Olukotun’s messianic oration and narration of the nation BY TOYIN FALOLA Continued from Wednesday (September 10, 2014) Since power must always fail him, Ayo Olukotun retreats into the closets of Amos’ angst and attack on the rich for trampling on the poor and to Job’s muses of anguish. Limited in songs of liberation and hope, sometimes, Olukotun transmogrifies into Moses with his cane disappearing into the wilderness of no return until he reaches the proverbial burning bush. His words, transmuted into prophecy, create the chaos that we see in our zoo: something of a paradox emerges such that the conflict and friendship between state and society begin to feed one another. Both recognise that they must co-exist in an uncomfortable tension, but the tolerance of one another is very deceptive and corrosive. We gossip about the agents of the state, as Olukotun exposes our private discussions of resentment and hate on Fridays just as the Imam does in his mosque on the same day. With its police (with whom Olukotun once sympathised given their appalling conditions of work), the state warns us that it could, without notice, unleash violence on us or even declare a state of emergency at will in order to take matters into its own hands. Remember, the beast of mis-governance! The beast visits the real beasts of burden, always members of the underclass and poor of our society, whose plight amounts to what Paulo Freire of Brazil saw as the pedagogy of the oppressed. But that verbal and physical violence that we have come to accept as a rite of passage brings only a temporary truce. Olukotun reports, in good faith, what he sees politically and otherwise as our entanglements with the state. The multidimensionality of our everyday life provides the food for Olukotun’s mental table, for without our difficulties, our indigestions, the ink in his pen would dry out. So, he engages in our micro-history, from the mismanagement of our cities to the refuse dumps that litter our streets. Then, the macro-history comes into it, as he compares our local universities and other tertiary institutions of higher learning with global ones; as he reviews the state of our hospitals while we take flights to India for medical salvation; and as he evaluates the totality of our institutions of governance. His weekly essays provide us with the means to historicise our desire, our subjectivity, even the instantiations of our conditions. We have accepted our poor “conditions” as a state of being, something permanent, something static, as in the condition of the tattered roads as death traps; the condition of NEPA; the condition of death, the great leveller; indeed, the condition of hunger; even the condition of hell. Let me stress that it is the conditionality of hell, which is what allows Pentecostalism to flourish, for the “Lord is my Shepherd” to be heard loudly, the veritable line that greets you when you call most cell phones before the owner answers. For that hell is both represented on our earth with witches and sorcerers (as well as the diviners who locate them in revival churches along the Ibadan-Lagos Expressway) and indeed above the sky in Heaven while hell is manifested by raging fire, sorrow, and suffering. Olukotun can be jealous in his protection of Nigeria, objecting not only to the violation of its sovereignty, but the integrity of its people. He is critical of Western scholars who adulate Western heroes, while criticising or ignoring the African heroes. He does not suggest making enemies of others, but rather seeing one’s country as the centre of the universe. He is not part of an intellectual community that sees the fragmentation of Nigeria as a solution. He does not dispute the integrity of Nigeria as a nation. Neither is he a member of the Pentecostalist corps that sees Islam as a threat, which denies the humanity of Muslims, portraying innocent people as terrorists, and aggregating the traditional thinkers as a bunch of idolatrous nonentities. There is no equivalent in his writings that equates an idea to the level of a religious sacrilege. There are no extremist declarations of nihilism or belligerence, but more of a commitment to the power of ideas, to rationality, and to solid arguments. Even in his critiques of leadership, he does not see politics as a zero-sum game between radicals and conservatives, left and right. Surely, he seems to distance himself from the PDP, the party that controls the Federal Government, as in his endorsement of Kayode Fayemi instead of Ayo Fayose in Ekiti State, or of Rauf Aregbesola instead of Iyiola Omisore in Osun State, but he is neither anti-compromise nor opposed to the toleration of the candidate who wins. Thus, his column is bereft of hateful speeches, of nihilist positions, even if his main tactics of resistance are guns loaded with words. No parochial views, no extremist views, no fundamentalist religious views, no glorification of violence, no self-aggrandisement. Olukotun is such an acute reader of our “conditions”: His cataloguing is close to being complete; his emphasis on each aspect is, to say the least, detailed and compelling. What is now missing from his work is the charter of our freedom. As we draw from his Juma’at, the Ummah can speak back and demand the following: We want peace and harmony; we want development; we want accountability; we want development. Nigeria belongs to all of us, the government must run on the will of all of us; we have been denied the right to live a good life; we have not been well served. As I tease more from Olukotun’s principled writings, I am further impressed by how they are grounded in history, drawing from our distant and recent past, sometimes as references, as allusions, as evidence, and even as echoes. One sees multiple genealogies, which are then combined with the sociology of words. This sociology of words, delivered in its own careful aesthetic norm of language, generates Olukotun’s self-conscious conventions to present our condition and visualise our desire. His writings cannot be divorced from us, as subjects, venerated not as objects, but analysed as strands, a combination of referents. As subjects of analysis, Olukotun’s paradigms are visible, if not always stated. There is a bifurcation between state and society where the meeting point is about progress. Both have to reform themselves. The meeting point is shaped by the credentials of modernisation—the need for better schools, better hospitals, better roads, more jobs, much more freedom of speech, etc. To deliver that modernisation, the political framework has to be based on democracy, which may explain his emphasis on anti-democratic authoritarianism. Democracy, he argues, requires the domestic assimilation of key democratic institutions, otherwise democracy symbolises nothing tangible, especially when the beast is crazy! As a Yoruba-Nigerian, he is not unaware of ethnicity and ethnic politics but he is stridently opposed to ethnic disenfranchisement. There is, therefore, no Yoruba-centric tone in his voice. Of course, he sees excessive centralisation as stifling, which is a call for regional autonomies, a desirable thing in a federal system. His own university where he works, as he has shown, is a victim of the exercise of excessive centralisation whereby the National Universities Commission uses its seemingly limitless power of regulation to punish its enemies and critics. His opposition to that authoritarian centralisation is not to be equated with a Yoruba-centric analysis. He has a strong commitment to quality education, not just because he is an educator, but also primarily because he sees it as crucial agent of change. He is assertive about reforming the educational system for all and sundry, particularly the universities. The transmission of knowledge and skills allows empowerment and enables one generation to feed the next. Without that knowledge, constantly updated and applicable, a people can be left behind and the country can become irrelevant or paralysed or find itself in a state of coma. In a piece devoted to the importance of knowledge, “Are we falling off the knowledge map,” Punch, August, 2014, he calls for the creation of a “knowledge society” whereby aspects of the culture of the past will be catalogued as well as preserved and put to good use. Concluded Excerpts of a Keynote Address delivered by Prof. Falola, Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities, University of Texas at Austin, at the 2014 Obafemi Awolowo University Alumni Banquet Dinner in Dallas, TX, USA.
Posted on: Fri, 12 Sep 2014 08:34:01 +0000
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