(Being a short comment on the 2025 National Honors List)
“The hunger march is a universal S.O.S.” – Wole Soyinka, Premium Times, August 4, 2024
“While you are there demonstrating, we will be here eating” – Godswill Obot Akpanio, Senate President, July 31, 2024
“That distribution undo excess and each man have enough” – William Shakespeare, King Lear
Biodun Jeyifo
Egeremiti is a term, a figure of speech in Yoruba rhetoric for any experience, act or utterance that is so wondrous – in a good or evil sense – that it is close to being an epiphany. As I read the names of so many living and departed comrades, friends and colleagues on the 2025 National Honours list, I was so moved that a thrill ran down my spine as I muttered “egeremiti, egeremiti” silently to myself. So big, so unprecedented is this “egeremiti” wonder in the list that no other national honours list like it exists or had ever occurred in either colonial or post-independent Nigeria. My sense is that this wondrous wonder has taken the Nigerian Left as well as the much larger community of progressive and pro-democracy patriots by such surprise that most of us/them are still wondering what to make of it, especially the living recipients of the honours. In particular, they/we are wondering how the departed comrades and colleagues whose names are on the list would have reacted. “How would Gani have reacted?” Festus Iyayi? Balarabe Musa? Chima Ubani? The persons on the list – both living and dead – were/are so driven by solidarity with the poor, hungry and oppressed of the land that they would have thought twice before accepting honours from any government that has the cloud of great mistreatment of the hungry, poor and oppressed masses hanging over its head like a halo. And indeed, this is the central dilemma or egeremiti contradiction of the president’s 2025 Honours List. On the one hand, it is without precedent in its celebration of past and present heroes of the struggles for social justice and democracy in our country. But on the other hand, it is closely tied to a humongous sweeping under the carpet of the harsh and unforgiving economic and monetary policies of the government of BAT toward the toiling and suffering masses. Thus, to accept and applaud the list seems like endorsing these policies.
I deem it very necessary to repeat this observation: no National Honours list has ever been so closely tied to the economic and administrative policies of a president and his administration. This is so important that it easily overshadows the fact that BAT himself has in the past been in the forefront of the struggles for democracy in our country. Let me put this in another formulation: there is the amazing list and there is the excessive praise for and justification of the harsh and unforgiving policies of BAT; thus, the list is the tail that is wagging the dog of the praise and justification of the policies. Comrades and compatriots, please check and recheck paragraphs 27-48 of the president’s Democracy Day speech for yourselves to see whether or not I am making a false or exaggerated claim here. In these paragraphs, BAT is not just crowing that his harsh economic policies are working, he is boasting that no policies of any other administration have worked better for Nigerians in all parts of the country. Egeremiti!
Hunger of a kind that an overwhelming majority of Nigerians have never seen or experienced is stalking the land due to the policies of his administration, but BAT is boasting that under his administration, things are improving and improving and improving. All the five or six coeval generations of Nigerians alive now are experiencing forms and degrees of poverty and impoverishment that no generation has ever experienced in the modern history of the country; but the president is saying the things you are seeing and feeling are not happening, don’t be fooled by what you are feeling and seeing. This brings to my mind a widely popular joke of the late African American ace comedian, Richard Pryor. “If your wife catches you stark naked on top of your lover, deny it. If she refuses to believe you, deny it even more vigorously. And if she continues to disbelieve you, ask her “who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?! BAT in his Democracy Day speech asks Nigerians “who are you going to believe, my statistics about how good things are or your empty, hungry and growling bellies?
Not in the Democracy Day speech itself but in other contexts, the President has bragged extensively about how it has taken courage for him to stick unwaveringly to his economic and fiscal policies. I beg to differ. What courage do you show in imposing on the poor and the powerless sacrifices that you have not dared to ask of the rich and powerful? Thus, even as BAT has imposed draconian policies on scores of millions of poor, hungry Nigerians, he has not imposed any curtailment on official and unofficial access of the rich and the powerful to the wealth of the nation. This brings to my mind the parable of Joseph pertaining to ten fat cows followed by ten lean cows in the book of Genesis. In his interpretation of this dream of the pharaoh, Joseph sees ten fat cows followed by ten lean cows as a long period of abundance that are then followed by ten years of harrowing famine and hardship. He therefore recommended that in the years of plenty, the people should gather and store much of the bounteous harvests so that they will have some provisions in store to protect people in the years of famine. The important point here is that the pharaoh and the elite, together with the whole population, fast and sacrifice together in the lean years. In Tinubu’s Nigeria, only the people are asked to fast and sacrifice while for the president, the state governors and the honorables of the National Assembly, it is ten fat cows followed by another ten fat cows. Listen to Godswill Obot Akpabio, President of the Senate: “While you are there demonstrating, we will be here eating”. The orgies of “eating” by the ruling class in Tinubu’s Nigeria far surpasses all past and previous records and this is within two years only!
I must come to the conclusion of this comment. Here, I am thinking of the pertinence of another parable: that of the frog in a slowly boiling pot of water. If the water in the pot is really, really boiling slowly, the frog barely notices that anything is wrong, almost close to boiling point. And then of course, total and utter destruction and catastrophe for the frog. We must revise this parable in order to apply it to Tinubu’s Nigeria. Here, long, long before boiling point, the catastrophe is already happening and there are over two hundred million frogs in a whole lake of boiling water. Long before many of them succumb to catastrophe, they suffer horribly. They shout to the king of froglake and his courtiers but because their own part of the lake isn’t boiling at all, they don’t know what the S.O.S call is about. That is why there is not even a single mention of hunger in Tinubu’s Democracy Day speech. But Godswill Obot Akpabio heard the S.O.S. calls in the hunger strikes of last year clearly and as utterly despicable as it is, his response is more “honest” than of the president’s total blindness and deafness to the hunger.
I suggest that at the root of the president’s indifference to the hunger is a legitimation crisis that did not start with his administration but has deepened immeasurably in (only) two years of his presidency. A legitimation crisis, according to a book of the same title published by the late German Marxist sociologist and philosopher, Jurgen Habermas in 1973, is not the same thing as a crisis of legitimacy. In a crisis of legitimacy, only a president or prime minister and/or his or her administration is under a suspicion of illegitimacy that is wide and deep in the collective mind of the public. A legitimation crisis is a hundred times worse than this because it affects all the institutions and organs of the state and public affairs: the executive, the legislative, the bar and the bench, the security apparatus together with monopoly of the means of force and terror. In a legitimation crisis, they are all not working smoothly and efficiently – or indeed they have completely collapsed. So pervasive is the resultant barbarism that only isolated and private acts of courage, compassion and decency remain to make life livable and solidarity still sustainable among families and communities across the nation itself. But barbarism pervades among the people as it does among the rulers from whom it originated. Neuroses and alienation, criminality and life-wrecking values and ritual beliefs and acts become so common as to be quite banal. Please, read Wole Soyinka’s 620-page novel, Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth published in 2022 and you will see the barbarism of legitimation crisis in our country as it has never been given literary expression before.
My deep worry about the egeremiti combination of the positive and the negative in the president’s Democracy Day speech, as I have suggested earlier in this comment, is that it has thrown confusion and irresoluteness into the ranks of the regular opposition as well as the much wider circle of the Nigerian Left, progressives and patriotic democrats. We must admit that this is a strategic master stroke, a vintage Tinubu gambit intended for 2027, for his own political survival. But remember, comrades and compatriots, Tinubu said Emilokan not Awalokan, we progressives and democrats throughout the country! The president can still pull back from his hunger games and transfixed befuddlement about what to do about the banditry and terrorism going on both in the heartland and the peripheries of the whole country. But will he, can he?
Epilogue
Three days ago almost immediately after I completed the first draft of this comment, information came to me that a very close, lifelong friend of mine had jokingly “complained” to guests at his house about the absence of my name in the 2025 National Honours List. Since I myself neither harbor this complaint nor asked anyone to make it on my behalf, I was so shocked and annoyed on hearing it that it effectively delayed my release of this comment by more than two days. Now, I wish to make the following clarification about my attitude toward national honors and awards from the Nigerian state in general, a clarification that I thought I would never have cause to make public in my lifetime.
When Professor Emeritus Niyi Osundare was awarded the Nigerian National Order of Merit in the year 2014, I was the first person – as he told me – that he gave the news. After congratulating him very warmly, I then quietly informed him that I would not be making my congratulation public. He was of course stunned by this information, but before he could put his surprise into words, I gave him my reason: I had been asked many times to allow my name to be considered for the same award but had politely declined the invitation. I had told the colleagues who approached me with the request that since I would reject the award if it was ever given to me by any administration in our country, it would be unfair and hypocritical of me to allow my name to be considered, knowing this unshakable personal attitude of mine to the award. Niyi of course asked me to explain the basis of this attitude: sadly but firmly, I had reached the conclusion that there was unlikely to be any president, any administration in the remaining portion of my lifetime whose rule I could support and respect enough for me to receive an award or accolade from him/it. I think that among all my very, very close friends, next to Edwin Madunagu, Niyi Osundare knows more than anyone else the depths from which my moral convictions and ideological assumptions come. So he said to me, “BJ, I accept and respect your personal stand on this matter, but as my views about the issue are different from yours, I am going to accept the award”. To this, I quickly responded that not only did I not expect him to reject the award because of my position, but I went on to assure him that I would never make my position public because I realize how our differences could be used as a wedge with which to create divisions between us by the megaphones and media foot soldiers of our ruling class and their administrations. To this day, I have rigorously kept faith with that promise. To what I said to Niyi on that day in 2014, I should perhaps add a further clarification.
In the immediate aftermath of the tragic “Ali Must Go” demonstrations of 1978, Edwin Madunagu and myself began a massive project of information, documentation and explanation to which we gave the project title of “the making and unmaking of Nigeria”. But within a year of starting the project, we found out that beginning with the “Ali Must Go” crisis” itself, “making” almost completely disappeared from the experience of our country, “unmaking” becoming the overwhelming reality – or unreality. There were, first, three military dictatorships; they were followed by three PDP administrations that were themselves followed by two APC administrations, all without exception contributing to the headlong “unmaking” of our peoples’ hopes, aspirations and happiness. It was in that context that I made the decision that I would never accept any award or accolade from any president or administration. It is a measure of the depth of my despair that I think this is likely to last for the rest of my lifetime.
Oluwaniyi Osundare, okunrin ogun, now that I seem to have broken that promise never to make this decision public knowledge, I hope that you do realize that circumstances beyond my control dealt me a hand that I could not ignore. The person who jocularly made the complaint about the absence of my name in the unprecedented 2025 national honours list is someone who I can trust with my life; he intended no harm. But I did not ask anyone to complain on my behalf about the absence of my name on the list o! Egbin! Tufia!
*Biodun Jeyifo is the foundation National President of ASUU and, with the late Festus Iyayi of revered memory, was ASUU’s representative on the National Executive Council(NEC) of the NLC under the presidency of Comrade Hassan Sumonu. BJ, as he is widely known, is also Emeritus Professor of English at Cornell University and Emeritus Professor of Comparative Literature and African and African American Studies at Harvard University. He divides his time between Oke-Bola, Ibadan and Cambridge, Massachusetts.