On so-called "Experts" and the Nigerian narrative

In some respect, this is a follow-up of this post, and in some respects it follows-up on my posts on "propaganda" and how the way we talk about things influences peoples perceptions of those things in a problematic way.

You may have been following the controversies kicked off when Governor Fashola of Lagos "deported" citizens of Nigeria from Lagos State to Onitsha in Anambra State. Apparently these deportations have been going on for a while, with deportees getting "shipped" out to the northernmost states. The arrival of deportees in Onitsha kicked off a firestorm of debate, which almost immediately took ethnic and regional shape. Especially on the internet, where insults were traded based on nasty stereotypes.

The discussion wasn't so much about the constitutionality of the action, nor have we begun the long overdue conversation about what Nigerian citizenship actually means. Instead we had people like Femi Fani-Kayode publishing ethnic slurs against Igbos.

I have never liked or respected Femi Fani-Kayode. He used to criticize President Obasanjo in the most vociferous of terms, but when Obasanjo gave him a cushy job as a pro-government spin-doctor, he became a dogged and rather sycophantic defender of the man he was only recently pillorying. A man who will sell himself to the highest bidder, and who forms his opinions based on whomever is willing to pay him the most, is not a man to be taken seriously.

People like Fani-Kayode should be ignored, and not given a wider platform from which to spread their bile. Unfortunately, Fani-Kayode's remarks attracted a firestorm of responses. And even more unfortunately, the responses took an ethnic and regional shape, provoking similarly ethnic and regional responses.

I want to focus on what such response to Fani-Kayode, because it highlights something I have talked about in prior posts. The full text of the response is here.

I am not interested in the response per se, just in the introduction of the author, and in the author's first two paragraphs.

This is the author's name:

Dr. N. Tony Nwaezeigwe

Senior Research Fellow

Institute of African Studies,

University of Nigeria,

Nsukka.

He is a PhD, a senior research fellow, an "expert" on African Studies. You are probably expecting something that will put an end to the pointless ethnic stereotyping and insults, something that will move us towards a discussion of the core issues and how to resolve them .... but ... then ...

Nigeria’s nationality question is neither the creation of the Igbo nor the Yoruba. It is the consequence of Hausa-Fulani’s megalomaniac quest for political power in the nation. Yet the Hausa-Fulani accept the fact that both the Igbo and Yoruba hold the key to their attainment of this divine-right objective only if both groups agree to remain suspicious of the other. It therefore becomes obvious that the solution to this national question can only be attained if both the Igbo and Yoruba realize that their mutual understanding and respect of the other’s perception of Nigeria’s progress would save the nation millions in loss of human and material resources.

First, both the Igbo and Yoruba, seen respectively as mentors to other minority ethnic groups in the South and Middle Belt should see their assumed characteristic rivalry, if at all there is something like that, as healthy to the overall development of the Nigerian nation and, not the vice versa. Second, both groups should be aware that this question of Nigeria’s nationality will always persist so long as the Hausa-Fulani feel that without any one of their own being at the helms of authority in this country, there will be no peace. And one fundamental means of achieving this Arabian power mentality is to ensure there is perpetual state of political belligerency between the Igbo and Yoruba.

And there you have it. Right from the very start, he plunges into the same ethnic stereotyping, the same insults. His response to Femi Fani-Kayode's unwarranted attacks on the Igbos as an ethnic group ... is to launch an unwarranted attack of his on on the Hausa and Fulani ethnic groups. Actually, there is a sly insult aimed at the so-called "minority" ethnic groups, who tend to react negatively to the suggestion that they are the political subordinates of Tripod ethnic groups to which they were yoked during the Independence Era and the First Republic.

This type of "discourse" has been the bane of Nigerian politics since the 1950s, and while people tend to point at violent incidents in our past as "proof" of their negative views of other ethnic groups, it is more correct to say that the violence was a result and a consequence of all of us having negative views about each other.  To many things are instantly misinterpreted as being pan-ethnic in nature, and too many times entire ethnic groups have been assigned the blame for actions carried out by small groups of people who happen to be from that ethnic group.

The people doing the misinterpretation are not "uneducated"; if anything, the public perception that "experts" know what they are talking about has tended to lend credence to problematic theories that do little to explain why our problems came to be, and why they exist. And it is not just our academics and intellectuals that do this -- the foreign experts are just as bad.  I am at a point where I almost want to call on the entire planet to consider anything and everything ever written or said about "Africa" by a foreign "experts" at any point in the past or present to be by definition false.

Indeed, among the many problems of African academia is the tendency to repeat-back or echo the conclusions foreign "researchers" make about our continent and to treat these as being established fact. This then leads to the tendency to adopt grand plans that are bound to fail, because they have nothing to do with the actual issues. Once the plan fails, we start to hear explanations for the failure that do not take into account the fact that the plan, and the "facts" upon which it was based, was bound to fail from the start.

There is a video posted on the internet, in which the late Sardauna of Sokoto, Sir Ahmadu Bello made certain comments about "Igbos", accusing them in effect of intending to take over and dominate the Northern Region.  A lot of present-day Nigerians would criticize the Sardauna's comments, entirely unaware that they approach the "issues" in exactly the same way he did. Some people are forthright about their views on other ethnic groups (like the Fani-Kayode and Dr. Nwaezeigwe) while other people make a point of sounding politically correct until you scratch them a little or subject them to just a little stress and their true feeling about other ethnic groups and regions emerge.

Back in the 1950s, somehow and for some reason, everyone in the political and academic circles, and consequently a lot of people in the wider society, became apprehensive that they were going to be "dominated" by other sociocultural groups. The late Sardauna may have been blunt in his comments, but everyone showed by their actions that they had the same feelings about other ethnic groups as he did. Indeed, the nascent Federation of Nigeria lost the Bamenda and Buea areas to Cameroun largely because the "minority" groups in those areas took their chance to escape "domination" by the Eastern Region's "majority" ethnic group. Western Region politics also changed in the 1950s to accommodate these suspicions, which had effects on national politics.

Our politics have neither resolved nor recovered from the problems and questions that arose in the 1950s. We are still stuck in the same arguments we've been having since the 1950s, and are still subject to the same consequent violence that has plagued us in greater or lesser intensity since then.

It is time to change the conversation.