Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 285

“We Are All Many Things” – An Interview with Nadia Davids

“In Cape Town there’s 800,000 plus / A large population we’re starting a nation / … half of the Cape is Arabian,” raps Youngsta CPT (government name: Riyadh Roberts) on his new single, “Arabian Gang$ter.” The rapper is one of a new generation of South African creatives of Muslim background who interact matter-of-factly with their social identity. They don’t foreground or explain what it is like to Muslim in South Africa; it is part of the background of their lives. Like the poet and literary scholar Gabeba Baderoon (who happened to have written a book about Islam’s history in South Africa from the advent of colonialism, through slavery), the poet and writer Rustum Kozain, or the writer Nadia Davids.

For the latter it started with the play “At her feet” (2002), in which one actress portrays multiple roles (mother, teenager, daughter) to make visible the complex lives of Muslim women in Cape Town. As Davids wrote at the time: “When I first began to think about writing a play about Muslim women, the world was reeling from the aftermath of September 11… I began to think very deeply about my place in the world, about the religion that I had been born into, about the country that I called home, and about the major and minor moments that had shaped me as a woman… about growing up in Cape Town, what it means to share one’s stories, and what happens when someone else’s life moves you to rethink your own.” Since that play, Davids completed a PhD. (on memory and forced removals in which her family were victims), moved to New York and then London to teach drama at Queen Mary University of London and has just returned to Cape Town. She also wrote a play about Cissie Gool, a mid-century Cape Town political activist. Now she has written her first novel, “An Imperfect Blessing,” which plot spans the late 1980s through the early 1990s and tells the story of a Cape Town family at the intersection of late Apartheid and South Africa’s political transition. It continues some of the same themes of her earlier work. This interview was conducted over email.

The novel takes place during late Apartheid and in the final period of “ constitutional negotiations, ” a period of intense politicization. Why write a novel about this period?

1986 to 1993 felt like a lifetime when I was a child but it was really only a handful of years and during that time we moved from being one kind of country into another. 1986 was a particularly bad year; Apartheid reached the apogee of its ruthlessness: government crackdowns, rolling states of emergency, killing with impunity, and an aggressive insistent denial from officials that any of it was happening. I wanted to write about that time and twin it with the run-up to our first democratic election. Those initial months in 1993 were intense, disorientating, exhilarating and that early nineties combination of hard-earned optimism and fraught compromise is difficult to describe today: people can be quite cynical about it (rightly so, I suppose) but it wasn’t a simple transition at all – it was bloody and dangerous and full of arguments about the right course of action. At the same time there were these moments of euphoria and fierce relief that things were changing. I come from a sort of “in-between” generation in South Africa: young enough when Apartheid ended to have not experienced the full force of its cruelty, but old enough to remember it, to have had intimate contact with it, to have witnessed what it did to the adults in my world, to understand the distortive generational damage it effected on people and communities. I came of age feeling this simultaneous fury at injustice, jubilation that is was “over”, and intense gratitude to everyone who’d gone before. The novel was a way of thinking about that time, holding it in my view, but also about telling a small family story that looked at art and activism and difficult choices, about the flow between those things, a way of asking how ordinary people were affected by that system.

I think of the book as sitting somewhere between memory and imagination, where writing is an act of remembrance, a process of turning over particular memories and then re-crafting those memories through fiction. Most of it was written when I lived away from Cape Town and I think I was trying to understand the city of my birth, its brokenness, its survival, its cruelty, its beauty, its impossible strangeness… Cape Town is an uncanny place, the past and the present are always entangled, the landscape seems to move constantly between the invitation to remember and the demand to forget and that remembering and forgetting has always been racially coded. When I write history, I always find it interesting to ask who is doing the remembering, how they are going about remembering and who would rather forget.

At the time of writing the novel there just wasn’t much fiction about that period set in the Cape Muslim community; sometimes you have to write your own history into being. It’s one way to push back against invisibility.

At another level, the novel is about how communities or families existed under Apartheid. At its heart its most vivid descriptions are of the everyday; and probably the most layered scene is that of the wedding. What does looking at regular, everyday life reveal about the dynamics of this time period?

I remember asking an aunt of mine who was in high-school during the 1976 uprising and who lived on the Cape Flats throughout the 1980s about how she coped with the constant army presence, with the incessant state violence, and her response was to shrug and say, “It was terrible, but life went on.” She wasn’t being at all dismissive; it was a very real answer about how people often live in and through conflict, how they negotiate the steady hum of a low-grade civil war, how their understanding of “normal” changes.

It’s a question that goes to the novel’s core: what was the everyday? What was ordinary? What was normal? How was it possible that the everyday functioned within the confines of an abnormal system? Yet it did. Somehow. It was normal to have everyday life infused by state violence, by racism. (For a large number of South Africans, it still is). It was ordinary to go to school and sometimes have that school shut down by the army, to have private relationships take place under the auspices of racially codified unions. But there was also resistance and so much of that resistance was precisely about refusing to normalize that immoral system.

I’m interested in the every-day, in sketching the ordinary against the backdrop of the abnormal: what it was like to ride an Apartheid bus as a child, to walk past your demolished home, to love someone who fell under a different racial classification, to go the beach not only to unwind but as an act of defiance…

You mention the wedding; it takes place when Apartheid’s laws have been dismantled and the atmosphere is celebratory, light-hearted, the focus in on food, fashion, gossip, but Apartheid and its aftermath is imprinted on everything: from the choice of venue, to the conversations people have. That chapter tries to thread together a few ideas; the everyday, the characters’ first brush with feminism, small victories, teenage alliances and rebellions, community pressures, the first conversations about the TRC. But it also tries to find the funny because I’ve always been intrigued by how humor functions under these kinds of circumstance: laughter in a politically untenable situation is a subversive refusal to be cowed, a gloriously self-affirming act.

This novel could not have taken place anywhere other than in Cape Town. Can you talk about the place of Cape Town in South African literature and in South Africa in general?

Cape Town is equal parts fascinating and infuriating: it’s at once incredibly beautiful, historically dense and famously segregated. It’s a city of dark beginnings founded through a combination of the systemized slaughter of indigenous people, a mercantile slave trade and long-term colonialism that eventually morphed into Apartheid. It was also, as a result of all these crimes, one of the most culturally and racially heterogamous places on earth by the 1800s.

It’s the sort of place that invites multiple tellings precisely because its inhabitants experience the city so differently. Capetonians do not have a shared set of fictions about the city; our imaginations reproduce our lived segregations. A rather banal example: a few days ago friend and I were reminiscing about how when we were growing up we would jokingly describe black or coloured neighborhoods through the prism of a white name: back then, Fairways was the “The Coloured Constantia,” Walmer Estate was the “Black Bishopscourt,” so was Malunga Park in Gugs, but if we then named those neighborhoods by their actual names to white South Africans, most wouldn’t know what we were talking about… I don’t know if the same things would happen today, but there is something in that, I think, about the way in which people of color knew this city. There was a deeper knowledge, a stronger sense of its difference, a more acute read of its geography. We knew more of it. We had to.

A more literary example would be this: I remember reading South African writer Stephen Watson’s lament that Cape Town had somehow resisted literary narration or that those who had attempted to narrate it had failed to capture it, to language it, and I was struck at how profoundly differently I had grown up experiencing the city. Because for me, Cape Town had always been a deeply storied place. My family ensured that the city full of inscription and dense with narrative. And those stories were always populated by people and in that telling, a web of community and place and time would be spun. Some of that storytelling-particularly around forced removal was, I think, a kind of gentle pushback at enforced discontinuity and loss, some of it was about establishing a sense of ownership in a hostile environment and some of it was just joyous. Maybe Watson was drawing a line between orality and literature; I suppose that’s possible, but I’m also a theatre person so I don’t really understand those distinctions. I wonder sometimes if theatre is actually in a fundamental way better positioned to tell South African stories… but that’s another discussion altogether.

There were certainly books set in Cape Town that I thought about when I was writing the novel, like Zoe Wicomb’s You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, Alex la Guma’s In the Fog of a Season’s End, and, (albeit very obliquely) J.M.Coetzee’s Disgrace. But the literary work that really forms the bedrock of the novel is Rustum Kozain’s poem The Blessing, a poem of and for Cape Town. It’s an incredibly strong evocation of the cityscape, its discontents, its difficulties, its startling beauty and breathtaking cruelty, its betrayals and promises and the novel is an attempt to respond to that poem.

So you’re right: mine is a hyper-local, tight study of Cape Town, focused on a sub-section of the city; the ruins of District Six, Obs house parties, buying gatbys, going to club matinees, cars as social space, mosques and churches, collecting money on Eid.

But it’s only one of many, many versions of Cape Town. I’m incredibly excited about the new spate of novels about the city that have been coming out for the last few years: CA Davids’ The Blacks of Cape Town, Masande Ntshanga’s The Reactive, Henrietta Rose Innes’ Green Lion.

All these works build a new literary imaginary of and around the city. Writing different versions of Cape Town, connecting neighborhoods, suburbs, communities deliberately disconnected by Apartheid, sharing stories that disrupt, comfort, confirm, engage, disorientate would go a little way to re-building what was broken. I’m optimistic that way; I’ve never not believed Michele de Certau’s perfect little aphorism, “What the map cuts up, the story cuts across.”

In a recent interview in the South African Mail & Guardian , Ebrahim Rasool, outgoing South African ambassador to the United States, said: “South Africa has been this wonderful laboratory for Islam, which has found a high point under democracy and freedom – for Muslims to perfect the art of integration without assimilation and isolation; for Muslims to live with the wonderment of many identities and not a single religious identity. I mean, which other country would have Hashim Amla as the captain of their cricket team or Nizaam Carr coming off the reserves bench for the rugby team? These are symbols that are so taken for granted in South Africa … but do you know how it rocks the world of eight million American Muslims and 15 million French Muslims?”  Your novel explores aspects of that history. What do you make of Rasool’s comments?

I think Rasool is right to be optimistic. There are few other countries as alert to Islamophobia or as instinctively and inclusively protective of its Muslim citizens as South Africa. There’s a confidence that Cape Muslim communities have about being simultaneously Muslim and South African, an ease in those identities that comes from a deep sense of belonging and historical entanglement. Which is to say that the historical matrix that allowed for “integration without assimilation and isolation” (Islam, colonialism, slavery and the struggle against Apartheid and in more shameful instances, complicity with oppression, with racism and racist practice) are all intertwined. Gabeba Baderoon’s wonderful book, Regarding Muslims explores exactly this. The novel does speak to some of those histories, but not entirely by design: that’s a by-product of a narrative in which the central characters are Muslim. If anything, I wanted to normalize Islam, normalize Muslim family life, to show that people within one family can have radically different views on love, faith, politics, to suggest that any identity is formed at a nexus of a number of different forces. Perhaps this is what Rassool means by a “laboratory.” We are all many things. How could we not be?

Irregular boundaries

The sahara (cricket) stadium in durban. Image credit Zahir Mirza via Flickr.

Now in Maytime to the wicket

Out I march with bat and pad:

See the son of grief at cricket

Trying to be glad.

– A.E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad

In the early 1970s, almost every summer weekend, I made the journey from the centre of Durban to the Springfield grounds. Springfield is now home to massive business complexes and highways hemming it into the city sprawl, but in the early 1970s, it was very much on the outskirts. Six or seven games of cricket were played, simultaneously, on ancient matting wickets, according to rules first written in the eighteenth century. There were no sightscreens. Irregular boundaries were marked by misshapen whitewashed stones. Clumps of grass and mole-hills hid crevices that tested the most flexible of ankles. In a script that veered between comedy and tragedy, I could not wait to get the call to don my whites and be drawn into the drama of a Springfield middle.

On a Saturday afternoon, you would arrive and drag the mat from a wood and iron shed. The mats were crusty and mouldy and came in all sorts of grotesque shapes. We would lay the mat on the pitch. The holes were huge. If you tried for a quick single, more often than not you would get stuck, so you had to run alongside the pitch. This meant running in the direction of cover and then veering back to the pitch. We were playing cricket but running like baseball players.

It was impossible to play cover drives that stuck to the turf. The ground was too spotted with holes and mounds. To score, one had to loft the ball.

This created its own problems. Once a big-hitter was in, the fielders in the adjacent ground needed eyes in the back of their heads. The fields were on top of each other with no sightscreens, so as the sun descended, one sometimes saw two bowlers coming at you.

What did a fifty mean under these conditions? What did five wickets mean when you managed to hit the hole in the mat and turn the ball sharper than Shane Warne?

Occasionally, my father and I would go to Old Kingsmead, the cathedral of white cricket. Here was a completely different world of wonder; turf wickets, picket fences, sight-screens, a scoreboard that flashed lights while invisible hands moved the score. Everything was so beautifully white, pristine and ordered. My father carved out a space under the clock for us to sit. A small blanket, two paper cups and a bottle of Coo-ee forming our own boundary within the tiny non-white section.

I watched the Springboks (as the national team was then still called) crush the Australians here in 1970. It was my joy also to witness many a provincial innings by the majestic Barry Richards.

During one provincial game against the Transvaal, my father, who was light of hue, snuck into the White area in search of a cup of tea. On his way back, he was man-handled and unceremoniously pushed over the fence, all the while trying to hold onto the cup of tea. People on both sides of the divide clapped and laughed. He took his place on the blanket, this most gentle of men, and without saying a word, picked up the binoculars to follow Mike Proctor’s run-up that started near the sight-screen. In one of my father’s greatest gifts to me, C.L.R. James’ Beyond a Boundary, I marked these words: ‘The British tradition soaked deep into me was that when you entered the sporting arena you left behind the sordid compromises of everyday life. Yet for us to do that we would have to divest ourselves of our skins.’

We never went back. The incident sparked a sense that, in order to understand the game, one required more than a pair of binoculars. Yet it never killed my passion for the game. How could it, given that its first seeds were planted in a son’s fond memories of trips to the ground with his father and nourished by a whole boyhood’s excitement and play?

In 1990, as Nelson Mandela strode out of prison, Springfield and Kingsmead edged closer. In 1991, the two worlds of cricket united, at the top at least. After years of sports boycotts against South Africa, international recognition beckoned.

When India toured in 1992/93, we went to Old Kingsmead, my father and I. He was like a child; taking in everything, as we perched high up on the Umgeni end. As was his way, avoiding trouble, he insisted on bringing his own flask of tea.

These stories, small as an individual spectator, played themselves out everywhere in South Africa, lost against the dramatic backdrop of apartheid coming to an end, Mandela meeting de Klerk and cricket supremo Ali Bacher meeting the ANC’s sports commissar, Steve Tshwete.

The game ended. My dad spied other men on the stands with whom he had batted through the 1960s and 1970s. They clasped hands. They spent a long time looking down at the empty pitch and then said goodbye. Men who played the game with such dignity, under conditions that mocked them. As I helped him into the car, little did we know that he would never see Kingsmead again, as Parkinson’s enveloped his body and eventually ended his life.

In post-apartheid South Africa, I avidly followed the Proteas as they made their way to the World Cup in Australia and wherever else in the world pitches were laid, boundaries marked out and willow swung. Expectations at home were high that the deep creases of inequality in the game would be steadily ironed out by the rollers of development and transformation, buzzwords that were all the rage at cricket headquarters in Johannesburg.

This book is an account of cricket in post-apartheid South Africa; from the tumultuous Gatting tour in which, ironically, the seeds of cricket unity were sown, to the Hansie Cronje saga and the change of leadership from Ali Bacher to Gerald Majola, and more recently to Haroon Lorgat.

It is a story of a new pitch; a quick start full of hope, followed by a steady erosion of the commitments needed to fulfil the promise of a level playing field. Economic and political compromises contributed to holding back the piercing of the covers of race and class privilege. Alongside this, the hurried hollowing out of the “politics of cricket”, aided by Black administrators assuming the accoutrements of office, saw very little internal challenge to the lack of transformation.

Meanwhile, global realignments in cricket initially gave South Africa some respite. But soon, the big three of Australia, England and India were collaborating to claim the lion’s share of global funding, thus limiting even further the resources necessary for development in the domestic game.

In a sense, we are back to the Springfield-Kingsmead divide. But there will be no posthumous honours, however grudgingly given, to lovers of the game who are keeping it alive in townships or side streets. Those whose innings are defined by lumpy mats and broken gear garner far less sympathy or note. For is cricket not now open to all, just like the Ritz Hotel; a game of money, dazzle, dancing girls and quick results?

* This is an extract from Reverse Sweep (Jacana, 2017).

Weekend Music Break No.104

Weekend Music Break is back to our regularly scheduled programming. Just a playlist of ten great songs and visuals from across Africa and its diaspora!

1) This week we start out with Malian legend Oumou Sangaré’s first release in seven years — and to top it off, she appears with Tony Allen in tow!

2) Then we head to Kenya where Muthoni channels a bit of (UK singer) MIA to call out corrupt politicians in her home country.

3) Up next, MHD and crew head from Paris to Manchester, rocking a Paul Pogba jersey, and showing the Brits the French-African flavor their gonna miss out on as they start the EU exit process this week.

4) But London-based Mazi Chukz shows that the British-Africans can hold their own when it comes to stews.

5) Back to the continent across from London, French rapper of Ivorian origin briefly drops the US-inspired trap beats to join the Coupe Decale resurgence going on in Paris (led by MHD).

6) Let’s head back to our continent now, alongside Wizkid who takes on a journey as he plays stadium shows across the continent.

7) Back home in Nigeria Lil’ Kesh makes an appeal for no fake love!

8) Cassper Nyovest does his best I’m from Atlanta impression with Tito Mboweni.

9) Let’s calm down from that a bit and head to Tidiane Thiam’s and Amadou Binta Konte in Senegal, and enjoy a more stripped down sound: one guitar, a hoddu and a microphone.

10) And let’s close out this week’s playlist with my current home of Brazil, and a who’s who of Afro-Brazilian rappers of many different stripes. Here they’re making an appeal for better and more and equal representation in their own country.

Ghanaians put their arms around New York

Kwame Nkrumah

“New Yorkers Put Arms Around Dr. K. Nkrumah” read the June 1951 New York Amsterdam News report about the future president of Ghana’s stop in the city. Nkrumah’s itinerary took him to his Alma Mater, Lincoln University, where he gave the commencement speech and was conferred an honorary degree. Unlike on his maiden journey to America where his stop in the city was to find shelter on the way to college in Pennsylvania, Nkrumah held audience with Mayor Vincent R. Impellitteri in his private quarters at City Hall.

On a recent Thursday evening, 66 years later and commemorating the 60th anniversary of Ghana’s independence, Nkrumah’s spirit was on display at the City Hall Chambers where the city’s council members meet. Interior decorations of the city’s insignia, a golden frieze as well as figures from the ceiling’s murals looked unto an audience of about 150 people lead by Bronx Council Member Vanessa L. Gibson, Bronx District Attorney Darcel D. Clark, a contingence from the Ghanaian Permanent Mission to the United Nations as well as community leaders from all the boroughs.

At a podium in front of the New York City, New York State and American flags as well a towering statue of Thomas Jefferson, Mohammed Lamin Ali in a white Kufi and stripped black and white batakari channeled the revolutionary Ghanaian leader. He dramatized and recited his speech at the dawn of independence (“we must realize from now on we are no longer a colonial but free and independent people”) that incited the crowd to cheers.

While at Lincoln University, Nkrumah would often travel down to Harlem. Here, the theology student would most often preach in local churches as he did back in Philadelphia, but perhaps just as importantly, he met thinkers like CLR James and Arturo Schomburg, encountered a thought of Marcus Garvey and was inspired by a pride for Africa that stood in sharp contrast with the colonial situation back in the Gold Coast.

Today, according to the Bronx Council Member Vanessa L Gibson, 30,000 of the 235,000 Ghanaian immigrants to the US call New York City home. “We are all Africans through our culture and it is not about the birth certificate” said the councilwoman overseeing the 16th District, which has one of the highest concentration of Ghanaians in the city. She cited Nkrumah’s famous declaration that “I am not African because I was born in Africa, but because Africa was born in me” to drive the point home.

The Councilwoman issued Proclamations from the City recognizing Professor Yaw Nyarko of NYU and H.E Martha Ama Akyaa Pobee for their “incredible contributions to the city.” Dr Nyarko a professor of Economics at NYU is Co-Director of the Development Research Institute as well as the founding director of NYU’s Africa House. H.E Martha Pobee, a 30 year veteran of Ghana’s foreign service and currently Ghana’s Ambassador and Permanent Representative to the UN, dedicated her recognition to “Ghanaian women everywhere.”

“My presence here” she added, “is a testament to what women can do if they apply themselves and if they are given the support by their country and people.” Emphasizing her amazement to be “honored by a people with whom we were linked centuries ago” she mentioned the spiritual connection she feels to African Americans today and joked about confusing Black Americans on the street often for old friends from Kumasi.

Also citing Nkrumah’s 6th of March speech that “the independence of Ghana is meaningless unless it is linked up with the total liberation of Africa” Mr. Victor Essien, a law professor from Fordham University who was also honored on the night instructed the audience in his keynote to keep in mind “as we Ghanaians accept this honor, to think that this recognition is meaningless unless it it is linked with the recognition of all immigrants, be they Muslim, Christian or Jew;  Africans, Europeans or Asians.” He cited the examples of former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, Victor Lawrence, Thomas Mensah and other Ghanaian immigrants to the US who had achieved global acclaim to convey that the “success of Ghanaian immigrant population is a part of long story of immigrants in America.” The 30,000 Ghanaians might not be of Nkrumah’s star power, but like other immigrants crucial to the economy of this city and the country as a whole, they are the ones putting their arms around New Yorkers.

Brave new world

Image via End Deportations website.

In Pakistani writer Moshin Hamid’s prescient new novel, Exit West, two young lovers confront a world being torn apart by conflict and inequality and re-made through migration. Part of the book is set in a future London very much like today’s London, where people who’ve arrived from other countries wait to see if the violence of “the nativists” will force them out. Standing between them and possible physical confrontation, as well as the iron gates of detention centers, are the activists.

In the pre-Brexit and Trump world, activists from a variety of  movements (environmental, migration, and so on) across the West were often much maligned, dismissed in liberal and even Leftist circles as impractical and too idealistic, their movements rarely covered in the mainstream press. But in this new world we find ourselves in — where cruelty towards people on the move is now US and UK government policy  — direct action emerges as the necessary response.

On Tuesday night, 17 activists in Essex outside London evaded airport security and ran onto a runway at Stansted Airport, throwing their bodies on the tarmac and chaining themselves to a plane to prevent a government charter flight of approximately 50 Nigerian and Ghanaians — along with an estimated 100 guards, two per person — from departing. The UK government’s detention of people it deems irregular migrants or failed asylum-seekers is unique in Europe — with a sprawling system where people can be detained for indefinite periods of time. People in detention centers are often given no warning before receiving an order to report that same day for a flight out of the country. They don’t have time to say goodbye to family members or contact a lawyer. People on Tuesday’s flight included a man who had lived in the UK for 18 years, a lesbian woman who says her abusive ex-husband is waiting to kill her, and Lovelyn Edobor, a 49-year old woman who uses a wheelchair. The Guardian reported that when Lovelyn asked to use the airport bathroom, she was forced into a waist restraint belt and dragged along on a chain “like a goat.”

According to Emily Hall, a spokesperson for End Deportations, one of the group’s involved in Tuesday’s protest, temporarily halting a forced return may buy someone enough time to find the legal aid needed to challenge the deportation order. “It’s a last resort tactic,” said Hall. “But buying someone even 24 hours can help.” The activists could only purchase this time through putting their bodies on the line; they were subsequently all arrested.

Although elements of the UK’s program are unique, the UK is not alone in Europe in trying to get rid of people it deems unworthy of residence. Germany has signed numerous agreements with other countries to facilitate deportations of failed asylum seekers and migrants, and in early 2017 has sent asylum-seekers back to Afghanistan. A draft law presented last week to the German parliament would enforce even stricter deportation rules. Meanwhile, Austria wants to stop providing food and water to people whose asylum claims are rejected, and is debating requiring unemployed refugees to work unpaid at jobs the government deems “of public utility.” Otherwise known as slave labor.

When the state fails to treat people humanely, only individuals and civil society can step in. Will we witness the swelling and expansion of the anti-border movements in Europe and elsewhere as alternatives to governments ordering the stricter policing of non-native bodies?

In Germany, churches have increasingly begun protecting failed asylum-seekers with sanctuary, and the state has so far declined to physically remove people in the church’s care. As of January 2017, German churches were providing this protection for 547 people. Tuesday’s UK airport protest is another promising sign that people are willing to risk arrest to fight policies that tear families apart and endanger lives. “When you have insecure immigration status, you don’t have life,” said one of the men who was being deported on Tuesday’s blocked flight. “Your life is not considered important. It should not be like this. Human life is more important than immigration status.”

Is South African trade unionism at a turning point?

A strike is a “social phenomenon of enormous complexity which, in its totality, is never susceptible to complete description, let alone complete explanation.” The complexity of the meaning and implications of strikes often comes to the fore when offensive strikes – strikes where workers demand more than what they have in terms of wages and working conditions – force the attention of the state, capitalists and civil society. They lead to a varied interpretation not only of how events unfolded but also the impact they have made.

Strikes are a key manifestation of the class struggle over the distribution of national income and reform of the labor relations system. Offensive strikes can generate an extraordinary amount of pressure on the social system, which often leads to structural changes such as the reconfiguring of the industrial relations system, the economy or the political system. Such events are referred to here as a turning point.

In the immediate post-Apartheid period, the trend was for strikes to increase in frequency, with the highest number of strikes in South African history – 1,324 – taking place in 1998. From 2000 and 2009, however, strikes averaged 71 per annum, which was even lower than the 1960s, and these strikes were largely defensive in character.

Despite the low frequency of strike action, the year 2007 marked the beginning of a new militancy in pursuit of higher wages and benefits. The level of 2007 strikes was largely owing to the huge support for the offensive public service strike involving some 700,000 workers, which was closely followed by a more successful wave of 26 offensive strikes, mainly led by workers’ committees at FIFA 2010 World Cup construction sites.

While centralized bargaining and sectoral minimum-wage determinations continued to act as counterweights against strikes, the numbers of days lost due to industrial action accelerated from then. The 9.5 million days lost in 2007 more than doubled to 20.6 million by 2010. Most of the days lost in 2010 were, again, in the public sector, where some 1.3 million came out on another militant strike. What was significant about this strike was that the ANC (African National Congress), for the first time, could not control the affiliates of its major labor alliance partner, COSATU (the Congress of South African Trade Unions). Further, there was an unprecedented increase in the proportion of unprotected, mainly wildcat strikes from 44% in 2012 to 52% in 2013, 48% in 2014 and 55% in 2015. The increase in the number of days lost and the increase in the share of unprotected strikes are important indicators of a change in the mood of the working class.

The offensive wildcat strikes of December 2011 to April 2012 were heralded by post office workers’ committees against labor broking, which at the same time exposed the union’s lack of will to take up the struggle of non-standard workers. These workers ended the system of labor broking in the post office, ensured permanent employment of 5,000 workers and doubled the salaries of workers to R4,000 (about USD300). The post office strikers became the first group of workers in South African history to reverse labor broking in full and win a 100% wage increase.

Both the Lonmin strike and the Western Cape farmworkers’ strike started in August 2012. Rock drillers initiated a wildcat strike at Lonmin platinum mine in pursuit of wages of R12,500 a month. The strike was led by an independent strike committee and the recognized union, the NUM (National Union of Mineworkers), actively opposed the strike, siding with Lonmin management. On August 16, a peaceful assembly of workers was forcefully broken up by a special paramilitary task team who killed 34 mineworkers in what became known as the Marikana Massacre. This strike secured only a partial victory, with a 14% increase in wages.

The Western Cape farmworkers’ strike lasted from August 27, 2012 to January 22, 2013. The strike and the associated community uprising spread to 25 rural towns and was led largely by seasonal workers, coordinated by locally based vanguard groups. The farm workers’ strike was historic because it was the first strike-wave in the post-Apartheid period to deliberately unite workers and communities, and this forced the hand of government which announced a 52% increase in the daily minimum wage in the sector. In general, figures about the agricultural sector indicate a trend to stabilize employment along with a significant shift from casual and seasonal to permanent employment, marking the beginning of changes in the labor process brought about through the agency of farmworkers against capital.

A year after the farmworkers’ strike, on January 22, the longest and most expensive strike in South African history broke out in the platinum industry. The 70,000 strong, five-month long platinum strike hit 40% of global production. The stoppage dragged the economy into contraction in the first quarter of 2014 and cost the three companies affected almost R24 billion in lost revenue. The final agreement between AMCU (the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union) and the three platinum producers included a R1,000 per month wage increase, or 20% increase for lower earners.

On July 1, just more than a week after the platinum strike, 220,000 metal workers from NUMSA (the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa) downed tools, demanding a salary increase of 12%. The protected strike lasted for one month without pay and concluded with a 4% real wage increase. While labor brokers will not be banned as NUMSA had demanded, it was agreed that a number of regulatory instruments would be introduced, including the appointment of compliance officers to act on complaints of alleged abuse and noncompliance.

The Marikana strike-wave changed the political landscape and gave impetus to the nationwide 2015 Fees Must Fall protests at higher education institutions, later expanded by the Outsourcing Must Fall campaign. In the absence of leadership from NEHAWU (the National Health Education Allied Workers’ Union), workers were mainly led by workers committees calling for for insourcing at higher education institutions nationally. The combined actions by students, workers and academics ensured that almost all universities across South Africa agreed to end outsourcing on campuses and to employ workers with the same conditions as full-time workers, resulting in wage increases between 66% and 163%. This event was an expression of a new level of consciousness and unity, with significant implications for the power relations at tertiary institutions. It constitutes the third instance of a reversal of labor process restructuring in the current period.

Does the gradual increase in the number of strikes – starting in 2007, followed by the Marikana Massacre and the farmworkers’ revolt of 2012, the five-month platinum strike and the one-month metalworkers’ strike in 2014 – indicate that a new wave of offensive strikes has begun? Or is it just a short-lived revival among a depressing long wave of defensive strikes? Has South Africa reached a turning point?

Several structural dimensions are affected. On the economic side, we have seen direct challenges and changes to the labor process, and huge costs to the economy associated with strikes. At the industrial relations level, there is pressure from business and the formal opposition party, the DA (Democratic Alliance), to change the law to undermine the right to strike. On the other hand, in January 2015, the Labour Relations Amendment Act (No.6 of 2014) took effect to ensure that vulnerable groups of employees, especially those employed through labor brokers, get adequate protection. On the political level, a new opposition to the ANC, the EFF (Economic Freedom Fighters), was formed in 2013, and the militant NUMSA was expelled from COSATU in 2015, setting the stage for the launch of an alternative, politically independent federation. Finally, in the 2016 municipal elections, the support for the ANC as the manager of neoliberalism in South Africa fell, indicating a decline of hegemony.

While some have argued that the Marikana strike wave was not a turning point, they have limited their analysis to a formalistic view of the events as a specific labor dispute gone wrong, and cite the fact that the labor relations system remains intact. Other mainstream economists instead focus on the irrationality of the actions in terms of losses of incomes to workers. Does the fact that Marikana workers lost 12% of their annual wages, that R10 billion in wages were lost in the 2014 platinum strike, or that NUMSA workers only gained 4% in their one-month strike, relegate the strike waves to defensive incidents?

By focusing on the formalism of industrial relations and on economistic views, these perspectives fail to comprehend the complexity of strike dynamics and the historical process of class struggle that is being unleashed. As Karl Marx said in 1853 regarding the dynamic of strikes: “In order to rightly appreciate the value of strikes and combinations, we must not allow ourselves to be blinded by the apparent insignificance of their economical results, but hold, above all things, in view their moral and political consequences.”

* This is an edited version of a post that first appeared on the website of Global Labour University. It is republished here with the permission of the editors.

 

“Too deep for mere outrage”–on corruption in Nigeria

On May 27, 2015, on the eve of the inauguration of the current presidency of Muhammadu Buhari, Transparency International published a press statement meant to keep the incoming president engaged with the fight against corruption. Of the several figures published in that statement, perhaps the most staggering was that “more than US $157 billion in the past decade left [Nigeria] illicitly.” Persons or companies allied to the former president Goodluck Jonathan or his wife are currently under investigation or on trial for corruption enrichment. Earlier in March, the acting chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, was denied confirmation by the Senate, whose president, Bukola Saraki, is on trial before the Code of Conduct Bureau for alleged false declaration of assets. The following is an edited version of emailed questions and answers between Chuma Nwokolo, and myself reflecting on the pervasive nature of official corruption in Nigeria. The author of several books, most recently How To Spell Naija in 100 Letters, and the forthcoming The Extinction of Menai, Nwokolo is the founder of the anti-corruption initiative, Bribecode. He lives in Asaba, Delta State, Nigeria, the same state to which the convicted former governor James Ibori recently returned after serving time in a British jail on charges of money laundering.

Akin Adesokan (AA): Even before I saw your Facebook post “ A Cashew Dies ” on Friday, February 10, 2017, I had had this feeling, of a cruel, debilitating irony, that James Ibori should return to Asaba , the city where you live. An irony because of the particular sense of the comic absurdity in your fiction as I know it. So, this convicted felon returns to your city, which is also his city, as if f ate wants to try your poetic patience, or gift you with an irresistible but also confounding tale. And it should happen that you ’ re connected to BribeCode , the anti-corruption activist initiative. Tell me that the short post has no connection in the way I’m thinking.

Chuma Nwokolo (CN): My ancestral town is Ahaba, renamed Asaba by colonists. I like to think that the real Ahaba is dead and the new city represents part of a strange alien country still coming into being. James Ibori is indeed back home to Delta State. Although the rapturous reception reported in the news took place in his own hometown in Oghara, I have no doubt that he has popular support in the Delta State capital, Asaba, as well.

AA: So, you weren’t thinking of this strange, alien turn of things when you wrote the blog post? I’m trying hard not to put you on the spot, but I’m more taken with the challenge that the news of rapturous return and celebration ought to pose to anyone who is concerned about the scale of corruption in Nigeria, and is dedicated to addressing it, as you are. In short, do you wish to comment on Bribecode’s outlook in relation to the confounding level of corruption? Not only Ibori, but others as well?

CN: I certainly do. In discussing corruption in Nigeria, we must appreciate that we have do not merely have endemic corruption, we have a pandemic on our hands. This is why a corruption conviction triggers no opprobrium from church pulpit to street corner. In tackling corruption, indignation serves us poorly. Like 17th century Euro-America embracing and defending the abomination of slavery, our public has embraced an anomaly which they perceive as essential to their survival.

The public has “normalized” corruption because government and the apparatus of state is still largely perceived as a colonial institution. We can process the legal fact of independence, but our heart ownership of state and country is still an emotional fiction. So state brigandage and the bilking of billions from a national budget does not hit the streets with the emotional punch of the theft of a loaf of bread from a trader. So we lynch the bread thief, and hail the budget brigand, “chief,” especially if he throws loaves at us as he cruises past in a stolen limousine.

This is to say that the most successful politicians operate a Robin Hood model with two defining characteristics: First, they never steal alone – they recruit a merry band to whom they bequeath power, such that, in or out of office, they control the treasury and operate a charismatic godfather network whose loyalty is cultic in intensity. In this way, the so-called developmental process of institutionalization is checkmated by the reactionary process of institution-capture. Second, they never “chop” alone, either – they are famously generous with loot and the sundry spoils of office, such that citizens who feel no sense of loss at the theft of a billion Naira (the Nigerian currency) from their public treasury feel doubly grateful at the “gift” of a thousand Naira.

Bribecode’s outlook is to take a systemic approach to this problem of a “post autocratic stress syndrome” that makes citizens to deify their politicians and public servants despite the constitutional sovereignty of the citizen state. Recognizing that our most egregious corruption offenders actually occupy statehouses across the land, the Bribecode introduces mechanisms that allow ruinous penalties to be enforced against them and their partners-in-crime. Without successfully instituting this mechanism, the anti-corruption campaigner is the would-be rescuer of a drowning man who is also drowned by the public he is trying to help.

AA: I get the analogy about saving a drowning man, but would you consider the proposition that the anti-corruption campaigner isn ’ t necessarily helping the public, but is trying to fulfill his or her personal duty? One chooses not to be a thief or a robber because it ’ s not in one ’ s nature. I wonder if this level of abstraction might be a counter to the extreme cynicism which fuels corruption in our country.

CN: Not really. In a society with endemic or pandemic corruption, an anti-corruption campaigner must act systemically or accept that his interventions are merely a lifestyle choice. An honest second class lower degree has little countervailing value in an employment marketplace awash with hundreds of first class degrees traded for sex. To stop sex for grades, you don’t merely offer your personal example of an honest degree, you act systemically in concert with others to change the system.

Another analogy is cannibalism: imagine that one were stranded on a desert island with no hope of rescue. If the only food available were human flesh, whether on day five or day fifty, most people will eventually become cannibals. Again, the solution is not the personal example of suicide before cannibalism. It is providing an alternative source of food.

Now, imagine a principled father with a daughter at death’s door, required to pay a bribe to secure a critical blood transfusion. It is the rare father that will stand on principle. Corruption is normalized at this existential crux when the request for a bribe crosses over into extortion. Imagine further, that the principled anti-corruption crusader of your example works in what is essentially a den of civil service thieves and he refuses to take his share of the bribes that are regularly divided. Clearly he constitutes a security risk to his corrupt colleagues and has inadvertently put his life on the line. The quiet, honest path is not always the safest.

Corrupt politicians and senior civil servants do not rely on their official salaries to meet their living expenses. They therefore have no incentive to ensure that national wages are living wages. Lower down the employment ladder, millions are forced to rely on their wages, which are sometimes unpaid for 12 months at a stretch. They are thus compelled into a lifestyle of petty corruption, or “executive begging.” You might find millions of Nigerians in this category, people who are certainly not corrupt by nature, corrupted by an immoral system.

We therefore take the view that the anti-corruption crusader who is merely doing his duty in an epidemically corrupt society is doomed to failure, if his goal is to achieve any kind of change. He would be similar to “ethical” companies who pay no bribes, but are happy to hire customs clearing agents who build bribes into their professional fees. We must act systemically to change the climate that fosters corruption, or concede that we are part of the superstructure of corruption, the valve that sustains the system.

AA: Maybe I phrased it too elegantly to give it the force I thought it required. It’s not merely just doing one’s duty, staying away from excreta but feeding on the maggots, like Chichidodo, the metaphoric bird in Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. The idea is that striving for transparency in all matters is an objectivity requirement that cannot be imagined outside of the force of example, personal or cultural. To cite an example that you might recall, of the men jostling for nomination for the presidential ticket in the People’s Democratic Party in 2006/07, the late president Umaru Yar’Adua was preferred because he was not corrupt. The system is corrupt, but there are individuals whose example might provide the basis for the kind of systemic confrontation you envision?

CN: I am afraid that “honest” leaders of corrupt systems are in fact chichidodos: they may wear their honesty as an electoral asset, but their blindness to the corruption of their staff, political party and political system is also a self-serving enablement of partisan slush funds to purchase elections, perpetuate their regimes and aggrandize corrupt friends and relatives whose loyalty can be monetized in the future when our “honest” leader has need for it.

Perhaps there are such individuals whose personal example can provide the basis for the systemic confrontation I envision but unless they act in concert to bring about that systemic change, all their honest, personal, examples will have zero impact on an endemically corrupt system. And I cannot phrase this more strongly. The personal example of a honest man that retires to a life of relative penury is not as persuasive to the young as that of a thieving retiree with billions of dollars of loot. It will be different, of course, if the thief were guaranteed jail time and ruin – as would likely be the case, when the Bribecode becomes law. Even if we conceded the personal probity of a Yar’Adua, what impact did that have on systemic corruption, even during his reign? The chief rationale of the Bribecode project is that all the money saved by an honest president in eight years of conscientious rule can be stolen in eight weeks of a dishonest president. In our context of course, we do not even have to wait for an honest president to retire. The corrupt superstructure of ministers, SAs, SSGs and DGs can steal whatever a president fails to steal. Our goal must therefore be to focus on creating good systems rather than merely throwing up the occasional good leader.

AA: What do you regard as the main strength of Bribecode ? In other words, how do you envision it to operate as an activist initiative?

CN: Our current anti-corruption system is paternalistic. All the reins of anti-corruption enforcement and good governance are in the hands of the government. Victim-citizens sit back and wait on the current occupants of statehouse to enforce the law, even when they and their partners-in-crime are the principal offenders. The main strength of the Bribecode is that it changes the system by giving the citizen a strong role, while leveraging the engines of privatization, competition and self-regulation in the service of anti-corruption enforcement. The Bribecode has three main pillars:

First, it changes the penalty of serious corruption. After it comes into effect, serious corruption involving a million Naira and above will attract a penalty of liquidation for the companies involved (this penalty is modified for public companies). Convicted individuals who collaborate with companies will suffer Total Assets Forfeiture. This ruinous penalty regime will introduce self-regulation into anti-corruption enforcement.

Secondly, the Bribecode not only protects, but rewards whistleblowers who bring information leading to the conviction and recovery of assets with a percentage of the recoveries from their information. This puts the vigilant citizen in the driving seat of anti-corruption enforcement, and by allowing companies to earn this recovery commission, introduces the energy of privatization into the mix and assures every corruptocrat that ruin lies at the end of the road.

Thirdly, the Bribecode permits any of Nigeria’s 37 attorneys general to prosecute serious corruption and liquidate companies under the act. This means that – contrary to what has obtained from the inception of Nigeria till date – no single godfather, clique or senior politician or political party can protect any company in Nigeria. The fact that the recoveries from such litigations will form part of the prosecuting state’s internally generated revenue creates the incentive of competition in Nigeria’s anti-corruption enforcement.

Working together, these three principal strategies of the Bribecode will ensure the transformation of Nigerian society as we know it.

AA: Have you had any support from any level of government? 

CN: Our current focus is on advocacy to secure public awareness and signatures to our petition here. Yet, to become law, the Bribecode must be passed by the National Assembly and assented to by the President. Early in the life of this government, we submitted the Bribecode to their attention and while they are yet to embrace it fully, they have recently submitted a whistleblowers law to the National Assembly, which incorporates the second pillar of the Bribecode relating to the compensation of whistleblowers. There are critical differences between the Bribecode’s recommendation and the provisions of the government’s proposed whistleblowers system, but beyond those differences, it is important to note that unless the entire Bribecode is enacted as a system, piecemeal laws that shadow it will simply join the rest of the otherwise excellent laws in our statute books, which are only enforced against scapegoats, dissidents and members of the opposition. That is why there is always a floodgate-level migration to the successful parties after an election: they operate like mafia protection systems. However draconian the anti-corruption laws, a party membership and generous campaign donations will not only insulate the most rampant thief from prosecution, it might actually bag him a cabinet position or an appointment as a principal legislative officer.

For instance, the prosecution of the Haliburton cases under the American Foreign Corrupt Practices Act yielded a treasure trove of probative information against Nigerian officials and politicians. This is the sort of probative information that a Whistleblowers Act that paid rewards to informants could be expected to yield. Yet, years after the Haliburton information entered the public sphere and the American government earned some US$579 million in record-breaking fines, not a single prosecution against individuals has been triggered in Nigeria. It is confirmation that the government’s proposed whistleblower’s law will be useless against the politically connected. The beauty of the Bribecode is that once in force, political connections would be irrelevant.

AA: I still want us dwell further on the Ibori case. You don’t seem to feel any kind of personal affront about any of this?  Or do you think it’s too huge for metaphor? We had Tafa Balogun, Alamiyeseigha, Bode George all of whom were convicted and did time. There were several others whose cases have been stalled. This pandemic, as you rightly characterize it, this can’t just be because no one wants to feel responsible for Nigeria?

CN: There is a sense in which our funk is too deep for mere outrage, and an emotional response to our crises has to yield to a clinical and systemic response. Our airports and public buildings are named for war criminals. We have the faces of genocide perpetrators on the Naira. Our highest national awards are granted to men who have bilked our treasury of trillions, all this in a society that jails and lynches petty thieves. Add to this, a climate of sycophancy that converts our most brilliant degree holders into mere holders of meal tickets, who rise to the defense of the odious status quo for the mere aroma of a wage.

In this climate, personal outrage is actually counter-productive. Like an ejaculation, it yields only temporary relief, while the siren continues to shrill relentlessly. The effective activist is a foot soldier slugging though the killing fields of a genocide, who cannot afford the luxury of burying individual victims, not when there is a stuttering machine gun to overwhelm. The police and anti-corruption agencies must do their work, but the work of the Bribecode is to envision a future. Every convicted Ibori is a place holder for a thousand who are burrowing their way through a treasury right now, and who will never get their day in court. Those must be the focus of those who feel any responsibility for Nigeria. We are not called to the post-mortem of a dead nation, but as architects of a renascent one.

AA: To approach this problem from another angle of abstraction, how do we account for the claim that all of this indicates the slow birth of a strange society? 

CN: The birth has been a long time coming, and it is a global phenomenon, certainly not merely a Nigerian thing. Another way of viewing our world today is to plot all countries on the spectrum between commodified countries and countries where the interests of citizens cannot be bought at any price. I wrote about this at some length in my article for the Massachusetts Review, “The Extended Family & the Trojan Horse.”

In 1600, the East India Company ran India’s statehouse for about a century. Some North American state houses were run by governments of the company by the company for the company long before president Lincoln’s Gettysburg address in 1863 where he spoke of a government of the people by the people and for the people. Before the creation of Canada, the Hudson Bay Company “owned” 12% of the Earth’s land mass. Similarly, to the south, the staff of companies like the Massachusetts Bay Company and the Virginia Company predated politicians in America’s state houses and some modern American states started their voyage into the American federation as mere real estate assets on a corporate balance sheet. In Africa, charter companies like the Imperial British East Africa Company, German East Africa Company and the British South Africa Company traded in countries. From their “capital” in Ahaba, my village (as she then was), Taubman Goldie’s Royal Niger Company politically governed – and commercially exploited – the northern and southern protectorates of Nigeria until the turn of the century.

Today, the position is different – at least on paper. Constitutions up and down the world confirm that countries belong to citizens, not to corporations. Electoral laws establish that citizens have the vote, not corporations. But brush aside the paper tigers of our constitutions and what emerges is the fact that the interests of the corporations still drive the history of the world. Nowhere is this more apparent than with corruption. President Thabo Mbeki’s High Level Panel on Illicit Financial Flows in Africa established that political corruption accounted for less than 10% of the illicit US$50 billion that leaves Africa every year, while at least 60% (US$30 billion) of those illicit outflows were traceable to large commercial companies. In the US the funding phenomena of SuperPACS gives corporations the right to invest unlimited sums to secure the election of candidates who align with their agenda. It is instructive that one of the first actions of the Trump regime was the revocation of the anti-corruption Resolution H.J. 41, which compelled oil companies to publish their payments to foreign companies.

Lord Lugard, the first governor-general of a united Nigeria was an ex-employee of the Royal Niger Company, which “owned” Nigeria. There is a parallel with the business team in the Trump White House that leads America into her brave new world. We watch with interest, while trying to establish our bulwark of the Corporate Corruption Act (a.k.a. Bribecode).

“Too deep for mere outrage” – on corruption in Nigeria

On May 27, 2015, on the eve of the inauguration of the current presidency of Muhammadu Buhari, Transparency International published a press statement meant to keep the incoming president engaged with the fight against corruption. Of the several figures published in that statement, perhaps the most staggering was that “more than US $157 billion in the past decade left [Nigeria] illicitly.” Persons or companies allied to the former president Goodluck Jonathan or his wife are currently under investigation or on trial for corruption enrichment. Earlier in March, the acting chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, was denied confirmation by the Senate, whose president, Bukola Saraki, is on trial before the Code of Conduct Bureau for alleged false declaration of assets. The following is an edited version of emailed questions and answers between Chuma Nwokolo, and myself reflecting on the pervasive nature of official corruption in Nigeria. The author of several books, most recently How To Spell Naija in 100 Letters, and the forthcoming The Extinction of Menai, Nwokolo is the founder of the anti-corruption initiative, Bribecode. He lives in Asaba, Delta State, Nigeria, the same state to which the convicted former governor James Ibori recently returned after serving time in a British jail on charges of money laundering.

Akin Adesokan (AA): Even before I saw your Facebook post “ A Cashew Dies ” on Friday, February 10, 2017, I had had this feeling, of a cruel, debilitating irony, that James Ibori should return to Asaba , the city where you live. An irony because of the particular sense of the comic absurdity in your fiction as I know it. So, this convicted felon returns to your city, which is also his city, as if f ate wants to try your poetic patience, or gift you with an irresistible but also confounding tale. And it should happen that you ’ re connected to BribeCode , the anti-corruption activist initiative. Tell me that the short post has no connection in the way I’m thinking.

Chuma Nwokolo (CN): My ancestral town is Ahaba, renamed Asaba by colonists. I like to think that the real Ahaba is dead and the new city represents part of a strange alien country still coming into being. James Ibori is indeed back home to Delta State. Although the rapturous reception reported in the news took place in his own hometown in Oghara, I have no doubt that he has popular support in the Delta State capital, Asaba, as well.

AA: So, you weren’t thinking of this strange, alien turn of things when you wrote the blog post? I’m trying hard not to put you on the spot, but I’m more taken with the challenge that the news of rapturous return and celebration ought to pose to anyone who is concerned about the scale of corruption in Nigeria, and is dedicated to addressing it, as you are. In short, do you wish to comment on Bribecode’s outlook in relation to the confounding level of corruption? Not only Ibori, but others as well?

CN: I certainly do. In discussing corruption in Nigeria, we must appreciate that we have do not merely have endemic corruption, we have a pandemic on our hands. This is why a corruption conviction triggers no opprobrium from church pulpit to street corner. In tackling corruption, indignation serves us poorly. Like 17th century Euro-America embracing and defending the abomination of slavery, our public has embraced an anomaly which they perceive as essential to their survival.

The public has “normalized” corruption because government and the apparatus of state is still largely perceived as a colonial institution. We can process the legal fact of independence, but our heart ownership of state and country is still an emotional fiction. So state brigandage and the bilking of billions from a national budget does not hit the streets with the emotional punch of the theft of a loaf of bread from a trader. So we lynch the bread thief, and hail the budget brigand, “chief,” especially if he throws loaves at us as he cruises past in a stolen limousine.

This is to say that the most successful politicians operate a Robin Hood model with two defining characteristics: First, they never steal alone – they recruit a merry band to whom they bequeath power, such that, in or out of office, they control the treasury and operate a charismatic godfather network whose loyalty is cultic in intensity. In this way, the so-called developmental process of institutionalization is checkmated by the reactionary process of institution-capture. Second, they never “chop” alone, either – they are famously generous with loot and the sundry spoils of office, such that citizens who feel no sense of loss at the theft of a billion Naira (the Nigerian currency) from their public treasury feel doubly grateful at the “gift” of a thousand Naira.

Bribecode’s outlook is to take a systemic approach to this problem of a “post autocratic stress syndrome” that makes citizens to deify their politicians and public servants despite the constitutional sovereignty of the citizen state. Recognizing that our most egregious corruption offenders actually occupy statehouses across the land, the Bribecode introduces mechanisms that allow ruinous penalties to be enforced against them and their partners-in-crime. Without successfully instituting this mechanism, the anti-corruption campaigner is the would-be rescuer of a drowning man who is also drowned by the public he is trying to help.

AA: I get the analogy about saving a drowning man, but would you consider the proposition that the anti-corruption campaigner isn ’ t necessarily helping the public, but is trying to fulfill his or her personal duty? One chooses not to be a thief or a robber because it ’ s not in one ’ s nature. I wonder if this level of abstraction might be a counter to the extreme cynicism which fuels corruption in our country.

CN: Not really. In a society with endemic or pandemic corruption, an anti-corruption campaigner must act systemically or accept that his interventions are merely a lifestyle choice. An honest second class lower degree has little countervailing value in an employment marketplace awash with hundreds of first class degrees traded for sex. To stop sex for grades, you don’t merely offer your personal example of an honest degree, you act systemically in concert with others to change the system.

Another analogy is cannibalism: imagine that one were stranded on a desert island with no hope of rescue. If the only food available were human flesh, whether on day five or day fifty, most people will eventually become cannibals. Again, the solution is not the personal example of suicide before cannibalism. It is providing an alternative source of food.

Now, imagine a principled father with a daughter at death’s door, required to pay a bribe to secure a critical blood transfusion. It is the rare father that will stand on principle. Corruption is normalized at this existential crux when the request for a bribe crosses over into extortion. Imagine further, that the principled anti-corruption crusader of your example works in what is essentially a den of civil service thieves and he refuses to take his share of the bribes that are regularly divided. Clearly he constitutes a security risk to his corrupt colleagues and has inadvertently put his life on the line. The quiet, honest path is not always the safest.

Corrupt politicians and senior civil servants do not rely on their official salaries to meet their living expenses. They therefore have no incentive to ensure that national wages are living wages. Lower down the employment ladder, millions are forced to rely on their wages, which are sometimes unpaid for 12 months at a stretch. They are thus compelled into a lifestyle of petty corruption, or “executive begging.” You might find millions of Nigerians in this category, people who are certainly not corrupt by nature, corrupted by an immoral system.

We therefore take the view that the anti-corruption crusader who is merely doing his duty in an epidemically corrupt society is doomed to failure, if his goal is to achieve any kind of change. He would be similar to “ethical” companies who pay no bribes, but are happy to hire customs clearing agents who build bribes into their professional fees. We must act systemically to change the climate that fosters corruption, or concede that we are part of the superstructure of corruption, the valve that sustains the system.

AA: Maybe I phrased it too elegantly to give it the force I thought it required. It’s not merely just doing one’s duty, staying away from excreta but feeding on the maggots, like Chichidodo, the metaphoric bird in Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. The idea is that striving for transparency in all matters is an objectivity requirement that cannot be imagined outside of the force of example, personal or cultural. To cite an example that you might recall, of the men jostling for nomination for the presidential ticket in the People’s Democratic Party in 2006/07, the late president Umaru Yar’Adua was preferred because he was not corrupt. The system is corrupt, but there are individuals whose example might provide the basis for the kind of systemic confrontation you envision?

CN: I am afraid that “honest” leaders of corrupt systems are in fact chichidodos: they may wear their honesty as an electoral asset, but their blindness to the corruption of their staff, political party and political system is also a self-serving enablement of partisan slush funds to purchase elections, perpetuate their regimes and aggrandize corrupt friends and relatives whose loyalty can be monetized in the future when our “honest” leader has need for it.

Perhaps there are such individuals whose personal example can provide the basis for the systemic confrontation I envision but unless they act in concert to bring about that systemic change, all their honest, personal, examples will have zero impact on an endemically corrupt system. And I cannot phrase this more strongly. The personal example of a honest man that retires to a life of relative penury is not as persuasive to the young as that of a thieving retiree with billions of dollars of loot. It will be different, of course, if the thief were guaranteed jail time and ruin – as would likely be the case, when the Bribecode becomes law. Even if we conceded the personal probity of a Yar’Adua, what impact did that have on systemic corruption, even during his reign? The chief rationale of the Bribecode project is that all the money saved by an honest president in eight years of conscientious rule can be stolen in eight weeks of a dishonest president. In our context of course, we do not even have to wait for an honest president to retire. The corrupt superstructure of ministers, SAs, SSGs and DGs can steal whatever a president fails to steal. Our goal must therefore be to focus on creating good systems rather than merely throwing up the occasional good leader.

AA: What do you regard as the main strength of Bribecode ? In other words, how do you envision it to operate as an activist initiative?

CN: Our current anti-corruption system is paternalistic. All the reins of anti-corruption enforcement and good governance are in the hands of the government. Victim-citizens sit back and wait on the current occupants of statehouse to enforce the law, even when they and their partners-in-crime are the principal offenders. The main strength of the Bribecode is that it changes the system by giving the citizen a strong role, while leveraging the engines of privatization, competition and self-regulation in the service of anti-corruption enforcement. The Bribecode has three main pillars:

First, it changes the penalty of serious corruption. After it comes into effect, serious corruption involving a million Naira and above will attract a penalty of liquidation for the companies involved (this penalty is modified for public companies). Convicted individuals who collaborate with companies will suffer Total Assets Forfeiture. This ruinous penalty regime will introduce self-regulation into anti-corruption enforcement.

Secondly, the Bribecode not only protects, but rewards whistleblowers who bring information leading to the conviction and recovery of assets with a percentage of the recoveries from their information. This puts the vigilant citizen in the driving seat of anti-corruption enforcement, and by allowing companies to earn this recovery commission, introduces the energy of privatization into the mix and assures every corruptocrat that ruin lies at the end of the road.

Thirdly, the Bribecode permits any of Nigeria’s 37 attorneys general to prosecute serious corruption and liquidate companies under the act. This means that – contrary to what has obtained from the inception of Nigeria till date – no single godfather, clique or senior politician or political party can protect any company in Nigeria. The fact that the recoveries from such litigations will form part of the prosecuting state’s internally generated revenue creates the incentive of competition in Nigeria’s anti-corruption enforcement.

Working together, these three principal strategies of the Bribecode will ensure the transformation of Nigerian society as we know it.

AA: Have you had any support from any level of government? 

CN: Our current focus is on advocacy to secure public awareness and signatures to our petition here. Yet, to become law, the Bribecode must be passed by the National Assembly and assented to by the President. Early in the life of this government, we submitted the Bribecode to their attention and while they are yet to embrace it fully, they have recently submitted a whistleblowers law to the National Assembly, which incorporates the second pillar of the Bribecode relating to the compensation of whistleblowers. There are critical differences between the Bribecode’s recommendation and the provisions of the government’s proposed whistleblowers system, but beyond those differences, it is important to note that unless the entire Bribecode is enacted as a system, piecemeal laws that shadow it will simply join the rest of the otherwise excellent laws in our statute books, which are only enforced against scapegoats, dissidents and members of the opposition. That is why there is always a floodgate-level migration to the successful parties after an election: they operate like mafia protection systems. However draconian the anti-corruption laws, a party membership and generous campaign donations will not only insulate the most rampant thief from prosecution, it might actually bag him a cabinet position or an appointment as a principal legislative officer.

For instance, the prosecution of the Haliburton cases under the American Foreign Corrupt Practices Act yielded a treasure trove of probative information against Nigerian officials and politicians. This is the sort of probative information that a Whistleblowers Act that paid rewards to informants could be expected to yield. Yet, years after the Haliburton information entered the public sphere and the American government earned some US$579 million in record-breaking fines, not a single prosecution against individuals has been triggered in Nigeria. It is confirmation that the government’s proposed whistleblower’s law will be useless against the politically connected. The beauty of the Bribecode is that once in force, political connections would be irrelevant.

AA: I still want us dwell further on the Ibori case. You don’t seem to feel any kind of personal affront about any of this?  Or do you think it’s too huge for metaphor? We had Tafa Balogun, Alamiyeseigha, Bode George all of whom were convicted and did time. There were several others whose cases have been stalled. This pandemic, as you rightly characterize it, this can’t just be because no one wants to feel responsible for Nigeria?

CN: There is a sense in which our funk is too deep for mere outrage, and an emotional response to our crises has to yield to a clinical and systemic response. Our airports and public buildings are named for war criminals. We have the faces of genocide perpetrators on the Naira. Our highest national awards are granted to men who have bilked our treasury of trillions, all this in a society that jails and lynches petty thieves. Add to this, a climate of sycophancy that converts our most brilliant degree holders into mere holders of meal tickets, who rise to the defense of the odious status quo for the mere aroma of a wage.

In this climate, personal outrage is actually counter-productive. Like an ejaculation, it yields only temporary relief, while the siren continues to shrill relentlessly. The effective activist is a foot soldier slugging though the killing fields of a genocide, who cannot afford the luxury of burying individual victims, not when there is a stuttering machine gun to overwhelm. The police and anti-corruption agencies must do their work, but the work of the Bribecode is to envision a future. Every convicted Ibori is a place holder for a thousand who are burrowing their way through a treasury right now, and who will never get their day in court. Those must be the focus of those who feel any responsibility for Nigeria. We are not called to the post-mortem of a dead nation, but as architects of a renascent one.

AA: To approach this problem from another angle of abstraction, how do we account for the claim that all of this indicates the slow birth of a strange society? 

CN: The birth has been a long time coming, and it is a global phenomenon, certainly not merely a Nigerian thing. Another way of viewing our world today is to plot all countries on the spectrum between commodified countries and countries where the interests of citizens cannot be bought at any price. I wrote about this at some length in my article for the Massachusetts Review, “The Extended Family & the Trojan Horse.”

In 1600, the East India Company ran India’s statehouse for about a century. Some North American state houses were run by governments of the company by the company for the company long before president Lincoln’s Gettysburg address in 1863 where he spoke of a government of the people by the people and for the people. Before the creation of Canada, the Hudson Bay Company “owned” 12% of the Earth’s land mass. Similarly, to the south, the staff of companies like the Massachusetts Bay Company and the Virginia Company predated politicians in America’s state houses and some modern American states started their voyage into the American federation as mere real estate assets on a corporate balance sheet. In Africa, charter companies like the Imperial British East Africa Company, German East Africa Company and the British South Africa Company traded in countries. From their “capital” in Ahaba, my village (as she then was), Taubman Goldie’s Royal Niger Company politically governed – and commercially exploited – the northern and southern protectorates of Nigeria until the turn of the century.

Today, the position is different – at least on paper. Constitutions up and down the world confirm that countries belong to citizens, not to corporations. Electoral laws establish that citizens have the vote, not corporations. But brush aside the paper tigers of our constitutions and what emerges is the fact that the interests of the corporations still drive the history of the world. Nowhere is this more apparent than with corruption. President Thabo Mbeki’s High Level Panel on Illicit Financial Flows in Africa established that political corruption accounted for less than 10% of the illicit US$50 billion that leaves Africa every year, while at least 60% (US$30 billion) of those illicit outflows were traceable to large commercial companies. In the US the funding phenomena of SuperPACS gives corporations the right to invest unlimited sums to secure the election of candidates who align with their agenda. It is instructive that one of the first actions of the Trump regime was the revocation of the anti-corruption Resolution H.J. 41, which compelled oil companies to publish their payments to foreign companies.

Lord Lugard, the first governor-general of a united Nigeria was an ex-employee of the Royal Niger Company, which “owned” Nigeria. There is a parallel with the business team in the Trump White House that leads America into her brave new world. We watch with interest, while trying to establish our bulwark of the Corporate Corruption Act (a.k.a. Bribecode).

“Too Deep For Mere Outrage” – On Corruption in Nigeria

On May 27, 2015, on the eve of the inauguration of the current presidency of Muhammadu Buhari, Transparency International published a press statement meant to keep the incoming president engaged with the fight against corruption. Of the several figures published in that statement, perhaps the most staggering was that “more than US $157 billion in the past decade left [Nigeria] illicitly.” Persons or companies allied to the former president Goodluck Jonathan or his wife are currently under investigation or on trial for corruption enrichment. Earlier in March, the acting chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, was denied confirmation by the Senate, whose president, Bukola Saraki, is on trial before the Code of Conduct Bureau for alleged false declaration of assets. The following is an edited version of emailed questions and answers between Chuma Nwokolo, and myself reflecting on the pervasive nature of official corruption in Nigeria. The author of several books, most recently How To Spell Naija in 100 Letters, and the forthcoming The Extinction of Menai, Nwokolo is the founder of the anti-corruption initiative, Bribecode. He lives in Asaba, Delta State, Nigeria, the same state to which the convicted former governor James Ibori recently returned after serving time in a British jail on charges of money laundering.

Akin Adesokan (AA): Even before I saw your Facebook post “ A Cashew Dies ” on Friday, February 10, 2017, I had had this feeling, of a cruel, debilitating irony, that James Ibori should return to Asaba , the city where you live. An irony because of the particular sense of the comic absurdity in your fiction as I know it. So, this convicted felon returns to your city, which is also his city, as if f ate wants to try your poetic patience, or gift you with an irresistible but also confounding tale. And it should happen that you ’ re connected to BribeCode , the anti-corruption activist initiative. Tell me that the short post has no connection in the way I’m thinking.

Chuma Nwokolo (CN): My ancestral town is Ahaba, renamed Asaba by colonists. I like to think that the real Ahaba is dead and the new city represents part of a strange alien country still coming into being. James Ibori is indeed back home to Delta State. Although the rapturous reception reported in the news took place in his own hometown in Oghara, I have no doubt that he has popular support in the Delta State capital, Asaba, as well.

AA: So, you weren’t thinking of this strange, alien turn of things when you wrote the blog post? I’m trying hard not to put you on the spot, but I’m more taken with the challenge that the news of rapturous return and celebration ought to pose to anyone who is concerned about the scale of corruption in Nigeria, and is dedicated to addressing it, as you are. In short, do you wish to comment on Bribecode’s outlook in relation to the confounding level of corruption? Not only Ibori, but others as well?

CN: I certainly do. In discussing corruption in Nigeria, we must appreciate that we have do not merely have endemic corruption, we have a pandemic on our hands. This is why a corruption conviction triggers no opprobrium from church pulpit to street corner. In tackling corruption, indignation serves us poorly. Like 17th century Euro-America embracing and defending the abomination of slavery, our public has embraced an anomaly which they perceive as essential to their survival.

The public has “normalized” corruption because government and the apparatus of state is still largely perceived as a colonial institution. We can process the legal fact of independence, but our heart ownership of state and country is still an emotional fiction. So state brigandage and the bilking of billions from a national budget does not hit the streets with the emotional punch of the theft of a loaf of bread from a trader. So we lynch the bread thief, and hail the budget brigand, “chief,” especially if he throws loaves at us as he cruises past in a stolen limousine.

This is to say that the most successful politicians operate a Robin Hood model with two defining characteristics: First, they never steal alone – they recruit a merry band to whom they bequeath power, such that, in or out of office, they control the treasury and operate a charismatic godfather network whose loyalty is cultic in intensity. In this way, the so-called developmental process of institutionalization is checkmated by the reactionary process of institution-capture. Second, they never “chop” alone, either – they are famously generous with loot and the sundry spoils of office, such that citizens who feel no sense of loss at the theft of a billion Naira (the Nigerian currency) from their public treasury feel doubly grateful at the “gift” of a thousand Naira.

Bribecode’s outlook is to take a systemic approach to this problem of a “post autocratic stress syndrome” that makes citizens to deify their politicians and public servants despite the constitutional sovereignty of the citizen state. Recognizing that our most egregious corruption offenders actually occupy statehouses across the land, the Bribecode introduces mechanisms that allow ruinous penalties to be enforced against them and their partners-in-crime. Without successfully instituting this mechanism, the anti-corruption campaigner is the would-be rescuer of a drowning man who is also drowned by the public he is trying to help.

AA: I get the analogy about saving a drowning man, but would you consider the proposition that the anti-corruption campaigner isn ’ t necessarily helping the public, but is trying to fulfill his or her personal duty? One chooses not to be a thief or a robber because it ’ s not in one ’ s nature. I wonder if this level of abstraction might be a counter to the extreme cynicism which fuels corruption in our country.

CN: Not really. In a society with endemic or pandemic corruption, an anti-corruption campaigner must act systemically or accept that his interventions are merely a lifestyle choice. An honest second class lower degree has little countervailing value in an employment marketplace awash with hundreds of first class degrees traded for sex. To stop sex for grades, you don’t merely offer your personal example of an honest degree, you act systemically in concert with others to change the system.

Another analogy is cannibalism: imagine that one were stranded on a desert island with no hope of rescue. If the only food available were human flesh, whether on day five or day fifty, most people will eventually become cannibals. Again, the solution is not the personal example of suicide before cannibalism. It is providing an alternative source of food.

Now, imagine a principled father with a daughter at death’s door, required to pay a bribe to secure a critical blood transfusion. It is the rare father that will stand on principle. Corruption is normalized at this existential crux when the request for a bribe crosses over into extortion. Imagine further, that the principled anti-corruption crusader of your example works in what is essentially a den of civil service thieves and he refuses to take his share of the bribes that are regularly divided. Clearly he constitutes a security risk to his corrupt colleagues and has inadvertently put his life on the line. The quiet, honest path is not always the safest.

Corrupt politicians and senior civil servants do not rely on their official salaries to meet their living expenses. They therefore have no incentive to ensure that national wages are living wages. Lower down the employment ladder, millions are forced to rely on their wages, which are sometimes unpaid for 12 months at a stretch. They are thus compelled into a lifestyle of petty corruption, or “executive begging.” You might find millions of Nigerians in this category, people who are certainly not corrupt by nature, corrupted by an immoral system.

We therefore take the view that the anti-corruption crusader who is merely doing his duty in an epidemically corrupt society is doomed to failure, if his goal is to achieve any kind of change. He would be similar to “ethical” companies who pay no bribes, but are happy to hire customs clearing agents who build bribes into their professional fees. We must act systemically to change the climate that fosters corruption, or concede that we are part of the superstructure of corruption, the valve that sustains the system.

AA: Maybe I phrased it too elegantly to give it the force I thought it required. It’s not merely just doing one’s duty, staying away from excreta but feeding on the maggots, like Chichidodo, the metaphoric bird in Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. The idea is that striving for transparency in all matters is an objectivity requirement that cannot be imagined outside of the force of example, personal or cultural. To cite an example that you might recall, of the men jostling for nomination for the presidential ticket in the People’s Democratic Party in 2006/07, the late president Umaru Yar’Adua was preferred because he was not corrupt. The system is corrupt, but there are individuals whose example might provide the basis for the kind of systemic confrontation you envision?

CN: I am afraid that “honest” leaders of corrupt systems are in fact chichidodos: they may wear their honesty as an electoral asset, but their blindness to the corruption of their staff, political party and political system is also a self-serving enablement of partisan slush funds to purchase elections, perpetuate their regimes and aggrandize corrupt friends and relatives whose loyalty can be monetized in the future when our “honest” leader has need for it.

Perhaps there are such individuals whose personal example can provide the basis for the systemic confrontation I envision but unless they act in concert to bring about that systemic change, all their honest, personal, examples will have zero impact on an endemically corrupt system. And I cannot phrase this more strongly. The personal example of a honest man that retires to a life of relative penury is not as persuasive to the young as that of a thieving retiree with billions of dollars of loot. It will be different, of course, if the thief were guaranteed jail time and ruin – as would likely be the case, when the Bribecode becomes law. Even if we conceded the personal probity of a Yar’Adua, what impact did that have on systemic corruption, even during his reign? The chief rationale of the Bribecode project is that all the money saved by an honest president in eight years of conscientious rule can be stolen in eight weeks of a dishonest president. In our context of course, we do not even have to wait for an honest president to retire. The corrupt superstructure of ministers, SAs, SSGs and DGs can steal whatever a president fails to steal. Our goal must therefore be to focus on creating good systems rather than merely throwing up the occasional good leader.

AA: What do you regard as the main strength of Bribecode ? In other words, how do you envision it to operate as an activist initiative?

CN: Our current anti-corruption system is paternalistic. All the reins of anti-corruption enforcement and good governance are in the hands of the government. Victim-citizens sit back and wait on the current occupants of statehouse to enforce the law, even when they and their partners-in-crime are the principal offenders. The main strength of the Bribecode is that it changes the system by giving the citizen a strong role, while leveraging the engines of privatization, competition and self-regulation in the service of anti-corruption enforcement. The Bribecode has three main pillars:

First, it changes the penalty of serious corruption. After it comes into effect, serious corruption involving a million Naira and above will attract a penalty of liquidation for the companies involved (this penalty is modified for public companies). Convicted individuals who collaborate with companies will suffer Total Assets Forfeiture. This ruinous penalty regime will introduce self-regulation into anti-corruption enforcement.

Secondly, the Bribecode not only protects, but rewards whistleblowers who bring information leading to the conviction and recovery of assets with a percentage of the recoveries from their information. This puts the vigilant citizen in the driving seat of anti-corruption enforcement, and by allowing companies to earn this recovery commission, introduces the energy of privatization into the mix and assures every corruptocrat that ruin lies at the end of the road.

Thirdly, the Bribecode permits any of Nigeria’s 37 attorneys general to prosecute serious corruption and liquidate companies under the act. This means that – contrary to what has obtained from the inception of Nigeria till date – no single godfather, clique or senior politician or political party can protect any company in Nigeria. The fact that the recoveries from such litigations will form part of the prosecuting state’s internally generated revenue creates the incentive of competition in Nigeria’s anti-corruption enforcement.

Working together, these three principal strategies of the Bribecode will ensure the transformation of Nigerian society as we know it.

AA: Have you had any support from any level of government? 

CN: Our current focus is on advocacy to secure public awareness and signatures to our petition here. Yet, to become law, the Bribecode must be passed by the National Assembly and assented to by the President. Early in the life of this government, we submitted the Bribecode to their attention and while they are yet to embrace it fully, they have recently submitted a whistleblowers law to the National Assembly, which incorporates the second pillar of the Bribecode relating to the compensation of whistleblowers. There are critical differences between the Bribecode’s recommendation and the provisions of the government’s proposed whistleblowers system, but beyond those differences, it is important to note that unless the entire Bribecode is enacted as a system, piecemeal laws that shadow it will simply join the rest of the otherwise excellent laws in our statute books, which are only enforced against scapegoats, dissidents and members of the opposition. That is why there is always a floodgate-level migration to the successful parties after an election: they operate like mafia protection systems. However draconian the anti-corruption laws, a party membership and generous campaign donations will not only insulate the most rampant thief from prosecution, it might actually bag him a cabinet position or an appointment as a principal legislative officer.

For instance, the prosecution of the Haliburton cases under the American Foreign Corrupt Practices Act yielded a treasure trove of probative information against Nigerian officials and politicians. This is the sort of probative information that a Whistleblowers Act that paid rewards to informants could be expected to yield. Yet, years after the Haliburton information entered the public sphere and the American government earned some US$579 million in record-breaking fines, not a single prosecution against individuals has been triggered in Nigeria. It is confirmation that the government’s proposed whistleblower’s law will be useless against the politically connected. The beauty of the Bribecode is that once in force, political connections would be irrelevant.

AA: I still want us dwell further on the Ibori case. You don’t seem to feel any kind of personal affront about any of this?  Or do you think it’s too huge for metaphor? We had Tafa Balogun, Alamiyeseigha, Bode George all of whom were convicted and did time. There were several others whose cases have been stalled. This pandemic, as you rightly characterize it, this can’t just be because no one wants to feel responsible for Nigeria?

CN: There is a sense in which our funk is too deep for mere outrage, and an emotional response to our crises has to yield to a clinical and systemic response. Our airports and public buildings are named for war criminals. We have the faces of genocide perpetrators on the Naira. Our highest national awards are granted to men who have bilked our treasury of trillions, all this in a society that jails and lynches petty thieves. Add to this, a climate of sycophancy that converts our most brilliant degree holders into mere holders of meal tickets, who rise to the defense of the odious status quo for the mere aroma of a wage.

In this climate, personal outrage is actually counter-productive. Like an ejaculation, it yields only temporary relief, while the siren continues to shrill relentlessly. The effective activist is a foot soldier slugging though the killing fields of a genocide, who cannot afford the luxury of burying individual victims, not when there is a stuttering machine gun to overwhelm. The police and anti-corruption agencies must do their work, but the work of the Bribecode is to envision a future. Every convicted Ibori is a place holder for a thousand who are burrowing their way through a treasury right now, and who will never get their day in court. Those must be the focus of those who feel any responsibility for Nigeria. We are not called to the post-mortem of a dead nation, but as architects of a renascent one.

AA: To approach this problem from another angle of abstraction, how do we account for the claim that all of this indicates the slow birth of a strange society? 

CN: The birth has been a long time coming, and it is a global phenomenon, certainly not merely a Nigerian thing. Another way of viewing our world today is to plot all countries on the spectrum between commodified countries and countries where the interests of citizens cannot be bought at any price. I wrote about this at some length in my article for the Massachusetts Review, “The Extended Family & the Trojan Horse.”

In 1600, the East India Company ran India’s statehouse for about a century. Some North American state houses were run by governments of the company by the company for the company long before president Lincoln’s Gettysburg address in 1863 where he spoke of a government of the people by the people and for the people. Before the creation of Canada, the Hudson Bay Company “owned” 12% of the Earth’s land mass. Similarly, to the south, the staff of companies like the Massachusetts Bay Company and the Virginia Company predated politicians in America’s state houses and some modern American states started their voyage into the American federation as mere real estate assets on a corporate balance sheet. In Africa, charter companies like the Imperial British East Africa Company, German East Africa Company and the British South Africa Company traded in countries. From their “capital” in Ahaba, my village (as she then was), Taubman Goldie’s Royal Niger Company politically governed – and commercially exploited – the northern and southern protectorates of Nigeria until the turn of the century.

Today, the position is different – at least on paper. Constitutions up and down the world confirm that countries belong to citizens, not to corporations. Electoral laws establish that citizens have the vote, not corporations. But brush aside the paper tigers of our constitutions and what emerges is the fact that the interests of the corporations still drive the history of the world. Nowhere is this more apparent than with corruption. President Thabo Mbeki’s High Level Panel on Illicit Financial Flows in Africa established that political corruption accounted for less than 10% of the illicit US$50 billion that leaves Africa every year, while at least 60% (US$30 billion) of those illicit outflows were traceable to large commercial companies. In the US the funding phenomena of SuperPACS gives corporations the right to invest unlimited sums to secure the election of candidates who align with their agenda. It is instructive that one of the first actions of the Trump regime was the revocation of the anti-corruption Resolution H.J. 41, which compelled oil companies to publish their payments to foreign companies.

Lord Lugard, the first governor-general of a united Nigeria was an ex-employee of the Royal Niger Company, which “owned” Nigeria. There is a parallel with the business team in the Trump White House that leads America into her brave new world. We watch with interest, while trying to establish our bulwark of the Corporate Corruption Act (a.k.a. Bribecode).

Weekend Special, 26 March 2017

(1) Identity politics is neoliberalism, as Adolph Reed once said. And it delivers like clockwork. The hip hop producer Sean Diddy Combs (he produced Biggie Smalls) opened a for profit charter school in Harlem where he was born. Because–as he said–he would rather do “something about” education than just complain about it. (And he chose to “do it” with a for-profit school that has “Capital” in its name. BTW, Diddy isn’t the only celebrity that’s in on the charter school movement. Even people like John Legend. Once you stopped chuckling, this sort of thing is further along in African countries (and elsewhere) than you think. In Liberia (they convinced the government; rapper Akon is kneedeep in this project), Uganda (where they’ve had some pushback), Kenya, and on a smaller scale in South Africa (the Spark Schools; most of the funding is private, but these initiatives are getting open support from the Democratic Alliance governed Western Cape province). Behind it are groups like Teach for All. The African outpost of the charter school movement get a lot of soft pedal coverage in publications like (obviously) The Economist. For a broad overview, we’d suggest revisiting Maria Hengeveld‘s interview with activists.

(3)  Staying with identity politics in #othercountries: “Hillary is Queen, Bae, Beyoncé—you get it. Chelsea is the prodigy—2.0, if you will.” I can’t anymore.

(4) In South Africa, a Nigerian migrant is suing the South African immigrant authorities and the police (South Africans, on balance, are notoriously xenophobic to other Africans). He was shot in the leg after they accused him of having weed on him. He was only charged 18 months later. The victim, Justin Ejimkonye, claimed he was shot because he did not want to pay a bribe.  It is well past time someone did. But as Alison Tilley, a rights activist reminded me, this is not the first time someone sued the South Africans.

(5) By now everyone knows about Helen Zille’s defense of colonialism. Whites in South Africans say racist things on social media on the daily. Zille matters because she is the Premier (the equivalent of a governor of a state) of the Western Cape, one of South Africa’s nine provinces. You can read Vito Laterza’s analysis of Zille’s remarks, including how she is emblematic of a global trend by rightwingers to say feel emboldened to say aloud what they’ve been feeling all along.  Some of have come to Zille’s defense, including the usual “explanation” and “on the other hand”-ery of liberals. The most prominent, though, was Ferial Haffajee, one of the first black editors of a major South African newspaper (and now at Huffington Post South Africa), who defended Zille’s “right” to be racist and offensive. The best response to Haffajee has been UCT law professor Pierre De Vos‘s response. It is important as it challenges “liberals” and their free speech absolutism. It may come across as a bit lawyerly and long. That’s necessary. Read it.

(6) More consequential than Zille’s odious tweets about colonialism, has been how she and her party governs the Western Cape and Cape Town. Last week, the provincial government nixed a plan to build affordable housing on the edge of the city center for mostly domestic workers and gardeners serving their mostly white employers and for people being displaced by gentrification. The Cape Town City Council, run by Zille’s party (the mayor blocked me on Twitter; surprise) is no better. On Human Rights Day, March 21, it sent in “the Red Ants” (an infamous council unit) to demolish shacks rebuilt after a fire in a squatter settlement outside Hout Bay, that place recently described by Omar of the Wire (Michael K Williams when doubles as a reporter for VICE) as what happens when “Malibu and the Hamptons had a baby.” All this–I am from Cape Town–made me wonder whether this could be impetus for new solidarities in Western Cape between Africans and coloured working classes / lumpens as counter to divide-and-rule of the Democratic Alliance and the rank incompetence of the ANC as opposition? Nothing wrong with dreaming.

(7) Near Johannesburg, South Africa, a white man bullied, threatened and abused a black woman over the actions of their children in a playpen at a popular restaurant chain.  By now, you’re mumbling “next” as this sort of thing is widespread in South Africa. In any case, this all happened at the Spur, a South African restaurant chain pretending to draw on Native American motifs.  Not everyone was surprised it happened there, given what that restaurant chain represents. As Busisiwe Deyi pointed out on this site in 2015: “Nothing about SPUR is Native North American except for its use of a Native American chief-like figure on its logo and Native American-esque names and themes. In truth, rather than Native American experience or culture, the imagery used by SPUR is that of the frontier US West and Southwest.” It is worth rereading that post.

(8) (This (in the London Review of Books) by Adam Shatz on the “debate” around  Dana Schultz’s painting “Open Casket” painting. On whether acts of “radical sympathy, and imaginative identification, are possible across racial lines.” Also see Kara Walker’s statement on Instagram. But it seems like we’ve been here before. Finally, it is worth remembering what Walter Benn Michaels argued a while back: “the point of the critique of capitalism is to get rid of poor people, not to make sure that they’re properly represented among the elite.”

(9) More #othercountries. This is an excellent take on the recent history of trade unions in the United States through the transformation of the Service Employees Industrial Union. I’d love to see an analysis like this on say unions in South Africa, Nigeria or Egypt.

(10) Yes, this happened: “An annual African trade summit in California [in the United States; President: Donald Trump] had no African attendees this year after at least 60 people were denied visas.”

(11) VICE went and investigated extrajudicial killing in Kenya that are part and parcel of wildlife conservation. It is particularly good on knocking off Richard Leakey’s halo (from how he is perceived/covered by elites/media in the west). Worth a read.

(12) Then there are these clips of Paul Robeson and Eslanda Robeson from the film “Borderline” (1930), filmed in Switzerland. Just going to leave this here. (How did I get here?

(12) Finally, since I am a shameless self-promoter: Go and get this new book about boycott politics that I contributed to.