside in various degrees of starvation – until they are recruited
into syndicates of armed robbers and kidnappers. Vulnerable,
impressionable, they also become willing recruits to extreme religious
indoctrination and are focused solely on the hereafter, having been
expelled by neglect from the garden of the here and now – albeit a
garden overrun by the brambles of inequity.
Well now, seeing that we have re-entered our own continent, let us
remain there a while longer. Our theme, may I remind you, is profit and
loss – who profits, and at whose expense? I recall, from my student
days, Peter Abrahams’ Mine Boy, one of the earliest documents of social
indictment to emerge from South Africa, indeed, sometimes regarded as
the first South African novel of proletarian realism. It narrated the
progress – or more accurately, the degradation of the individual psyche,
exposed to the inhuman conditions of labour in South African mines, and
specifically under Apartheid. As I have narrated in my memoirs, in the
formative years of my generation, South Africa was the zone of
consciousness of collective racial humiliation. The apartheid
codification of indigenous Africa as a subhuman entity in the
continent’s history was unique, unknown anywhere else except perhaps
under the Jim Crow laws of the southern parts of the United States. The
atrocities committed under apartheid laws deeply affected my generation,
a generation that was weaned on the racy, yet gritty magazines such as
DRUM, not to mention direct interaction with South African refugees –
across all classes. It is necessary to evoke these ancient realities to
understand why, even till today, at least for many of my generation,
when South Africa stubs her toe, we bleed in distant parts of the
continent. Pity, many South Africans, post-apartheid – do not appear to
reciprocate this shared history as demonstrated in their attitude to
outsiders.
With atrocity surmounting atrocity, as if determined to outdo the
conduct of apartheid government at its most brutal, the newly liberated
once again affirms the insights of Franz Fanon, the psychiatrist of
social convulsion so accurate in his diagnosis of the psychology of the
oppressed in The Wretched of the Earth, his seminal work. Yet I wonder
if even he could have foreseen that the once marginalized entities, as
new incorporations, mimic their predecessors by turning their guns on
their own kind, mowing down thirty-four workers of the underground
sweat-shop – the miners, massed in a peaceful demonstration.
We shall be very careful here be careful here and not fudge the
background – demonstration there was, and it is undeniable that it
turned violent, but surely, in the knowledge that has come through to us
of what has become known as the Marikana Massacre, nothing whatsoever
justified the replication of what the black majority constantly
experienced under apartheid, or indeed, just to recall us to our own
history, this nation’s own baptism of fire in the Nigerian Iva Valley
massacre of Enugu, nearly a century ago, a colonial atrocity that
resulted in Hubert Ogunde’s combative folk opera, Bread and Bullets. The
most grotesque aspect of the South African fatal confrontation however
werd the charges filed against the miners, accused of the deaths of
their own colleagues. That charge has now been withdrawn, yet, which of
us in this hall could have imagined the surreal situation where charges
were indeed laid against the survivors of that massacre. This is what is
known as gallows humour, a macabre travesty that reads more like an
episode extracted from the imagination of a Franz Kafka. And latest on
the news is that the state is gearing up for – I quote – “a crackdown on
the miners”.
Those mines were closed down, we learnt earlier. Perhaps that is the
only answer to the industrial unrest under a post apartheid South Africa
but by now, surely, we do know that throwing workers out of any employ
to swell the jobless army is a time-bomb that detonates suddenly when
society is complacently asleep. Be it in Pakistan, in Nigeria, Namibia,
Cambodia, Japan, France, Soviet Union, South Africa or wherever, one
condition that ensures national security and cohesion is the lowering of
its unemployment ratio, not its increase. To lop off even one finger of
the industrial hand in any society is to throw on the market the
ingredients of a counter-corporation that leaves the original
corporation, and the rest of society, exposed and – insecure. This, I
suspect, is the lesson that is lost on state corporations. The choice of
that word by the way – corporation - is quite deliberate, since one
observes that there are certain modes of conduct that are common to the
entity that we call state, nation, their entrepreneurial arms as state
or private enterprises or indeed, their theocratic equivalents. To begin
with, there are very few differences left in the running of this nation
– from years back into this active present - and the operations of a
corporation owned by an oligarchy.
In any case, in my attempts to come to terms with the anomalous
entity known as ‘nation’, I find myself resorting to several terms –
anything at all to avoid actually conceding the expression – nation – to
many of its pretenders, including ours. I have resorted to expressions
such as ‘the Nigerian project’, ‘the Nigerian nation-space’ among
others, none of them quite satisfactory, but certainly less painful than
having to subscribe to the notion that any entity that has given itself
a flag, an anthem, and been granted a seat in the United Nations has
thereby become a nation. So, let’s settle for ‘corporation’ – at least
for now. It conveniently covers also those entities I describe as
quasi-nations – borderless, flagless, lacking anthem or a seat in the
United Nations, yet forging alliances with recognized nations, imposing
taxes, entering into negotiations and even occasionally occupying
spaces. Most obvious and notorious of these are terror organisations
relying only on the propulsive ideology of coercion and disdain for
human lives to impress their existence on the rest of the world. I refer
to such entities such as al Queda – yes, those I call wannabe nations,
whose aspirations to nationhood are fitfully exercised whenever they
succeed in capturing space, such as our Africa’s current force of
occupation – and incorporation - in Northern Mali.
A new United Nations Report reveals that the Taliban, soul-sister of
Al Queda - to make a concession to attempts to keep the two separate
entities – raised 400 million dollars through taxes , donation,
extortions from businesses as well as narcotics in 12 months up to March
this year. For a government that is without a nation-space since it was
pushed out of Afghanistan where it ran a diarchy with Al Queda for
several years, these are no small pickings. 275 million dollars are said
to have gone to the leadership, while the rest - $125 million – and
here I quote – “was spent and misappropriated at the local level.” From
this alone, it is difficult to deny that the aspiration to nationhood –
at least through the familiar conduct of leadership – is not to be
lightly dismissed. The report specifies - and again I quote:
“Revenue extorted from nationwide enterprises such as narcotics
producers and traffickers, construction and trucking companies,
mobile telephone operators, mining companies, and aid and development
projects goes to the Taliban Financial Commission which answers to the
Taliban leadership.”
The report continues:
“The Taliban use traditional taxes: a 10% tax on harvest and a 2.5
percent tax on wealth. The harvest tax, much of it from poppy
cultivation, is the “main source” of income….but the Taliban also tax
water and electricity supplies and other services.”
Not much of this is unusual, and it does not apply to Al
Queda/Taliban alone, or indeed to religion based irredentist movements
with or without a terrorist arm. The majority of revolutionary movements
have resorted to forced taxation, extortion and downright criminal
activities at various moments in history, often with the conviction that
“all is fair in love and war” or even more to the point – “the end
justifies the means”.
Most times they are persuaded that once the revolution is over, their
first target for demolition would be the very rickety rungs of the
ladder by which they ascended to power. Not all, but certainly some. No
one can attribute such goals to the Delta creek militants, even in the
attempted corporation of MEND since, despite all efforts, it never did
become a political body with a central command, subject to discipline at
the centre, nor did it aim at a full revolutionary takeover even of its
own corner of the federating states. It thus left itself open for
psychopaths and opportunists who turned extortion and kidnapping into
lucrative corporations within a revolutionary movement, the consequences
of which plague Nigeria today. We did not even require the additional
identification of the recent catch of the kidnap kingpin of Anambra
state as a former creek militant, to remind us that throughout history,
it will be difficult to find one single movement, however idealistic,
ideology focused and motivated, that did not harbour some of the lowest
scum of humanity.
Far-sighted movements recognize this likelihood of criminal
infiltration and police themselves internally – the IRA for instance
adopted methods such as knee-capping for some of their criminal
elements. A handful of anti-colonial movements established an elaborate
programme of orientation that emphasized, at all times, the primacy of
the human factor, anxious that they did not become the very things they
fought to eradicate. No matter, it is virtually impossible to avoid
miscreants whose ideology is simply spelt as the spoils of power,
extracted with maximum sadism from a prostrate populace – in short: the
higher the human deficit, the higher the corporate gains. The first
casualty, we have learnt to recognize, in any social convulsion ,
organized or spontaneous, is always the very humanity on whose behalf a
state of contention has been launched.
Was it surprising that an internal struggle between two factions
began so soon after Northern Mali was overrun by rebellious Tuaregs, a
situation generated by the ill-conceived adventurism of the military
corporation? Of course the quarrel is over turf. Who dominates it? Who
exploits it? Secular ideology or theocratic, the ultimate goal - and the
gains thereof - is Power. For these contenders, the wages of power are
palpable – amputations of limbs for all sorts of infractions, stoning
to death of alleged adulterers and so on and on – at base, simply the
insemination of fear into every household among a people who, also
practicing moslems, had never been subjected to such forms of
dehumanization or loss of societal volition.
Virtual power - exercised through the mind, through the virtues of
example and persuasion - is never sufficient for our warriors of the
theocratic mould.
Power also needs nation space in which to manifest itself. May I
recall your memories to the pious dedication of the warlord Basayev
after the siege of Beslan in the Soviet Union? Remember that siege?
Perhaps some of you here even saw footages of that repudiation of, and
harrowing degradation of primal innocence that took place in the Soviet
Union. Permit me to refresh your memories with this unparalleled
instance of gross human defilement in pursuit of corporate gains. It is
an episode that is now undoubtedly subsumed in many minds, overwhelmed
as we all are under the culture of competitive atrocities that have
become the signature of conflicts in virtually all corners of the earth,
but most noticeably on our own continent. Does anyone still recall the
searing event of mass rape and massacre – nearly three years to this
very day - by the Guinean military corporation in that nation’s sports
stadium? That shame of Africa should never be permitted to settle into
the sump of collective memory. The Russian episode was however in a
special category of its own, since it involved school pupils. It took
place in far off Soviet Union during the war between the Chechen
nationalists and the Russian state. As it happened, I was quite
sympathetic to the aspirations of Chechnya for self-determination. I
still am, since I remain dedicated to the principle of
self-determination for any groupings. Incorporation should not be the
privilege of large, powerful entities but the entitlement of all human
settlements from the Urals to the disputed islands of Bakassi – at which
we shall duly arrive before we are done.
Right now however, the siege of Beslan by the warlord Chamil Basayev.
That catastrophic event remains stuck in my mind, perhaps because it
was beamed live all over the world – that is, even as it was unraveling.
Seeking to carve out further pieces of Russian territory - the Dagestan
- and unite them with Chechnya to create a Greater Islamic Republic,
the warrior Basayev declared: ‘When people ask me who’s going to benefit
(that is, from the war with all its slaughter and suffering), I say
God. Allah will get a new part of the world.’ Note, never Basayev
himself, not Chechnya, not Dagestan but – Allah! The disruption of life,
the kidnappings, general mayhem, rape and bloodshed had to be
understood as sufferings undertaken on behalf of – a remote Superbeing!
And what arguments can any mere mortal propose against a holy warrior
who is evidently in direct satellite communication with God? Well then, a
piece of real estate for the unreachable God, but what is in it for
God’s representative on earth?
The same Basayevian justification - slightly adjusted – will of
course be advanced for the mayhem that is taking place over parts of the
world even as we are gathered here. That frenzy will spread – if it has
not already begun – to Jos, Kaduna, Maiduguri, Gombe etc. – just as it
did years ago when a loutish editor in far-off Denmark allegedly
insulted the image of the Prophet Mohammed with some cartoons. As I
stated at the time, poor, already marginalized individuals, the
unemployed, shirtless and unsheltered - perhaps even from the closed
garment factories of the North - who had never even tasted Danish butter
paid with their lives within our own borders for the irreverence of one
white individual somewhere on the fringes of the North Pole. This time,
it is a naturalized American of yet undecided origin who has chosen to
plough the donations from as yet unidentified theocratic corporations
into a crude, anti-islamic film video, but the scene is instantly set to
plunge this nation deeper into the ravine of intolerance, virulence and
disintegration in which it has resided for some three years running. So
what is there to choose between the two forces of blind hatred? None
whatever, but there are questions to ask, such as, “when will supposedly
grown-up individuals, including heads of states and religious prelates
learn to distinguish between the droolings of lunatics and the policies
of states and allied corporations? Are there no real problems
confronting the world?” Mobs take their cue from the attitudes of
leadership, inferred or overt. The truth is that much of the mayhem we
endure from remote wastelands is solely in the interest of the
perpetrators and their instigators, not in defence of any revered saint,
deity or avatar who are totally beyond, and contemptuous of the
imbecilities of mankind. They need no assistance from earthly
corporations or deluded, infantile but homicidal followers. Opportunists
abound who merely wish to assert their territorial imperiousness on
earth, to impress on us, and in the most violent way, that they are very
much around and muist be reckoned with.
The craving, ultimately, is Power! The Ecstasy of Power and
Domination. When Basayev, destroying the innocence and right to life of
school pupils declares that he is capturing a slice of real estate for
deity, he knows he is lying, and his response would have been worthy of
General Franco, or Musollini, or Pinochet. Or Mariam Mengistu, the
textbook butcher of Ethiopia. Or indeed the Hutu genocidaires of
Rwanda, the last two of which list never cited any deity. The earlier
named were great churchgoers, never known to miss a Sunday morning mass
or neglect the pomp of the cathedral on national occasions.
Some of the preceding excerpts – with updated commentary - can be
found in my preface to the 2004 edition of THE CLIMATE OF FEAR, the
collection of my BBC Reith Lectures under that title. Nothing has
changed, but much has escalated. All we feel compelled to stress today
is the affinity of mind between the conduct of the Chechen warlord, the
Libyan opportunists who sacked the embassy of their recent ally and
slaughtered two or three diplomats without whose help their tormentor of
four decades, Colonel Qaddafi, would still hold them in abject
servitude. They will find soul-mates in our own ever-ready Nigerian
mimics without one original thought in their heads, except
quantification of the ability to destroy, no different from the garment
factory owners and their periodic bouts of worker homicide, the Guinean
military corporation of rapists…all the way to the Hutu genocidaires who
at least openly sought power and had the decency not to call on any
deity as the ultimate authority and beneficiary of corporate terror.
Now, that is where blasphemy truly lies.
It is not the first time that children have served as sacrificial
lambs. There are thousands of infant skulls in the open-air museums of
Rwanda, they litter the killing fields of Cambodia. Children’s throats
have been piously severed in the classrooms of Northern Nigeria during a
number of upheavals. Children are abducted and forced into military
service all over the continent, they are forced into prostitution, and
even infants were not spared the Nazi gas chambers of Germany. The
Beslan episode however, was a vivid, real-time indictment, a gloating
performance under the gaze of the world, and the images remain to haunt
human conscience. The retentive power of those images does not benefit
from considerations of an accidental triggering off of a tragic chain of
events. No, its deliberateness was reinforced by the self-commendation
of the master-mind himself as he recounted details of preparations for
the assault, and the promise of more to come. Listen to this. It speaks
to much that we have endured in this nation, most devastatingly in the
North, and we had better pause and take note. The portents are
overwhelming. Place Basayev’s utterances side by side with the rantings
to which we have been subjected by the Basayevs of Northern Nigeria:
“The fight continues without any rules, and with the connivance
(sic) of the entire world, so we are not bound by any obligations to
anyone and we will fight the way we find comfortable and beneficial.” (Interview on Lithuanian website)
Basayev’s chilling itemization of the cost of the operation – 8000
euros for some eight hundred lives, a third at least of them children,
compels one to withdraw inwards and re-examine every proposition that
has hitherto governed human co-existence. Place this side by side with
the meticulously itemized expenditure of executions by the self-
designated revolutionary Dergue of Ethiopia – which evoked no deity but
the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, and whose prophet was Karl Marx; or
Pol Pot of the Cambodian Khymer Rouge who liquidated millions of
Cambodians – intellectuals, the middle class, factory workers, shop
workers, peasants – whomsoever the Khymer Rouge considered an enemy of
the Revolution and in need of re-orientation; consider the meticulous
ordering of bureaucratic details of the killing machine, right down to
the last kopek, won or cent and you come to a realization that you are
dealing with a distinct corporate mentality of the most primitive kind.
The events of Beslan profoundly impoverished normal discourse to the
point of near extinction even as, today, the Boko Haram destroys not
just the livelihood and lives of already impoverished okada riders, the
edge-of-survival market dealers, factory workers, students and school
pupils and taunt the nation with their smug self-satisfaction.
Let me remind you of the actual battle lineup once again: A band of
heavily armed, battle seasoned adults against a sanctuary of children.
They deprive the children of water and food over three days, watch
impassively as they drink their own urine in desperation, subject them
to physical and psychological terror, bayonet one, shoot others in the
back as they flee certain death, and finally incinerate them in their
hundreds. Is this, for us, an unimaginable scenario within this country?
The horror of Beslam may prove only a distorted mirror of the future,
but complacency is no longer an affordable luxury for the nation. It
may be the national psyche that is undergoing distortion, not the
mirror. Once, armed robbers were content just to rob, and vanish, now
they taunt, humiliate, maim, kill, and rape. Was the Sagamu-Ore road in
Beslan, Cherchnya, in Dagestan or Rwanda, where a bus carrying pupils
from a girls’ school was waylaid, and the pupils robbed and raped? No,
it took place here, in the land of green and white – for agriculture,
and for peace, we were informed at independence. But it goes beyond the
outlaw corporation of the highways, and the underworld.
Of the many chilling pronouncements that I heard during and after the
riots that were triggered off by the last presidential elections, one
has kept its permanent echo in my head. It was uttered by a governor, as
well as by some of the personal aides and spokesmen for the side that
felt that they had been cheated out of victory. I heard that statement
during a closed circle meeting with the supporters of the losing
candidacy. I read it in statements in the media, including one by a
vocal critic and former government minister in an extended interview,
one who, from all indications, even nurses presidential ambitions. That
response was given to those who, like me, had deplored the shocking
pursuit and butchery of youth, specifically members of the National
Youth Service Corps who were hunted like animals and killed as such. The
remarks took various forms such as: ‘Were they the only ones that were
killed?’ ‘One life is not more important than the next’. ‘We should keep
sentiment out of this’ etc. etc. – with the inference of course that
their position was objective and analytical, while those which deplored
the killings, and especially the murders of students were mushy,
sentimental. With the cushioning of distance in time and the presumption
of sober reflection by all the participants in that saga, plus armchair
commentators, I wish to enter that aftermath in our theme.
My internal comment, as I listened to those statements that evening
was: how lucky we all are, sitting in a cosy living room on Victoria
Island, drinks in hand, safe, secure, waited on hand and foot by our
host. Next, how lucky for these speakers that I did not lose any one of
my children in that mayhem – in all likelihood, I would not be here
speaking to you today. As a matter of fact, I found it wise to withdraw
from the gathering much earlier than I had planned. These are
subjective, but also legitimate reactions, founded on elementary
humanistic bonds that transcend ideology or religious teaching. From the
moment any self-vaunting intellect loses the capacity for empathy, he
or she joins the soulless concourse of the damned. Casualties are not
bloodless statistics. Ultimately however, Choice is the deciding factor.
When a human entity attains the stage that society concedes as the
state of choice, that entity becomes responsible for the consequences of
his or her choice. If I choose, as a consenting adult, to place my body
in the path of a locomotive, the consequences are mine and mine alone.
Bereft of that conferment of choice, considered in all things as being
not yet adult, compelled to go where directed by the collective will of
adult society, that dictating society owes a fundamental responsibility
for the vulnerable – nurture, health, shelter, security and – the right
to life! That is not only a moral responsibility but is founded on
unassailable logic. To lay claim to less is to contribute to the human
deficit that leads eventually to the Herodian syndrome. We shall avoid
distractions such as whether the demonstrations were spontaneous,
organized, accidental, externally instigated or totally home grown,
justified or unjustified etc. etc. – all that no longer matters. I wish
to concentrate very simply on the phenomenon of humanistic deterioration
that enables even the consideration, much less the articulation of a
dismissive nature for the valuation of any life, but most especially of
the vulnerable – and in this case, those we might even consider the
value-added sector of the productive arm of the nation.
I find myself compulsively revisiting that statement that was
repeated over and over – after all, no life is more important than the
next - since the movement known as the Boko Haram moved to demonstrate
quite unambiguously that it had declared war, not merely on the state
corporation, but on Nigerian humanity – and do take note of the
difference! To take up arms against the state engages in a totally
different form of conduct from declaring war on a populace. In the
former, the people may indeed incur what is known as collateral damage –
one must be realistic – but they are never deliberately targeted for
destruction. Boko Haram has unleashed its rage against people,
indiscriminately, against humanity, specifically targeting institutions
established for adding value to the intellectual and scientific
potential of inert wealth that we have identified as being the material
base for the transformation of society.
So, let us indeed dismiss sentiment and tackle the hard, material
parameters of social value, treating humanity just as productive
resource that belongs to our joint corporation, and ask whether or not
society has a duty to pay especial attention to such assets, or leave
them to the whims and caprices of fluctuating assessment, to be disposed
of, and with brutish nastiness, by any one sector that feels aggrieved
for any reason, real or imagined, or in any cause that is considered
higher than that of the totality of one’s community.
The issue therefore is not whether one life is more important than
the next – no one, to the best of my recollection - even entered such an
ascription, so it is nothing but a cop-out invention of minds that
either approve of the slaughter of youth, or wish to shirk adult
responsibility. The issue is whether or not society accepts certain
responsibilities for its weaker members. Failure to fulfill those
responsibilities should be followed by abject remorse, not aggressive
repudiation and rhetorical deflection. Society is built on wealth, on
development of its resources. The one irreducible component, the lowest
common denominator of any source of, or nature of wealth, we continue to
emphasize is – human labour. Even when wealth is inherited and – as
the saying goes, made to work for you, as opposed to you working for
wealth, there is a chain, reaching back to origination, which, when
tugged, reveals at base a human value that has been responsible for the
production of such wealth. All we know is that, without that input, what
we call wealth would not even begin to exist. Even lottery is the
product of past labour, and if it happens to appreciate under the
custodianship of one beneficiary or the other, such wealth is not
virtual but grounded in a history of the labour – either of exploitation
and extortion, or assiduous, systematic, and rewarded labour, on the
material transformation of human initiatives. And by labour, we include
intellectual and other forms of specialized labour. However remote, all
wealth is built on it, and it can never be wished away, not even by
those who go to church and mosque, praying for a miracle to happen that
would turn them millionaires overnight.
When we speak of education, training, what exactly do we educate or
train? Robots? Even robots are the work of human intelligence and
inventiveness. We know that other animal species can be trained to
perform some tricks or routine chores. A trained elephant will lift
timber and deposit it where it is led. A Security dog can sniff drugs,
gunpowder and other contraband. Of all the creatures that can be made to
contribute to a nation’s economy however, only the human species has
the capacity to exercise its mind in a dynamic, creative manner.
Importance? Degree of importance? These are meaningless claims. When
taken to their illogical conclusions, they also justify attacks on
universities and all institutions of learning with the pronounced goals
of their permanent closure. If newly trained youths are available for
casual disposition, then what use are the institutions of learning, from
primary to tertiary? I think perhaps we should all simply burn them
down and enroll in the ranks of Boko Haram.
Finally, to round up -the theme of wealth – both inert and dynamic
takes one’s mind inevitably to Bakassi, that island that has become the
latest interrogatory for the lop-sided valuation of human worth in
relation to corporate accumulation and gains. For this nation in
particular, Bakassi remains a testing ground for corporate integrity.
The basic facts are no longer in dispute – there has been much fudging,
much elision, much false attribution and denial – all in order to avoid
taking responsibility for an actuality that no one can deny. The Bakassi
islands were not uninhabited spaces. The Bakassi islands were human
settlements, they existed not as wasteland but as homeland. And then,
they were traded off – a quite pertinent expression – traded off between
the leadership of Nigeria and the Cameroon corporations during the
civil war.
What I warned of at the time, the failure to have taken into
consideration the wishes of the people who actually inhabited and worked
that piece of real estate, turning its inert wealth into a dynamic
composite of their livelihood, has returned to haunt, not merely the
state, not merely the nation, but the international prospects for peace.
Reactions to what I said at the time focused, in the usual reductionist
way we have in this nation, on a side issue. That side issue was: I
declared had seen the official, authorized atlas of Nigeria from our own
side, signed by a former head of state – military - in the symbolic
green ink of office. The signature was that of the head of state who had
succeeded the original donor – which made it an affirmation of the
first act of excision. Every page – demography, contours, fauna and
flora, aerial view, lateral view, oceanographic map etc. had been
authenticated, and that the line of division between Nigeria and the
Cameroon enclosed the Bakassi islands within the acknowledged
geographical boundary of the Cameroons. My intervention was a necessary
act of citizen testimony, of sharing facts, since very few Nigerians
would have laid their eyes on that atlas even while they were singing
jingoistic national anthems. I therefore could not understand how the
government had hoped to succeed in the International Court at the Hague
on the terms on which the Nigerian case was argued.
However – and here we come to the crux – I asked the pertinent
question, were the wishes of the people who actually inhabit that space
taken into consideration when that head of state appended his signature
thereon? Were representatives of the indigenes invited to The Hague to
testify? The answer was No, thus vitiating whatever judgment that
learned body chose to pass, and no matter how many topographic maps the
Heads of the Nigerian state and the Cameroons had signed. The world no
longer lives in a feudal fiefdom. The rights of minorities and
indigenous peoples are encoded in the statutes of the United Nations.
The human deficit inserted into the Bakassi decision is now plagued with
unpredictable scenarios. Land does not speak, nor does it agitate. When
it does agitate, we all know what that means – convulsion. Well, human
beings also share some characteristics with Nature. Not in every aspect,
thank goodness, but certainly in matters of self-knowledge, deserving,
and self-fulfillment. The chickens have come to roost and the natives
are restless.
Nobody truly relishes being parted from what was once considered his,
or hers, or had grown to relate to as a part of one’s self – not even
where it has been grafted, not organic. Unless of course that part is
more liability than asset, then we cannot wait for the surgical
excision. That conceded, let us recognize that no amount of posturing,
war-hoops and other forms of nationalist jingoism can substitute for the
claims of community over the land that its people have worked and which
has sustained its members for generations, irrespective of what other
material is later found to be hidden within its earth. Is it not ironic?
Much of the nationalist rhetoric that we heard at the time of the Hague
judgment was a mere regurgitation of the credo of colonizing powers,
most robustly articulated by the British empire builders in those
memorable words: what we have, we hold. The irony of how ‘we’ came to
have, or the morality of hanging onto what we ‘hold’, despite the
dubious origins of such possessions, the cost of holding on to it at all
costs, as colonizing powers have found to their cost, the consequence
on future relationships between the contending claimants – all these
tend to remain beyond the logical considerations of the owners of
disputed
The ones we must beware however are those upon whom none of this is
ever lost, but who did urge, and still urge the nation to go to war over
Bakassi, knowing that they are safe from being compelled to put their
money where their mouths are either through volunteerism or conscription
for the campaign for Greater Nigeria, or even through donations to the
war chest. They knew the score from the beginning, and had been
responsible for dragging the nation through a costly and protracted
litigation in their own interest, for reasons that were neither
patriotic nor legalistic but extremely renumerative. Do not take my
word for it.
The then Head of Nigeria’s version of the KGB cum MI5 etc etc, M.D.
Yusuf has placed it on public record that, among those who urged the
nation so stridently to defy the judgment of the international court
were indeed those who enjoyed lucrative retainerships from the state.
Were they ever interested in the people? Did they care for the humanity
of Bakassi? Of course not. The views that I expressed at the time, and
to which I still adhere, is that neither Nigeria nor the Cameroon had a
modicum of just rights over the slab of real estate known as Bakassi.
The crucial question that the International Court does not appear to
have considered remains this: what do the people of Bakassi want for
themselves? To become Cameroonians?
To become Nigerians? Or simply to remain Bakassians? Bakassi became a
focus of interest and desire only because of her oil reserves and the
greed of state corporations – presented as national interest.
So, let the next act commence. The final date of appeal is still
ahead. It is within legitimate rights that the Nigerian corporation
should appeal the judgment. This time round however, let the suppressed
voice of Bakassi’s humanity be heard. There is a certain procedure known
as Plebiscite. Simple, straightforward, and full of precedents – a
time-tested reversal of the pattern of human deficit! Let us give voice
to the people of Bakassi.
Once again, both to the people of Bakassi, and to our celebrant, I
offer you Tai Solarin’s enigmatic prayer of human solidarity: May your
road be rough!
