9th April, 2014
A book, Yoruba Elites and Ethnic Politics In Nigeria: Obafemi Awolowo And Corporate Agency, will be presented to the public in Lagos on 17 April. Its author, Wale Adebanwi, Associate Professor at the University of California-Davis, USA, speaks to NKRUMAH BANKONG-OBI on the book and its theme
Your book centres on ethnicity, one of the very divisive elements in the Nigerian socio-political culture today. To what extent does it patch up the suspicion that exists between the groups that make up the country?
I didn’t write the book to “patch up” suspicions, to use your phrase. That was not my purpose. My primary task as a student of society is to explain and interpret. If people are able to “patch up” their suspicions, then you are happy that your explanation and interpretation have helped in that process. But you cannot overstate your capacity or even the potential of your explanation and interpretation as a scholar. I guess you shouldn’t understate it, either. Yet, you cannot assume that explanation and interpretation, where these are even fundamental and brilliant, can help every society in solving its particular problems. However, it is critical for the student of society that she provides the basis for problem-solving, or, in fact, provoke that crucial process of problem-solving, if not immediately, then hopefully at some point in the future.
However, when you consider the underlying crisis of our society, you realise that, for the student of society and the public intellectual, the task is actually not to “patch up” suspicions, but to provoke further suspicions, especially regarding power and its associated formations. The scholar is not a peacemaker. In fact, in a sense, she should be a “trouble-maker”; make trouble for power and through this push society towards providing answers for nagging social problems.
This book is about a particular elite group. It happens to be one of the most progressive elite formations in the country and its late leader, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, undoubtedly, is one of most far-sighted, most capable and visionary public administrators that Africa has ever produced. And I write against the grain of the usual suspicions of elite groups as perpetual conspirators against the masses. Yet, as it was evident even when Awo was alive, and more so since his passing, the group, in its various mutations, is one that has failed to “patch things up,” even while, for a long time, reflecting the assumed solidarity and solidity of its corporate agency.
I also take up the issue of ethnicity, which you are raising here as a problem. Ethnicity in itself is not a problem. It is the particular trajectory of the politicisation of ethnicity that produces the kind of challenges, including suspicions among groups, which you pointed out.
From your analysis of Chief Awolowo’s contribution to the Yoruba and Nigeria in general, do you, with the benefit of anthropological and sociological expertise you have brought to bear on the book, foresee the emergence of another politician of Awo’s stature in Nigeria today?
I am not sure if we need another Awo. He helped in blazing the trail. He theorised the conditions of collective good life in an African context and showed the practical processes and possibilities of that in the context of the Western Region. For reasons that we all know, some believed that the kind of possibilities that Awo and his team created in Western Region of Nigeria must never be replicated all over Nigeria; they insisted that such good life must not be shareable across cultures, regions and faiths. They succeeded partly, but failed in other respects. They succeeded in ensuring that Nigeria continued to fail in meeting what Awo saw as the country’s manifest destiny. However, they failed woefully in defeating his ideas. As the great poet, Odia Ofeimun, never tires in reminding us, all the major ideas about the total organisation of the Nigerian society that are defensible today were Awo’s ideas or ideas that he first defended and recommended as the best ideas to be embraced in creating a liveable country. When he first proposed federalism and defended it stoutly as the best form of political arrangement for a multi-ethnic state such as Nigeria, he was dismissed as a “Pakistanist”. Today, even the most unrepentant “unitarist” in practice, would claim to be a federalist in principle. When he proposed that the welfare of the citizens must be sole purpose of government, and fleshed that out through egalitarian social policies in the area of education and health care, he was attacked as a “socialist” who was making proposals that the resources of the state could not support. But today, even those who have no plan to implement egalitarian programmes must speak to it when they campaign for votes. Awo’s ideas have becoming the ruling ideas of the age, even among his most vociferous adversaries. The tragedy is that they are not prevailing practices.
He was also an alliance-builder, despite what those who lack the open mind to read Nigerian history have been saying. The only difference between Awo and other alliance-builders in the country, as I point out in the book, is that Awo always insisted that certain common principles must be the starting point of alliance-building, rather than power. He didn’t like to move from “let us do whatever we can to get power first”. No, Awo would start from “What do we do with power when we get it?” Many people forget today that when the Action Group first publicised its agenda if it formed government, the spokesperson of other parties in the immediate pre-independence era were laughing at the party. How can a party be elaborating what it would do in power before getting to office, they queried. But by the next round of elections, the other two parties also had their own cardinal programmes. This devotion to an agreement of first principles before the pursuit of power was a major challenge of his politics. In the context of Nigeria, many would see that as rigidity or inflexibility. Yet, the man has had much more to say to us, even in death, about how to create a society that will not hurt so many people, than all his contemporaries.
Even though he was a man for all times, Awo was also a product of a particular period of history. You cannot recreate that. It is the same with Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe and the Sardauna, Sir Ahmadu Bello. You cannot recreate a Zik? How do you combine such dazzling mind and fine oratory with a powerful pen in a fascinating cosmopolitan character? As for the Sardauna, who again can ever wield that kind of awesome quasi-spiritual and temporal authority over such a vast region and combine that with a virtual veto power over what happens in the rest of the country? Therefore, rather than trying to create another Awo, what we need are resourceful leaders who can face the challenges of their own time by using the ideas and examples of a visionary like Awo, and also reconstruct those ideas, in responding to emergent and pressing socio-economic and political obligations.
What do you consider the very basic exigencies that the political elites must take care of to make Nigeria better today?
One hundred years after the amalgamation, Nigerian political elites, at least some significant formations of the political elites, are still afraid of asking fundamental questions about the country. They say that some issues relating to Nigeria are not up for debate. Nigeria is eternal, we are told! If we can’t reconstitute it, can we not also rethink it? A country has become an embarrassment to its citizens, yet you say you cannot reconstitute it. The much-vaunted “patriots” who are opposed to reconstituting or rethinking Nigeria ought to realize that the only chance that the country has of surviving as a corporate entity is the path of reconstitution and rethinking.
To accuse those who want Nigeria to begin to answer to its endless possibilities of wishing to end Nigeria’s history is so puerile. You wonder why those who make these accusations cannot see that, to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, this country cannot long endure with about ten percent of the people free, while about ninety percent under the bondage of poverty, want, illiteracy, ignorance, disease, superstition, and so on. Indeed, there are those who want this country to be dismembered, and they are entitled to their wishes.
There is something about us as Nigerians, despite all the divisions and acrimony, which excites one. Everywhere you go in the world, you can almost always identify a Nigerian, even from afar. Our bravura, our expressiveness, our gaiety, even our conceit! Who wants to lose that? But, at the same time, how can we have such a territorial space bustling with such amazing natural, not to talk of human, resources that are constantly handed over to the most incompetent among us to look after? Take a look at the photograph of those people, all former heads of state, who showed up at the centenary celebration with President Goodluck Jonathan. I am keeping their joint photo-op for my children. If their own children asked them, when I am gone, what happened to their fatherland, one way to start explaining things is to bring out the photograph of the current and all the living former heads of state in 2014. That will do some part of the explaining that needs to be done.
Some analysts do not see anything corporate about the way the Nigerian state is run. They say it’s a band of gangsters, conglomeration of corrupt elements and so on. What’s your view? Also, if your study includes the present-day Nigeria, what is your description of the corporate agency?
What I mean by “corporate agency” in the book, Yoruba Elites and Ethnic Politics in Nigeria: Obafemi Awolowo and Corporate Agency, comes from a specific scholarly description of “corporation”, not the business sense of the word “corporate” that is common. But it is related. As I explain in the book, in the discipline of anthropology, the unilineal descent group is the classic corporate group. The concept of corporate group in defining a group of people comes from Max Weber’s concept of verband, which etymologically in German means a “relation”, “bandage”, or “link”. While being composed of individuals, a corporate group has a specific bounded character which makes it possible for it to act like a super-individual. Even in law, that is what is called a corporation. Here, I use the concept to capture a socio-cultural and political collective that acts as a corporate group, and that also possesses corporate agency. The corporate agency of the Yoruba (progressive) power elite in Afenifere or any other configuration is organised centrally around two intertwined ideas. The first is the past and continuing agency of this dominant corporate agent, Chief Awolowo. The second is reflected in the processes and structures through which the members of the groups organising in the name of Awo interact and struggle for power in Yorubaland and in Nigeria.
The book engages in both historical and contemporary analyses of the Yoruba political elites, including the political life of key actors like Awolowo, Chief Bola Ige, Alhaji Lateef Jakande, Chief Adekunle Ajasin, Chief Abraham Adesanya, Chief MKO Abiola, Sir Olaniwun Ajayi, Chief Ayo Adebanjo, Senator Bola Tinubu, the AD governors and the current governors in southwestern Nigeria and many others. It, of course, includes the analysis of the relationship between these Yoruba elites and the political elites of other parts of Nigeria and other important actors in Nigeria such as Major General Shehu Musa Yar’Adua, General Ibrahim Babangida, President Olusegun Obasanjo, etc. There is a chapter that is devoted to “How to Be (and how not be) a proper Yoruba” which attempts to exhaustively explain the relationship between President Obasanjo and Chief Bola Ige in relation to the Awolowo camp in Nigerian politics. Another chapter looks at the emergence and dominance of Tinubu in the politics of the Southwest and the rest of Nigeria. These are the chapters that deal with post-Awo politics.
I started the study in 2003 and ended it last year. Even though the initial manuscript was ready in 2012, I kept revising and adding materials until last year. It is interesting, for instance, that the introduction to this book starts with a press statement delivered in 2012 by General Alani Akinrinade calling for the convocation of a national conference. By some coincidence, the book is being released at a point when that call has been heeded and the General is a member of the conference. It is another coincidence that, before the announcement of the conference, we had decided that General Akinrinade would chair the public presentation of the book.
…Published in TheNEWS magazine